It's Late Again...
Now Playing: Ariana Stewart - Daddy's Baby Girl
Topic: Personal or Reflective


See Ariana Stewart's page for an audio stream of "Daddy's Baby Girl."

Lack of Sleep Makes You Fat and Stupid
Now Playing: Sheryl Crow - Strong Enough
Topic: Personal or Reflective
Damn, I'm screwed: Lack of Sleep Makes You Fat and Stupid

It's a Podcast Night
Now Playing: Jonathan Coulton - Baby Got Back
From the most recent Podtech.net podcast w/ Steve Forbes of Forbes magazine and Flat Tax fame, an optimistic outlook on the future. Life is too short to be a pessimist or according to Giuliani a month ago, life is more fun as an optimist. Compare that to the crowd's response when Jon Stewart asked that same day what we thought of the future (loud booing which I can only consider a pessimistic response).

Here's the full transcript, below are my favorite excerpts:

"On a global basis, the world is doing better than most people seem to think...perceptions are lagging reality...We are making progress. Things are moving in the right direction."

Five years out:
"...As broadband becomes a common place, full broadband, not what we have now....the possibility of delivery of services, what it means in terms of communication around the world, in terms of creating things that we've never even thought of before, it will be profound.

It?s not just going to be new industries, new services, new products only, it will also be existing companies also will learn how to use this new technology, they?re going to transform themselves and be able to provide traditional services in ways that we can't even imagine today."

"...What the economists call the trend line is profoundly positive. We are living in an era that should be one of the most innovative, inventive eras, an era where the sum of human liberties is going to expand in profoundly positive ways. People are going to look back and say that was a golden age. You never know it was a golden age when you live through it, but looking back it's going to be a good era I think."

Music from last night and today: Broken Social Scene - 7/4 (Shoreline)
Currently listening (hat tip to Fred's Podcast): Jonathan Coulton - Baby Got Back

Sunday Afternoon Musings
Now Playing: Broken Social Scene - Hotel
Miss Saigon last night was great. I've never seen the show and had heard only a little about it (mostly about the helicopter) and the show didn't disappoint. From the opening scene to my favorites, the Ho Chi Min number with the old communist bloc facade and any of those scenes with the Engineer, the show was definitely entertaining. We met Will after the show and headed back to the Hyatt Regency for a drink. It was a funny scene, Halloween revelers downtown mixed in with a wedding/black tie event at the hotel and us & few cast and crew at the small hotel bar.

Saw this flier while at the show, De La Soul on Nov. 16th. Hmmm...

More on music:
It's taken since June (when I first posted on the XV6000) to figure this out, but thanks to RadioShack, I can now play any internet music streams (i.e. KCRW) in my car.

The 3/32" end plugs into the XV6600 and then I plug my tape-adapter into the adapter's 1/8" stereo jack and voil?, the EVDO connection on the smartphone pumps internet radio through my crappy car speakers ( better than having to hold the phone's speaker up to my ear while driving). Yeah this may be geeky for most out there but I need to have good music when I'm driving.

Last but not least, the High Falls Film Festival is back. Quickly scanning the list of films, this one on Sarah Silverman jumped out at me. Still haven't seen The Aristocrats down at The Little yet, but read that she and Bob Sagat (yes, that guy from from Full House and AFHV) were hilarious in that too.

November is shaping up to be a busy month, stay tuned.

In Doonesbury
Now Playing: Broken Social Scence - It's All Gonna Break
Again late to the news but noteworthy for those outside of western NY: RIT mentioned in Doonesbury

The D&C's angle:
" The national notice came with a bit of a backhanded gibe at RIT. Alex's mother indicates that her list of schools — which this week includes Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cornell University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute — was "a bit geek-heavy." "

Hat tip to Wired for recommending Broken Social Scene (iTunes link)

Drunk Dial Emails
Now Playing: NPR
Topic: Personal or Reflective
It's 8:30am on Sat. morning and thanks to JK, I'm laughing my ass off. Thank you Mr. Soon-to-be-Ph.D for that drunk-dial email, it was hilarious (edited for language but the formatting is original):

From: John <•••••@ucla.edu>
To: Chris <••••••@yahoo.com>
Date: Oct 29, 2005 4:17 AM
Subject: to

" MEKIN motha fuckaeaa.a.a.a

a

ayou are you are gubig fat wussy. Moth fuya auflc a.

sucki it

see you skiing at breck. Bring your brain buc,et.or else… "

Chink in Web 2.0's Armour?
Now Playing: Common - The Food (feat. Kayne West)
Topic: Web 2.0
Had to laugh at Wired's article on Web 2.0, below is the funny part (emphasis added):

" While there's no strict agreement on exactly what Web 2.0 is, much of it involves public participation and contributions from the commons.

Web 2.0 is very open, but all that openness has its downside: When you invite the whole world to your party, inevitably someone pees in the beer.

These days, peed-in beer is everywhere. Blogs begat splogs -- junk diaries filled with keyword-rich text to lure traffic for ad revenue. "

And of course Nicholas Carr (of IT Doesn't Matter fame/infamy) adds his two cents:
" "Online, free media is one of the contributing factors to the shrinking circulation of good newspapers," he said. "Now, traditional media is shifting away from large investments in bureaus and hard reporting, and towards cheaper content and opinion-making. It's hard for me to imagine participatory media devoting investments to hard, investigative or overseas reporting. The healthiest scenario would be one in which both kinds of media thrive." "

Even Flickr gets its chance:
" Not all Web 2.0 endeavors are wracked with problems. Take the online photo-sharing service Flickr, which, despite its open nature and robust membership growth, has so far remained relatively parasite-resistant. "

Why I Love the Web
Now Playing: Sia - Breathe Me (Four Tet remix)
1) The new Economist.com website looks amazing; nice, clean style and XHTML/CSS goodness makes me happy. I'm a little late on this (new design went live 10/2) but congratulations on the new site and to the designer.

2) The Economist again, IP, Patents, and Innovation in the Marketplace

3) The answer to a national wi-fi initiative, straight outta Japan: unmanned aircraft drones

4) The Magazine Aisle Experiment
Without a doubt, my favorite aisle in the grocery store is the books/magazine aisle. I finish all of my other shopping and save the magazine area for last, as a treat to myself. The experiment is deciding which single magazine from the racks of magazines at your local grocery store/bookstore that best represents you. I'd choose WIRED and the wide range of articles in Issue 13.11 explains why I love the magazine.

5) Kansas up to antics again and even copyright law can't slow down intelligent design:
" While the copyright denial could cause delay in their adoption, as the standards are rewritten, it is unlikely to derail the board's conservative majority in its mission to require that challenges to Darwin's theories be taught in the state's classrooms." (NY Times)

6) Merry Fitzmas (this is just for my brother)

The Colbert Report
For those at the Jon Stewart show a couple weeks back, it should be no surprise that Comedy Central and its brand of political satire is extremely popular and influential.

The NY Times covered the Daily Shows' spin-off show, "The Colbert Report," comparing this best of breed humor with the stale, lackadaisical humor of SNL.

" Mr. Colbert's on-camera persona may not wear well over the long term, but for now at least "The Colbert Report" is a worthy spin off, an icy-cold beer chaser to the shot of whiskey that is "The Daily Show." "

And besides, anyone poking fun at FNC is okay in my book.

Music this Week
Now Playing: KCRW
Topic: Personal or Reflective
Imogen Heap of Frou Frou fame is playing on KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic tomorrow morning, 10/26. You'll recognize her voice from the Garden State soundtrack; mp3 samples here and here. Subscribe to the MBE podcast if you aren't in L.A. listening live.

And here's MBE's latest lineup of performances: David Gray, The Magic Numbers, Supergrass, Nada Surf, Medeski Martin & Wood, Tracy Chapman, & Keane.

All of these artists are in my iTunes library and hopefully they're all in your collection as well. It's so nice to have a such a great radio station that puts so much of their content on the web for us non-Angelinos to enjoy. Thank them by becoming a member of KCRW.

Current Song: Sia- Breathe Me (Four Tet remix)

Brain Drain vs. Flight of the Creative Class
Now Playing: random music at Spot
Topic: Creative Class
This NY Times article dicusses the brain drain but from the international perspective.

"In contrast, less than 5 percent of the skilled citizens of the powerhouses of the developing world, like India, China, Indonesia and Brazil, live abroad in an O.E.C.D. country."

What's the interplay between Florida's "The Flight of the Creative Class" and the brain drain from the world's poorest countries? If the creatives are leaving the United States and the well-educated are leaving the developing countries, then where are people emigrating?

This was the connection that I made after reading the Times article. It's not a perfectly parallel connection between these two extremes but I think there's an interesting discussion there. I don't know the answer but the larger developing countries are better prepared than the smaller developing countries (see the graphic above) to handle the "relatively smaller losses of talent."

Taxing the expatriate workers of a developing country? I don't think that's the answer, sounds more like a short-term band-aid for a far larger, systematic problem. But the "idea that Professor Bhagwati first proposed in the 1970's - that developing countries should tax their expatriate workers - is getting a fresh look." Here's mentioning Bhagwati, who came up during a debate on the merit of Freidman's "the world is flat" mantra.

Looking for more OECD reports? Here's one that's on my post-Masters-completion reading list: Digital Broadband Content
I have an eBook folder full of PDFs to read (~90MB) in addition to the Amazon reading list. Focus, focus, focus...

Miss Saigon w/ cousin Will
Now Playing: still playing KCRW
Topic: Personal or Reflective
Cousin Will (of the Volvo beast fame) plays in the orchestra for Miss Saigon and they'll be in Buffalo this Sat. night. Can't wait to see him and watch the show; hopefully we'll go out for a good meal and a drink afterwards. I don't know Buffalo so if you'r ein the know, email or comment below with your suggestions.

Current Reading: Creative-Class Struggle article in Fast Company magazine

Current Listening Stereo MC's, "Set it Off"

3rd Annual How to Make Friends on the Lift
Now Playing: New Ground on KCRW
Topic: Personal or Reflective
The Lounge's 3rd Annual How to Make Friends on the Lift went down Sat. night at HotShots. Despite the annoying, intermittent rain, there was a great turnout. The event was a benefit for Boarding for Breast Cancer so it was nice to see people out for a fun event that was supporting a good cause.

The rail jam started at 5:30 or 5:45 but I was late so I'm not exactly sure but it was in full swing when I got there. A scaffold setup, about 12ft off the ground, was the strap-in and runway area leading to 45 degree before the actual jibs. There were two jibs; an up-flat-down box on the right that didn't see much use and a double-barrel rail on the left that saw the majority of the action.

I heavily Photoshopped for bright/contrast, levels, and color balance b/c it was raining and dimly lit last night. My digital wasn't doing well with those conditions. I switched to video and was able to capture the action a little better b/c there wasn't the same delay that I suffered shooting stills without a flash. QuickTime clips below:

Backside 180 out

Backside lipslide

Nosepress

Backside lipslide 2

After the rail jam ended, things moved inside for the movie premieres: Burning Bridges, The Community Project, and FutureProof.

Burning Bridges had a lot of rail/jibbing and acid drops that made my knees hurt but I got tired of seeing rail after rail sequence. The movie was quirky, I'll give them that, but it seemed more like a home video than a snowboard video. That may have been their intention, the un-snowboard movie, but it meant there was no continuity or flow, just disparate clips slapped together haphazardly. Here's TWSnow's review, they give it more credit than I do but maybe that's b/c they know the guys that made the movie.

The Community Project was the best of the three movies: big names and big tricks. It showed that some foresight had been put into achieving the theme of a snowboard movie. The city, transition, and lifestyle parts the blended into the movie made it visually appealing in addition to the great snowboarding. I was on the edge of my seat but then again, I love watching snowboard videos. The highlights were the Japan segment (a little Lost in Translation feel and boundless powder as far the eye could see) and the film's last segment where Travis Rice spins onto a spine to backflip off and then a double-backflip off the last 60-70ft kicker. Although I've seen the stills from this sequence, it was no less amazing that seeing it in video format. Here's TWSnow's interview w/ Rice about the movie.

Futureproof looked like an amazing film as well except that people were standing in front of the screen (holdovers from when free schwag was thrown into the crowd). I couldn't see everything and with a few beers on board, I yelled at them to move. [Disclaimer- I love snowboarding and don't mess around when it comes to watching snowboard movies; I'm there to really watch & analyze the film so I have little patience for those shooting the breeze or and hanging out during the movie]. There was lots of backcountry, big air sequences and incredible straight-lining of AK chutes that had me silently thinking "damn he's hauling ass..." I'll have to watch this movie again. Here's TWSnow's review.

For all of the downtime, there was tons of free schwag thrown to the throngs of teenagers. I stayed in my seat and kept drinking $2 Molson Light specials to dull the pain; just show the snowboard videos, that's what I came for. The saving grace of having to wait before and in-between the different movies was the beer and the DJ Battle, which DJ Artie K definitely won. He got the crowd into it, which is saying a lot considering high school kids won't often dance in public for fear of looking uncool.

Overall, a great event and a fun night. Props to Josh at the The Lounge and to HotShots for putting together such a great event for the western NY snowboard community.

Posted by cph19 at 2:04 PM EDT

Updated: Sunday, 23 October 2005 8:03 PM EDT

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Assorted Links & Events
Now Playing: Rob Dickson - My Name is Love
Topic: Personal or Reflective
I wanted to post last night but it was too late and I had other work to finish but I Gmailed myself a to-do list for my next post. In no particular order:

1) Arlo Guthrie is playing tonight in Ithaca

2) Podtech.net podcast w/ Ray Kurweil, talking about the future of computing in our society: imagine always having the internet in the palm of your hand or in your thought processes. Download a new firmware to your brain and possess new knowledge in an instant.

3) Noticed that Lessig spoke about municipal wi-fi recently. I posted about this subject after talking with an old boss who's the assitant city manager for the city of K.C., so it's nice to know that I'm thinking about about the same subjects as Lawrence Lessig.

4) I wouldn't call myself a lefty (this is for someone out there in the blogsphere, maybe she's reading this) because the terms "liberal" and "conservative" are have so maligned/perverted that I don't think they're meaningful terms or labels anymore.

I do, however, consider myself a broadband liberal. My younger brother, however, is a lefty and below is an excerpt from the Rolling Stones' article on his organization's head honcho [emphasis added]:

---

" Other Clinton veterans are even more pointed about Emanuel's assets. "He's got this big old pair of brass balls, and you can just hear 'em clanking when he walks down the halls of Congress," says Paul Begala, who served with Emanuel on Clinton's staff. "The Democratic Party is full of Rhodes scholars -- Rahm is a road warrior. He's just what the Democrats need to fight back."

Friends and enemies agree that the key to Emanuel's success is his legendary intensity. There's the story about the time he sent a rotting fish to a pollster who had angered him. There's the story about how his right middle finger was blown off by a Syrian tank when he was in the Israeli army. And there's the story of how, the night after Clinton was elected, Emanuel was so angry at the president's enemies that he stood up at a celebratory dinner with colleagues from the campaign, grabbed a steak knife and began rattling off a list of betrayers, shouting "Dead! . . . Dead! . . . Dead!" and plunging the knife into the table after every name. "When he was done, the table looked like a lunar landscape," one campaign veteran recalls. "It was like something out of The Godfather. But that's Rahm for you."

Of the three stories, only the second is a myth -- Emanuel lost the finger to a meat slicer as a teenager and never served in the Israeli army. But it's a measure of his considerable reputation as the enforcer in Clinton's White House that so many people believe it to be true. You don't earn the nickname "Rahmbo" being timid.

---

Currently Listening: Rob Dickinson - My Name is Love

Chum Still Feeding the Blogsphere
Now Playing: Snuff - Nick Northern
Why comment on this when so many others already have?

Cheney 'cabal' hijacked foreign policy
"In a scathing attack on the record of President George W. Bush, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January, said: “What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made."

As of 1:10 EST, 1,731 posts and counting for "Cheney cabal." Not all are related to this article but let's see how many posts there are by the end of the day.

The Week Ahead
Now Playing: Brazilian Girls - Don't Stop, Josh Rouse- Directions
Topic: Creative Class
I've been at Spot Coffee a lot lately, trying to get out of my apartment while finishing my Capstone project for school. While I have broadband at home, my desk is small, cramped, and a bit isolating for the 4-5 hours spent sitting there after work doing more work.

And I'm not alone. There's a univeral need to venture out for a little bit and be social, even if it means going to the coffee shop with your notebook, typing away or reading while the headphones keep motivating (I call it cranking) music thumping in my head. Here's the cranking playlist.

Wired's article describes this feeling pretty well. It's a topic one of my best friends and I have discussed before: is going to the coffee shop with my notebook and headphones and sitting there typing away sociable? Needless to say, we disagree.

I don't always end up chatting with someone but more often than not I do as the Wired article suggests. The kind of people at coffee shops are typically of a different nature. Do I go because I want to hang out with people who are like me or is becauset I want to hang out with people who are intellectual, creative, and otherwise cool people?

I'm looking for a place with energy and although Spot Coffee is an osais, Rochester as a city does not have energy. Although I've posted about Richard Florida before, the excerpts below clarify what I so uneloquently described above. From his speech at CC almost a year ago:

---

" You have to understand, I’m pretty darned conventional. I have no idea what’s going on. I’m going into it with an open mind, then I start asking people, especially young people graduating colleges and focus groups. We start to ask them, “How do you pick a place to live and work?” Young people, and we’re assuming they want a good economic opportunity, and I start to hear this weird thing. “We want to move to a place that has energy.” “Yes, we want to go to a place that has energy.” ....

...As one of my interview subjects said, “This isn’t about playing. It’s about recharging our batteries, about becoming more focused on work, about release… regenerating ourselves.” We’re getting ready, as she said, to work a second working day. A second 8-hour day. So people wanted to be involved, and in arts and culture, the same thing...

...I put my two boys through Purdue, and they graduated Purdue and they had a ton of offers in the Indianapolis area, and neither one of them stayed. And when I asked them, ‘Boys, why didn’t you stay?’ They said, ‘It’s not enough for us just to have a great technology job. We’re creative. We’re creative. We want to be challenged in arts and music. We want to be challenged by the sports we do. We want to be challenged in the other people we meet.’” He said, “My boys moved to Seattle and San Francisco. They’re challenged when they walk out their door in the morning in all facets of their life.” Challenged...

...Creative people don’t want to have stuff handed to them. We compete on merit. That’s what these focus groups tell us. We compete on merit. We AR meritocratic people. We want to know we’re gonna get by on our skills and our capabilities and how good we AR, not on who mom and dad AR and how many connections we have. That’s what people were looking for, and these were the visual cues that they could go to a town, they could go to a town and see that it was based on merit, because there was all these people part of the mix, and it was open. "

---

Event from Last Week: Dr. Brian Greene speaking on String Theory
Event for this Week: The Lounge's Snowboard Movie/Rail Jam on Sat. night

Flickr Happy
Now Playing: Positively 10th Street podcast
Topic: Personal or Reflective
More late nights and early mornings and it has come to this, a Landshire chicken salad sandwich (I use that term loosely to describe this thing):

Another good Flickr hack, using it to post & tag business cards. I keep the business cards that I've collected, with notes on the back, in a little box on my desk. But why not digitize them (make them private of course) and tag the hell out of them for later use. It's a great idea consider my recent reading from Inc magazine on power networking.

Here's the last few weeks in photos, in no particular order of importance other than I had my camera phone on me at the time:

More on Municpal Wi-Fi Initiatives
Now Playing: Boojo Bajou - Take It Slow
Topic: Web 2.0
Well my last post came at an opportune time as Wired just published this article on a huge wi-fi network blanketing Hermiston, Oregon. And my old boss was right, politics is the stumbling block to municipal wi-fi initiatives:

" Asked why other municipalities have had a harder time succeeding, he replies: "Politics."

"If we get a go-ahead, we can do a fairly good-sized city in a month or two," said Ziari. "The problem is getting the go-ahead."

"The 'Who's-going-to-get-a-piece-of-the action?' has been a big part of the obstacles," said Karen Hanley, senior marketing director of the Austin, Texas, Wi-Fi Alliance, an industry group. "

Municipal Wi-Fi Initiatives and RSS & Mashup mp3
Now Playing: John Mayer/Alicia Keyes mashup mp3
Topic: Web 2.0
Citywide broadband infrastructure projects have been in the news for some time, perhaps since Philly started an initiative and was almost shut down by Verizon's protest. Despite the legal wrangling in PA (Verizon waived its right of first refusal, part of a new law that says cities must submit a written request to the local telcos before starting a municipal wi-fi initiative), several other cities including San Fran & Google, are exploring the idea.

I briefly talked to my old EDC boss (now the assistant city manager in KC) about the prospects of that city starting a wi-fi initiative. Too political, he said, remember the telcos are big supporters of local and city government, you'd need to have real guts (or a lot a political capital in reserve) to pull it off. Well the idea itself must be getting traction or be a hot area for future growth because the Yankee Group just started a Municipal Broadband Market Research and Advisory Service.

Check out C|Net's big picture view of this story and the web of related stories. Reminds me a lot of tag clouds, ala Flickr, Technorati, or Del.icio.us, but I haven't seen it applied to news stories before (is Google listening to this, visually representing its Google News). Kudos to LivePlasma for powering this, it's a cool (and probably a useful) tool that should be integrated into academic research databases to find related information or sources.

---

Soon after Apple introduced Podcasts to iTunes, I stumbled upon this mp3 mashup RSS feed via Del.icio.us. The first song that I heard was this John Mayer/Alicia Keyes mashup and I really liked it (I put it on repeat as I often do with new songs). That was my first experience with the power of RSS, finding great content (music in this case) from a completely unexpected source, pushed right down to iTunes for me.

Though I loved the song I didn't understand the podcast side of iTunes well enough to know that the mp3 remained on my system. I thought it had been inadvertenly deleted or replaced when the feed refreshed with newer mp3 files. I was pleasantly surprised to find it again tonight and it sounds as good as it did when I first heard it back in June-- John Mayer (Daughters) and Alicia Keys (If I Ain't Got You) mashup mp3 compliments of MashupTown.com

How Could I Forget Toastmasters
Now Playing: The Flaming Lips - Ambulance Driver
Topic: Personal or Reflective
Yeah it was a great weekend (see my post below) but how could I forget how such a wonderful weekend started. Friday night we hosted a Toastmasters District Contest at work. In the office from 8-9pm was what it meant for me but the contest went well and it was the other club officers that put so much hard work into the successful event. I barely got the name badges right, even though that used to be my specialty/job back in Colorado.

Here are the photos from the contest and congrats to Rich and Erin for their second places in the Evaluator and Humorous Speech contests, respectively.

Last but not least, the wild adventures of Grant Kaye. He's a legend as a founder of the Freeriders Union of Colorado College and he's living the dream while most of us aren't (myself included...but I'm working on the dream as we speak). He's a crazy guy who lives life to the fullest and if you don't believe me, check out his recent adventure that included schralping, Burning Man, Hawaii, and everywhere in between.

Copyright Grant Kaye 2005

(Amazon link to the new Flaming Lips album, which includes Ambulance Driver)