Category: obscure pursuits

from The EPIC Alert

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[1] Birthday Greetings
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Dear Mr. Orwell,

Greetings on your 100th Birthday! You might be gratified to know that
a new generation of readers have a growing interest in your writing.
Your insights resonate as never before in these times.

We take this occasion to share some of our personal reflections on
themes you brought attention to, including language, commercialism,
inequality, and war. The theme of surveillance is notably missing; we
hope interested readers of the EPIC Alert might contribute a 1000 word
essay on the subject and send it to orwell@epic.org. Contributions
will be edited and posted on our website.

Best regards,

The EPIC Team

Due Diligence

So repeat after me: Communications is king. Content is bait. Commerce is an afterthought. That’s the real value prop, always has been.

Worth reading in full, even if your holdings in this train wreck haven’t lost most of their value . . .

/understand/ – what a tangled web we weave Archives

So, you know, I think I’m disappointed in Dave Winer. He is certainly entitled to his opinion, but he would have a more credible case if he didn’t twist words. His personal bias runs deep:

Since MS people so often require reassurance that they aren’t going to hell, I’ll also say (once a year, please) that most of them love their kids and their moms, and really want to make good software, and MS is about the only place you can do that now, and they have no control over what Gates, Ballmer and Allchin do, yada yada yada, but honestly it wears thin, they could read the damned transcripts too, but if I worked there I wouldn’t want to either, because I’d have to quit, because no one with a conscience could work for such a company.

This is a problem/question I have: I know the folks over at MSFT are smart, and I know they like their work and work hard at it. But do they see the big picture? Does it matter? Or is the next milestone all that counts?

There has to be some understanding about the products you’re making and their effects.

nikon-coolpix.com

Introducing the user-friendly, highly functional, extremely cool-looking COOLPIX 4300 digital compact.

I just got one of these today (as a gift, yay!) and it’s very cool. We got it with a 64 and 128 Mb flash card, so our trip to Oregon tomorrow should be recorded in excessive detail.

Took a couple of test pictures this evening and tested the connectivity with iPhoto: as easy as anyone could hope. The camera was correctly identified and the pictures imported, just like that.

I bought batteries for a film camera I was thinking of bringing, but after seeing the images on the Coolpix, I may not bother.

Read My Lips

Everyone wants taxes to be cut, but no one wants services to be cut, which is why Democrats have to reframe the debate . . . .

It depresses me that this has to be explained. But then there are too many citizens who think highways are a naturally occurring rock formation, that homeless people like sleeping outside, and their position in society is due to their own hard word, not luck, not the foresight and sacrifice of their parents’ generation . . . .

Born on third base and think they hit a triple, as the saying goes.

Minister of Information

Too funny . . . but tragic at the same time.

FCC Audio/Video Events Home Page – Worldwide access via the Internet to live and pre-recorded broadcasts of selected FCC events

The Commission will consider a Report and Order concerning its broadcast multiple ownership rules. This is the first of 2 open meetings in June.

This will be the first of two open meetings in June to discuss the pending rules changes on media ownership or concentration. The bottom-line is that the FCC will be deciding whether or not to strike down or modify the rules on how many media outlets in a community or market — radio stations, TV stations, newspapers — can be owned by a single owner.

Read more here and below.

And then contact the FCC and tell them how you feel about this: it all gets into the record, so exercise your right. They’re your airwaves, after all.
Continue reading “if you care, tune in”

I missed out on a job I had interviewed for last week: I got the phone message today. Disappointing but not entirely unexpected. I got the sense I wasn’t connecting with the interviewers (there were three of them).

So back to the drawing board, or better, the want ads. My current gig is going to drive me nuts. I’m tempermentally and vocationally unsuited to be an administrative person in a workplace I understand nothing about.

CNN.com – Apple’s online music coup ignites a budding industry – May. 11, 2003

Singer-songwriter Janis Ian, a Grammy Hall of Fame inductee and vocal critic of her industry’s anti-piracy tactics, is thrilled by Apple’s offering.

“You can’t call it visionary because they should have come up with this five years ago,” she said. “It’s ironic that a computer manufacturer is teaching the record industry the next step, and so far, that’s what’s happening.”

Is this innovation overdue? Of course. Does it follow that a software and hardware company would be best suited to lead the music giants to this next step?

Apple

it’s the first music service that doesn’t view every customer as a criminal-in-waiting.
Continue reading “what Apple does best”