American Idol's Top 10

My thoughts on the Top 10. It turns out i don’t need to post my thoughts, but Television Without Pity summed it up perfectly for me:

…when Amanda sings, I feel like I’m in a bar; when David Cook sings, I feel like I’m in a club; when Brooke sings, I feel like I’m in an amphitheater; when Jason sings, I feel like I’m in my dealer’s living room; but when David Archuleta sings, I feel like I’m watching a high school talent show. Every time. And it’s a performing arts high school for gifted kids, absolutely. And he’s clearly the best in the talent show, and he’ll totally win and deservedly so. But if you’re asking me to list the places I’d pay to be, I’d rather see Amanda at the bar, David Cook at the club, Brooke at the concert hall, and Jason at my dealer’s house than go to David A.’s talent show.

So true. After hearing Achuleta sing “Imagine” i never thought i’d turn on him. But i now realize that he doesn’t have the personality to bring it home. Personally, i hope Cook takes the prize as his songs are the only ones i could possibly imagine in my iPod.

I’d also like to just hang out with Syesha – maybe go to the mall with her and go shopping. Maybe ask her to do that baby crying trick one more time. She seems like she’d be pretty fun to just chill with. I’m just saying.

Red Band Trailers are Back!

There are 2 types of trailers: red-band and green-band. The trailer you usually see in front of a movie that reads, “This trailer has been approved for all audiences” has a green background and is a “green-band” trailer. There is another kind, the red-band, that is not approved for all audiences because it has something “bad” in it (read: more fun to watch).

In the past, only green-band trailers have been shown. But today, Regal Cinemas announced that they are going to start showing red-band trailers again. And since Regal is the nations largest chain, i have to hope that this starts a trend of it getting nasty before your film begins.

The Smart and the Silly

I’ve got two videos for you today. The first is a WWII type battle done with all different types of food. It’s done so well that it’s memorizing

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=e-yldqNkGfo]

The second is really cool. It’s a neck brace that will project your voice

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyN4ViZ21N0]

Jobs Interview

There’s a good interview with Steve Jobs in the latest Fortune magazine.  One of my favorite parts was this:

People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on.  But that’s not what it means at all.  It means saying no to the 100 other good ideas that there are.  You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done.  The clearest example was when we were pressured for years to do a PDA, and I realized one day that 90% of the people who use a PDA only take information out of it on the road.  They don’t put inforation into it. Pretty soon cellphones are going to do that, so the PDA market’s going to get reduced to a fraction of its current size.  So we decided to not get into it.  If we had gotten into it, we wouldn’t have had the resources to do the iPod.

That holds very much true at Qloud. We’ve had lots of ideas on our whiteboard and killing some of the good ones is just as hard as building the great ones.

Bebo for $850 million. Now Hi5?

This is an interesting graph which shows Bebo, MySpace, Facebook and Hi5. Clearly one of them is stuggling.

However, what Bebo has that Hi5 does not is a English speaking user base which is able to be monetized. AOL has a slew of Advertising companies that must be just itching to get their hands on the Bebo inventory. I’m sure there was plenty of analysis done such that AOL’s pretty sure they’ll earn that $850 back and more

Joke: How many is that?

Got this from here and it gave me a chuckle.

Donald Rumsfeld is giving the president his daily briefing. He concludes by saying: “Yesterday, 3 Brazilian soldiers were killed.”

“OH NO!” the President exclaims. “That’s terrible!”

His staff sits stunned at this display of emotion, nervously watching as the President sits, head in hands.

Finally, the President looks up and asks, “How many is a brazillion?”

Oil Companies are Hypocrites

I read an interview this morning by former Massachusetts Representative Joe Kennedy, who runs the nonprofit Citizens Energy Corp., which provides discount heating oil to Americans in need in 15 states and the District of Columbia.

On quote of his that stuck out for me was this:

The U.S. oil industry in the last five hears has made over $800 billion in profits. None of them is putting profits back into developing new sources of crude.  ExxonMobile put zero percent of profits into renewable or alternative energy; BP, six tenths of 1%; ConocoPhillips, seven tenths of 1%; Shell, 1.3%; Chevron, 0.5%. And everybody says we’re running out of oil. You know, 74% of the earth’s surface – as we all learned in the third grade – is covered with water.  And we have developed less than 1% of the energy supplies contained underneath the surface of the ocean.  So there’s nothing to suggest to me that right now there’s an imminent crisis

It’s amazing how little these companies are putting towards alternative fuels.  It makes me think all those BP commercials I see on the Discovery Channel are totally hypocritical.

My 3 Favorite Moose Posts

My cousin Sam Lewis (aka: “Moose”) is pure genius. He’s one the of the funnier writers you’ll ever meet. For your reading pleasure, i thought i’d introduce you to my favorite 3 blog posts of his.  His blog is called “Van Dusen Speaks” and you should make it your home page.

v

Here they are with a little excerpt from each:

Number 1: The Captain of the Duke Lacrosse Team’s Time in Prison, as Told by Red in the “Shawshank Redemption” (link)

shawshank.jpgDay 1: There are some betting days when you know you’ve got your hands reined around the right horse, and when that bus pulled up I knew it was one of those days. They asked me my double down on who was gonna wail first, and I went with the pale faced white boy twirling a stick.

Day 23: I’ve always been known as a man who could obtain certain items. Liquor, dirty magazines, a bag of reefer if that’s your thing. But when Bret Thompson came up to me, it was the first time anyone had ever asked me for a No Fear T-shirt and a shark tooth necklace.

Day 24: The sisters got to Bret that night, making him wish Brine, Inc. made lower body padding. Later on they would know why his plunger was missing from the police evidence locker.

Day 97: So instead of laying tar, we all sat there on the roof on that hot afternoon, drinking those cold Gatorades that Bret’s mom had sent him.

Day 648: That (blasting Dave Matthews over the PA system) stunt cost Bret two weeks in the hole, but for a few minutes he truly felt free.

Number 2: You think you know me, Netflix recommendation software? Well, you don’t know shit (link)

…And let’s talk a little about the “one foreign film begets another” assumption. Just because I randomly order up “The Milkmaid of Avignon” during a bored frantic queuing session doesn’t mean I’m interested in watching just any foreign film. So spare me the instructions to rent some epic tale of a young boy waddling through the Uzbekistani mountains chasing a tire iron. Nor does it mean I will perk my ears up at any movie with a corseted woman on the cover who’s cleavage is about to take over Luxembourg. For your information “The Milkmaid of Avignon” is a gripping period tale of a young woman of humble origins who through courage, determination and unwavering firmness survived famine, the Spanish Inquisition and seeing John Paul Belmondo’s orgasm face. …

Number 3: Holiday Movie Mashup (link)

“My mother the tap dancing penguin.”  directed by Pedro Almodovar

The inspiring tale of a young boy who examines the ups and downs of all his past relationships through the viewpoint of his mother, a tap dancing penguin who one night fell victim to the passions of a drunk and lonely Spanish researcher on post in Antartica. This journey of self examination takes him hitchhiking where he meets Esteban, a traveling defibrillator salesman/fluorophiliac (people who like to rub toothpaste on their genitals before sex) on his way to meditate in the confines of a buddhist leper colony. This transformation inevitably takes him back to his roots, where he himself becomes a tap dancing penguin and strangely adopts the voice of Hugh Jackman, who as the voice of a computerized swimming bird uses slightly more facial expressions than he did in “Swordfish”.(Side comment: There’s alot of talk these days about movies being safe for the fragile minds of young children, but I ask you this: which would frighten you more as a young child, computerized tap dancing penguins or Michael Douglas doing a woman from behind over a desk. I say the penguin, unless the name of that actress has the words Glenn and Close in it).

Warren Buffett on Life

I thought this was an interesting quote by Warren Buffett to a class of Emory students:

What if you could buy 10% of one of your classmates and their future earnings? You wouldn’t buy the ones with the highest IQ, the best grades, etc, but the most effective. You like people who are generous, go out of their way, straight shooters. Now imagine that you could short 10% of one of your classmates. This part is usually more fun as you start looking around the room. You wouldn’t choose the ones with the poorest grades. Look for people nobody wants to be around, that are obnoxious or like to take all the credit. If you have a 500 HP engine and only get 50 HP out of it, you’ll be beat by someone else that has a 300 HP engine but gets 250 HP output. The difference between potential and output comes from human qualities. You can make a list of the qualities you admire and those you despise. To turn the tables, think if this is the way I react to the qualities on the list, which is the way the world will react to me. You can learn to turn on those qualities you want and turn off those qualities you wish to avoid. The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. You can’t change at 60; the time to look at that list is now.