In college basketball last night, Villinova senion Allan Ray was giong for a loose ball and got poked by a player on the opposing team. When he did, his eye literally popped out of his head. This is some crazy footage,
[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=L-xsUYEnFSc]Apparently Ray is going to be fine. It is being called a “soft tissue” injury and there was no damage to the cornea, required no stitches, and he can still see. No harm no fout.
I recently watched the documentary Grizzly Man, which was great. At first i wasn’t sure how pysched i’d be to watch an entire movie that’s all about a guy hanging out in a National Park with bears. But from the moment it began i was mesmerized. This guy is a total nut-job and the movie goes on trying to make him a hero. The bear scenes are amazing too. I have yet to see a National Geographic special that has as good footage as this does. The bear scenes are incredible. But lets focus on the guy being completely insane.
The Sports Guy has some good comments too:
It’s the first documentary since “American Movie” that ranks a perfect 100 on the Unintentional Comedy Scale. First of all, it’s directed by Werner Herzog, who (incredibly) decided to narrate the movie even though he sounds like he’s auditioning for a Hans & Frans sketch. Second, the Grizzly Man guy is an absolute maniac and can’t be described even remotely. You just have to see him in action. He’s surpassed Mark Byars (from “Paradise Lost”) and Mark Borchardt for me, and I never thought I would say that. Third, there are so many ridiculously funny moments (like
when Grizzly Man claims that he lost out to Woody Harrelson as Coach’s replacement on “Cheers,” or when he’s playing with the bear poop) that you can’t even believe it’s happening as it’s happening. I kept thinking that this was like the “Blair Witch Project,” some sort of elaborate hoax by the creators of “Mr. Show.” But it’s not. And fourth, this is the first movie that I can remember that glorifies someone who’s completely insane. I mean, COMPLETELY. Utterly and totally.
There is some great soccer news out today (found both of them on deadspin). Check this out:
Let me just say this. I love MyWare and use it all the time.
What is MyWare? MyWare is software you install on your computer, knowingly, that tracks what you do. It’s usually confined to a niche area like music, video, or web browsing. I am a sucker for it. I use MyWare for my music (last.fm), my searches (a9), my desktop (Google Desktop), my chats (Google Chat) and I even my credit card as MyWare as i only use it pay for stuff so i can track every penny.
Even offline there are services that do this are great and i love them. The Garmin workout tracker is great. Whenever you run outside, it plots your actual course, speed and heartrate (among a bunch of other very useful stats). When i first heard about Wayfaring.com, i thought it was a cell phone geographic tracker and i was pretty pumped (it’s not).
At Ruckus, we were building a MyWare product to help college kids find new music by populating a user’s profile with their actual listens. Last.fm similarly aggregates the data and they do the aggregation better, but at Ruckus, we did a better job of allowing users to find music using the data.
I think the trends of MyWare reflects the online social networking of society. More and more people are confortable putting their persona online. In the case of MyWare, it goes one step farther by placing actual, real usage online, not just what you want people to see. This lends some authenticity to the data and can show a more accurate dipiction of a person. There are obvious privacy concerns when you get to location and all desktop applications, but there are some low hanging fruits that i’d love to see put online.
Everybody knows itunes and how it works. But, the 2nd most popular format for
music is Windows Media Audio, aka WMA. Why? Because with WMA you can protect it in very sophisticated ways. You can rent the music by the month (like Napster and Rhapsody) or you can purchase it outright to be played back on 5 computers (like on Buy.com). Any way a distributor wants to protect an audio file, you can do it with WMA. The industry term for this protected format is Janus.
This is a neat technology for business (although quite clunky for users) and it is being used all around the internet. The codename “Janus” however was never meant to be mainstream, so, starting early in late 2004 Microsoft started branding all protected WMA devices and files as being “Plays for Sure” – all devices were Plays-For-Sure compliant, all files, all everything had this attached. For Sure
I always thought the “For Sure” part of this was strange. I stared thinking about it more and eventually realized that it reminded me of the muppet that always ended phrases with “For Sure!” For the longest time i couldn’t remember the muppets name, then it came to me – her name was Janice! Even better, Janice was the musician Muppet. On TV, she regularly jammed with Linda Ronstadt, Elton John, and Linda Lavin.
You see: Janus -> Plays “For Sure” -> Janice. All having to do with music. Am i reading too much into this? Maybe, but i think it’s a terrific coincidence.
I was talking with some people the other day of the genius behind Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. I was surprised to hear that many didn’t know about the hidden subplot going through the entire movie. So, i thought i’d write it down….
There are some clues.
A person’s soul as described in the bible is one of the most beautiful things imaginable. It is beyond compare and mesmerizing to look at. That is why, whenever anyone opens the briefcase up, they are in total awe of its beauty.So, some choose to think this is all coincidence. I think it is true and completely awesome.
There’s a new media player that’s been released called Songbird. iTunes has dominated as the go-to media player for people to play music. And with WMP, Winamp, Yahoo Music Engine and others (J. River) it would seem that the space is pretty saturated. How could a new player even hope to catch up, let alone beat these other players?
The answer is the open-source community. Similar to how Firefox has used the legions of developers to create a great product with many extensions/plug-ins to be better than Internet Explorer (IE), Songbird hopes to do the same to WMP and iTunes. In fact, Songbird is built on top of Gecko (Firefox’s core engine) so it’s basically a media playing browser that is open for developers around the world to use.
Version 0.1 was release 2 weeks ago and 0.1.1 was released this week. While still not as feature rich as other players you can see the potential and let me tell you, it’s only a matter of time before great extensions and services leverage its openness to create a superior experience to iTunes and WMP. 
I read an interesting blog posting today from a guy who’s visiting Switzerland and 
he’s noticed that all the watch advertisements he’s see has the time set at 10:09. It’s kind of eerie when you see all the ads.
Check out his blog post here .
I think this flew under the radar for a few days for me before i fully appreciated how great a move this is for Google. I figure it will take about 6 months or 1 year before there’s an article in Time/Newsweek/Fortune about how great Google is for things like this (and maps, search, etc). First off, after search, Gmail is the only real application that i really like from Google.* It’s a great application – they really thought through how people use email and introduced some very nice features that i hadn’t seen on webmail services before, such as 1) threaded email messages – which appear that way in your inbox, 2) labels instead of folder – others still haven’t caught on to the subtle difference, 3) unlimited storage, 4) Unlimited session time – no need to sign in every 20 minutes.
The last point, which i always took for granted, is the key to their new Google Chat. I didn’t know the power until they started building for a me a buddy list on my left-hand side. Then i started receiving IM’s from them (Google IM’s, that is). Whoa!
I’ve been using AIM for a decade now and although other IM clients are far superior, i didn’t think i’d see anyone overtaking it because of the network effect. What i didn’t realize is that Google is doing the smart thing by leveraging the fact that there’s a huge user base logged into Google all the time. Why not convert GMail into an IM client? AIM is adding on email.
Think how many companies could have done this before? Outlook knows everyone’s email. It could have built a buddylist in the side and allowed you to IM (using MSN Messenger technology) anyone in your address book who is also using Outlook or using MSN. That would have been huge.
My prediction is that Google Chat/Talk will become the #2 IM Network in 2 years. AIM will hang on b/c it has all the youngsters already.
* Note: I have a bias against Maps because of my past relationship with Keyhole (which Google bought to make Google Maps).
I was looking at Intel’s new core, and i heard about Sun’s new Sparc. It’s clear that microprocessors continue to get faster and better, and seem to be mostly utilized on the server side. Laptop and desktop machines don’t need more power because there aren’t that many applications pushing that envelope. For instance, i have a wimpy 1.2 Ghz machine and it does fine. But browser applications are becoming more and more demanding and Operations centers need more and more power from their boxes – which they will be getting with these new chips.
In my opinion, this foreshadows Google and Yahoo’s besting of Microsoft. MS has been very successful for years at making desktop applications, and have ridden the proecssor advances accodingly. There is a fundamental change going on today. All the new applications being build, all the new tools people are using, they aren’t desktop applications. They are browser applications. Compare MS applications Word, Excel, and Outlook (Email/Calendar) to Writely, NumSum, Gmail, and CalendarHub. These new browser applications are still new but you can see how they are just as powerful and networked in ways that MS apps aren’t.
What’s interesting is that this is not a new vision or direction. Sun was there 10 years ago when they touted the Java terminal. They were just 10 years too early