Impressive Pong Skills

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While i’ll never truly endorse “Beirut” as a legitimate form of pong, i do have to give this guy a lot of credit. Or maybe i should feel bad for him with all the time he must have put in to make this happen. I wish i would have seen more consecutive sinks instead of 1-time shots b/c he could have just sat there for hours trying to get it to work. That said, they are good shots.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFZevw1AHZs]

For those of you who care, i’m a much bigger fan of beer pong with paddles. This is a game that requires more skill, is more fun to play, and much higher stakes (i.e. more beer).

Kurt Vonnegut: A Legend

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One of my favorite authors, Kurt Vonnegut, died this past week at the age of 84. He led a pretty incredible life. Born in 1922 in Indiana, he began his writing career at his high school newspaper, The Daily Echo. He briefly attended Butler U, but dropped out when a professor said his stories were not good enough. He then went to Cornell (41-42) where he served as an editor for the student newspaper and majored in biochemistry. He enrolled at Carnegie Mellon in 1943 but studied there only briefly before enlisting in the Army (it was WWII).

In the army he was a scout during the Battle of the Bulge, was cut off from his battalion, and wandered alone behind enemy lines for several days until captured by German troops. There as a POW, Vonnegut witnessed the aftermath of the bombing of Dresden, Germany, which destroyed much of the city. Vonnegut was one of just seven American prisoners of war in Dresden to survive, in an underground meatpacking cellar known as Slaughterhouse Five. He described it as, “Utter destruction. Carnage unfathomable.” This experience formed the core of his most famous work, Slaughterhouse-Five and is a theme in at least six other books.

Continue reading “Kurt Vonnegut: A Legend” →

Grindhouse Rocked

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I went to see The Grindhouse this weekend and LOVED it.  Rodriguez’s terror flick, Planet Terror, was completely entertaining and Tarintino’s Death Proof was satisfying in on every level.

I went to see the film with 3 other friends and the best thing about the movie was how each person liked a different part and not everyone would agree on which was the best feature.   I’ve noticed this in the reviews too. Some reviewers (like this one) loved Rodriguez’s spoof while others (like this one) loved Quentin’s.  I happen to have liked Quentin’s better too – mostly because i love his quirks.

What is in the Grindhouse? As one reviewer correctly posted, it is a double feature movie where both directors brought their A-game and provided all the must-haves, such as:

zombie hordes and one-legged go-go dancers, hot rods and hot pants, evil doctors and exploding pustules, trash-talking identical-twin babysitters, castration, decapitation, dismemberment, diminutive Mexican badasses, customized motorcycles, Kurt Russell, Osama bin Laden, Fu Manchu, tasty sausage, jive-ass stuntwomen, outrageous car wrecks, buckets of blood, geysers of gore, mountains of weaponry, explosions bigger than God and of course titties, lots and lots of titties.

How could this not be one of the best movies of the year?  What did you think?

Twitter: Facebook's News Feed for People over 25

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picture-6.pngThe technorati are going insane about the website Twitter these days. It’s all people can talk about. It’s driving me nuts! One thing that i keep asking myself is, isn’t Twitter is just the same as Facebook’s status indicator and news feed? If you don’t know about this feature in Facebook, here’s what it is…

When you log on to Facebook, there’s a little window where you can write what you’re doing. The home page for each user is something called a “news feed” which displays what all your friends are doing. This could be their status that they’ve typed in, a change in their profile, a new message, etc.

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Kids on facebook have been using this feature A TON, everyday, all the time. Twitter does the exact same thing – except that it is ONLY the status description as you can’t do anything else on the site. Facebook is mostly used by people under 25 and it is used frequently. So basically Twitter took one (of the hundreds) of features of facebook and made a site around it for people over the age of 25. Not a bad idea, but doesn’t seem worthy of all the hubbub.

What do you think?

Technology Incantation for Muggles

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My friend danah boyd gave a talk at the Etech conference last month (link is here). I just got around to reading the speech which i thought was fantastic. She begins it….

Isn’t there something magical about how fast the Internet went from a defense project to a key part of social infrastructure? Isn’t there something magical about how grandparents are blogging and activists are remixing popular TV shows to make social commentary? It is my belief that if we stare solely at the technology, we lose track of the true magic that exists around us.

What she does in the speech is break down how startups, corporations and almost anyone thinks

if you want to think about people, you need to understand how technological and corporate decisions interface with people’s lives and practices…

danah breaks down America’s society into stages and then describes the top 5 priorities of each stage, which are:

Life Stage #1 Life Stage #2 Life Stage #3 Life Stage #4
* Friends * Sex * Labor * Family
* Attention * Friends * Family * Health
* Play/Leisure * Money * Money * Religion
* Sex * Play/Leisure * Power * Hobbies
* Consumption * Labor * Property * Friends

As someone who is moving from stage 2 to stage 3 (damn that’s scary) i see this switch happening. Friends are harder to get access to as work and relationships/marriage take a more important role in everyone’s life.

I like how she can switch from looking at behavior patterns to how corporations and startups behave and deliver products:

Startups typically are naive about people’s practices but utterly passionate about technology. If they’re lucky, their technology will reach the hands of a population for whom it will make complete sense. This population will morph their product to meet their needs. And if the startup is not stupid, it will support this morphing, learn from it, and seek to make more and more happy users. Companies typically try to model out demographics and design for the market that they think is most monetizable. They go straight for mass adoption based on need, not love. Even more so than startups, they tend to blow through their early adopters so that they can get to the cash-cow as fast as possible. Warning: once you destroy the trust of your early adopters, you’re on the greed path.

All in all, it’s a great speech and worth checking out if you’re at all interested in technology (even if you’re not technical).

Changes Coming for Timberwolves

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As many of you know, i’m a huge Minnesota sports fan.  I love the T-Wolves and it’s been frustrating for me to watch their season fall apart this year.  Also, there are a lot of rumors about what’s going to happen with Garnett after the season ends.  We have a great group of young players – Foye, McCants, Craig Smith – and we could get a lottery pick in the upcoming draft.  So, we could have a group of great youngsters or some good young player + KG coming back next year.

This ESPN interview with KG i just read echoed those thoughts (interview here). Here’s the final word from KG.  There will be some major changes coming and frankly, i’m looking forward to them.

Marc Stein. So if you or the Wolves choose not to pursue a trade this summer, do you think we’ll still see some major changes with this franchise?

Kevin Garnett: There’s got to be. F— yeah. I think [head coach] Randy Wittman would echo that, so it’s not just me.

The Fratellis – Good Music from Scotland

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There’s a new band from Scotland called The Fratellis. If you remember the movie, The Goonies, you’ll remember that the bad guys in that movie are the Fratellis. Nobody knows if this is where this band got their name, but i sure hope so.

I like them. They’re catchy and they can rock. To me they are 2007’s version of the 2006 Arctic Monkeys.

I’ve got the album here for you to download (click here). My favorite songs are “Whistle For the Choir” and “Got Ma Nuts From A Hippie”

Enjoy….

EMI Tracks on iTunes – Not mp3's

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I’ve heard a bunch of stuff today about all of EMI’s tracks being available on iTunes without DRM. At first i was really happy, but 2 things kept me from being REALLY impressed.

First, these tracks are not mp3’s. Everyone is assuming they are, but they’re not. They are in a format called “unprotected AAC. ” For those of you who don’t know, AAC is a similar format to mp3 but to-date it is only used by MPEg4 players and Apple (it was partially developed by Apple).  The format is understood by iPods and iTunes, but really nothing else. If you buy an unprotected AAC track, you can email it to whoever you want and listen to it on unlimited amount of computers. But, can you listen to it on the an iRiver player, the slick Samsung players or the nice Sandisk Sansa player? NOPE!

This is very clever strategic move by Apple. They have 2 objectives in mind by only offering AAC: 1) Get out of the legislation trouble they’re having in Europe which is asking them to open up thier DRM technology so other people can make iPod-like devices. 2) Try to keep the iPod as the go-to device for music. If they sold mp3’s they would solve problem 1 but then any player could be used with iTunes music. By making the tracks AAC, none of the competing players in the market today will work. Of course, new players can add AAC format compatibility in the future. But they have to license it. From who? – you guessed it: Apple!

The second thing that struck me as strange is that unprotected music is more expensive than protected. This is dumb. Sooner or later the labels will realize that people want convenience and value. There is a group of people who use the iTunes store. By making the unprotected tracks more expensive you’ll earn a few extra dollars from those users (and only those users) as they will prefer to have un-tethered music. But they won’t get the P2P fanatics. They won’t get anyone under the age of 25 to go to iTunes and buy a track. I’m not sure if 99 cents is low enough for an mp3, but i know that $1.30 is too expensive. It’s a shame. Sooner or later they’ll realize they aren’t going far enough, they aren’t getting new users with this model.

All this being said, it’s a step in the right direction and i can’t wait to see what the other labels do when they see that EMI unprotected tracks are MUCH more popular than the regular iTunes tracks.

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