Soccer Madness

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There is some great soccer news out today (found both of them on deadspin). Check this out:

  1. A Romanian soccer team traded a player to competitor Regal Horia for 33 pounds of meat. Turned out to be a good deal for them too, because the guy they traded — perhaps sensing the inevitable after being swapped for meat — promptly retired. Check out this quote from the team:
    • “We are upset because we lost twice — firstly because we lost a good player and secondly because we lost our team’s food for a whole week,” said a Regal Horia official.
  2. Ron Artest move over. At a FA Cup match between Manchester and Liverpool Alan Smith (a ManU midfielder) broke his leg during the game. As the ambulance was leaving the stadium, a group of Liverpool fans attacked the ambulance – which is just ridiculous. Check out the news from London. The reports say the ambulance was surrounded by people who “threw stones and bottles” at it, and even tried to rock it from side to side. Nothing like a good riot – sheesh.

My Love of MyWare

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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.

WMA / Janus – the Muppet?

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Everybody knows itunes and how it works. But, the 2nd most popular format forjanice_trans.jpg 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.

10-12playsforsure_lg.jpgThis 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

janice.jpgI 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.

Pulp Fiction’s Hidden Storyline

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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.

  • Apparently, the theory is that when a person’s soul is sucked out by the devil, it is taken through the back of a the skull. When you first see Marsellus – when he’s giving his speech to Butch – you see a bandaid covering the back of his neck.
  • Vincent and Jules are hitman who work for Marcellus. Marcellus wants his soul back and gives them the task of stealing his it back. When they arrive at the apartment in the beginning, they stumble upon a group of the devil’s henchman. Jules recites Ezekiel 35:17 as he is now doing God’s bidding to save a lost soul.
  • The code on the briefcase is 666.
  • A henchman comes out from hiding in the back with a “hand canon” and shoots at Jules and Vincent. Miraculously all the bullets narrowly miss them. “God came down and stopped the bullets” because they were saving a soul. Jules calls in “divine intervention.”
  • pulp.jpgA 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.

Songbird's Here

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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. extn_birdmeditating.png

Gmail Chat Is Awesome

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Gmail.gif

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).

Google vs. MS: Web Terminals Will Win

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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

Snowboarding in the Olympics? I Don't Like it

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Snowboarding

I was watching the snowboarding tonight and i just couldn’t help feeling that it just isn’t right. This should not be a sport in the Olympics. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be a sport, at least not right now, i’m just saying don’t put it in the Olympics. Anyway ,here are my main complaints:

  1. Hasn’t been popular long enough. In almost all the other sports in the Olympics, they’ve been around for decades. They’ve ironed out all the rules, they’ve tailored the games to be the most exciting and competitive, and they’ve established some tradition and records. The 100 yard dash has always been 100 yards. They didn’t start with 90 then go to 120 and then settle for 100. It’s been this way for a long time. Snowboarding is so new, it is in the larva stage of production. It’s like the inside of a tomato – it just isn’t quite developed yet. Wait a couple more X-Games, wait for it to be understood by some more folks – then if it is really played across the world, you can bring it in. There aren’t even world-record holders yet, are there?
  2. Too popular. To me, the Winter Olympics is all about letting the folks who have really put their sport above sex shine. You look at the speed-skater, the nordic skier, the bobsledder or the luger and you see a guy who, for the first time in 4 years, is being noticed. I can feel them thinking to themselves “I’m finally here in the Olympic Village – my one chance to get some ass.” And i say let them get ass – let the entire world watch them – let us applaud their dedication and devotion to being the best in the world. This ins’t the case for the snowboarders. They are already the cool kids. They already have groupies – this event does not make or break them, and you can tell. There isn’t the same passion, the same level of excitement or dispair. Maybe this is because the X-games is on every year so this is just a side-show that that. Maybe they should only allow X-Game winners to participate in the Olympics – that’d make it more prestigious wouldn’t it and provide a good feeder system. It runs the risk of being like tennis or soccer where you already have Wimbleton and the World Cup so Olympics is pointless. It just seems like it doesn’t fit in yet.
  3. Too American. America dominates snowboarding. I see snowboarding’s addition an Olympic sport as a shameless attempt for the Olympic committee to try to get more marketing dollars from the US. One of the good things about the Olympics is that it is a global affair. These are sports that all countries play. Why introduce one that is mostly done by Americans? That just doesn’t seem fair.
  4. Too fun. All other sports seem grueling and painful and tough. There’s not another sport i can think of in any Olympic Games that people would want to get up off the couch and do in their free time (with the exception of beach volleyball – and i have the same complaint there). Snowboarding on a half-pipe is just too fun – it can’t be a sport. It’s like wakeboarding, water skiing, or tubing on a lake. That’s a blast and some people can do some amazing things, but that doesn’t mean it should be a sport in the Olympics, does it? Check out Shawn White’s post victory interview – is he even taking this seriously?
  5. Drugs. I’m sure they’re not all stoners, but they’re not doing a good job of shedding that stereotype. Especially when even the announcers are saying things (and i seriously heard this), “I bet she’s pretty stoked she landed that one.” Come on.
  6. Judges. I hate it when a sport has to be defined by other people giving scores. It sucks during the slam dunk competition and it sucks here. I want to know, and i want the competitor to know, immediately whether they’re in first or last place. I fully back downhill races and/or any race because you have a clear winner and you are the fastest. In snowboarding competition – a winner is what, the best jumper? trickster? i just don’t buy it.

It makes you wonder why skateboarding isn’t an Olympic sport. It’s been around longer, has just as many people do it, and is just as dangerous. Oh well, that’s my rant for the night.

But, before i go. Toby brought up a completely random good point tonight – we never see a zamboni while watching speed skating. But yet the ice is always incredibly smooth which means that they must zamboni between every race. Those things can take a long time. Can you imagine how boring that is?!

Milan to Minsk? How about DC to NY

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Sure it’s not an erotic journey (a la Seinfeld), but it is still quite an adventure. Asny3.jpg someone who has lived and worked in both DC and NY and gone back and forth regularly, i’m very familiar with the various travelling options. But this weekend was something special. As usual i explored my options:

  • The train is usually the best as it takes you right into the city (no cabs) and isn’t delayed as much as a plane.
  • Driving can be convenient if you need to be flexible, but you can’t do anything on the trip, so it’s just wasted time. If i have some good tunes or a podcast, it’s fine, but i rarely have enough material for the 4 hour trip. Plus there’s alwaysny4.jpg some parking hassle.
  • My latest love is the Chinatown Bus, or what i like to use is the Eastern Shuttle. This amazingly cheap and takes you right from Chinatown to Chinatown (or Midtown). We’re talking $30 round trip and you can just relax, get work done, watch a movie, whatever. For the money, my favorite.

This past weekend i took the bus and had a pretty good trip. However, what i wasn’t counting on was 26 inches of snow!

ny1.jpg

I woke up Sunday morning to quite a scene. What i love about NY snowstorms is that the cars disappear and the streets become filled with walkers. I reminds me of movies after the apocalype occurs or zombies take over and everybody’s just on foot fending for themselves. Think of the movies 28 Days Later or The Stand except with a crapload of snow and without the mass destruction. That’s what NY is like today. Pretty great actually – just a serene scene of beautiful NY in the snow.

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