The Underground Man

XBox 360

Now while I might agree with much of this article, I have to disagree with the conclusion.

In it, the writer concludes that the money that MS has invested in the XBox program would have been better spent returning dividends to investors. I think that's a patently stupid idea. It makes sense in a mature business, where you control the marketplace and have a ton of cash lying about.

But Microsoft isn't operating in a mature space (at least not in the console market) and is by no means a dominant player in the space. You have to pay to play, which is exactly what they are doing.

Paying a dividend rather than investing in the Home and Entertainment market would have been tantamount to giving up on the gaming market (which is key to driving adoption of new OS variants in the home) and the home entertainment market - where MS hopes to grow to become a dominant player in the next few years.

Oh.. so.. let's just give up and go home? What kind of bizarre, incompetent business advice is this?

Oh.. wait.. it's Forbes.

Silly question.

What's your Daemon

I thoroughly enjoyed reading His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. I was intrigued to learn that it has been made into a movie and will be released this December.

It's a fascinating sci-fi - a look at a neo-Victorian world that has one very radical difference from ours. People have external souls, called "daemons". They can never be separated too far from their people and in infancy can assume many different animal forms. As a person matures (and presumably the personality) the daemon fixes in one particular aspect.

I keep running into the Myers-Briggs test - I just finished taking a related test for a Philips (a company that I hope to join). The movie site provides a test to determine what your daemon is. It looks to be derived from the Meyers-Briggs personality test. The output is your own "daemon".

Here's mine:

Liverpool v. Chelsea, UCL Semi-Final

Liverpool, the team, I support plays Chelsea in the second leg of the Champions League semi-final. The semis, as usual, are turning out to be cracking matches.

Liverpool didn't play well in the first half against Chelsea and went down a goal. The second half was a different story and they dominated possession in search of that vital away goal.

Tuesday, Chelsea has to visit our house (Anfield) and I hope that the crowd, and the spirit of Liverpool makes a difference. It'll be a difficult challenge, made a bit easier by the likely absence of Chelsea's best defender, Ricardo Carvalho (who set up their goal at Stamford Bridge).

We have a good chance of repeating the great Championship run of 2005 and possibly having an all-English final. Actually, I would prefer that we play AC Milan again because I'm not sure it's healthy for the game to have an all-England final.

Whatever the outcome, all four teams are worthy of the Championship. Though one could wish that Mourinho (Chelsea's coach) wasn't so damn grating.

Amsterdam

It's interesting, I've been doing some research on Amsterdam and investigating all aspects of living there. I spent some time recently putting up my recent photos (some, not all) on Flickr and discovered an explanation of why the Dutch don't use window curtains.

This is something I noticed while in Amsterdam that puzzled me a bit. Apparently it has something to do with the old Protestant ethic and the idea of not having anything to hide.

I found a reference to this on a Dutch blog which seems to confirm my understanding.

ABN Amro

I suppose my uncle the financier will disagree with me violently but I'm very supportive of ABN Amro remaining a viable entity and rejecting the Royal Bank of Scotland's bid.

The deal is that ABN Amro recently agreed to be acquired by Barclay's bank. A bit sad that a 183-year old institution would be acquired but at least it would continue to exist.

Just as the news of this bid came out, RBS and a coalition of other banks put in a higher bid. Key to that was that an American property of ABN would not be sold.
However, with their bid ABN would be broken up and the parts sold to the coalition members.

Of course, one might imagine that this would be disastrous for the employees and a very old Dutch bank would cease to exist.

Weighing this against the Barclays bid, which is for about 4 euros less per share, it seems reasonable to imagine that the bank's management would want to take the Barclay's bid - which keeps the bank as operating as an entity.

But there is a shareholder revolt in progress, as a large trust which owns about 4% of the stock, wants the management to take the RBS bid. From what I can see it's a question of balancing the preservation of a lot of Dutch jobs against the immediate gain in stock value in taking the higher RBS bid. If it was purely money, I would see the sense. But it seems akin to the "raid and strip" practices of raiders like Icahn in the '80s and I dislike the idea that RBS will succeed.

Stealing images

I recently found one of my images stolen and put up on a scooter site. When I contacted the site admin, he told me it wasn't stealing and that I should make it impossible for folks to "inline" images from my server.

That's akin to saying, "oh, you should lock your front door otherwise you cannot call people stealing food from your refrigerator as theft". I think his is is a patently absurd argument, based on a limited understanding of copyright law.

Basically, my rights were violated when the image was referred to (using img src), thus forcing my server (and me) to pay the price of serving up the image to his users. So I suffered immediate and quantifiable damage in monetary terms. Beyond that, a fairly recent court case has addressed this specific issue:

"On February 6, 2002, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals announced its decision in Kelly v Arriba Soft. In favor of Ditto.com, it did uphold the right of image search engines to display thumbnail copies of images within their search results so long as the website URL was linked from the thumbnail. In favor of Kelly, it found that Arriba Soft's display of the framed, deep linked full sized image, was not fair use. Further, it found that Kelly suffered harm as a result of the Arriba Soft's display of full sized images, deep linked and framed at the Arriba Vista Image Searcher. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals remanded the issue back to Judge Taylor for determination of damages. The decision clearly determined that image search engines cannot display full sized images out of context of the website on which they were originally displayed; image search engines can only link from the thumbnail to the website!"

This reference is from the NetCopyrightLaw Web site. It seems incontrovertible that the thief violated the law and quite possibly that the admin's response indicates that he is a contributor to the violation (refusal to take down the reference).

I've since modified my files to make this sort of thing more difficult but I was just stunned by his response. Basically, blaming the victim of the theft. I suppose it happens all the time - and has happened to me before. Were this a photoblog, I imagine that I would have seen this much more often.

In the end, I wouldn't have been so pissed off if the guy had just (1) served the content up from his own site, (2) asked permission, and (3) gave me full credit for the photo rather than pretending he didn't know where it came from (I speak of the bboard user, not the admin).

My uncle and I have been discussing this for a while and I'm coming around to his point of view because of this whole issue.

Re-evaluating

Re-evaluating old photos. Taken at an vintage car show in my parent's small town. No clue what it is.. I never take notes, sadly. I thought the sepia treatment worth trying..

The Phillips Collection

I had the pleasure yesterday of visiting the Philips Collection in Washington, D.C. I spent the day in D.C. to visit my first cousin and her husband and have a good brunch (Cafe Saint Ex).

They kindly invited me to join them at the Phillips Collection for a Beethoven trio performance (the Archduke). As we were leaving, I noticed an interesting painting on the wall. Walking over, I discovered it was a Picasso. Lifting my eyes and looking around the room, I found several more Picassos, a Klimt, and a Mondrian. Duncan Phillips was a wealthy young man with an eye for art and he built an extraordinary collection over his lifetime.

They noticed my interest (they are members, so they've seen the collection before) and we walked through much of the collection. The pride and joy, to my mind, was Renoir's "The Boating Party", which I absolutely loved.





This picture sadly doesn't come close to doing it justice as I found the original much more colorful.

In any event, a wonderful collection and highly recommended should you visit D.C.

Judgement at Nuremburg

Caught the tail end of this film last night. The concluding speech by the presiding judge (Spencer Tracey) made me think of events in our country today. What he said (or the script writer said) forty-odd years ago is still pertinent today:

"[This] trial has shown that under the stress of a national crisis, men - even able and extraordinary men - can delude themselves into the commission of crimes and atrocities so vast and heinous as to stagger the imagination. No one who has sat through this trial can ever forget. The sterilization of men because of their political beliefs... The murder of children... How easily that can happen!

There are those in our country today, too, who speak of the "protection" of the country. Of "survival". The answer to that is: survival as what?

A country isn't a rock. And it isn't an extension of one's self. It's what it stands for, when standing for something is the most difficult! Before the people of the world - let it now be noted in our decision here that this is what we stand for: justice, truth... and the value of a single human being!"

It seems like we need to consider history a bit more closely and re-learn a few hard-won lessons.

What is it with American tv?

Maybe the question should be "What is it with American culture/mores?"

How is it that this society finds violence so much more culturally acceptable than sex?

As a result of some conversations I had with European friends last week I paid a bit more attention to what I saw on TV over the weekend. I think I was watching Spike or the SciFi channel and the movie in question was some sort of shlock horror thing. I don't normally watch these as I'm rarely into horrorfests but for some reason these caught my attention.

What did I notice? They were bleeping out selected words of the dialogue that contained profanities. Not normally something to comment on, but the very next shot showed a decapitated women's head, still dripping blood from the wound. Extremely graphic and not something you would want to show your children.

Why is it that this sort of violence - typified by the evening news, the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and countless horror films - is so acceptable - and desensitizing and that a little profanity is unacceptable.

The double standard is just mind-boggling.

tinyurl

I've gotten fed up with humongously long session variables in URLs and so have just starting using tinyurl.

Great tool for ensuring that no one ever writes back to you again saying "That URL you sent me was broken and didn't work".

too much stuff

I own far too many possessions for someone who doesn't own their own home.

I cleaned out much of my Seattle storage locker last week after returning from vacation, and now I'm faced with winnowing out the chaff before leaving Baltimore. Huge amount of work, and I'm becoming a coffee addict again, doing it. I had a friend out here to help, but it was likely premature because I have to discard a lot of stuff.

It's complicated because I don't know if I'm going to SF, Seattle or Amsterdam yet and the situation hasn't cleared up a great deal. So I'm packing a minimal set of stuff for Amsterdam, more if I move to SF, and more yet if I move back to Seattle.

Sometimes I think that all I really need are my cameras, a few clothes, my laptop and my cats. Anything else is really superfluous.

I wish.