What a game.. just watched Tottenham v. Chelsea and I was thinking, I hope we don't have to play Tottenham again this season.
So I check the Premier League schedule, and what do I find? The last game of the year - Tottenham v. Liverpool at Tottenham. That could be an absolute doozy of a game - it undoubtedly will be since it is very unlikely that Liverpool won't care about their league standing in that game.
On another note, Mike Riley is a great ref. Watching him work in the Tottenham-Chelsea game, he knows what he is doing and is a very active ref.
Finally, I was thinking about what it would take to me Liverpool feared. I think the answer is another striker of Torres' calibre. Like Dimitar Berbatov for instance. Let's hope that DIC actually does buy a stake in Liverpool and that we can afford another 20-goal scorer for next season.
Have recently found it all over the Web. Mixed feelings on this. I explicitly put it under the Creative Commons license but I didn't expect that people would use them to make money (festival tickets, book jackets, etc.).
Now I've changed the licence to CC-no commercial use. Let's hope that stops some people from using them to make money (and not sharing!).
Heaven help me. I'm about to upgrade my antiquated installation of MT to the latest version. Since I don't have full shell access to the Linux server, this is going to be a bit of a bear.
My service provider mucked up some settings a couple of years ago and was never able to figure it out, hence I lost my blacklist for spam and had to shut down comments.
This is in aid of integrating plug-ins and getting anti-spam filters and comments to work again. After a successful migration (and probably lots of CSS/PHP hackage) I'll evaluate whether MT 4.0 is worth staying on. If not, it's off to WordPress.
It's a lesson in this consumption-oriented society that it always pays to ask. I use credit cards frequently but always try to pay them off monthly. I just paid off a big balance on one card and noticed that my interest rate was absurd (13.5%). So I called, fully prepared to close the account if they didn't give me a much better rate.
I had recently shifted online payment banks and had entered the wrong account number. Their system equated my attempt to make an online payment with the wrong number as an "insufficient funds" and charged me $35. Because it was a mid-month payment, it took me a few weeks to notice it.
So I asked for a refund, and after talking to a supervisor, got it. Then onto the matter of the interest rate. They offered 11.5%. Not good enough I say.. can you do any better (channeling my uncle the finance whiz). The supervisor comes back with "we can give you 6.99% as a special rate".
Sold, says I.
It never hurts to ask. And be prepared to walk away.
It's a dirty little secret of iTunes that when you buy albums, you may not necessarily be getting the whole album. By comparing albums on iTunes with the contents of CDs sold by Amazon, I've found a number of albums that are missing tracks - but they're still represented as complete on iTunes.
I don't get it. Am I missing Apple telling us this? Yes, I like instant gratification, but if it misses getting the whole album - as opposed to buying it on Amazon, waiting for delivery, and then ripping with iTunes, why do it?
It's always a worthwhile exercise to Google yourself. If you don't watch over your reputation, who will?
Found an ancient post of mine (1991) where I started the process of separating the old Usenet group rec.motorcycles into a number of smaller, more dedicated newsgroups. This was a big thing then as there weren't that many newsgroups and folks tended to be pretty ardent about membership. Huge flamewars ensued, but the new groups were eventually formed after about six months of wrangling.
Ah.. youth.
--- cut here --
Xref: rpi news.announce.newgroups:1448 news.groups:33074 rec.motorcycles:43908
Newsgroups: news.announce.newgroups,news.groups,rec.motorcycles
Path: rpi!bounce-back
From: Stefan.Fielding-Isaacs@Corp.Sun.COM
Subject: RFD: rec.motorcycles.tech
Followup-To: news.groups
Sender: tale@cs.rpi.edu
Nntp-Posting-Host: cs.rpi.edu
Date: 28 Sep 91 23:16:19 GMT
Approved: tale@rpi.edu
Alright. I'm interested in starting a new newsgroup, split
off from rec.motorcycles. I propose that it be limited to
discussions of technical content and road- and dirt- track
racing.
Normally, I think two groups might be more appropriate
(a number of individuals have suggested .tech and .race
groups) but I'm not convinced that there would be sufficient
support or traffic to support both groups.
I have a copy of the UseNet guidelines on the matter and
intend to follow them pretty closely.
Consequently, we have the following stages:
1) this posting to news.announce.newsgroups and rec.motorcycles
2) follow-up discussion in news.groups
3) after discussion and settlement on the name and new charter for
the group there will be a call for votes (3 weeks in duration)
which will be posted to news.announce.newsgroups and rec.motorcycles
So hear it is folks. I (and those like-minded individuals out there)
would like to fission rec.motorcycles into two groups. The
new group would be called:
rec.motorcycles.tech
unmoderated group. Discussion limited to articles with technical
content and on- and off-road motorcycle racing.
Follow-up discussion is to be conducted on news.groups.
The debate will be over the title and charter of the proposed new
group. We have 30 days to reach a consensus on title and charter.
Alternative group names have been suggested:
rec.motorcycles.sport
rec.motorcycles.racing
rec.motorcycles.offroad (both track and dirt racing)
Feel free to put forth another suggestion.
Thanks for participating. I welcome your input on the matter.
Stefan
Got to say that Tully's has really stolen a march on Starbucks. I guess no. 2 really does have to try harder. Tully's is a local Seattle coffeeshop chain offering pretty much everything Starbucks does, but with a little more current technology (cf. their big plasmas showing music or traffic).
In the time since I left and returned to Seattle, they've added free WiFi. So now I use the Maps feature on my iPhone to find (and mark) the nearest Tully's so that I can have free, hi-speed WiFi while sipping breve lattes.
I shall never grace another Starbucks until they add free WiFi.
I look back on my "career", and I use the word advisedly because it hasn't been a constant path and I think about what I've accomplished. I'm frequently asked in interviews what I'm most proud of. I suppose other than creating my self-funded startup and running it successfully for seven years it would be some of the work I produced.
Oddly enough, it wasn't the biggest or most well-known sites that I'm proud of. It's the two sites that actually did (and still do!) something to better people's lots: HIV Insite and Smoking Stops Here. HIV Insite remains the no. 1 information resource for HIV and AIDS sufferers, some twelve years after we built it. Smoking Stops Here I did two years ago - both of these were team efforts - and I firmly believe it continues to change peoples' lives.
What concerns me is that I cannot say that the work I'm doing now will ever have the same effect. Indeed, it will be forgotten in another six months. I've been well compensated for it, and done a good job and it's all pointless in the long run.
I feel a crying need to do something that will make a difference. I think that will be the next decision point for me in my career. If it doesn't have the potential of bettering people's lives, what's the point?
Wow.. interesting draw for the Champions League quarter finals. Liverpool gets drawn against Arsenal, away and home (thank goodness!).
Should be a heck of a week, as we'll be playing Arsenal three times in one week (one will be a Premier League game). It'll be a clash of titans as both teams, along with Man United, have to be the favorites to win it all.
Given our recent performance against Arsenal (we looked pretty dominant playing them at home with a just-added Torres going out injured at half-time), I think it likely that we'll have a better than even chance of beating them. But I've got to confess, playing at home in the second leg is a dream.
It's going to be a very interesting week in April.
I must say, the more I visit Texas (particularly Austin) the more I like it.
I have a first cousin and her family in the city and they put me up when I visit. I've gone a bunch of times now, having had a romantic interest in Austin as well as the SXSW festival.
For a "small" town, it's got a good number of good restaurants that I've been able to explore, across a lot of different cuisines. Plus a good movie culture (my cousin is the president of the Polish-American society in town and they even have their own film festival).
Of course, I've only visited in spring and fall, not winter or summer yet but the temperatures don't seem that much different than California.
At least I would be able to leave my convertible top down most of the year if I lived there. If I don't move back to SF, it will likely be to Austin if I can find the right firm.
Currently, I'm looking at Frog Design (first choice because of their brilliant industrial design), GSD&M (wonderful creative talent), and Avenue A/Razorfish (my deepest skillset, the Web).
SXSW has reminded me that I need to exercise the creative part of my brain to get real satisfaction. I think that's possible here at Microsoft too, it's just much harder to find a role in such a large company. I'm trying now but there are no guarantees I'll find anything before my contract is up in a couple of months.
Let me say right now that if I could afford to go to TED, I would. But at $5000+/pop it is just out of reach if I cannot write it off. However, as a new friend from SouthBy pointed out, most (if not all) the TED content is available on the Web now. Good way to build your brand if you ask me. I would have done the same thing. I think it's very cool that they are posting archived content too (check out Negroponte's talk from 1984). That's the good Negroponte (Media Lab chap) not the evil brother.
I find in interesting (sad, really) that SXSW is so lame about getting videos and podcasts up on the SXSW site. Note the bit about releasing "over the coming months". Pathetic. In past years, I've seen it take them over six months to get the content up.
I was surprised to see that they dared to put up the terrible Zuckerberg keynote interview but then when I played it (I had been sitting down to lunch with the great Dutch fellows from soocial.com) I discovered that it mysteriously terminates about 5 minutes into the interview. Not having seen it, I can only speculate that this is the point at which the interview went sideways for Sarah Lacey (note that she has already started twiddling her hair by this point).
Hard to tell whether it's incompetence or real intent, though I intend to write and find out.
Still light on sleep, though.
Suggestions for next year's SXSW:
- segregate beginner, intermediate, technical tracks much better and confine them to a specific area of the convention center. having to run about from one conference room to another is bullshit when the transit time is +15 minutes. No time to have the "hallway conversations" that SXSW used to be famous for.
- add a second slice - perhaps something like "legal", or "social", or "web design" to each conference/discussion and group them in the same area as well. Allow some cross-pollination by letting two adjacent areas have overlapping meeting rooms so you can still have the hallway conversations.
- require panelists to submit a "position paper" or something equivalent so you know they have a POV and won't just get up and say "my startup did this, and this, and this". It's become way too self-congratulatory and pitchlike on the panels.
- get more academics in on the panels. All-academic panels with maybe a "practical" moderator. This could lead to exposure to real social science and methodology, something our industry sorely needs if it is to mature.
- Consider capping attendance. 7000 people is just ridiculous because you never see people again after having met them once (or at least, much less frequently than in the past). Cf. hallway conversations.
- Add workshops. Some of us have real technical problems that we need to solve.
- Add an angel/VC track and meetups with the above so we can have an opportunity to learn how to present our ideas and have them criticised/analysed by VC/angel community.
- build a better Web site. The SXSW site is pathetic for a conference with such a design focus and so many good designers in attendance. Make it easier to use. Do a better job of enabling mobile device interaction/use with the site/schedules. We shouldn't have to hunt for third-party schedules to get a useful schedule on our iPhones.
- improve the WiFi. If you're going to have 7000 frikkin' people in the ACC, make sure your bandwidth can handle it without crashing every five minutes as it is now.
- issue podcasts or videos of all the conferences within a week, not six months as has been the case in the past.
At a very conservative estimate, this conference nets $2MM+ without sponsorships. For that sort of money, a lot of people could do a better job.
And what's with 700 presenters? I can assure you that we didn't get 700 good presentations. Start filtering them, damn it.
The conference is getting bigger. Last attendance was, I think, about 2000-2500. My gut level impression is that we're looking at much closer to 5000 this year. Much more of the convention center has been taken over (almost all of it). Not for the better sadly. The CC isn't well laid out and it's in a "U" shape on 3 and 4 levels and sometimes one has to go about 1/2 way around in order to move from level 2 to level 4. So I'm walking much, much further than before, and seeing less of the same people, both because of the layout of the panels (in far distant corners of the CC) and the sheer number of people.
That said, today I've spoken to folks from Meebo, PETA (yes, PETA), the Peace Corps, Findlaw, and the Texas Board of Education.
Still a good conference - and perhaps a higher level of speakers - just heard Henry Jenkins of MIT talk - but it'll take more work to get something out of it.
It was a choice between "Rome, Sweet Rome: Ancient Lessons in Design" and this panel session. I hate having to miss good stuff.
I find this panel quite interesting because it calls out something that most of us who have spent some time on the Web already now. Much of great design or usability has been borrowed ("filched") from other sites. The panel session is replete with examples of major companies borrowing each other's designs.
Opinion is definitely divided as to what level of borrowing is permissible and ethical. Color palette? Navigation? Layout?
Interesting question: can HTML/CSS be copyrighted? The analogy just used was "you cannot copyright a quarter note or an eighth note in music, but you can copyright the melody they are used to create". Sounds sound on the face of it, given that HTML/CSS is a programming language.
Difficult question.
Two days before I take off for Austin and reconnect with friends and family. My mom's first cousin lives there and has kindly put me up every year I've gone. I bring flowers and liquor and all that but I suspect I get more out of the equation than they do - given that I'm gone for most of the day, and occasional nights.
That said, it's always really good to see them and my cousin's husband serves some of the best steaks I've ever had.
I missed last year because I was flying off to Amsterdam to interview for work and didn't really have the mental space to take the time to go to Austin. This year, however, I've put in a ton of overtime at Microsoft and really need the break.
This will be the first week since the new year with less than 50 hrs and recent ones have exceeded 80. I fear my health has suffered a bit so I'm looking to chill, engage my brain, and make some new friends. I'm also planning on working on my functional spec/business plan for my new startup venture (happily exempted as a prior invention by my current contract).
What are these idiots doing to my club? I'm really resentful that they've bought the club, put it in debt, and tied Rafa's hands when he asks for new players to put him at a level where he can compete with Chelsea, Man Utd, and Arsenal.
Not to mention that the stadium deal has been hanging fire and has been scaled back.
They should just sell to DIC and let us move on.
Today is "Sprint Freedom Day" for me. I just terminated my Sprint service - quite possibly the worst customer service I've ever encountered - today.
Hip hip hurrah!
Now I just have to manage my Cingular service for my iPhone. With any luck, that'll be a lot better experience. So far, it has been.
I almost don't mind the two-year service agreement given the quality of the phone and what I get for it.