Yes, I'm calling about your car, is it still for sale?
Um... well... uh...
You live in the Los Angeles area, right?
Uh, yeah, but...
Do you know anyone at Walt Disney? Anyone high up in the company?
Uh, no... sorry. Why are you calling exactly?
Well I have an item, a collectible item, which could be worth a lot of money to the right collector, it's a Disney item, one-of-a-kind, could be worth a million dollars - or more! - to the right person.
Yeah, but what does that have to do with my car?
Well I was thinking, maybe we could make a deal, I could trade my item for your car, there could be some cash involved too.
Huh. (pause) I'm not sure I want to sell my car, I haven't thought about it.
Okay, let me tell you... you see, I have this cat, and my cat's coat has this marking, it looks just exactly like Mickey Mouse, and I was thinking...
Are we talking about your cat or my car?
Well I was thinking, maybe we could work a trade, because this cat is very valuable, I posted it on the Internet, you can see it for yourself...
Wait a minute, you want to trade your cat for my car?
You really have to see this cat, it looks just like Mickey Mouse, it is amazing...
Are you serious? This sounds like a joke.
(silence)
Am I on a radio show?
(silence)
You're calling to see if I would trade my car for a cat?
Monday Monday, what was I going to do with you? Well as it turns out, a lot; managed to plow through all my status / email / reporting stuff and make it to some real work: coding! I have a technical project which just has to be done this week, and although I have a million many balls in the air and high-level meetings etc. it just has to be done. So why am I wasting time blogging? Um ... um ...
An obituary for obituaries? "You probably didn’t read the story – because what red-blooded American reads a newspaper anymore? – but apparently the nation’s newspapers, having already lost their editorial dominance to cable news and the Web, their sports coverage to fan sites, their classifieds to Craigslist, and their editorial pages to the blogosphere, are now under heavy assault on their last profitable redoubt: the obituary page." So be it. (BTW the "rainstorm" link above is to the LATimes website, but via Drudge's RSS feed. That's the future, right there...)
Actually what I think is that newspapers aren't dead, they're just fading away into irrelevance. Same with news magazines. Print media will continue to exist, but they'll just evolve. I just got the latest issue of Wired - one of my favorite magazines, and it is about 1/8" thick, about half what it used to be. On the cover, in 72pt. type, is the word Fail.
Related: Michael Arrington bemoans the end of hand-crafted content. Oh I don't know about that... seems like blogs and Facebook and Twitter all facilitate hand-crafted content. No machine can crank out this stuff!
Doc Searles agrees with me: the revolution will not be intermediated. "Just as an aside, I’ve been hand-crafting (actually just typing) my “content” for about twenty years now, and I haven’t been destroyed by a damn thing."
The Google Phone: this changes everything. Aka the HTC Passion, running Android. To me the fact that Google are "making hardware" isn't that big a deal (they're reselling hardware). But if they sell an unlocked phone and it uses VoIP, that would be different. A data-only phone could change the model. How interesting.
I'm shocked: Microsoft's top developers prefer old school coding methods. "'Graphical programming environments are usable when they are useless, but unusable when they would be useful," said Jeffrey Snover, a Microsoft distinguished engineer... While visual programming can be easier to learn and can help make developers more productive, it's also 'easier to delude yourself,' said Butler Lampson, a technical fellow at Microsoft. For instance, 'no one can ever tell you what a UML diagram means.'" This makes me so happy; I knew that UML emperor wasn't wearing any clothes...
Titan news: Shining lake confirms presence of liquid on Titan. So be it, I cannot wait to go. BTW with the advent of virtual reality, I am beginning to think when I do go, I might not have to go physically. Maybe I'll just send my avatar!
Some people don't care about Z, but not me: I love my new notebook and like Win7, but over time I've noticed a galling problem; it messes up Z-order. This is the sequence of windows from front-to-back. Alt-tab does not always do what you expect, and that's annoying. Seems like this would have been easy to find and fix during beta testing, too. PS yeah I know about Window-Tab, and yeah I think it's cool too, but it doesn't solve this problem; the Z-order is wrong.
The Giant Crystal Cave: deadliest place on Earth? "It's 50oC and has a humidity of 100%, less than a hundred people have been inside and it's so deadly that even with respirators and suits of ice you can only survive for 20 minutes before your body starts to fail. It’s the nearest thing to visiting another planet – it’s going deep inside our own." Sounds like a scene from a movie. Another good place to visit via avatar...
ZooBorn of the day: a baby pygmy hippo. Is it a jumbo shrimp, or a little jumbo?
Actually what I think is that newspapers aren't dead, they're just fading away into irrelevance. Same with news magazines. Print media will continue to exist, but they'll just evolve. I just got the latest issue of Wired - one of my favorite magazines, and it is about 1/8" thick, about half what it used to be. On the cover, in 72pt. type, is the word Fail. 
