Archive: June 25, 2009

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Bye, Farrah

Thursday,  06/25/09  09:10 PM

And so we lost Farrah Fawcett today, to cancer; she was 62.  I know the picture everyone remembers, the swimsuit pinnup, but this is the one I remember; it shows a beautiful girl, but also a fun girl, a friendly girl, a girl with personality and a bit of fire.  I had this very picture varnished onto the bottom of my own handmade wooden skateboard, circa 1974 (I would have been about 16).  So be it.  She will be missed... but I will always remember her like this.

 

Thursday,  06/25/09  09:27 PM

Hey everyone out there in blogoland...  how's it going?  Thanks for tuning in tonight; I've got kind of a nasty cold, and didn't ride, and I'm bummed about Farrah (and okay about Michael too), and worried about riding the Grand Tour Saturday with a cold.  Otherwise things are great; I can't complain, but sometimes I still do :)

I am aware of a disturbance in the force, somehow my posts are not syncing from my computer to my server, and so although I see them, and think they're "out there", you do not, and do not.  Compounding things I believe my dynamic DNS servers are intermittently down.  None of this is interesting to you, but I'm sorry if you can't see this!  Stay tuned...

[Update: I think I finally found and fixed the intermittent sync problem I've had.  Whew.  Stay tuned.]

John Hinderaker concludes Obamacare is disastrous in every way.  "The worst thing about socialized medicine isn't its ruinous cost, or the rationing of medicine, or the inevitable decline in quality.  It's the change it implies in the relationship between the individual and the state...  Congress is on the brink of making one of the worst mistakes in the history of the Republic."  Huh.  I thought it was bad, but I didn't think it was that bad, but now you've got me thinking... 

With the Tour de France a week away (yay!), Velonews helpfully published a video retrospective: Armstrong's first tour win, ten years later.  I wasn't a big cycling fan then, but I do remember Lance.  And the good news is this year Versus is broadcasting the entire tour in HD.  Wow, thirteen hours of coverage per day.  Get that Tivo ready! 

An interesting article pointed out by my colleague Kathy: Image in a Haystack, about searching for video online.  Yeah, it is hard, and in fact searching for static images online is hard.  Unless either are indexed with text by humans they are pretty tough to find and classify.  This problem will be solved, but it hasn't been yet! 

ZDNet: Blu-Ray buzzkill: the death spiral.  "Will consumers upgrade to Blu-ray?  The CEO & co-founder of fast growing Netflix believes mailed DVDs shall be replaced by web-sent movies.  And a recent Harris Poll finds that people today are less likely to buy a Blu-ray player than they were last year."  This is no surprise at all - physical media are dead.  In future you will have a box the size of a toaster which holds 10,000 movies.  The vPod. 

Wow, this is bad: Rethinking the Kindle.  Did you know there's a limit on the number of times you can [re]download a book?  I didn't, and I bet you didn't either.  That's an amazing limitation, because it means although you've bought the book, if you don't keep it on your Kindle you'll lose it eventually.  And since your Kindle can only hold a finite number of books... wow.  I suspect this policy will change as it becomes more widely known. 

Electric Daybook considers the Nano [car]: Shifting Gears.  "Go ahead and chuckle, sneer, and guffaw while pointing at the diminutive and ridiculously low-priced Nano automobile being made in India.  We can sit up high and superior in our massive SUVs... But the facts remain: Entrepreneurs in India, not America, designed a car that bested 700 entries to win the Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award in the 'Transportation' category."  This is a disruptive technology, clearly.  Watch out above! 

CNet: saying goodbye to Kodachrome.  Wow.  The end of an era, huh?  Check it out, there are some great photos in the collection...  that's my favorite, at left... 

Ted Dziuba: Print isn't dying, serious journalism is.  "Print media isn't hurting because it's an outdated business model, print media is hurting because it's boring."  I think it's both actually, print is dying, along with serious journalism, and it's a chicken-and-egg problem to say which is causing which. 

Sounds like an Onion headline but isn't of the day: Onion is an effective cancer cure.  Who knew? 

But here's a real Onion story: 95% of Opinions Withheld on Visit to Family.  It may not be real, but man it rings true...  

I must tell you for me: 0% of Opinions Withheld on Blogging :)

 
 

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