Vimeo still down

I tried Vimeo for the first time today - they've been down almost all day. Seriously. My video was processing after it was uploaded, and then the site died. That was about 10 hours ago. Fuck Vimeo.

Google's site for their special video uploader client was down earlier today, too.

And YouTube's multi-file uploader was fucked.

Just sayin - how bout a little fuckin professionalism, losers? The whole video internet decides to fail on the same day? WTF?

iPhone theme for Windows desktop

I'd like an iPhone theme for my Windows desktop.

So, I basically want rid of my traditional 'desktop' and I want to replace it with an iPhone interface.

How difficult would that be?

The iPhone IDE must have an iPhone simulator - can it do file access and all that fun stuff?

There are a bunch of reasons I want this, but one reason is to inspire Android developers to develop a new 'desktop', which will make them think they can realistically replace Windows on the desktop - at which point, hopefully, they will.

Microsoft has to die. Soon. Karmic justice requires this.

...previously.

...google is trying to make me look smart.

Why we love Arcade Fire

Cause they rock out, and they help out.

...Haiti.

MLS Racism Galore

Some things just shouldn't be. One of them is racism. The other thing is professional soccer in the U.S.

Some racist Columbus Crew fans got off after their team got smoked.

Some people actually dig all the gang-like, violent atmosphere being created in the MLS these days - they'd suggest it's now more like international soccer.

Memo to dumbfucks - some things aren't worth duplicating.

It was easy to see this coming by the way -- just take a look at any clips during Columbus crew and other games where the fans in the corners are leaning over into the field, talking shit, throwing things - it's really unbelievable to me that the MLS has let it go as far as it has. They just let the players get abused like that, and fan clubs like Sams Army actually get off on that stuff. Like watching crowds actually boo players on the basketball court, or football field, or whereever.

To me, even booing an athlete is beyond reprehensible. I mean - you can give a guy some ribbing if he's being a total ahole, but we gotta keep things in persective.

Actually booing an athlete, or dropping N-bombs on him? WTF?

Thanks, but no thanks - I don't want any part of that racist, nationalist, unthinking mob-style shit.

Despicable.

The Gruen Transfer

Every informed citizen needs to be intimately familiar with advertising and public relations techniques. One of the most important is The Gruen Transfer.

Australian Broadcasting Corporation, our PBS, is putting on a show called The Gruen Transfer that will talk about popular ad manipulation techniques.

Here are some theories. And here are those same theories in any easier-to-digest format.

PBS did a somewhat similar show called The Merchants of Cool.

...check out one of the commercials for the new show:



Can't imagine ad-related folks, including advertisers, are too happy about this down under. More vids here.

Centre for Social Innovation

This place is like a lot of other co-working spaces, but it's run specifically for social ends, and it's nice as shit.

Flippin Toronto - is there anything they don't have going on up there?

I know San Francisco has something like this for non-profits (I think), but I think it's in some run-down building - not sure.

San Francisco is also working on the Global Citizen Center - which has a similar concept:

Professional Gamer League in Korea

From Al Jazeera - the title of the video on YouTube is incorrect, but this is the right video:



Not sure how I feel about all this gaming stuff. But I know I want one of those fly professional gamer jerseys!

The game they play is StarCraft - check out the wiki on the league/series.

Oh - and Al Jazeera burns O'Lielly. Ouch.

:D

p.s. All this gaming talk made me realize that I actually attended an E3 event (wiki) back in the day, in Atlanta. Man, even back then - 10 years ago?? - it was pretty darn big. Scantily-clad women, massive displays of computer power - think, SGI, during it's heyday - this year, it's probably gonna be even more crazy, even with some producers having pulled out.

When will Google index the legal world?

I've been looking for the text of this case for about an hour - I finally found it...at Westlaw:

Theodora Holding Corp. v. Henderson, Del.Ch., 257 A.2d 398 (1969)

Westlaw costs money - unless you're in law school or something, or maybe if you can physically get to a law library or something??

I can't imagine why that should be the case, unless the powers that be were intentionally trying to keep power out of the hands of poor and working class people and.....oh.

So, Google - what's up?

I'm guessing all this legal information is freely, publicly available, right? So, then all we need is to start having courts publish all public court documents to the web in electronic format, right?

Someone's gotta be working on this already...

...the two major players are Lexis/Nexis and Westlaw. The Lexis wiki page has this:

As part of its current publishing deal with the California court system, Lexis has a stripped-down free site, available from the California Courts Web site, for the public to search California opinions. It also has a stripped-down free site, called LexisOne, that has case law available for all American jurisdictions for the last five years.

So, we're getting somewhere. I don't know what an 'opinion' is vs. a 'case law', but if the California information is being digitized, then Google should have access to it, too.

I can imagine that judges and the entirety of the public judicial system would not want our prying eyes all over their work, but what they do is so illegal, we need to be watchdogs. Hopefully we can get access to all that stuff.

...Delaware, where Google and most other corporations are incorporated, has opinions online from the year 2000 up until the current time. I sent an email (web form) asking if they planned on adding earlier years. The particular court that handles corporate-type decisions there is called the Chancery - here are those opinions.

...there is a Free Access to Law Movement. Suh-weet. World Legal Information Website - doesn't seem to work too well for the U.S., but I like the idea.

...more movement on the opening-up of legal research (I added some links):

A mix of for-profit and not-for-profit firms have missions similar to Fastcase's, including PreCydent, Public.Resource.org and Collexis Holdings' Casemaker division. They are assembling a digital version of the collections that fill miles of shelves at law libraries across the country.

What people will do with it is anybody's guess. Public.Resource.Org is the brainchild of Carl Malamud, a data-access advocate who in the mid-1990s started putting filings from the Securities & Exchange Commission online for free. The SEC later took up his idea and created the Edgar online service for accessing filings. Malamud prodded the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office to do the same with patents in 1998.

With the help of influential backers like Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar's foundation, Malamud's Public.Resource.Org is filling up a 24-terabyte Sun Microsystems (nasdaq: JAVA - news - people ) server with case law going back to 1754. (That's a lot of bytes, enough to type out 12 million novels.) Malamud bought some data from Fastcase while building his service, which is available for free on the Web. "If we do it and do it right, there are 100 other people who will copy our data and use it in interesting ways," Malamud says.

It is not online yet, but Chris Anderson has a good article called 'The End of Theory' in the July 08 issue of Wired Magazine. Google has been known to be fond of the technique of 'throwing more CPU at a problem' to conquer it as opposed to trying to figure out some kind of perfect algorithm (like PageRank, etc.).

The End of Theory

Scientists have always relied on hypothesis and experimentation. Now, in the era of massive data, there's a better way.

It seems like Forbes used the Wired article as background, but who knows -- and in any case, this Forbes article really fills out the scene for the legal industry. Anderson's Wired article talks about several problemsindustries, including legal, agriculture, physics, news/journalism, infectious disease outbreak control, search (Google), astronomy, health/skeleton, air fares, voting, terrorism, and 'big data' analysis. Good stuff.

...it's important to note that Fastcases's CEO and other seem to be Republicans, they built their platform on Microsoft technology, and they're partnering with ChoicePoint - the criminals that helped George Bush prevent tens of thousands of black folks from voting in Florida in the 2000 election, and they've likely been similarly successful and criminal in many other districts and states and countries, and continue their criminal ways to this day, and have probably already successfully stolen the 2008 election for the Republicans.

Google Maps as gaming platform II?

Been thinking about Google Maps and the ability to possibly play video games in/on Google Maps - games, maybe, like GTA.

There would be quite a few limitations to the technology, but the upside could be very big/unique, as well - for instance, being able to play a first-person shooter game in your own neighborhood, virtually. I guess some gaming companies and universities are already being funded by the Pentagon to be able to recreate real-world environments on the fly and plan out battle scenarios, but maybe Google Maps can offer some fun for the consumer world, and without the massive injection of taxpayer money, and without contributing to the suffering of innocents by increasing the Pentagon's ability to terrorize.

Street View has been around for a while, but now it's available via a Flash API, too. Flash offers much better performance than regular Javascript/JSON/etc.

Check out this example Street View of NYC (you might have to click it once to give it focus) and move around using your arrow keys - it'll give you a better idea of the responsiveness of Google Maps to game controller-like input. You can zoom and pan, turn and view in a 360-degree circle, and now you can look almost all the way straight up (and you've always been able to look down a good bit). If you hold down your arrow buttons, you'll continue advancing/rotating/etc.

One major drawback is that you are stuck to the 'rails' of the Street View - that is, you're stuck to the exact paths that the Google Street View camera cars drove - usually down the center of some street lane -- so you can't really walk/run/drive/ride/be on the sidewalks, peek around corners, etc.

Even that limitation could be overcome if you were to use your own custom tile layers - with your own imagery license from whoever.

At a minimum, I could see smaller, less-sophisticated, unique 'video games' popping up on Google Maps in the next couple of years.

CarrotMob to go formal, for-profit

Not sure what it all means, but it does seem like someone's read their Chomsky.

BCorporation.net (wiki).

...this article, linked from the wiki, gives us the straight scoop on B&J's:

It's a problem that has long dogged socially responsible businesses. Public companies are legally obligated to maximize returns to shareholders, according to a widespread interpretation of corporate law. For private firms, it's more a matter of withstanding pressure from investors. Hannigan and Marx, for example, fear their social mission could be threatened if an investor changed his mind about Give Something Back's penchant for charity. They want to avoid the fate of ice cream maker Ben & Jerry's, which received a buyout offer from the Dutch conglomerate Unilever (NYSE:UL) in 2000. Founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield didn't want to sell, so Cohen assembled a group of investors to make a counteroffer. When they couldn't offer as much as Unilever, shareholders sued, and the company, then publicly traded, was forced to relent. In April 2000, Ben & Jerry's was acquired by Unilever for $326 million.

Damn - that's no joke. So, should we still buy Ben & Jerry's? I was never into it, but that's still surprising news about Unilever buying them out.

Every commercial, a song

So, commercials are not completely useless.

Every commercial you hear on tv that has a decent, not-completely-annoying song accompanying it - it's probably an independently-released song. I guess it's been a trend forever now, but these days it seems true about 100% of the time.

Latest example:

Oren Lavie - Her Morning Elegance

Now, don't get it twisted - I'm not saying I really dig this song or whatever (it's not bad), but there are some good songs cropping up on primetime, national tv - like this one (Saul Williams).

Horry maims again; NBA cheers; Spurs win again

Horry put Nash out of the game last year - at least temporarily - with a flagrant foul that helped clear the benches. Horry's team, the honorless Spurs - led by the honorless Gregg Popovich - the guys who employ hack-a-Shaq off the ball - went on to win the championship.

Tonight, Horry put David West out of the game.

The announcers for the NBA/ESPN said 'good clean foul' and cheered on Horry's dirty tactics. You can see Horry lower his shoulder. It was a dirty play, intended to injure. It worked.

The definition of 'pandering'

Pandering:

when a politician tells potential voters that s/he will take immediate steps to help alleviate some of the pain of their worst problems in the short term, but does not provide a direct, practicable, provable path to world peace.

Not pandering:

when a politician tells potential voters that s/he will not take immediate steps to help alleviate some of the pain of their worst problems in the short term, but does not provide a direct, practicable, provable path to world peace.

I don't like My Morning Jacket

I like 'Golden', but even that - only the recorded/produced version. That's a legit song. A good song. Maybe even a great song. But what of this madness? MMJ were the thing to see at SX.

It seems like everyone loves this band, and their legendariness only grows every day. It definitely seems like they have musical talent, but it's just not something I can get into. They sound a touch like Band of Horses, only a lot less compelling.

Can someone explain?

Do you have to be a Willie Nelson or Dollie Parton fan to dig MMJ?

They remind me of another very hyped band that I saw at SX, briefly - Lucero. Lucero reminded me of the Grateful Dead. Nothing wrong with it - just not my style.

Liberal pedophile this time

No, not yet another Bush Republican official caught raping children - this time it's a...former priest - suprise.

And this priest is/was a liberal San Francisco talk radio host, apparently. Brilliant.

The take-away?

Shut down the Catholic Church, of course.

They don't deserve to exist anymore. They never did. They've raped and brutalized for centuries and they should be gone already. How many children are being abused right now by Catholic Priests?

Obviously, it's not just Catholic Priests that are raping kids - it's plenty of Republicans and other folks, too - but the Catholic Church is a criminal enterprise, not unlike the mafia. It needs to be dismantled immediately and completely so they can't abuse any more children.

It's not all that complicated, one would think, but money talks. Lots of people still believe in superstition, apparently, and their weekly donations go to protecting pedophiles.

Google onebox for flight information

Check it:

Pretty cool. Airlines sites are total disasters, and totally anti-competitive. Google can't fix those problems, but it can help alleviate them a bit.

Google Sports Schedule Onebox

That's what you call it when Google gives you a direct answer to your question at the top of search results - a 'onebox'. So you don't have to go diving into some crappy website for looking up a gametime, for instance. Here's what I got when I did a search for 'Manchester United':


I was checking out ManU because another website - SplashMedia or something - launched another ManU blog. I'm not sure how they can do that copyright-wise, etc., but whatever.

Oneboxes rock. And finding game times for international soccer is still almost impossible. You have to dive into ESPN sports and convert GMT to your local time, and account for DST, and coordinate that with look up if FSC is carrying the game, and if not then you have to find out if your local pub is carrying the game, because some of them cost money and some only show on Setanta. Disaster.

It'd be nice if we could get this same info for basketball playoffs right now, but Googling 'Lakers' doesn't pull up anything.

Google Maps as gaming platform?

Just an idea. The new embedded panoramic street views are very 'gamey'.

Gaming has been on my mind a bit because it is growing as an industry, and it has this funky crossover with film/cinema, and both are important and big and growing in Austin.

NBA: Nobody dead yet

David Stern thought it was OK for Jason Kidd to try and kill Jannero Pargo, so we shouldn't be surprised when other players do more of the same.

New York Bans Anal Electrocution

Went over to Peta to look for a statement on the death of Eight Belles after the Kentucky Derby.

I didn't find a statement on that death, but this headline was there.

the end of horse racing

we've known it's been coming for a long time.

nobody likes to go to the track anymore, in part because of the good work done by peta -- they've sensitized us to the idea that animals are thinking, feeling beings. and what decent human being likes to think of their dog or cat being tortured and/or killed?

and then they killed another horse today. it' enough to make anyone sick.

the last of the horse tracks are closing up show, now. nobody cares about the big three races except for if and when a horse might be able to capture the triple crown.

I'm down with philosophizing over whether or not animals deserve the same amount or rights (or more) than humans, but we need to stop the obvious torture and killing. That goes for cows and chickens - no matter how much I'll miss Chik-Fil-A - but also horses, too.

Horseracing is over.

...espn reports fans crying in the stands at churchill downs. peta is in - links horse racing to dog fighting - take action.

...compound fracture(s) - i.e. bone through the skin.

Then, he heard it was his horse, took off running for the ambulance and rode to Eight Belles. The bones were protruding through the skin, a catastrophic injury that left no alternative.

"When I saw it, it had to be done," he said.

...pic.



...p.s. i'm a guilty as anyone else - i actually had a bet on the race! someone called me up and said 'kentucky derby' and 'pick two numbers' - so i did. still, i should have known better. so i sent the peta letter, and i'll rejoin peta as soon as i can afford to.

...there seems to be a media blackout - as there is when any event of importance happens, until the owners of this country can craft the message as much as possible. Will NBC release the video of Eight Belles writhing in pain on the track? Where are all the pictures of fans in the stands, crying their eyes out?

...horse-jumping kills, too - and not just the horses.

utu - saving the internet (with hate)

Fun project.

I'm not exactly sure what it's about, but I suspect it'll have something to do with using crowdsourcing to figure out who certain people on the internet are - people who engage in death threats, or spam, or even just generally rude behavior.

Found via an epic rant.

Cindy for Congress

Good luck to her.

RSSDay.org: self-centered losers

I don't hide my disdain for much of the tech crowd. They are often vain, care only about themselves, care only about enriching themselves. Many of them are like miniature versions of eBay - do whatever it takes to make a profit.

The RSSDay.org folks have called May 1st 'RSS Awareness Day'.

They could care less that May 1st is an international-known, respected, and practiced holiday for workers - otherwise known as 'May Day'.

Harymarket Massacre? Fuck those people.

Of course, none of these dimwits have worked a day in their lives, and for the few that did - if clickin and clackin away on one's keyboard is to be considered 'work' - they would never lower themselves to the level of actual physical laborers. Asking for that kind of solidarity is just not possible - it might exclude one from the 'cool kids' club.

Losers.