On bolds and zunes

I've had my blackberry bold for a month now and I have to say that I'm loving it for the most part. The email + web is great, videos are decent and the screen & keyboard are awesome. The only thing about it that sucks is how much the thing crashes. Sometimes its a couple of times a day and sometimes it's every few days. Clearly this thing isn't quite perfect. On top of that, I'll have to be really careful with this one because my old phones took tons of abuse and lasted me years, the bold looks kind of fragile and reboots when it takes a big bump. I dread the day when I drop it on concrete.

Regarding the Zune, I have to say that the Zune Software V3 blows iTunes right out of the water and the Zune itself is still my preference over the iPods. I really don't like the touch and before you get your panties in a bunch, I do actually have one and use them both side by side. I don't use an iPhone but I get the general idea and understand why some people like them. I also noticed that the new iPod touch finally has a physical volume button but I still wouldn't get one if I had a choice. I am however using my 1st gen touch to play spore when I'm bored. Which brings me to another gripe - I bought spore on the iTunes store for 6 bucks and only after I downloaded it did I realize that it didn't work on my touch - fucking store and itunes didn't even warn me. I didn't read the fine print. I had to then buy the 10 buck touch version with no chance of a refund for my mistake.

At the end of the day, I still think that iFans are a closed minded group that don't really realize to what degree they've been been short-changed and won't figure it out until Apple becomes un-trendy. After all, Apple aren't really the underdog anymore and it's hard to be an individualist when everybody in your subway car has the exact same gear as you right? Are you really a counter culture individualist who uses the same gadgets as George Bush? Does listening to JJohnson & Feist somehow make up for it?

Apple used to run an advert about 1984 and big brother, these days I think that they're the second biggest brother on the planet with the first being Google.

Gina

How cool is this?

Two weeks with a blackberry bold

Week 1 went great, roaming around the east coast of Canada. No problems whatsoever switching between 3G/Edge/GSM. However when I got into NY state last friday, it started crashing regularly. Spent 4 days in NY/NJ upstate, midstate and bottom including coastal NJ and it crashed every 6 hrs. Zipped over to Boston for the past couple of days and now its rock solid. Seems like there are still some roaming issues with ATT USA and that's probably what's causing the launch delay.

My advice to RIM is to hold on until its rock solid because clearly it's going to be a disaster if released in the US in this state. In Canada however, rock solid and a joy to use. I get lots of Americans down here eyeing my device and asking me about it so clearly it's lustworth.

Oddly enough, at a software conference it seems like most of the programmer types use iPhones and the founder/owner types use crackberries.

It's been a while

I'm sitting here at the Seaport in Boston for the Business of Software conference and I have come to realize how great it is to get so much insight from people who have been through a lot more than I have. I've met loads of people who came from all over the world and spent some fairly significant money to be here. Since Boston isn't too far from me it wasn't such a big commitment but after being here this year I think I'll follow this conference wherever it goes next year even if that means going to the UK or wherever it is next.

I also realized that I have a lot of knowledge to share with others as I have been through 3 bootstrap companies, 2 IPOs, 2 mergers and 3 fiascos. That's a lot of startups! A fellow with a show on the BBC will be interviewing me about my experiences with VCs, that should be interesting.

So all that to say that I'll be contributing to this blog regularly again soon but probably more with a slant of what I've learnt over the years and what's driving me.

Adios from Boston!

Smug bastards

Every time I see a smug Apple advert it makes me want to puke. How about this, recently the biggest and most dangerous hacking hole since 1997 had been discovered, patched and closed by all of the major vendors together in a cooperative effort with no BS. This includes Microsoft, Cisco, CERT and all of the Linux/GPL community.

Everybody pitched in, coordinated and fixed their systems but the smuggest bastard of the lot (Apple) were not only late with a patch, failed to tell their customers about it but they also fucked up their patch and now Macs and OSX servers everywhere are vulnerable. Notice how the press hasn't jumped on their heads like they would for any other company? Good thing there's so few of them out there that nobody really gives a shit.

Test your connection here.

The Rotten Apple

It's no secret that I don't care too much for Apple and their products so take this post with a pinch of salt. Here's how the summer went with Apple;

1) Released a pretty phone with crappy reception
2) Came out first in the IBM most vulnerable software list
3) Filled my computer with junk and keeps asking me to download 70mb of new junk every month
4) Released a crappy mobile web email app that doesn't work too well
5) Launched a mobile app store that keeps going out of service

All of that isn't a big deal if they weren't so fucking smug. Lets face it, if you pretend to be flawless you'd better be ready for a shitstorm when you show some warts.

Funny thing is that the shitstorm hasn't started yet despite all of the problems. I'm curious to see how long Google & Apple will keep being immune to public scorn for crappy products and elitist attitudes.

Cool

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

The answer to the secret

There's this book and video called 'The Secret' that purports to let anybody in on the secret of success. I hate the book and think that it's a load of crap and actually destructive in a sense. It lets losers justify their lethargic underachieving lives so that they can continue to sit on the couch watching their bellybuttons waiting for gold to pop out if they believe it enough because some mystical force is going to deliver it to them. I think you have a better chance of U2 playing live in your rectum than being successful just by wishing it to be.

And so...

There's a follow up book by one of the contributors - a Canadian named John Assaraf that's actually pretty interesting. This book ('The Answer') is about taking action and getting your fat lazy ass off your filthy couch. Although it still refers back to the Chopra-esque inter connectivity of all things and quantum power wells, it does so just to tell you to get off your lard bags and start taking action. I'm not finished reading it but it seems to be quite accurate and rational and so far I'd say that it's a pretty good asset for those starting or running their own gigs.

Here it is on Amazon.

One Voice One Will

Mark Ronson

Mark Ronson seems to have the golden touch these days, here's his new it girls video - Candie Payne/I Wish.

Here's All I need to hear from CP, no video unfortunately;




And if you like that smokey soul sound, here's another one from Saint Etienne;



Thanks to Fred Perry/Subculture for getting me back on this stuff.

Subculture Radio

Fred Perry has some great radio stations under their subcultures brand. Here's one of them.

Siouxsie

I was reading an interview with Siouxsie from this past winter in which she goes on in detail about what a good time she had vacationing in Sri Lanka, scuba diving and hanging out with monkeys. I found that really striking because she was always portrayed as such a severe and serious character sometimes like a spinning ball of razorblades if you crossed her line. While I couldn't imagine her drinking mojitos and dancing to Andre 3000 around the Hilton pool, I understand where she was coming from and for the most part I'd much rather be hanging out with monkeys and manta rays than the urban monkeys I'm forced to hang out with most of the time.

Speaking of manta rays, I was in Costa Rica recently and saw a ray that was much larger than our 20 foot panga (boat), looked like a huge cloud passing underneath. It really gave me shivers and at the same time was breathtaking. I've never seen such a huge creature up close.

Oh yeah, by coincidence, Siouxsie's newest album was called Manta Ray, here's "Into a Swan" (2007):



And here's a really awesome live clip with Suede from 1993;

My Spring Vacation

Ubuntu 8 thumbs up

I just installed Ubuntu 8 on a laptop headed for Costa Rica. I'm figuring that if I put Windows on there I'd be asking for it because out in Mal Pais the bandwidth is crap so it wouldn't be updated and XP would be hacked in minutes without updates.

I didn't want a Mac because it's too pricey so I got an old hand me down Dell laptop and threw on Ubuntu 8.04.

All I can say is WOW is it ever cool, very fast, functional and so far in the past couple of hours it's been totally headache free.

If somebody can put an AOL-esque shell on it, it would save hundreds of millions of old computers from the trash. I think I'm in love, sweet.

Download it, run it from CD to try it out and then put it on some old hardware - you won't be sorry.

Find it here.

BMW X6

On my way out of a dental appointment yesterday I saw the first new BMW X6 on the back of the delivery truck being unloaded at the BMW dealer. Very sweet wheels. Looks like a 6 series with 19 inch wheels.

Off for a couple of weeks

I'm off to Costa Rica for a couple of weeks on a working vacation and then back in time for 10 more roadtrips in the next 3 months. Such is the price for that that I asked.

I haven't been updating this blog much probably because I haven't had a hell of a lot of inspiration outside of my work (which in itself has been hair-raising and exciting). I'm not sure if I'll continue this blog or just let it wither as it does from time to time.

I'm actually thinking about starting a cutting edge technical group blog related to my profession with a few other posters, lets see how that goes.

Maybe I'll just drink some tequila and go fishing for the next couple of weeks and say fuck it.

CNN T-Shirts

CNN have this strange but cool feature where you can order any one of their headlines as a T-Shirt. How cool is this?

One pint of piss and three shots of peroxide

I was having a couple of brews with some friends on Sat nite and one fellow who works in a health food store told me about some secret cure for almost every ailment known to mankind. He tells me that gargling, inhaling and drinking hydrogen peroxide will kill most germs and viruses in your mouth, lungs and gut and it's a proven fact that your immune system uses peroxide to kill bacteria and viruses.


Hold on a sec, last time I checked there was a poison label on peroxide bottles and it says clearly on the side "not for internal use".


So I called him a nutbag more or less and forgot about this story until yesterday. You see yesterday I had to go in for some dental surgery so I googled peroxide mouthwash and did some research on ozonated water and found something startling. First off, peroxide is regularly used as a mouthwash and can be found in all the off the shelf mouthwashes with opaque bottles including Crest super white. Just check the ingredients (I did). Second, the FDA approves the peroxide up to 3% (10 vol) as a mouthwash (not ingested). Third, the Time magazine product of the year for 2006 was the Lotus sanitizer which uses something similar in the form of ozonated water. And finally, the EPA approves peroxide as a sanitizer.

Here's what got me really curious, I found hidden in a report on the Tersano (lotus mfg) site that shows that 3% peroxide is seriously more effective than ozone-water or even Lysol!



So finally I go to see my dental surgeon and ask him what he thinks about peroxide mouthwash. He says its excellent and he recommends it for his periodontal patients but it's overkill for most people.

Seems like a pretty good treatment for throat, mouth and sinus infections when gargled but deadly when ingested in a concentrated form (i.e. over 10%). I've tried gargling it and it tastes and feels horrible but seems to work because my mouth is pretty fresh and my teeth are extra clean. I'm not going to use it regularly but I'll probably start buying the Crest mouthwash with peroxide.

Here's a relatively accurate article from truthorfiction.com.

As for the piss, some other people drink it for medicinal purposes. Personally, I'd probably be dying before I'd consider drinking pee.

Introducing Earl

This is my new roommate Earl the bearded dragon.

The Nigerian Mergers and Acquisitions Scam

Let me tell y'all about the Nigerian M&A scam. Here's how it goes, a small company (Smallco) gets an offer to be acquired by a large company (Bigco) and all the founders are thrilled because they're about to become multi-millionaires. Bigco feeds on Smallco's greed to rub out Smallco. Here's how the burn works;

• Smallco spends hundreds of thousands in legal fees during due diligence
• Bigco ties Smallco down in a 'no-shop' agreement that means Smallco can't go get re-financed
• Bigco stresses everybody out at Smallco and Smallco's business suffers because everybody is working hard on retiring
• Smallco employees and founders are shopping for yachts, watching Bigco stock prices and ignoring their business
• Bigco examines all of Smallco's customers, technology, share structure and decides that there's patent/intellectual property/scalability etc. issues and drops the offer by half at the last minute
• Bigco now decides that the offer is all stock and the shares are restricted and are in escrow (i.e. very hard to sell for a long long time)
• Smallco is out of money and accepts the offer
• Smallco founders get stuck with shares in Bigco that they can't sell for years and watch the stock drop to pennies
• Smallco founders likely owe significant taxes based on the capital gain at the time the acquisition took place and not at the time the founders can sell their paper

All in all, the Smallco founders are fucked and lost a crazy amount of real money (vs make believe stock money) and are probably broke and demoralized. Variations of this story happened a thousand times over in the dot com days and will keep happening in more subtle variations over time. This is just like a corporate version of the Nigerian scam.

Things to learn from this scam:

• Find a lawyer/firm who'll spot these problems and let you know about them on day 1 of your deal
• Don't confuse shares for cash
• Escrow sucks, get at least 2 X cash value of the Company in cash and enough cash to cover taxes & legal fees
• Restricted stock sucks
• Cap gains taxes suck, get good tax advice
• Get a deposit from Bigco
• Find 2 Bigcos and let them bid against each other

As for me, I've been burned by escrow, legal fees and no-shops. Luckily I never sold my company for Bigco stock, it would mostly be good for toilet paper today. As my NDA's have expired, I can tell you that my Bigco's were Intervu, Akamai, Yahoo and Microsoft. Intervu sucked us dry and luckily I told them to keep their paper which is why my I no longer have any business partners. We never got very far with the others so I can't say if they would have tried all of the dirty tricks but from what I've heard Cisco made the playbook.

My New Friend Earl

My GF and I adopted a bearded dragon this weekend named Earl. Pics to come. Who knew that a lizard could have a personality?

This is pretty cool

My Startup Rules

Here my first crack at a list of startup tips:

1. Love what you're doing passionately enough to not sweat the short term pain of things going wrong and not having much cash.
2. Learn how to explain what you're offering to non-industry people in under 10 plain English words and make that your whole company's mantra.
3. Love your customer and provide something of incredible value to them. If you would be a passionate buyer of your product/service then you're probably on the right track.
4. Hand pick a team that really believes in what they're doing and confront them with kid gloves regularly if they seem distracted or disinterested. Discard bad apples QUICKLY!
5. Build a cult around what you're doing. If you, your team and your customers believe strongly in what your doing then nothing can stop you (See point #1).
6. Read as many books as you can about your field and people that have succeeded, learn from others successes and mistakes.
7. Buy cheap stuff and have an ugly office if you never have customers come over. You can buy tables for $100, chairs for $250 and computers for $1000. Get furniture at office refurb/recyclers cheap if you need a pretty office. Get as much software as you can for free/cheap from Microsoft/Oracle/Whoever dev programs.
8. Get to cash flow positive as quickly as you possibly can unless you are ready to hand over some of your company to investors.
9. Don't give everybody a phone extension until they are talking to paying customers regularly.
10. Forget about hype and tons of tiny customers and find yourself a really nice big reference account that loves what you're doing and will fund your new projects. This is of course assuming you're not starting a dollar store or micro commerce business.
11. You don't need a full time accountant but you'd better have tight control over your pennies because they'll evaporate quickly.
12. Try to do the rounds and talk to everybody in your office at least twice a week to see how they're doing.
13. Pair people up in teams that depend on each other so people don't slack off on their own moods as much.
14. Experiment with variations of what you're doing if it isn't working well.
15. Don't work crazy hours + weekends non-stop all the time unless you want to miss out on life and be a bitter rich asshole, there's a time to walk and a time to sprint. Choose them wisely. Same goes for your team, don't burn them out unless its worth it for everyone. At the same time, don't let opportunities pass you by because you don't want to work nights and weekends.
16. Ignore trends, listen to your customers pain (needs) instead.

Startup rules

Two really smart guys have posted their tips for starting up a new business. Read what Jason Calacanis and Mark Cuban have to say on this subject. Personally, I been part of about 5 or 6 startups including 2 that went public so I've got my own opinions. On the whole I agree with about half of either of those guys observations.

Jason is a guy who starts blogging companies for a living so buying Macs and a $5000 espresso machine might work for him but I think its just plain dumb for most business models. Mark starts and invests in varied technology businesses that he scales out rapidly in a hurry (or at least hopes to) so he's got a different spin that's a little closer to mine.

Myself, I tend (recently) to start 'old fashioned' profitable, private software start ups and I don't tend to sell them in any hurry.

I haven't thought of my rules yet but I will post them soon when I compile them. A lot will overlap with what Jason & Mark say.

Across the universe

I never had an astronomy class when I went through school but I can imagine that it would be pretty dry. It takes a leap of faith to visualize a night sky in three dimensions, especially when the scale of what's out there is so incredibly enormous. In fact I don't even know if the human mind is capable of imagining how huge the universe really is.

All that to say that this Microsoft World Wide Telescope project is pretty staggering. Essentially they've composited pictures from the best telescopes that mankind has and put them together in some software that lets you navigate the universe in 3d. I guess over time as the imaging gets richer, so will the visualizations.

It's hard to look up at a nighttime sky and see a swirling mass of millions of stars when all you see is a little white dot. This software lets you zoom into the swirling masses and read up on what's there. Check it out;

Another Zune

It's no secret that I really like my Zune 30 better than my iPod touch and so did my GF and we were timesharing the thing to the point that it became really irritating and finally broke down and bought her a new red 8GB Zune of her own.

She would have killed me if I bought an iPod and I understand why because she's used to the Zune and gave away the free iPod that she won because frankly it sucked for what she used it for. Most Apple people are equally or probably even more religious about their products and I guess it's easy to see why when you look at how nice the industrial design and form factors are and how easy they are to operate. Unfortunately, it seems they're also a little out of date with certain features for active users and the iTunes UI is really out of date.

That brings us to the new Zune and what's cool about it:
- Same zippity/fadey/glowy UI as the Zune 30 - super easy to use and great for sports/etc
- Squirt songs, albums & playlists wirelessly between devices but with a 3 play limit
- Wireless sync (GREAT!!)
- Flick through big lists with a feather touch flick vs. multiple clicks or click&hold

What's bad
- Software is maybe a bit too simple
- Firmware didn't update right away, I had to switch to a second USB port after a few cryptic errors
- Harder to get add ons

So in short, if you're an of the Church of the Fruit then don't bother because you've already got a great way of working but if you're starting from scratch it seems to me like a much more functional and modern alternative but not quite as pretty as the fruit. Then again looks are deceiving.

Where the hell am I?

I'm not sure if anybody even noticed but I've been out of sight for a while. You see, I've been busy - real busy. For the last couple of weeks I've been on the west coast in Victoria and then in Silicon Valley. Victoria was a straight up business trip, customer signoff and training. California on the other hand was some pretty exciting stuff. We've been working on a project with a major broadcaster on the Bejing Olympics. I can't say much about it but it's pretty cool stuff and I'm pretty stoked to have the contract. Now I'm back in my office and hopefully will get back in gear with blog updates soon.

I got my SO one of the new tiny Zunes and it's been a pretty cool addition to the toy department, deets soon...

Googopoly

The pressure is starting to mount on Google.

Another Flight Finder

Try Momondo, I've been using it and Kayak to find flights these days.

More Winehouse

I feel a little guilty for dropping that Winehouse video where she mauls through it so here's a little redemption. Winehouse and Ronson. Sorry, Columbia don't want no embedding.

Oh the Hypocracy

Here in Quebec/Canada, we have a bunch of pissed off French politicians trying to get elected by singling out immigrants and anglophones for all of the historical linguistic woes of the past, present and future.

This is particularly repugnant because they've singled out immigrants as the cause of decline of the French language and hence are gaining popularity by fanning the flames of intolerance against cultural and religious values that are different from their own.

This is very similar to what the National Front (UK/FR) has been trying to do in Europe for the past few decades.

It's particularly frightening when the leader of a major federal political party can say this in public:

"I say to all the Uncle Toms from Quebec that are in Ottawa who say to us, 'If you want to enforce French, do it in Quebec,' that the federal Labour Code is a federal jurisdiction. It's for them to act ... if they are serious about
recognizing Quebec as a nation."

Gilles Duceppe - Bloc Quebecois

BTW an "Uncle Tom" is an extremely offensive racial pejorative also known as a "house n****", in this case referring to French people who cooperate with the rest of the country. So that's what it's come to in Quebec, politicians are working overtime in Quebec to unite the masses against the threat of immigrants while the local economy slides down the toilet and the Chinese methodically chip away at our manufacturing and processing industries.

Another Nero keeps fiddling while our Rome burns.

Mongoose Mouth

There's something really fascinating about a trainwreck, you cringe and squirm but you can't look away. This one is my fave. It just never fails to crack me up.

The Synthetic Genome - This is Staggering

These scientists have gotten yeast cells to build arbitrary DNA. This is pretty scary because any DNA pattern can be created.

The yeast can build any DNA from a database such as the Human Genome project. From any DNA pattern on file, the DNA created by the yeast can then be dropped into a DNA-less cell and set in motion to start reproducing.

This means that your DNA (and mine) can be stored in a computer and sent somewhere else to be booted up into a cell that might one day become another person. Staggering. This will have major implications for pretty much everything having to do with genetics and molecular biology.

Yikes! Read more here.

New skin

I reskinned to add a twitter panel. I'm not crazy about this new skin but then again the old one was kind of clunky too.

Amory Lovins

I never heard of him either. As it turns out he's one of the smartest guys on the planet and he's funded by the Pentagon (of all places) in his quest to end the oil endgame. He's an extremely pragmatic dude and makes a ton of sense without flinging tofu at anybody.

Here's a video and here's the website.

Job hunting hints

I put an ad on Craigslist last week for some part time marketing help and then asked the applicants to write me a pitch in under 100 words.

Here's what I got:

• 52 applicants in 4 days
• only 9 bothered sending their pitch, 5 had bad grammar (IE: worse than mine)
• about 15 sent a CV with nothing else in their email
• about 20 couldn't spell or compose a sentence
• 1 was an aggressive Internet marketing guy who started blasting me about commissions (WTF??)
• 1 applicant told me (unsolicited) how confusing my website was and how horrible the color was and proceeded to send me a pitch targeted at geriatric people interested in surfing (double WTF???)
  

Only one was really enthusiastic, followed my instructions, was professional and wrote a decent pitch. The bar was pretty low but she did a great job and will probably get my business.

So here's some tips for any of you trying to get business from somebody else, this includes you guys/gals who are looking for jobs, selling companies, cars, services, websites, bandwidth, tomatoes or whatever;

PC = Potential Customer

• Read every word of what was asked and reply with exactly what the PC asked for
• Even if you have a form letter, add a personalized note that shows you actually understand what your PC wants
• Be professional, enthusiastic and positive
• Check your grammar and use your spell checker
• Throwing a compliment helps but don't blow too much smoke up your PCs ass
• Criticizing your PC really doesn't help even if you think it was constructive unless they specifically asked for it and even then you should be very careful with your words not to ruffle feathers
• Stand out without being a clown

Sounds simple right? Then why did only 4 out of 52 MARKETING applicants follow this? I could understand if the job was VP of Cleaning Earwax out of Phones but for fucks sakes why can't a marketing person market themself?

If they aren't professional with me, how are they going to be with my customers?

On Design

I've always thought that Frog Design, SGI, Bang and Olufsen and Porche had the best industrial designs. I never really liked the Apple design vocabulary even though Frog concocted some of it, and I really don't understand why everybody thinks they're so amazing. The thing that I like best about OS/X is the fluidity of motion within the UI but overall I really don't think the ecosystem is as intuitive as most people think it is. The thing I like most about the iPod is that I don't have to use one.

Then again, I've grown up with computers and mainframes from a deep chips & boards and soldering iron perspective so the dummied down metaphors like throwing a drive in the garbage to eject it doesn't make much sense to me. Honestly, I think that glass buttons are like faux hawks, mullets and moustaches. Maybe they were cool in high school once upon a Camaro but they're embarrassing now much like a 50 year old with a pierced ear and a tribal barbed wire armband tattoo.

Having said that, I am really glad that Microsoft mostly ignored Apple when it designed the XBox 360 and Zune and that Nintendo ignored everybody when they designed the Wii. These products are great on their own and despite a rough start, will have a pretty big influence on industrial design going forward.

Another company that I totally forgot about was Braun. As it turns out Apple has been as deeply influenced by Braun as it had been by Xerox back in the day. Check out this article.

Supply and Demand

Market theory states that prices will go up when supply contracts and reverse when the opposite is true. I'm happy to say that I've rented out my villa for 8 weeks at mostly full rate and I've removed my standard discounted ratecard from my website so that I can charge the agents a few percent more to absorb their commissions.

So far I have some upscale clientele who think that the rates are really cheap, a few friends of friends who think that it's fair but pricey and total strangers who want to pay less per person than what a backpacker pays at a campground. My tactic has been to stick to referrals only and even at that, upscale only. I figure that I'll get less business but more upscale repeat business and my team can spend more time making fewer people more happy.

Lets see how this goes - Hilton strategy versus HoJo.

Speaking of market forces, read this.

Sookie Sookie

Animoto

Three bucks and ten minutes bought me this video at animoto.com

Battling the beard

About a month ago I bought an electric razor to leave at my country place so I don't look like grizzly Adams on weekends. Unfortunately I haven't had time to go there for a while so I started using the razor in town. It turned out to be pretty useful because I can shave in the shower and after a couple of days, my skin got used to it and I was getting clean and smooth shaves.

Here's the cool thing, I guess my hair started growing straight out instead of at an angle so I just noticed recently that my beard is a lot less like a Fred Flintstone sub-cutaneous grey shadow both right after a shave and at the end of the day. Go figure, by 5:00 my face feels like a pot scrubber but still doesn't look like I've got a dirt-beard. I'm sold on it full time now even though I used to hate these things. Takes a little longer to shave but I'm doubling timing with my zombie in the shower ceremony routine so I'm actually saving time overall.

Take a sec

and watch this.

Been mighty busy

The Year

This year was pretty intense. I spent two years buying out dead weight business partners and rebuilding my business and in the process ended up with a brand new outlook on things. First off, my business has been re-engineered and is doing great. This was largely because I was under so much pressure to raise funds to buy out my partners and had no safety net in the process. Failure wasn't an option. Second, I really learnt the value of teamwork and have had awesome teams around me in all aspects of my life. Weeding out the people that were negative influences was painful but in the end I have a fantastic crew. Third, I have in this past year not only expanded my reach in business as far as I could but also took a lot of risks in diversified investments and they all seem to be paying off reasonably well.


The Projects


This year I've been fortunate enough to win over new customers from all around the world and a few major ones in North America. I can't say that I did it myself, I couldn't have done it without the amazing team that I've been lucky enough to assemble. We've killed ourselves and amazed our customers and that's the key to keeping up momentum. We've had 6 major projects in 5 cities and all of them were executed with class and finesse and of course were profitable as well. The biggest project had nothing to do with my primary technology business - I invested in some property in Costa Rica where we'll be building a private resort. The first step was renovating the nearly finished villa that was already there.

Costa Rica

We started with a partially finished shell in August and just completed the renovations and a new infinity pool two weeks ago. This was an intense 4 months in which everything that could possibly go wrong did. Not only is the property on a peninsula that only has ferry access, it's also on top of a pretty steep hill and there are no concrete trucks in this region. It gets better, the renovations and pool construction were done in the rainy season which was the worst one in 30 years. Our main road got washed out twice, there was a tornado that zipped by 100M from the house and of course an earthquake in Peru triggered a small tsunami.

The People

It's all about the people. The team that worked with me on this, my construction manager in CR, the locals who he hired and the contractors were all unbelievably loyal in a place where nobody is reliable or very concerned about anything at all. They were all amazing and we showed gratitude by treating them with utmost respect and then turned the villa over to the construction crew on the final night so they could party with a pig feast to celebrate an impossible job. These people were so happy to be able to have a party in the house that many of them looked like they were going to cry. None of them had ever been allowed in all of the pools and houses that they worked on let alone have a party with all their bosses and whoop it up in the pool. That alone made it worth it.

The Villa

The first 3 bedroom villa in the project is complete and is taking bookings. It's a referral only kind of thing but ask me nicely if you're interested in renting it. We set the bar really high especially given that it's in such a remote surfing town but I think that the results are pretty spectacular.

Santa Teresa

Happy Holidays from Costa Rica

I'll be back in a day or two and try to catch up. In the meantime, read this.

Free Stuff

Who doesn't love free stuff? Get your free DivX Pro holiday promo here quick.

Christmas Challenge

Here's a balls out challenge open to all my friends and associates in or around Montreal, I will match dollar for dollar any donation to Dans la Rue between now and Dec 31st of this year up to a grand total of a (a big number edited out) (mucho pain + ouch + yikes! + sandwiches for a year). The only catch is that I have to know you already to match your donation. Email me.

Edit: I made the total matching amount private because it seemed pompous and self serving but the offer remains the same and the sum hasn't changed. It's a big painful number, believe me.

A Secret about The Secret

Man, I can't believe how many people I've met that have bought into this Oprah induced "The Secret" bullshit. Seems like a great placebo for the North American culture of quick fixes. Take a pill and lose 100lbs, make a wish and "the secret" will make it come true through the cosmic nature of the universe - how utterly absurd.

This is such an enormous load of shit and yet so successful that I wished sometimes that I was in the business of selling snake oil to gullible idiots who need quick fixes. I can't do it because I just don't have the heart.

If you think that I'm a bitter old toad, at least humor me and spend ten bucks and read some alternatives. A much better credible alternative is "Power of Your Subconscious Mind" followed by "Learned Optimism" and "Giant Within" and finally when you're on fire and the game is on you'll need "48 Laws of Power" and "The Art of War".

Buy a dozen copies of The Secret and give them to your enemies and competitors so you can crush them while they're making wishes and summoning up cosmic forces.

Edit: The quick fix weight loss pills will make your ass leak oil.

Beware of Non-Problem

I'll admit it, I got sucked in by an expert telling me "no problem". I had an architectural problem with some complex geometry and I handed the problem over to an architect as I was clearly in over my head. "No problem" she says. Ten weeks later, still no solution but I'm still hearing "no problem". Somethings not right here so I start pressing harder, finally after coming a nanosecond away from a bat-shit crazy drooling foaming rabid psycho homicidal freak-out, it's revealed that (wait for it) there's really a big problem after all.

I'm an idiot for not listening to my gut. When somebody tells me there's no problem and doesn't tell me how they're going to solve the "non problem", the alarm should have gone off.Now the non-problem is once again my problem. Fuck do I ever hate when that happens and the next person that has a non-problem with a non-solution is going to get a good kick in the proverbial nuts, either that or a bat-shit crazy drooling foaming rabid psycho homicidal freak-out.

Captivating

Kind of like watching a overturned heineken truck, horrific yet compelling.

I like Jeff

Warning: Geek post ahead

Jeff Bezos is probably one of the most underrated guys on the planet. Once upon a time during the Internet 1.0 boom, everybody gave out stuff for free or under cost and lost money and nobody could figure out how they'd ever make money. Jeff's Amazon.com was one of those companies. After the boom, analysts were laughing at them as a failed relic of the Internet Bubble. Then Amazon started making money hand over fist and they stop laughing.

These days, Jeff is quietly selling cloud storage, cloud computing, group manual processing, virtualized servers and basic banking as a service. This stuff is called Amazon S3, EC3, Flexible Payments, Mechanical Turk and a bunch of other geek names.

What it means to the small business is that now any small business can have unlimited storage, unlimited severs on demand, unlimited people tasks and Amazon grade funds transfer service available to their own apps.

This is some brilliant stuff that's going to change the business world that we know and also change the Internet that we know. This stuff is Internet 3.0 and I'm pretty excited about it. We're doing a bunch of dev stuff right now on this at my office and it's pretty cool.

You can create a virtual server, boot it up, load software and run it and then destroy the machine - all using web service calls and all hosted on Amazon servers.

Brilliant, great work Jeff.

Marsupial

Kids

Processing Trentmoeller

I like Trentmoeller and I think that the Processing platform is pretty cool so it was really a pleasant surprise to see both combined together in this rendering called Magnetosphere by Robert Rodgin.

Not so Fast Al

In 1984 there was a movement from the US religious right that demanded that record companies re-evaluate contracts of musical artists that released material that they found offensive. They put together a list of fifteen songs and artists that they consider offensive (the filthy fifteen) and they singled out a number of other artists and songs.

Among the songs that they found offensive were "Rocky Mountain High" by John Denver because the word 'high' was in the title, "We're not going to take it" by Twisted Sister for violence and "Dress you up" by Madonna. This wasn't in 1954, it was 1984.

Here's the scary part, the charge was led by none other than Saint Al Gore's wife Tipper. It was Tipper that gathered a motley crew [sic] of Senate wives to bring the issue in front of the Senate Commerce Committee to "review" offensive lyrics and performances. Guess who was on the committee? None other than everybody's favorite saint - Al Gore. Did Al cry out in outrage against the McCarthy-esque squelching of free speech and persecution of the musical trinity of Denver/Snyder/Zappa? No, rather he tried in vain to validate his wife's pathetic campaign of McCarthy-esque persecution and censorship.


So why did he do it?

a) He didn't want to piss of his wife and get cut off from nookie.
b) He thought it would move his political career forward
c) He thought it was a good idea with a reasonable approach


My answer is all of the above and it's the first two that make me really nervous. Anybody looking to appease somebody else or move their career forward has enough motive to filter the facts to their advantage.

Buyer beware, double check Saint Al's numbers before you believe him. He's got (and keeps getting) tens of millions of dollars by peddling his product. Personally, I believe about 30% of what he has claimed.

Update: Read this (coming from the left no less) and remember that Gore and Clinton took $6M from the dirty oil companies that Al is railing against these days..

Finally, Saint Gore if you are reading this thanks once again for creating the Internet.

"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet"

Saint Al Gore
CNN Late Edition
March 9, 1999

A Saturday

Today I got sucked into accounting. I don't know how it happened. I had nothing to do but some paperwork so I went to the office, screwed around on Fark and FB for half an hour, had a coffee and decided I'd do some accounting. That was nine hours ago and I'm nearly finished cross referencing and reconciling 9 months of transactions across three companies and three currencies. I have a headache and I need a beer several beers tequila.

Genetic Ambiguity

I was reading this article about James Thomson who pioneered stem cell research and has now developed a technique for using viruses to introduce genes into skin cells to turn them back into stem cells. This is some profound stuff and he brings up some some really confounding scenarios. So what happens if you inject human stem cells into a rats brain and the brain develops human tissue? Is this creature subject to the same religious and constitutional rights as us? How about if it's just one gene like if a pig is cultivated with a human ant-diabetic gene? What is the threshold at which these creatures acquire human rights? How about the other way around, if you grow body parts in vitro, at what point do these parts be qualified as human?

And what about those plants with animal genes? Very tasty stuff.

Montreal's Place in Early Century Black Mobilization

Did you know that in 1920 Marcus Garvey organized a UNIA convention in Montreal and that's where Malcolm X's parents met and married?

Well neither did I. Marcus is considered a great prophet by the Rastafari and Malcolm X was one of the founders of the Nation of Islam.

The Heat is on

GOOG gets smacked by senators. AAPL gets slapped by end users. AAPL gets slapped again in Germany by the courts with a brand spanking new restraining order.

Cuban, OReilley and Fark

Well two of my favorite blogs collided in this post (Fark and BlogMaverick).

Nuclear Greenpeace

Sounds a little weird I know but Patrick Moore who was the co-founder of Greenpeace is now a vocal advocate of nuclear energy. Read more here. Much like John Coleman, the founder of the Weather Channel who says that global warming is the greatest scam in history, it's worth your while at least giving smart guys a listen.

Here's the part at the end that really got me interested:

"WN: Outside your relationship with Greenpeace, are there
environmental groups or thinkers out there that you support?

Moore: People like Stuart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, long-time
environmentalist and thinker. He's solidly in favor of nuclear now. Going back
to James Lovelock (founder of the Gaia theory), he was the first iconic environmental guy who said nuclear has got to be part of the solution. Jared
Diamond. He's in favor of nuclear energy too. "

On Fast Failure

Obiter dictum; I had yet another conversation on Saturday night over too many pints and agave juice about growing a company. I met somebody with a small business that was surviving but stuck in a holding pattern. My advice these days has been pretty much a canned answer; set your goals high - high enough to scare you and go for it. What I realized is that a lot of people can do some of this easily but then fail to execute. I guess I'm the same but I fight to get over that feeling that whatever I do has to be perfect so I'm not going to start it until I'm fully prepared and once I've started it I'm not going to release it until it's perfect. Well that principal fucked me over for a long time. Perfection is a pretty good excuse for procrastination and procrastination is a pretty good plan killer. I think that it was Tom Peters who said "Test fast, fail fast, adjust fast". This is a powerful statement because if you can't get stuff out fast, fix it and move on then you will be stuck in a pattern of never doing anything outside of your comfort zone because you're not perfect at it and you can't let it go. Learn rapid iteration and things will move quicker.

Listen to Tom, fail fast and fix faster.

CAVEAT EMPTOR: Of course if you're a heart surgeon or airline pilot please disregard this post.

This is funny

More from the Right

HDNet (Mark Cuban's company) put out a new Brian Depalma film called Redacted. It seems like the right wing establishment doesn't like this film because they consider it unpatriotic as it might be viewed as critical of the war. The cheerleader for this chorus is Bill OReilley who is quite an unsavoury character. So for the past few weeks OReilley has been attacking Cuban on his Fox TV show (a Rupert Murdoch property). Now some bumpkin rednecks are calling in bomb threats and death threats to everybody involved with Cuban and HDNet. Sounds familiar? This is pretty much the same thing that happened to the Dixie Chicks.


Here's the funny part (if any of this can be considered funny). Cuban being the billionaire that he is, bought ad space in OReilleys show and is now advertising his film from within the FOX network and on the OReilley show. Shows what a whore OReilley is and just goes to show you how intolerance isn't very pretty. Read more here.


On that subject, I have seen many people viciously criticize John Coleman, the founder of the Weather Channel who says that global warming is the greatest scam in history. If you find yourself thinking (gasp) "what blasphemy", you probably suffer from the same disease as OReilley. When you can't look at evidence from both sides and make up your own mind then you've painted yourself into a corner of religious narrow minded dogma. Even if you believe strongly in something, it's always worth your while to view the evidence from the other side.

As for global warming, I'm not yet sold on it but I haven't seen a balanced dialog. My belief is the big rush for "green" status by everyone and their dogs is simply another ploy to squeeze more money out of consumers in the form of taxes, LEED bureaucracy and hysterical hippies peddling idiotic products to pacify the guilt of oxygen deprived suburbanites. Yes we know you think that SUVs are horrible even though most of them have the same consumption as mid sized cars and (gasp) minivans. Why is it fashionable to dis a Hummer H2 (17MPG) and not a Kia Sedona (15MPG)? Where is the pragmatism?

If we can't get China and India to clean up their acts, we're fucked anyways regardless of how much tofu and lentils we pick out of our beards.

One last thing, even though I'm not convinced that global warming is grounded in truth, I still don't own a car, I walk to work, compost and recycle. The worst thing that could happen if I was wrong is that I got a bit healthier and saved some money right? Now that's pragmatic.

The smackdown continues

Google takes another smack to the head and history repeats itself.

Thoughts on Zune 2

The new Zune software is out now and it's pretty cool. I have a first gen zune and it's updated for free with the new firmware.

Here are my thoughts:

- Gorgeous UI on the device, more glowing stuff, smoother fades and wipes and nicer alpha channel/translucent effects. Very slick indeed, more chic than the now dated iPodesque glass buttons

- Girly/swirly UI on the software but it can be skinned to a muted minimal look/feel. It's really minimalistic in a Stark/Bang Olufson kind of way but at the same time organic like your moms velvet wallpaper. They definitely didn't copy iTunes and it shows.

- The software is very easy to use but it lacks some of the depth it used to have. I guess they rewrote it from scratch because a lot of the metadata and playlist features are gone. So are the heirarchical views of artist/genres/albums. We're left with minimalistic lists that can be sorted but you can't re-order the columns. Very nice for kids and noobs but a little lame for the rest of us. I would expect this to be built back up over time.

- There are lots of new social networking features and wireless features that I haven't tested yet.

Final thoughts: I think M$ will steadily chip away at A$ by honing into the facebook/mobile/xbox/pvr/tivo features that A$ will never have. M$ makes money by letting partners have a piece of the pie, A$ makes money by keeping partners out.

2 steps forward, 1 step back. 8.5/10.

The Reason

Featuring everybodys fave mulletted lesbian Sara Quin from the twin lesbian duo Sara & Tegan.

January 9th, 2009

Seems so far away but it's only 14 months away. This is a big day my friends because this is the day that GWB relinquishes authority to the next elected president of the United States. That is if he doesn't dissolve parliament, jail the senate and declare a state of emergency under martial law. This of course is highly unlikely but dictatorships often start as democracies. Case in point Pakistan, Venezuela and Russia.

I'm bringing this up because I just saw the Dixie Chicks "Shut up and Sing" documentary and it raised the hairs on my neck. It is scary how easily the media conglomerates can be manipulated by a marginal special interest group. It's scarier still how somebody like Rupert Murdoch can do it legally worldwide. I guess Billy Bragg was right all along.

In my ears

These days, I've been listening to a pretty diverse palette of tunes. Avenged Sevenfold have a new album out, I just got a huge stock of 60's reggae and northern soul and I'm really hooked on Booka Shade.

The GOOPLE Conspiracy

Are Apple and Google competing in the mobile space? Yes and no. With cross pollination between their boards of directors and seeing that they've been such bum buddies it's hard to believe that they are going to fight it out like two adversaries.



My prediction? GOOPLE will collectivley target MS-Office with a web based suite of tools with lots of applishious iphonish features. And GOOPLE will buy Adobe thereby controlling Flash & AIR. GOOPLE will get a head start by buying Glide.

Let's come back here in a year and see what happens.

Guiness

Frankly I think Guiness tastes like fermented bong water but their new advert is simply brilliant.

Not a Second Too Soon

Google's smackdown begins. And will continue.


GOOG market cap 216B and rising
MSFT market cap 325B and holding

When GOOG share price hits 1000, Google will be the same market cap as MSFT. Coming soon to a portfolio near you.

Alaska

Going to Alaska sometime soon? You might want to know in advance that it's illegal to wake up a bear to take a picture, no problem shooting it while it's sleeping though. Oh yeah, it's also illegal to throw a live moose out of a plane.

And those boneheads in Oregon won't let you pump your own gas, just ask Ricky B.

Do no Evil

Do no evil my ass! This is Googles mantra yet they keep peering deeper and deeper into my gmail account to deliver target ads. I have a thread with a friend running over a year and it started with "Hey Dred". I'm still getting Bob Marley CD compilation ads to this day. WTF??? Why is it that everybody freaks out about Microsoft and Facebook but Google and Apple get away with murder??

Here's why:

Microsoft is the new IBM.
Google and Apple are the new Microsoft.
Keep loving them while you can fanboys, nobody's fooling me.

I love bugs

Well actually I really love Bug Labs who happen to be my favorite company in the world. These doods make open source modular hardware to build and program your own mobile net connected gadgets. Yep, you gotta be a geek to really appreciate this one. Here's how it works, get a base module, throw on a wireless receiver, touch panel, GPS and camera module and whip up some java code and you can have this thing document and geotag your travels through space and time while recording the weather at the same time.

Once again, this project is for geeks only but fuck is it ever cool.

iPod touch versus Zune

I've got one of each, so what's better? If you have the time to sit in front of an iPod touch and have it as the center of your attention for extended periods of time then it's a clear winner with a better and prettier interface and form factor. However, if you listen to music while walking/jogging/cycling/motoring then the iPod sucks. Why? While it's in your pocket you cant control the mute, vol up/down, skip fwd/back and all that other stuff. You have to take it out, unlock it and then fumble through the landscape/portrait detector until it figures out that you want it right side up and then it lets you control it. Even then, you can't seek without tapping once on the screen and getting to an exact spot is impossible unless you have a 3 millimeter diameter finger. What else pisses me off is that it doesn't remember where you are in a playlist or long format audio and there is no way to create a playlist on the fly. It's great for flights and airports, shit for pocket operation. That's why Rick loves it and I hate it.

Google Opensocial

Somebody posted yesterday about Googles new social networking platform. It's hard to say what the impact is going to be but at this point it is just a bunch of developer stuff that doesn't have any impact until it shows up as applications on web sites.

So what exactly is the deal with this? In a nutshell, it would let me put in a funwall or superpoke right on my blog or web site. That in itself is no big deal but like digg, it ties together a bunch of unrelated people and sites like hidden glue.

The big news is that MySpace has signed on. To me this means that MySpace will become Googles pawn in its war against Facebook. So in effect, OpenSocial is really the MySpace application layer that lets developers enable Myspace users to poke each other and to poke people on the LinkedIn network (maybe?).

What an enormous waste of time, but some people are making huge money from this stuff. Looks to me like News corp will likely sell Myspace to Google within the year since there are no real synergies and MySpace needs some serious CPR to make it "cool" again.

Free PIcasso, Monet & Renoir!

How cool is this? The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has waived admission fees until Jan 27th. That's right, it's free to get in until then and there are lots of exhibits rolling through.

1380 Sherbrooke Street West,

Tuesday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Wednesday 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Thursday and Friday 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Saturday and Sunday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Edumacation

Somewhere in a science lab some high school kid is learning about electrons and protons and how they hold molecules together. He might learn about history, math, art and lots of other stuff. He might make it right into the deep n-th level calculus and be able to calculate the half life of some esoteric isotope. He won't however learn how to balance a chequebook, he won't learn how to build his credit profile, he won't learn how to not get ripped off when he buys a car and he certainly won't learn how to negotiate his first job terms. Most people have to learn this stuff by screwing up and then correcting. Some people never learn this stuff and live hand to mouth day in day out and wonder why it is that they can't ever make ends meet.

So here's my recommendation for some new high school courses that I wish I took that would have come in very handy:
1) Basic personal cash flow and finance
2) Negotiating fair deals
3) Financial independence
4) The generation gap explained
5) Self confidence and learned optimism

Having said that, being the idiot that I was in high school I doubt that I would have voluntarily taken those courses.

More on Control

I finally saw Anton Corbijn's Ian Curtis biopic "Control" on Saturday. It's everything that I thought it would be, bleak, severe and torturous - much like me when I was 16. I guess seeing this movie was a lot like picking an old scab but now I'm almost doing it from a third persons perspective. If you like indy music or Joy Division, it's worth seeing. However, if you are looking for some light entertainment then avoid it like yellow mayo.

Being Upfront

It's actually easier than you think, change your outlook and do what you say. No so hard right? So why is it that so many people flap their lips and don't follow up with action? Most people would rather not face the unpleasant part of being honest upfront. In the real world, being upfront leads to awkward situations like when you have to say no, like saying no to doing something you don't feel right doing. What's the option then? Say yes and don't show up and then avoid the person? Sadly, most people don't have the backbone to be upfront with the people around them. Frankly, I'd rather avoid those kinds of people because in reality it seems that they aren't upfront with themselves and to me that lack of self confidence sucks energy out of those around them (i.e. Me). Fuck it, life is too short - I'd rather hang out with 2 people that inspire me than 100 who bore me.

On Homogeneous Societies

I find it sad and troubling that Quebec French Canadian society seems to be rejecting multiculturalism on such a grand and public scale. How ironic is it that an ethnic group so fiercely intent on preserving it's own culture would like to do so by obliterating the cultures of other minorities. The laws of Quebec are in place to prevent the assimilation of the French culture but at the same time the great hypocrisy lies in the equally intense desire to assimilate those who are different. Smells of institutional demagoguery and xenophobia - sad, pathetic and frankly embarrassing

"Giving a majority to Harper would have disastrous consequences for Quebec," said Duceppe, accusing the federal government of failing to protect the French language in Quebec.

He also blasted "Canadian multiculturalism" and said he will present amendments this fall to exclude Quebec from the Canadian Multiculturalism Act that promotes the preservation of various ethnic cultures and heritages.

National
Post Oct 14, 2007

A majority of Quebecers -- 56 per cent -- think minorities should be discouraged from forming their own communities here and, what's more, actually abandon their cultural practices, a Leger Marketing survey said.

By contrast, only 20 per cent of other Canadians feel that way. As well, only a minority of Quebecers -- 44 per cent -- think society should try harder to accept minorities' customs and traditions. In the rest of Canada, a strong majority -- 75 per cent -- thought so.

The phone poll of 1,500 Canadians, including 1,000 Quebecers, was done over the Thanksgiving weekend, between Oct. 4 and 10, on behalf of the Montreal-based Association for Canadian Studies.

Poll
on Immigration

Other articles:
Bigotry on public display


We don't have to look too far to see how well this policy worked for France where 9000 cars were burnt and thousands of attacks were launched against the police forces by disenfranchised immigrant youth. How well did assimilation work there?

More on Staglieno

Who knew that the biggest tourist attraction in Genoa was the Cemetery?

Here are a couple more tours:

Flesh to Stone

Shaftoe

Sergio's Flikr gallery

Webshots gallery

Another Flikr set

Closer

If you like Joy Division then you probably appreciate the aesthetic of the artwork that went with all of their releases. My favorite was the album cover for closer and the 12" Love will tear us apart.

The photograph on the cover of Closer is of the Appiani family tomb in the Cimitero Monumentale di Staglieno in Genoa by sculptor Demetrio Paernio, photo by Bernard Pierre Wolff.

These photos taken in this cemetery have a lot of familiar statues and monuments but taken from different angles.

I especially like these two from the covers;

Something creepy

It took me a while to figure out what it is that creeps me out about this dood other than him being a pedophile, then it struck me. He looks just like Moby YUCK!!!

Cheap(er) Flights

I've been spending a lot of time in airports these days so I've had a chance to use a few different web sites to book my travel. Usually I use Expedia or Air Canada/Westjet but these days with the Canadian dollar above par, I'm using Kayak.com quite a bit. Overall they seem to be finding me flights about 25%-30% less than I usually pay and with much more variety in schedules. Highly recommended, give them a spin sometime.

More Control

More on Corbijn here.

Control

Anton Corbijn's film Control is coming out any day now which is a biopic of Joy Division's rise and fall. This is prolly the film that I've been most anxious to see this year. JD were for me the most important and underrated band of my lifetime.

"This is why events unnerve me,

They find it all, a different story,

Notice whom for wheels are turning,

Turn again and turn towards this time,

All she asks the strength to hold me,

Then again the same old story,

Word will travel, oh so quickly,

Travel first and lean towards this time.

Oh, Ill break them down,

no mercy shown,

Heaven knows, its got to be this time,

Watching her, these things she said,

The times she cried,

Too frail to wake this time.

Oh, Ill break them down, no mercy shown,

Heaven knows, its got to be this time,

Avenues all lined with trees,

Picture me and then you start watching,

Watching forever,

forever,Watching love grow,

forever,Letting me know, forever."

It's a little hard

to keep writing this blog from airports and rental cars which is where I seem to be spending most of my time these days. I was wondering if I should just delete this whole thing but I figured I'd give it another shot.

Here are some cool cooking gadgets from PopSci.

Facebook as the new AOL

Seems like Facebook is turning into a new walled garden for noobs who don't see too far over the fence. I have a lot of friends on there who don't even check their email and seem to exclusively rely on FB messages, photo, blog, etc. Kind of like the romper room AOL from days of yore. As for me, I'm on there but incognito. If you don't know where to find me, you won't find me.