The Iron Yuppie

You know what has a bad user interface? The human body. I have a headache. Does that tell me remotely what's wrong? My wrist hurts... ok, what am I supposed to do now? While I'm at it, let me criticize babies as well... um, ok, you're crying... now what?

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Klein nailed on falsehoods in Al Franken Show grill

Jeez, I don't know what I was thinking would happen, but I guess this is what I should expect if someone gets completely called out with no basis. Apparently the new book on Hillary Clinton has been found to have a number of real mistakes in it, and the author (Edward Klein) went on the Al Franken show. And got absolutely destroyed. He hemmed and hawed through the entire thing and at the end it made it seem like he had just thrown together random rumors and quotes. It's not like it's a problem, of course. It'll still sell millions ...

Was there ever a time where when someone was proven so completely wrong they were just thrown out of the talk show circuit? Because I guarantee that's not going to happen here. These quotes and rumors will be echoed for the next 20 years and likely will be perceived as facts forever. And they will make up the basis of the negative campaign that assaults Mrs. Clinton in her next run. I don't even particularly like her, but this is terrible. It's not new, but it's completely transparent now that all that matters is selling the books and, even if they are completely false, the books will continue to be churned out at amazing speed. It'd be nice to have a time where after a book or quote or ad or whatever was proven wrong, the responsible parties retracted it all and destroyed the remaining copies (or reprinted them to be sorted in the fiction section). Not likely that's going to happen any time soon.

Technorati Tags : What, it, looks, like, when, someone, gets, nailed

Longhorn (heart) RSS via Channel 9

I know that I have a huge bias here, but I really think that MS is doing a really great thing when it comes to RSS. The beautiful part of it is that amount of work that an application developer no longer has to do. I think that RSS is going to be so much broader because MS is putting the work they are doing into the platform. The nice part is that this is not novel work… soon you’ll see these kind of platform investments in every platform. The surprising part is that any one else could have done the work first, but MS did. I think this may be the first time in a long time that MS has done something big that other people will emulate. Because knowing what RSS is and parsing XML for a dev is absolutely useless. It’s like knowing how to handle a TCP/IP packet. It’s the start of a brand new world. And when you can synch your databases, web directories, book marks, photos, calendars, reports, contacts, sales pipelines and everything else you can think of over RSS, you can have announcements like this to thank for kicking it off.

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I’m sitting in Gnomedex right now… boy if everyone in here was taken via some alien abduction, basically 80% of the daily posts on the web would just disappear. My question is that if that DID happen ,would the blogosphere lose it’s strength? Is it big enough to exist on it’s own? I’d like to think so… but it’s still so new. I’ve been posting for a decent amount of time in Internet time (2 years this fall), but it still feels like a shaky medium in a lot of ways. The blogosphere is made up of personalities, not publications, and that could suffer if the personalities decide to move on to something else.

I will say this, I think the people in here really miss how broad blogging really is. I’ve heard comments that ~50% of the population doesn’t know what blogging is. Are you kidding? NINETY percent of the population doesn’t know what blogging is. And the majority of the remaining 10% don’t even know they’re on a blog when they’re reading it. I used to think my company had a unique sense of myopia when it came to understanding how broadly technology was adopted. I’m beginning to think it’s all geeks.

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What follows is what I like to call a complete fucking waste of time which, coincidentally, would probably be my dream job.

• "Big Day - 30 seconds" - Jetta VW Commercial
• "Big Day - 60 seconds" - Jetta VW Commercial

First, I’d like to say I consider this to be one of the greatest short films (calling it a commercial is almost an insult) I’ve ever seen. It is so dense and intricate that one can watch it a thousand times and be taken up and down the emotional and intellectual roller coaster every time.

But second, and most fascinating part to me, is the subtlety of editing resulting in the dramatic difference of character portrayal from the 30 to 60 second video. In the 30 second video (from now on Video A), you might walk away thinking that the interrupter (call him Ben) was unwelcome. The woman (call her Elaine) was going through her wedding to her fiancé (call him Carl) and seemed unphased until Ben showed up and then she knew it was on, ending with the fantastic double entendre “Fasten Your Seatbelts”.

In the 60 second (from now on Video B), there are the following additional clips:

• 16 - 18s: Elaine spins her ring and looks up and away, caught in thought
• 28 - 30s: Elaine’s father looks around at the window with trepidation
• 34 - 35s: Elaine pensively looks out the window and then abruptly turns away

The remainder of the piece is roughly the same. The amazing thing here is that with an additional six to seven seconds of footage, you now have Elaine portrayed as torn between the decision she’s made and the consequences of that decision. Absolutely incredible! I know that in some other life I was an editor… this stuff is too interesting for me to have nothing to do with the movie/television industry.

Oh and for the curious, I was reminded how amazing this short film was after hearing yesterday’s All Things Considered on the subject of the excellent composer, J. Ralph. You better believe I’m going buy the shit out of that guy’s discography here and here.D

I came upon the Fountains of Wayne a while ago after hearing that song about Stacy's Mom.

This past NFL season, I was treated to a commercial with their song: http://www.fountainsofwayne.com/media/

I'm always happy to see an interesting band achieve success. One thing that strikes me as particularly interesting about them is that they seem to write a lot of songs about being pre-teenager. Did they write all the songs when they were in junior high and then finally get around to recording them?

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Tom Delay's Comment About Houston I mean Iraq

A posting from two (!) years ago about how wrong the comparison is

People on both sides make these mistakes. But you know that these policitians are just reading off of talking points. Do you guys and gals who write these know what Google is? You could do a QUICK search if you'd like. Better yet, why don't you just pass them my way and I'll spend the 2 minutes it takes to verify if you're telling the truth or not. Passing this stuff off as fact just cheapens the debate.

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Small Ads from the UK

I'm not sure how many of these are real, but they're all really funny. Subscribed!

Edit: By real, I mean really in the newspaper, not just photoshopped in. I assume they're all jokes... except for the 30 Chinamen and the zeppelin.... I mean who DOESN'T need that.

Salon.com News | Bush lied about war? Nope, no news there!

Salon basically comes to the conclusion that the media has begun to go soft on the Bush administration because they have been so harsh with anyone who puts out a negative piece. Considering I work in a job where lots and lots of people are taking aim at the stuff I put out, I think I understand the Bush administration's tact. What I don't know is exactly how much access a daily reporter needs... does it make that big a difference if you can get a 30 minute canned interview? Is that real reporting? I just have no idea about the journalism world.