Welcome Back, Ray!

It's good to see Ray blogging again after stopping back in November. Looking forward to reading his new posts.

Chandler debuts

Congrats to Mitch & the OSAF crew for the 0.1 launch of Chandler!

Big article on Nettle

Earlier today I wrote and published Part Eight of a long series of reviews of the Netflix online DVD rental service over at Nettle, my other blog.

Fred Turner on the Rise of Techno-Utopianism

Fred Turner of Stanford's Communications Dept recently gave a talk at Terry Winograd's fantastic HCI lecture series at Stanford. Fred's talk is interesting -- especially for WELL users, since his talk is all about Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth techno-utopian influence on culture in the 1990s.

Here's Fred's abstract page, and here's a link to a high-bandwidth video stream (ASX format) of the actual talk he gave on Apr 11th.

Clever eBay Feedback

Been doing some eBaying lately, and I noticed someone had some fancy feedback from some other user:

If you do a lot of eBaying, you prolly don't see this too often. Then again, maybe this is common. Here's the actual text (wonder if it'll render in your browser):

º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,TRES BIEN º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø

Selling the G4

I bought a Mac PowerBook and to help pay for it I'm selling my G4 desktop machine on eBay.

Four Word Film Reviews

Came across an interesting site today: Four Word Film Reviews (www.fwfr.com).

Some reviews include:

• Phone Booth: "Sniper, phone, ring, ring" and "Callin' and killin' Colin."
  
• Chicago: "Gere's singing deserves prison" and "Doesn't transcend stage origins."
  
• Star Wars Episode I -- Phantom Menace: "16 years for this!?" and "Script written over weekend".
  
• The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowshp of the Ring: "Short hero, long movie" and "Lucas could learn something."

D'oh!

A popular photo on Yahoo right now is the X-Ray of a 12-week-old Staffordshire Bull Terrier named Jake, who, er, swallowed a 7-inch kitchen knife. Sounds like something my Jesse would do, but luckily hasn't (he has swallowed a nylon stocking before, and I've always expected a license plate to come out some day, like in the movie Jaws).

The Mirror in the UK has a story and BBC has a story too.

VentureBlog

Three VCs from August Capital (Andrew Anker, David Hornik, and Naval Ravika) recently started VentureBlog, running under MovableType. Postings range from peeves about poor cell phone performance along Sand Hill Road to WiFi ruminations to VC advice not to be conservative with numbers during a pitch session. Interesting tip about Anker doing lunch with CEO of Silicon Valley Bank --- SIVB's stock finally began to rise in March for the first time in a while.

Blossiers

Added a new satire story at Denounce Newswire on a service called Blossier --- a fictional blog dossier service where people can track, stalk, and spy on people who write blogs. Want to know when someone's traveling? Sign up for Blossier and get notified fast.

On a more serious note.... When Doc Searls begins a recent blog entry saying,

We left our house in Santa Barbara around 7am yesterday. We just arrived at our hotel in North Carolina. It's 4:35am. We didn't leave Chicago until after Midnight.

can the whole world assume nobody's at home in Santa Barbara? Doc clearly doesn't mind mentioning when he's home and when he's not. Lots of bloggers offer such mundane tidbits of their daily lives online.

But at what point do blogs become sources for identity thieves or other criminal elements? When do we see a cop TV show where the detective investigating a burglary asks, "You don't happen to publish a blog, do you?"

Gas Price Gouging in California

I keep reading these stories about how has prices are dropping. For instance, Gas Prices Under $1.40 in Springfield. (The Simpsons gotta be happy about that.) And then CNN/Money comes out with a story, saying . All this after the California Energy Commision and California Public Utilities Commision came out with a report saying, price gouging? No, not to worry.

Ok so I needed to buy some gas today. I live in La Jolla, CA. I drove around with the camera to see what prices were like in Pacific Beach and La Jolla. My findings are shown below --- all images taken within the past 3 hours:

From the "Well, Duh!" Department

New article at the distinguished journal NATURE, where we learn that Dinosaurs Ate Each Other.

Photoshopped Reality

The LA Times has admitted that Brian Walski, one of its photographers altered an image that appeared on the front page of its Monday edition. Makes one wonder, just how often does this kind of thing happen and we don't hear about it?

The LA Times seems to be wiping out his photos from all over its site. Compare a recent Google cache of a LATimes "War With Iraq" Photo Gallery series with the one that is live on the site right now. No more Brian Walski work to be found.

Walski was named Photographer of the Year in 2001 by the California Press Photographers Association -- click here to see a gallery of his work. They're great photos. But are they real? One of his 2001 CPPA awards was for a Spot News photo depicting a soldier looking up to a circle of jet contrails in a blue sky. Actual spot news or Photoshop? Click on the thumbnail image and decide for yourself. Another image (click on the thumbnail for a blow-up) shows a soldier looking off to bombs going off on a mountainside. Also an award-winning shot. I'd love to know if it's real though.

The New York Post has a short article today about this controversy.

UPDATE 3 Apr 2003 -- 1036pst
Poynter Online has more detailed story about Walski's termination at LA Times.

Inside Google

Interesting FastCompany article on how Google the company runs. Five "rules" are described:

• Rule Number One: The User Is in Charge
  
• Rule Number Two: The World Is Your R&D Lab
  
• Rule Number Three: Failures Are Good. Good Failures Are Better.
  
• Rule Number Four: Great People Can Manage Themselves
  
• Rule Number Five: If Users Come, So Will the Money