While there’s no shortage of calendar apps for every taste, it seems that this is the only one that caters to mine. Calendar is very simple. I have it sitting in the background, all but invisible on top of my desktop picture. It has minimal functionality for adding events. And it displays five days worth of weather information, although it’s questionable when compared to other forecasts.
A couple days ago, a final decree was issued in the interminable Microsoft anti-trust suit. Microsoft got off with a slap on the wrist. Unsurprisingly, this boosted Microsoft’s stock. More surprisingly, the market rallied overall.
Microsoft lifted many other technology stocks with it today, including Cisco Systems, I.B.M., Intel and Dell Computer.
This baffles me. Microsoft is a convicted monopolist, with predatory business policies. Investors appear to be operating under the principle that “what’s good for Microsoft is good for the market.” The opposite is the case. Although one company’s success need not be at the expense of another’s in general, Microsoft operates according to Gore Vidal’s maxim: “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.”
Saw Michael Moore’s new movie, Bowling for Columbine yesterday. This is a documentary about gun violence in the USA. It asks a lot more questions than it answers, the central question being “why is there so much gun violence in America?” Moore trots out the counter-example of Canada, which has widespread gun ownership, a similar culture, and very few gun-related deaths. He doesn’t have an answer to this question, but gives a lot of food for thought. Is America’s bellicose foreign policy somehow related to street violence? He suggests that it is, but doesn’t say how (if at all), and it doesn’t quite ring true for me.
One review I read before seeing the movie criticized Moore for his argumentative interview with Charlton Heston at the end of the movie. I had a different reaction: If Heston didn’t already know that Moore is a rabble-rouser, he had time (and a publicist on-hand) to find out between the time he made the appointment for the interview and the time of the interview itself. But more to the point, Heston clearly did not have the moxie to defend his position. If someone is a prominent representative of a controversial viewpoint, as Heston is, that person should have the intellectual courage to defend it. Heston didn’t–he allowed himself to be backed into a corner very easily. If I had any respect for him before, I lost it there.
Mid-term elections attract something like 20% voter turnout. Pretty sad, and ripe fodder for jokes, but perhaps things won’t be quite so bad this time. News is that early voting has been unusually active, which may be cause for optimism.
At any rate, I do believe it’s important to vote, and to be an educated voter. With that in mind, here are a couple of scooby-snacks for the interested voter: Open Secrets and Vote Smart.
Went down with Gwen to Cafe Mundi for what is now a tradition–the Tantien Halloween Show. I was one of the safeties, and I think more than half the fire-folk in Austin were involved in some capacity. It was a good show, and a good crowd–excellent people-watching. Unfortunately, I got almost no photos.
Gwen’s costume, which involved a liquid-latex top, took quite a long time to apply, so we missed out on the 6th-Street experience.
This is brilliant. A guy who got rich during the dotcom era is photographing every inch of the California coastline from a helicopter
The camera is linked with a cable to the helicopter’s global positioning system, and to an Apple Power Book laptop. Every three seconds, he snaps a picture, and the exact longitude, latitude and altitude are recorded.
Adelman said he will spend about $20,000 to photograph the whole coast, and take about 10,000 pictures in all. He has finished about 60 percent, including nearly everything from Marin County to Los Angeles. He expects to finish the rest of Southern California this week. One area, over Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara County, is in restricted air space and Adelman is still working to get permission to photograph
This is what computers and the Internet are for. The fact that this project can be undertaken–and made universally available–for so little money amazes me.
Why is he doing this? I’m sure that once he is done, people will find all kinds of fascinating but unintended uses for it. His motive is environmental preservation. Check it out at californiacoastline.org.
I haven’t seen this yet, but evidently some enterprising scumbags are now inserting spam into people’s blog comments. A detailed discussion of possible techniques to thwart this ensued.
As a side-dish, I discovered a website that will test how well e-mail addresses on web pages have been obscured to foil spambots (this page passed).
Saw Punch-Drunk Love last night. Excellent movie. Very weird, jarring audio throughout. Very studied use of symmetric framing, apparently to reinforce the sense of soul-crushing artificiality. This is perhaps only the second good movie that Adam Sandler has been in (Shakes the Clown would be the first), and he really goes beyond himself in this role, as Jim Carrey did in the Truman Show. But I’ll see just about anything from P.T. Anderson on spec.
Saw Caetano Veloso last night at Bass Concert Hall with Gwen and another friend (who just happened to know the cellist). The local alternative weekly did an interesting piece on him recently.
The show was great. Although he played a number of old standards, there was nothing stale about his show, or about him. Unlike some musical acts that have been around as long, he clearly continues to innovate musically, not resting on his laurels. He’s also just damned talented.
I don’t know why, but the Samuel L Jackson Soundboard makes me laugh my ass off (Flash required)
