Optimus Prime FTW!

Sure, you can read fellow NoVa resident Zbigniew Brzezinski (highly recommended), Friedman (o.k.), et. al., but the only evidence I need that globalization really has taken hold in China is this 40 foot tall statue in the relatively remote mountainous region of Yunnan.

An American rendering of a Japanese remake of a Korean cartoon writ large across a Chinese city-scape.

Charlie Rose free today on Google Video

Wow, an actual reason to hit up Google Video for, shocking I know, quality content.

Follow-Up: This shows how long it's been since I've been on Google Video, but for the love of god Google Video player developers, "full screen" should mean full screen.

Follow-Up: It appears that HP is now sponsoring all of the Charlie Rose content on Google Video. The ads consist of text banner at the top of the playback window and an easily skippable HP commercial at the end of the broadcast. I'd still prefer to pay a nomianl fee for a high-quality downloadable, archivable, DRM-free version, but this a reasonable compmromise.

DRM versus Emergent Media

Legal scholars can go back and forth about "fair use", "copyright", "copyleft", "artists rights", "cultural reference" etc. I'm really not much of a hip-hop fan and the last time I was in any sort of club or live DJ environment was the late 90's. Nevertheless, I can't think of a more elegant demonstration of emergent media than this mix.

Can anyone honestly say that this sort of talent, creativity, and artistic expression could arise under a DRM'ed environment?

Along those same lines, Mr. Attaway is so full of shit I know his eyes must be brown though his portrait is only in grayscale.

Thanks Mr. Frank

I was having a pretty crappy Saturday until I ran across Ze Frank's latest rant on his Delta Airlines experience. He's so on target.

Superman 1 w/ Bunnies

Via Digg:

Superman 1 movie reinacted in 30 seconds (flash).

After seeing X-Men 3 this afternoon, this cheered me up.

X-Men 3

Saw X-Men 3 today. It sucked—big time.

Please keep in mind that this is coming from someone who greatly enjoyed the previous 2 movies and once spent over $150 USD of his hard-earned teenage summer job money (during just one trip) on back issues of the X-Men comic. I'm likely a wee bit more invested in the franchise and its ethos than the average movie consumer.

Net Neutrality

A friend asked me the other day what my take on "Net Neutrality" was. Quite frankly, I haven't had the time to parse through the various positions and proposed legislation (pdf). When I mean 'parse', I mean read thoroughly through as much original source material as possible—from both sides. The issue is currently confusing enough that I'm not even sure how many "sides" are engaged in the debate.

I am, at first blush, very skeptical about any positions which yield more power to telecommunications companies. As we've seen with the recent AT&T fiascos and, historicallly, with a variety of common-carrier providers of all sizes, telecoms do not have a good track record when it comes to customer service. I am currently keenly interested in reading Vint Cerf's recent testimony (pdf). Besides being one of the "founding fathers" of the Internet, he used to work for MCI and now works for Google. He's been there from the beginning and has seen things from both sides of the fence.

Follow-Up: Tim Berners-Lee has published a position paper on net neutrality. I haven't read it yet.

Hilarious self-spoof of Web 2.0

A wonderfully vicious spoof. of Web 2.0. It's done in the style of Steven Colbert's "The W0rd" segment. The best part is the presenter co-founded Reddit—a Web 2.0 company.

I love the part, clearly planted, of how the domain name was already taken.

AT&T is screwing its customers...again

I have never before used an explitive, in a public forum, regarding a company, but this new policy is absolutely outrageous. Yes Virginia, I am the kind of person who actually parses legalise for fun. As if the warrantless wiretaps weren't bad enough, now we get this crock of shit.

Fortunately, I currently have no vested interest in AT&T or any of its subsidiaries nor do I have any direct dependencies on AT&T for telecommunications service for my personal or business use. If I did, I would divest myself of them immediately.

Unfortunately, I believe that this is just the first of many steps which will result in the default loss of personal data privacy and personal meta-data privacy in this country.

A nice summary of the nasty bits.

Oh and John Brittain (AT&T spokesman), you're a liar.

*sigh*

Time for some much needed relief in the form of

• A brisk walk.
• Some Islay scotch
• A rousing round of Go
• An episode of Regenesis

Missing You

Hulk angry.Hulk disappointed. Hulk sad.

Hulk want new episode This Week In Media.

Quote of the day/week

Umm...yeah... I know it's only 11am on a Monday, but I think we have a winner. This pretty-much sums up the market's rapid positive response to Ubuntu Linux:

"Ubuntu is the ancient African word for ‘I’m sick of compiling Gentoo.' "

LOL!

Microshaft web framework

Mmmm...delicious parody from the Hak.5 folks here in good 'ole Virginia of over-hyped buzzword-compliant software technology. Ah...they days of Cold Fusion back in late '97...fun...fun. I still have the scars.

I can't wait until the new "season" of Hak.5 starts.

As Bill McNeal from News Radio would say, "Good times....good times".

Thanks to Wes Tobler for letting us NoVa folks know what a "true" Virginian accent sounds like.

Tufte's new opus

Beautiful Evidence is out now.

Woot! I am such a Tufte fanboy it's kinda' sad.

I realize that, to many, he comes across verymuch like the stereotypical elitist Ivy League academic, but there's no denying that his philosophies have a real resonance within the visual design and scientific communities. Much like good 'ole Jakob, he's a reliable touchstone for a particular worldview whether or not it's possible to put the majority of his ideas into practice.

The pace of the Web today

A really nice interview with David Weekly on the quick rise and fall (2 weeks) of his non-start-up start-up SingleStat.us.

If MySpace had been smart, they would've offered him a quick 5 figure buy-out of the codebase to incorporate it into their service rather than a C&D letter.

Now they will have build this feature, which is clearly in demand, from scratch at probably 5x that cost and have yet another entry for them on ChillingEffects. I thought Rupert & Co. were smarter than this.