March, 17, 2001 archives

i finally watched msnbc's silicon summit ii last night, which was fairly interesting. brokaw definitely let some of the panelists off the hook (and one of the questioners, who asserted that violence in schools is increasing without being soundly rebutted). aol and microsoft are clearly going to keep playing semantic games in justifying their walled gardens. i also found it interesting that jay walker didn't bring up his precious patents when talking about how microsoft had entered the name-your-price travel business (apparently with little success). jeff bezos has taken on the role of internet punching bag quite well, along with jerry yang (although with yahoo it is a little less deserved, since they are actually making money). the financial person they had on the panel (some woman with allen & co.) gave answers that were totally bizarre. the head of sony usa was quite funny. and it was entertaining to see michael powell (fcc chief) fend off one question by answering that the question was about something his agency didn't regulate (i think it had to do with child pornography and hate speech on the net).

i watched girl, interrupted last weekend, and something i took away from the film that i really appreciated was a new respect and understanding for the word ambivalence (and ambivalent): the coexistence of opposing attitudes or feelings, such as love and hate, toward a person, an object, or an idea. the root of the word (valere) means "to be strong".

i watched erin brockovich last night (one of the two best picture nominees i've seen, along with traffic). it turns out the car accident scene was shot just up the street from where i live. that was a little strange to see ("wait a second, those buildings look familar...").

one of the funnier lines -- bite my ass, krispy kreme!

the movie was good. i liked traffic more, though. i haven't seen enough of the nominees to have an opinion on who should win what oscars, but i wouldn't be disappointed to see anyone from traffic or erin brockovich win anything. (the only other film with any nominations i've seen is cast away.)

the dotcom 1040. for those who have yet to file their taxes.

the los angeles times has turned out to be a dud, newsfeed wise. they appear to only update daily. i had hope for the daily news, but they appear to be the same. time to poke around the local news stations, but i'm even less optimistic about those. (it seems to me that web journalism requires the vigor of print journalism with the rolling schedules of television news.)

in a fit of madness, i reclaimed some cabling i had stuffed into the ceiling and a wintv card stuffed in a drawer, and now i can watch tv on my computer through the miracle of xawtv. pretty silly. i need a proper 1/4" patch cable to get stereo sound, but it appears to work. i configured a couple of sawfish bindings so i have easy channel-up and channel-down buttons.

i also set it up so that the scroll lock led on my keyboard flashes when i've got email. once i get around to setting up my modemblaster, that will include voicemail, too.

i plan to do silly things with the modemblaster once i set it up. i'm waiting until i get the replacement hard drive from seagate so i only have to screw around with my server once. (the cd-rom is currently dead because i accidently left it disconnected when removing the dead hard drive.)

(oh, and i upgraded to the 2.4.2 kernel on my desktop to get the wintv card to work. a little excitement with mkinitrd not understanding /dev/root, but once i realized mkinitrd was a perl script, a little kung fu was applied and things fell into place.)