January, 7, 2002 archives

michigan congressman conyers is going to hold hearings to look into payola in the radio broadcasting business. i guess he's not getting enough lobbying money from the radio and music publishing businesses. (i'd have less of a problem with payola if radio broadcasters had to buy their spectrum at auction.)

there's a great article on loudcloud's site about employee retention. it looks like that url won't be permanent, so here's the same thing as posted to the fork list. i wonder how much loudcloud itself lives up to this ideal.

verisign buys tuvalu's .tv for $45 million (cash). .tv paid $50 million to tuvalu to license the domain (although that deal was spread over 10 years, so they haven't paid it all out yet). i wonder if this means idealab! is cashing out some of its companies.

the big thing, aside from the money, that keeps me from getting a mac (like the cool new imac) is a remembrance of how mouse-bound the macintosh interface was. (and i assume that os x hasn't changed that dramatically.)

(i'll admit to being an atypical computer user, though. i spend 99% of my time using mozilla, mutt, tin, and a terminal window with bash and vim.)

much ado is made about voice recognition being the next big thing that will impact user interfaces, but i really can't imagine that it will ever make a big dent on the personal computer (outside of being used for dictation). what i think would be huge is eye-tracking. imagine being able to look at a link (with some subtle visual feedback that lets you know where the computer thinks you are looking), and just hit a key on the keyboard to follow it.

doing some more cleaning up, i've catalogued all the windows/dos cd-rom games i own. if you want any, make me an offer. i will throw almost all of these out next time i move. (the ones i imagine i'll keep are the first two x-com games, relentless, and the lucasarts non-star-wars games.)

in any case, they're now all boxed up and i'm once again left with a giant cd rack with nothing on it. that's up for grabs, too. i've got a couple of smaller plastic ones and a small wooden one i could also do without.

dave thomas, founder of wendy's, passed away. that's too bad. he was almost certainly one of the good guys.

besides being quite beautiful, the lighthouse at cape hattaras underwent a modern engineering miracle in 1999 when it was moved about 3,000 feet from where it was originally constructed in 1870. it lost out to a depiction of the wright brothers' first flight as north carolina's entry in the 50 state quarters program.

some big-shot hollywood types are apparently raking in fees for doing dvd commentaries, which could mean less of them. that would be a huge shame. next to the video and audio quality and the prevalence of widescreen, commentaries are the best thing about movies on dvd. (but really, i could live without most of the other extras. cast and crew bios? whatever. and most of the making-of documentaries i've seen have been deathly dull. i guess deleted scenes can be interesting, but often they were deleted for good reason.)

“do not attach yourself to any particular creed exclusively, so that you may disbelieve all the rest; otherwise you will lose much good, nay, you will fail to recognize the real truth of the matter. god, the omnipresent and omnipotent, is not limited by any one creed, for, he says, "wheresoever ye turn, there is the face of al-lah" (koran 2:109). everyone praises what he believes; his god is his own creature, and in praising it he praises himself. consequently he blames the beliefs of others, which he would not do if he were just, but his dislike is based on ignorance.”
— muid ad-din ibn al-arabi (1165-1240)

rohit khare writes about the visible history of lax on the fork mailing list. airports can be interesting places, particularly the older ones and the more out-of-the-way ones.