blast from the past – fellini outtakes videos

Rob from 29 Live has been posting videos from the show and I came across these from the Fellini Outtakes when we played on the show in 1998 (geez was that 10 years ago?). It’s kind of embarrassing to look at myself now, and I honestly had totally forgotten these songs. It is cool to see Ray again though. The band was me on bass, Eveline Mueller-Graf on drums, David Fullweiler on guitar and Luray Hodder singing.

More Seattle restaurants should have dress codes

I have often complained about how I have dressed up for an expensive meal and been disappointed to be seated next to someone in casual or extremely casual attire. How that takes away from the experience. It could be my age (I’m much more sensitive to it now than I was when I was younger) or it could be my mid-westerness conflicting with the devil-may-care attitude of the west coast. Maybe I feel this way because I work in an industry where casual dress is the norm and so wearing a tie feels special to me.

You want a good meal to be an experience. Restaurants work hard to create an appropriate ambiance. Allowing diners to diminish that can pollute the memory of a special evening. I started thinking about this again when I read Adam Roberts’ Anti Dress-Code Manifesto and the response by Frank Bruni in the New York Times. You can tell that I found myself much more in line with Frank Bruni rather than Adam Roberts.

I’m not suggesting that all nice restaurants have dress codes, but there are several which are trying to provide a special atmosphere where I think it would be appropriate. Maybe we would choose one restaurant over another for a special occasion because we’d know that if we wanted to dress up, we wouldn’t feel out of place.

the bio

I’m really bad at writing my bio. This doesn’t come up often enough that I have a canned text, but it does come up more often these days. I tend to write my biography to suit the occasion, but I was checking out my friend Kevin’s website and I really liked what he did with his bio.

It’s a bit tough, I’m too mid-western to want to toot my own horn, but too much of an ego-maniac to not think that people don’t care.

I thought that this site had some good suggestions. I’d like more if anyone has them.

found a weird OS X 10.5.3 bug

sometimes when my MBP turns off the monitor for power save, when it re-activates, the screen is black. I get the password dialog, but then the screen is black. If I hit the power button, I get the dialog for sleep/restart/cancel, but if cancel, the screen is black. Weirdest of all, if I hit fn-F8 I get the display of all my spaces, but when I choose one, the screen is black. This is obviously a software thing, something is drawing that black box, but if I do the force quit, I quit the active app and not the screen power saver. Each time this happens, I have to power-cycle the machine. Really annoying.

What do 90,000 Microsoft Employees do all day?

I saw this article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer about how Microsoft added another 11,200 employees this year and I was a bit dumbfounded. What are all those people doing? How could Microsoft expect to maintain quality hiring standards continuing to grow at that rate? Why on earth would someone want to join a company that was so large that you were guaranteed that your best hope would be to rise to middle-management. Companies with 90,000 employees don’t attract aggressive and creative folk who want to make a difference. They attract people who want a steady paycheck and job security, the risk-adverse. The risk-adverse don’t make good products, or push boundaries. They follow trends, they don’t create them (at least not on company time).

on a side note:

That article lead me to MSFTextrememakeover which had this awesome mega-post about everything that is wrong with Microsoft since 2000. Unfortunately, it was the last post

So it’s time for me to listen to the fat lady who has been singing for years now, and finally pull the plug. I can’t keep waiting another 11 years for MSFT’s leadership to deliver the returns that say AAPL’s have in just the past 12 months, despite struggling (and that’s on top of 2000+% this decade). I’m also increasingly concerned that under this leadership team the long-term flatline will eventually be resolved to the downside versus the up, with all the implications for additional shareholder value destruction that implies.

I’ll miss the insights from you MSFTem!

Boulangerie Nantaise

I’ve had their pastries several times over the years. They are decent. Not worth going out of your way for, but perfectly reasonable if you are peckish as you pass by. Today, I was there near lunch time, so I decided to try one of their sandwiches. Big mistake. I got two thin slices of ham and some old chese along with a single slice of lettuce and little bits of leftover tomatoes. The crust of the bread was so tough that eating it made my jaw sore. The primary taste of the sandwich was the bread and the cornichones which was the only thing they weren’t stingy with. For $7. Next time, I’ll walk the three blocks to Macrina instead of wasting my money there.

Boulangerie Nantaise on Urbanspoon

Bush administration gives carte blanche to destroying 10% of arctic polar bear population

Companies get OK to annoy polar bears (AP)
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2004477335_appolarbearsoil.html

Less than a month after declaring polar bears a threatened species because of global warming, the Bush administration is giving oil companies permission to annoy and potentially harm them in the pursuit of oil and natural gas.

The Fish and Wildlife Service issued regulations this week providing legal protection to seven oil companies planning to search for oil and gas in the Chukchi Sea off the northwestern coast of Alaska if “small numbers” of polar bears or Pacific walruses are incidentally harmed by their activities over the next five years.

Environmentalists said the new regulations give oil companies a blank check to harass the polar bear.

About 2,000 of the 25,000 polar bears in the Arctic live in and around the Chukchi Sea, where the government in February auctioned off oil leases to ConocoPhillips Co., Shell Oil Co. and five other companies for $2.6 billion. Over objections from environmentalists and members of Congress, the sale occurred before the bear was classified as threatened in May.

Polar bears are naturally curious creatures and sensitive to changes in their environment. Vibrations, noises, unusual scents and the presence of industrial equipment can disrupt their quest for prey and their efforts to raise their young in snow dens.

This is ridiculous, I can’t believe the gall. In the closing days of a hated administration, rather than try to reclaim some goodwill, they get progressively more evil. I guess they hoped that no one would notice.

Frank Rich hits it on the head

Wow, this op-ed from Frank Rich really summed up this point in the race for me and crystallized some vague thoughts around the race. Definitely worth a read

Op-Ed Columnist – Frank Rich – One Historic Night, Two Americas – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com

WHEN Barack Obama achieved his historic victory on Tuesday night, the battle was joined between two Americas. Not John Edwards’s two Americas, divided between rich and poor. Not the Americas split by race, gender, party or ideology. What looms instead is an epic showdown between two wildly different visions of the country, from the ground up.