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NBC stop lying to me

Dear NBC,

I just watched the final on the CBC, don’t show me video of the team getting off the bus and say that they just arrived and competition should get started in about an hour.

Morons.

Yer pal,

Kevin

[update 11:21PM PST]
NBC is now claiming to be broadcasting something “live” that the New York Times has already reported the outcome of and the CBC actually did broadcast live a few hours ago. I can understand tape delay for the west coast, but three hours ago was prime time on the west coast. You could have shown it then. And don’t freaking call it live when it isn’t.

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Bob Costas interviews President Bush (updated)

A sports journalist asks all the hard questions, leaving a smirking Bush probably wondering what he got himself into. I love it! He sits down thinking he’s going to talk about basketball or some bs like that and Bob Costas gets into Darfur and the Russia/Georgia situation and GWB looks like an idiot yet again! Can we maybe move the change of administrations to November 5th to get this idiot out of power?

[Update 8/11/08 2:12pm]
Youtube removed the original video embedded here, but Huffpost has the video also. See comments below for a link to the transcript.

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Another iPhone App that I don’t feel like writing…

I’m pretty sure that this app exists for other smart phones and I know that a similar thing exists for normal PCs.

An App that scans the barcode using the built-in camera and then allows you to look it up on your choice of site: froogle, Amazon, whatever… To see if you want to buy it on-line instead.

I’d write this one myself, but it isn’t anything I’d be that jazzed about writing and supporting for a long time… It should be something that Amazon would jump right on if they weren’t worried about getting sued…

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freebie iPhone app idea for the real estate websites

yes, this one is for you redfin, windermere, et al. Normally, I’d sit on idea like this, but lets be real. I’m not going to write this one. So, as a customer, I’m asking you guys to do it for me.

I want an iPhone app version of your websites.

Obvious:

  • Get me details on the houses presented for the iPhone screen size
  • Show me houses for sale near my current location

Less Obvious

  • Let me pick a bunch of houses to view on the website: give me a tour, in-order, with turn-by-turn directions
  • Show me how far and the way to get to the nearest: school, park, etc.

Go for it, I’ll use it, and if you want to toss me a commission or make me VP of product development, I’m cool with that.

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Go big or go multiple?

Everyone on my team is pushing to get 30″ screens are part of their equipment upgrades. I can certainly understand this. We all get top of the line machines automatically and so what is the cool expensive thing to get your employer to buy you? 30 inches of 30-bit color of course! Now having screen real estate is critical for developers, I can totally dig that. I was just reading Ryan Block’s blog post, 30-inches: too much screen?, and I realized that I actually prefer my dual 19-inchers over a larger screen. While having that break in the middle is a distraction for some, for me it is a boon. Having visual studio stretching over my entire visual field is just going to cause eye and neck strain. With two monitors, I choose my organization so I can focus on one at a time, but have the other handy for reference. When I’m debugging, I have the app on one monitor and Visual Studio on the other. When I’m developing, I’ll have Visual Studio on one monitor and Firefox or Acrobat on the other with documentation. When I’m not coding, I have Outlook on one monitor and Firefox on the other. For me, I’m never really focused on a single application, I always have a primary and secondary application and so dual-monitors works for me.

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where does StumbleAudio get their music from?

I saw a post today on TechCrunch about StumbleAudio, a Pandora-like service for finding music. I gave it a try, I entered “Godspeed You Black Emperor” into the search field. The first track it decided to play was “Uniform Random Variables” from the Intonarumori “Material” album. MY ALBUM. This was especially funny because my major complaint with the TechCrunch article was the assertion that Pandora tended to play music that you already knew and StumbleAudio did not. Not only did I know the first song, I WROTE IT.

While I like that SumbleAudio is recommending my music, I’m a bit concerned. You see, I didn’t license it to StumbleAudio. As far as I can tell, neither did CDBaby (my digital distributor). So where are they getting their music from? In their “AboutUs” they claim to pay the artists whose music is played. If they aren’t pulling tracks from other services and they aren’t pulling them from CDBaby, that isn’t going to be true in my case.

Interestingly enough, if I put “Intonarumori” into their search box, I get no matches found.

Also, interesting is that their is very little info on their site and their WHOIS is private, so no way to contact them.

We’ll see what develops with this company, but they better get way more transparent very fast…

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No IPhone For You!

noiphoneforyou.jpg

Guess I’m not strolling into a store tomorrow to pick one up after skipping standing in the hot sun for three days.

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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.

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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.