A young French man (why young, just a guess actually) called Kevin Amoros, seems to have met the love of his life in an airport. The problem is that he didn’t get her number or her name for that matter, but love “gives you wings” as they say in French. So he placed an advert through Google, hoping that someone could help him find her, or that the love of his life would read the Google ad! Read Oilman’s account of the event !
Monthly Archive for April, 2006
Page 2 of 4
If you enjoyed listening to the Pink Martini album below, Hang On Little Tomato, you may well find these links very interesting. Two recordings of Pink Martini in the KCRW studios, taken from the Hang on little tomato album :
There is also an interesting interview with Pink Martini. It’s nice to be able to put a face, or in this case faces to such a fantastic group and they all seem so enthusiastic about their music and the whole creation process, really a great interview here : KCRW Pink Martini interview.
I really enjoyed watching these, I hope you do to !
Bush explains he listens to the Beatles on his iPod. Now this most probably doesn’t sound much of a sensational piece of information does it ? The problem is that the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) professes that transferring a song from a CD to MP3 file ; ripping a song from a CD as they say, is illegal. The Beatles songs are only legally available in CD format and are not available anywhere on the Internet in digital file format like MP3 yet. So Will the RIAA take Bush to court ??
An alarm system is extra insurance from my perspective that gives you piece of mind since there is little I can do about the global picture that leads to burglaries.
Spiegel’s interview with Kenneth Rogoff from Harvard can probably be considered similar to an alarm. In effect Rogoff discusses the alarming effect that ‘unbridled capitalism’ is having in the world. For right wing US politicians that marvel at the UK as an example of the success of capitalism this may be an interesting read. Although Rogoff seems to finish the interview off as if he was the newly appointed coach for the German Olympic team, a kind of pep talk style finish !
I have always been astonished that right wing politicians, whether they are in Europe or America, don’t try harder to imitate Tony Blair. I mean when you are so far right of the left wing in any country you might as well just call yourself right wing ! But I think Tony has been waiting for the right moment, for his political ‘coming out’ or should I say ‘way out’. Previous European politicians like Mitterrand gave Blair the example. Blair has just taken it to the next level, to the extent that the English right wing just no longer seems to be an alternative. Between Thatcher and Blair which one do you think has enabled the rich in England to get richer while the rest of the country has stagnated comparatively? Whoever invited the Blair wolf in amongst the labour lambs will probably get a medal from English aristocracy and ‘fat cats’ ! I mean when you’ve got Blair in power who cares about the conservatives !
So why should Blair be a role model for the right wing ? Pretty simple really, you give the impression you are not a pure capitalist and that you do care about people, including those that aren’t rich, while slowly dismantling the institutions that help the people that aren’t rich and creating tax rebates and rules that are advantageous to the rich. Now why didn’t the conservatives think about doing that ? Err, they did she was called Thatcher ! The difference, she was honest about it !
But seriously, am I the only one that feels that the rich seem to get carried away with the whole ‘I want to be rich’ thing. It’s as if they need someone to tell them “Oh by the way, old chap, you are now officially rich”, “Hey, you’ve won the game, you can stop now !”. But no, it’s seems that they get addicted, the poor things. I suppose they may feel the need to say, “You don’t know how lucky you are, not being rich!” just so we feel better…
A quote from the Rogoff interview :
I tell my children that a man like Bill Gates has a personal fortune of $100 billion. They can’t even comprehend that. Then I explain that he has more money than some countries.
So far though, the common belief has been, well, what can we do, life is life etc. Then according to some journalists, along came the French, oooh yes, they’re wicked they are, I’ve heard about them in some history book. Wasn’t it Bryan Adams that sang about them as well ‘In the summer of ’89′ ? They all took to the streets because the powers that be and the upper class in general were driving them mad, and it also it was summer so it must have been pretty hot…
So anyway, several years later the French are doing it again. It’s weird though after chopping off those heads in the summer of ’89 you would have thought they’d be happy by now.
There are journalists who actually seem to have understood what is going on in France like Christopher Dickey, where the name of the game isn’t just about sensationalism. The article recounts the recent demonstrations further discussing some of the underlying issues that France is faced with.
French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin had gambled that he could win this showdown. It would be a Margaret Thatcher moment, a Ronald Reagan moment, reminiscent of the way the Iron Lady defeated Britain’s unions or the avuncular American president faced down the air-traffic controllers in the 1980s.
As this journalist from the New York Times writes, the French are like the Italians, they have this weird aim in life, to have a stable job. He seems to be saying, in the US, that people like taking risks so much that stable jobs, well, they’re just not interesting enough. What’s funny, is when the guy takes the example of tennis, in Italy they complain about not being able to play tennis until the afternoon !!? Well it’s not that funny because it’s most probably as representative of Italy as talking about country clubs in the US, where the rich CEOs complain about being late for the tennis match due to the time it took to fire a few hundred people that morning!
But this journalist is a professional of course, he quotes renowned economists in explaining that France and Italy are living above their means, unlike the US. No I’m only joking, he doesn’t quote anybody, he most probably wrote the article after being ditched by his ex Italian girlfriend and decided to take it out on the entire nation ! Why take it out on the French ? Well he remembered that entrepreneur is a French word and since jabbing the French is an American pastime at the moment… And to mirror some of the simplistic remarks I have seen recently about the French. Maybe the US is annoyed at the fact that France may have a woman as a president before the US ?
So if you want a laugh, read the New York Times and if you’re more into serious articles go the Spiegel interview. Well Rogoff does try to be funny :
The New Orleans disaster made it painfully clear what happens to people in deep poverty: they don’t even have a boat.
Err, what, so deep poverty is you don’t even have a boat and normal poverty is what, having an inflatable boat ? I’m not that familiar with New Orleans but isn’t a boat a bit of a luxury there for the majority, let alone the poor !?
To simply read an interesting article take a look at Dickey’s article…
Note : (free) registration required for the New York Times article. Both Dickey and Rogoff use the term ‘unbridled capitalism’ in their article/interview.
While I was in Paris I came across so many women of my age and slightly older that were, to put it mildly getting uptight about having babies. I recently had a girlfriend after two weeks asking me if I had thought about kids ! OK, we had been out before, but, wow, two weeks. Suffice to say the whole “I think there should be love before talking about babies” didn’t go down to well as a response because as close friends pointed out that kinda meant love wasn’t there. Well I must say I’d prefer a situation where love takes the time it takes to sprout but that the “Oh darling I’m pregnant” comes after…
I came across a very interesting web site yesterday called “Dr Diana” a feminist blogger. Val (I call my parents by their first name) is such a feminist, that I now warn my friends in advance just in case. But hey, I can talk about it, so I haven’t been that traumatised by the whole thing.
Anyway, Dr Diana answers the biological clock question:
The answer is short and interesting; obviously Dr Diana is clued in with the attention deficit prone society that surrounds her 
Take a look at her answer rather than me trying to paraphrase and do a far worse job than her (trust me it would be so easy)…
On the feminist front I’m pretty sure that the Dr Diana has used a pretty macho icon from our recent past, known as Indiana Jones, in her site’s logo and I thought that was “forbidden” for feminists.
Each time I hear the word forbidden at the moment I remember the Harold Pinter play Lee (my dad) recently produced were the officer shouts “Language is forbidden”. Not that using an ‘Indiana Jones’ type typography in a logo is forbidden…
So anyway do take a look at Dr Diana’s site you’ll like it, unless you are not really as open minded as you try to kid yourself into thinking you are ! Yes she uses words like boobs and talks about strip clubs, ooooh, yes naughty things and all…
A short video parody of what Microsoft would probably have done, had they been in charge of advertising for Apple’s iPod product :
Ooooh it is soooo bad making fun of Microsoft
I have only started blogging recently, even though I have been building web sites for nearly twelve years.
What I find interesting about blogs is how people define them.
I have tried to define blogs in two distinctive ways :
A (1 to 13) : from a functional and technical perspective
B (1 to 7) : from a conceptual and more emotional perspective
Main characteristics :
A1 Title, each article/post/note has a title
A2 Date (optionally time), each article/post/note has an indication of when it was created.
A3 Content/Body, each article/post/note has content that is the main body, however it is possible that title and content be the same length in certain cases.
A4 Comments, each article/post/note allows users to post comments. Some systems have central user authentication systems that will recognize users and authenticate them so they can post as a recognized user.
A5 Permalink, each article/post/note has a specific URL/address that will display the article/post/note in full and generally followed by the comments
Common Options :
A5 Author, articles/posts/notes will have an indication of the name of the author or a nickname/handle of the author
A7 Categories/Tags, when each article/post/note is created, the creator usually can indicate which categories/tags it is associated with.
A8 Trackback, blogs are precursors in this area, the trackback is basically an automated communication system that will inform another blog/system that a message has been posted about an article/post/note. When an article/post/note is written on blog A about something on blog B, blog A automatically pings blog B to inform it.
A9 Archives, blogs usually have links to archives and or previous articles/posts/notes sorted by months
A10 Order, blog comments are usually displayed after the article/post/note, in reverse chronological order (the most recent is displayed first)
Back-end Functions :
A11 Users or groups of users will be authenticated and thus gain access to a type of dashboard that will allow them to create and often preview before publishing the article/post/note.
A12 Categories/Tags and Pages and of course the articles/posts/notes can be managed using a WYSIWIG or form based system like the articles/posts/notes
A13 Themes and Plugins, Blog systems allow bloggers to heavily customize/personalize the look and feel of their blogs as well as adding specific functions like contact pages, photo galleries etc.
Conceptual and Emotional Perspectives :
B1 Opinions, blogs are often defined as being personal accounts/diaries/journals
B2 Theme, blogs and the content often have a central underlying theme
B3 Types, blogs are often professional or personal and sometimes group based
B4 Discussion, blogging is closely associated with the idea of discussion via the concept of posting comments about the article/post/note
B5 Personal, blogs often present themselves as the work of a person or a group of people and do so with an about page and more often than not with a photo. This instantly gives personality and creates a link/bond with the writer that is often lacking in many online newspapers/magazines.
B6 Free, on a par with the founding spirit of the Internet, blogs are so far, in the vast majority, free to create and use. This is one of the nice sides of blogging in that it resembles a large freedom of speech movement. Specific and extra user needs like having your own domain name are obviously available at a price…
B7 Easy to use, blogs do not really require knowledge of any programming language and each new version of the most well known systems makes things easier and bring new interesting functions to the blogging world. A lot of networking functions like trackback to inform others of what you have posted are automatically handled without any user intervention required.
What Blogs are not :
Forums are not usually like blogs. In a forum multiple users can post articles/content and multiple users can post comments. When following a thread of posts in a forum it is often difficult to differentiate between the first post and the following posts. It would be possible to set-up a forum whereby the initial message in a thread could only be posted by a specific user or group of users and only then could others respond, however this is not how forums are traditionally set-up. Unlike blogs where discussions evolve from one point, forums allow multiple starting points for discussion. Blogs also seem to link more between each other and between posts/notes than forums do.
Newsgroups are pretty different to blogs. Newsgroups are not only different in form but also technically in the way they work. Groups on newsgroups are replicated over multiple servers all over the world which rarely happens with blogs in fact I don’t know of an example. Newsgroups are just messages posted to a specific group and depending on the software used to read the messages links and/or associations between messages can be hard to figure out unlike in forums. There is no real structure in commenting on an initial post in newsgroups since links between posts are not that easy to establish. Newsgroups are also well known for multi-part binary posts of images, video and all sorts of other file formats on top of text messages.
CMS, I’ve worked on creating web sites using Content Management Systems (CMS) like Vignette StoryServer and recently Gossamer Threads Links (can be considered a CMS). With this experience in mind I tend to disagree with most blog fanatics in their will to differentiate themselves with CMS systems. There is no real need to debate here, professional CMS software is capable, when properly configured, to provide everything blogs provide, and more (hence the extra cost involved).
Most CMS can be set-up to look and work exactly like blogs. From this point onwards blog fanatics tend to turn to the quoted conceptual and more emotional definition of a blog to argue differences between a CMS and blogs which can obviously also be replicated…
Blog Trivia :
One of the first bloggers Justin Hall started with a site called links.net
Web log was first used in 1997 by Jorn Barger and was first shortened to blog in 1999 by Peter Merholz
Open Diary first started the article with comments system in 1998
I must say before you view it :
a) There are no nude images or indecent images
b) There is some language that will be considered by some as indecent but the language is not really vulgar
c) It may be recommended to not listen to it out loud at work
d) If you are a puritan, then don’t watch and then you won’t need to complain…
Well if Mastercard did actually go for a commercial like this in the US you’d understand why it would get banned !?
What is funny though is when you try describing it, and trying not to giving away the story, people get really curious !
Needless to say comments that give away the story will not be published
In an article on the New York Times (free registration required) it seems journalists are having to take Google into account on top of the readers and the editors in order to attract Google !
The titles targeting Google are considered to be boring by journalists more often than not.
Part of the craft of journalism for more than a century has been to think up clever titles and headlines, and Google comes along and says, ‘The heck with that,’ observed Ed Canale, vice president for strategy and new media at The Sacramento Bee.
The art of getting high results in search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo is known as Search Engine Optimization or SEO. There are often two schools in the SEO world. On the one hand an ethical and “above board” practice of rules and techniques that could be considered a sub section of online marketing. On the other hand a more devious and guerrilla type marketing that aims at exploiting any loopholes and bugs in search engines that will give them a high position in the results.
Google has a system called page ranking that calculates a mark, out of ten, that corresponds to a site’s importance (from Google’s point of view). One of the main criteria is the amount of sites that link to a page on your site. The more links that point to your site the higher your page rank. Having a high page rank is interesting in the case of Google since Google uses the page rank to decide which pages are displayed first in Googles’ results.
Simply put in the case of ten sites with pages that have the words “chocolate chip cookie” will be displayed from 1 to 10 depending on Googles’ calculations of the importance of each page. The page rank and calculations are far more complicated than just how many links point to the site but this factor is pretty important.
Google has recently started rolling out a new system (code named Big Daddy) that has tried to correct some of the loopholes that were enabling some sites take advantage of ‘cheating their way up the ladder’.
One factor that has actually been called the ‘Sandbox effect’ is what you could define as a rule in page ranking that is supposed to not include new web sites immediately. Web sites sit in a kind of waiting list for something like six months before being included in any Google results…
This very interesting article at Level Ten’s blog discusses the sandbox effect and how so far little backing to ways around this have surfaced. Level Ten’s article also refers to another article at socengine.com that provides an interesting read on key factors to consider.
To read some more about SEO in an extremely complete article I recommend you take a look at this article over at Kevin O’Keefe’s blog…
Dr. Hallowell was the first to name Attention Deficit Disorder in 1995. He is convinced that without a name certain of society’s present issues are neither fully understood nor dealt with. An example of a neology set to conquer a new insidious ailment many of us are faced with:
Screensucking, which he defines as “wasting time engaging with any screen, for instance, computer, video game, television, BlackBerry.” He goes on to use his new word in a sentence: “I was supposed to write that article, but instead I spent the whole afternoon screensucking.”
Read the article (NY Times : requires free registration) and see some other suggestions for modern issues we all have to deal with…
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