New phone - and it works
If you think any of this gibberish looks interesting, you should poke around and subscribe to my RSS feed to keep up with new content.
After a week or so of wandering around with no service whatsoever, I finally decided to pop into a T-mobile store and see what the deal was.
It turns out they let you return any phone no questions asked as long as you do so within 30 days, so it made sense to pick up a new phone and see if it was the T-mobile signal or my phone itself that was having problems.
And since I was getting a new phone anyway, I decided to spend the extra $50 or so to go ahead and get the phone I’ve been drooling over for a while: the T-mbile SDA.
It’s pretty slick, pretty sexy, and most importantly it works. Hooray.
Net Neutrality
There was another artcile in the LA Times yesterday about how divisive the issue of net neutrality has been in the House.
Personally, I don’t get it. It’s a matter of regulation vs. non-regulation for big businesses. The only reason it shouldn’t be an issue at the moment is that there currently are no regulations and none of the net providers have been abusing that yet.
But since we live in a world where large companies do whatever they can to screw the consumer instead of simply making the best product or providing the best service (we have the slowest internet connections in the world). I guess this is because telecommunications and internet service providers aren’t really working in a competitive market.
Featured!
I don’t know why I’m proud of this, but a portion of one of my comments got bumped to the front page on Tom Evslin’s blog.
I’m not sure my gibberish really made enough sense to warrant it, but whenever I write a comment on someone else’s blog, I get really excited at the idea that I’m giving valuable feedback or, as they say, “contributing to the conversation.”
It’s fun to be noticed ;)
Filming…
I don’t have much time to write today, so enjoy the picture instead:
Reboot BBC
I wonder if the new site design has to actually work, or if I can simply construct a static but snazzy looking page that they can do the backend on.
On set
I’m spending basically all of today (and tomorrow as well) on set for my friend’s student film called The Last Spin. It’s an amazingly big production, with a budget that is probably around $6,000 and equipment that is very heavy (read=expensive).
Second Sun?
Apparently, there is evidence that our Sun (the star Sol) is part of a binary star system. That is to say that it’s supposedly possible that this Solar System has a companion star:
Cruttenden believes that Sedna’s unusual orbit is something indicative of the current solar system configuration, not merely a historical record. “It is hard to imagine that Sedna would retain its highly elliptical orbit pattern since the beginning of the solar system billions of years ago. Because eccentricity would likely fade with time, it is logical to assume Sedna is telling us something about current, albeit unexpected solar system forces, most probably a companion star”.
My question is: if there’s a second star affecting the orbit of planetoid bodies, how the hell can we have missed it? Seems like nearby stars would be kind of hard to miss. Next we’ll find out there’s two moons as well.
But maybe I’m missing something here.
Space ain’t what it used to be
According to the Big Bang theory, some day in ancient history, the entire universe simply exploded from one ridiculously subatomic particle (nevermind what was outside that particle at the time - we don’t know and we don’t want to know). As theories go, this one is fairly well supported and agreed upon by those who see meaning in astronomical numbers.
An article I grabbed from digg says that:
In 2003, researchers announced that, with WMAP [Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe] data, they were able to capture a snapshot of the primordial universe and ascertained its age to be approximately 13.7 billion years old.
When I read that, my first thought was “that’s it?” When you think about it, there’s a lot of stuff that has to happen between Big Bang and Today for me to be sitting here posting to my blog.
Of course, 13.7 billion is a fairly huge number of years. But I think the fact that there are 23 people in the world who have more dollars than there are years in the life of the universe is what’s throwing me off.
Happy Birthday
I’ve seen a lot of people give their blogs a little “happy birthday” love on the anniversary of their starting post. I think that’s usually just an excuse to have something to write about.
Today is my birthday, but I still feel like it’s just an excuse to post something. I’ll let you know if something interesting actually happens.
Economics vs. Human Rights
I’ve learned pretty much one thing from my three courses in economics and countless classes in world history, politics, and culture: economics trumps human rights.
I thought about this while I was listening to the music of Fela Kuti in my music of Africa and the Middle East class. Fela was essentially a revolutionary and a musician in Nigeria. I believe that in his lifetime he had about 6 million wives, promoted anarchy, and founded his own nation within Nigeria.
It goes without saying that the government hated him. The police abused him all his life. He was arrested numerous times. But he got away with a lot of things because he was famous.
He was famous for being a good musician. But someone had to record and distribute his music. My bet is that some of those same people who did the recording and the distributing had a lot of interest in the Nigerian government, or at least in maintaining the power structure that lets them be record executives.
But they recorded his music anyway. They made him famous and more powerful as a political figure. Why? Because they could make money. Thus, economics helps in the fight against human rights abuse. “They” (whoever they are) would rather make the money from his music than preserve their power structure.
Of course, this is a double-edged sword. The much more obvious and depressing examples are those of sweat-shops, wal-marts, and monopolies. All over the world, developing economies have the powers to crush the individual worker and their human rights.
Thing is I’m really an optomist at heart, and I think that if anything the developmental path of the US is proof enough that there’s an upward push when you mix two parts bald-faced capitalism with one part semi-corrupted democracy.
Go mixed drinks.
It happened
I was really curious how long the Google front page (be it standard or customized) would last without advertising on it. It’s such a tempting target!
Alas, today is that day. My guess is that we’ve said goodbye to ad-free Google homes:
Digital Dialogues
I just got back from one of the talks that make up the digital dialogues series of speakers at Occidental College.
Today’s was “The Art of Play: Player Centric Design and the Process of Innovation,” given by Tracy Fullerton.
It was a really interesting talk about the process of game design and how games themselves (from old games to video games) take part in our lives. Overall, it looked like USC has a really cool program (go figure) that’s an extremely perfect setup for anyone that wants to go into the games industry.
They have a “game design” sub-section of the cinema school that basically groups up cinema, computer science, and design students, and then encourages them to develop original games like That Cloud Game, which we saw demoed at the talk.
Very cool stuff.
Changing the press
I ran across a cool article about how the relationship between the White House and the press has changed dramatically in the last three years while McClellan has been the press secretary for the Bush Administration.
The article, well, articulates some of the ideas that I’ve felt like the administration has been choosing to pursue as a press strategy. It’s clearly written from a press perspective (and a fairly anti-Bush perspective) but the ideas are fun regardless of bias:
The era of news management lasted 40 years— from 1963, when the networks first began their 30-minute nightly broadcasts, to 2003, when McClellan, Bush, Cheney, and Rove proved there were other ways. Replace news management with press nullification. Drop the persuasion model, in favor of the politics of assent. Choose non-communication to demonstrate that you ought not to be questioned (it only helps our enemies.)
Ganked the link from Metafilter.
Live Drive
As part of Microsoft’s Windows Live push on the web, they’re apparently planning to offer a service called Live Drive that lets people store files on a virtual web drive for access on any device.
Now I don’t use a mac so I don’t really know, but isn’t that was .mac is? is .mac free or is that a type of subscription thing you need to have?
Life at Microsoft
Being from Seattle, I know and have known a lot of people who work for Microsoft. My dad worked for Microsoft. I’ve been to Microsoft campus several times, I’ve even played around with one of the early Vista betas.
So I’ve had a few opportunities to see what it’s like to work at Microsoft, and I have to say that this essay (February of 2005) by Michale Brundage seems to encapsulate most of the things I’ve heard and seen about the company.
There are a few points I think he nails pretty well:
Unreality: It’s hard for people who don’t work at Microsoft’s main campus to understand just how unreal the experience of working there can become. Some employees forget that most of the world doesn’t have broadband wireless networking, high-end consumer electronics, luxury vehicles, and enough money that they don’t need to live on a budget. Some employees spend so much time using Microsoft products, that they forget about the competition and/or lose touch with typical customers’ needs.
Microsoft is not evil: The reality is that Microsoft is made up of mostly honest, earnest, hardworking people. People with families. People with hardships. People with ordinary and extraordinary lives. People who make wise and foolish decisions. Some employees are bad apples, and some leaders make poor decisions (which their employees may or may not support). Both usually meet with failure. All the Microsoft employees I know are internally driven to “succeed,” where success sometimes means outselling the competition but always means doing your personal best and improving people’s lives with your work.
I found it a well written peice about how working at Microsoft apparently feels from the inside.
I also found an essay on his site called This is not a blog, where he describes at some length how transient and trivial blogging is. I was going to dedicate a separate post to knocking down his article point by point, but then I realized that (ironically, if you read it) it was written in 2004, and most of his points are either obviously wrong or irrelevant.
Ps. It’s 2:30am and I’m way too awake.
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