Sight: 08/01/2001 - 09/01/2001

News of note

Fry's might buy Outpost.com - on the news that Fry's might buy Outpost.com, the Web site with the COOL ticker symbol went up 55% according to yahoo finance.
Cancelled Comic Cavalcade - Photocopies of the Cancelled Comic Cavalcade, a two-shot comic DC issued comprised of 18 comics cancelled in 1978. These comics never saw print except in the 35 issues of this Cavalcade, 34 of which were sent to the contributors, and the 35th sent to Bob Overstreet, "to show the world it actually happened." (At least, that's what the first issue intro says)...
- From Memepool.com

Apparently Compaq's already got what I want

That's right! Compaq's iPAQ BlackBerry H1100, available now for only $750(?!?) at CDW looks very similar to Handspring's forthcoming Treo k180 (dubbed “The Manhattan”).

Forrester Research - Another research/consulting company to add to my list.

Wow. From the guy who invented Mathematica-- a new science of modeling the world using simple computer programs to create complex patterns. Might be useful in modeling nature and boosting the upcoming VR revolution. (found this link after searching for pages that link to google on blogdex using blogdexter's who's linked to me tool.)

Here's his book, A New Kind of Science, out in October.
His company, Wolfram Research, distributers of Mathematica.
Mathematica store

Even stars are getting in on the Weblog craze. Check out the official Wil Wheaton IMDB blog (remember, Wesley Crusher from STTNG and Gordie from Stand By Me?). Funny site, too.

More blogger links:

USA today article - on blogs. Gripes: Why do online articles these days have so few links? Anytime a company is mentioned it should have a link associated to it... makes it easier to review the references online. Also-- you should be able to set the default for links when you click them. I always open new windows, and it's getting time consuming to right-click and choose "Open In New Window" everytime.
- Metafilter.com - Web discussions about the Web.
- Blogdex - MIT Media Lab's amalgumation of newsblogs.
- LiveJournal - Blogger competitor.

Having used this since October and still not listed in the directory, I should probably give a shout out to other bloggers in the hopes that somehow I'll get noticed. By the way, if you do read this, send me an e-mail. Otherwise I feel like I'm yelling in the ocean.
Blogs recently visited:

College needs:
I went to school in the wrong era.

Oregon Scientific Alarm Clock (also listed on weathertools.com | picture) - Clock that synchs with US Atomic clock via radio waves, displays weather and can project the time on the wall or ceiling... only one hundred bucks.
George Foreman's Grille - George Foreman's site lists some of his grille in his gift shop, but but the links point to salton-maxim, which I assume is the company that really owns the product. Foreman's gift shop is "currently under development". This is the one page which should be functional above all others... you would think.
- I looked up Salton, Inc. on Yahoo Finance. Apparently they are the ones behind the Foreman Grills, the Juiceman, Breadman, Maxim, Timex and a host of other products. This must be the company running all those informercials.
Computerless e-mail - if it did IM it might be worth something...
AT&T's Voice over IP phone

Aging Gen-Xer Doesn't Find Bad Movies Funny Anymore - funny end of irony story from the onion... when parody comes too close to reality...

There's not much news about it (a search on Google for "treo k180" turned up nothing), but Handspring's new wireless devices look pretty cool. This article says they'll be out on shelves by Christmas.

Looks like Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back got panned.
Some review quotes I liked:
"...disposable..." -Chicago Tribune
"...even the funniest of [the] brainily ludicrous jokes sputter halfheartedly." -Salon.com
"...shows virtually no sign of being made for an audience." -Village Voice

Two observations:

Contrary to what this man says, Apple stock will rise again. Demand will pick up when Apple's 25 new stores open in the US by the end of the year. People will buy what they see -- if it is demoed in front of them they are more likely to buy. There are still a lot of people who don't own computers, contrary to popular belief... and like televisions, soon people will own more than one.
Yesterday I would not know what he meant by "pikers", but I just happened to catch some of the movie Snatch last night, enough to know that pikers are gypsies.

Aaliyah, 8 Others Said Killed in Crash
Heard it on 97.7.
No News on Mtv or regular television, just AP and Reuters.
Its a sad day when young talent dies...

Ginger research:
Ginger... what happened?

Exodus board members exit; AOL ripple effects on Net and Meeker gets slammed by lawsuits, and a whole lot of gobbledygook at the end.

Brand this!

Phoenix Editorial - ads

Wow. I have a strange craving for olives.
Other Matt Silverman effects.

Microsoft may control the net with its .Net strategy, at the heart of XP.

International Data Corporation - consulting company based in Framingham.

FactSet Research Solutions - tech/finance research/consulting company.

The US Stockmarket switch from fractions to decimals gives an edge to market specialists competing with institutional investors. If an institutional investor bids $50 for 100,000 shares of a company, a specialist can up the bid by a penny, prompting the large investor to move up a couple more cents. The specialist walks away with a profit from the spread. How will this affect the market? We will probably see a continuation of large jumps in stock prices, typical of our age. But is this good or bad?

Reference: Penny shake-up for US markets (BBC)

I don't think I've ever seen the Milky Way.

Listening to the BBC this morning, I heard about a discovery that the fine structure constant, one of the universal constants involved in how subatomic particles interacted in the distant past, may have increased over the course of time.

According to the report, this could open the door to new discoveries about different dimensions.

References:

A Constant that Isn't Constant from Physical Review Focus
BBC radio report which I can't find on their website

Doing some nutritional research:

Protein in diet (WebMD/adam.com)
USDA Food Guide Pyramid (WebMD/adam.com)
Getting Nutrition Guidance (WebMD)
Ethnic/Cultural and Special Audience Food Guide Pyramids

Three Men in a Boat : To Say Nothing of the Dog! - Looks like a funny book - I was searching the Hugo awards page when I came across Connie Willis' To Say Nothing of the Dog, a sci-fi book which won the award in 1999, and got its name from the subtitle for this book.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Won the Pulitzer Prize for 2001. A book about comics, the war, and escapism. Sounds good.

Books on the failure of LTCM:

When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management (Adobe Acrobat Reader Version) - An amazon reviewer recommends the second book on this list as being a better history on the subject.
Inventing Money

Global Business Network - research/consulting company modeling future business strategies through scenario planning (essentially creating stories of future outcome and playing out decisions in preparation for actual future events).

NPD INTELECT - research/consulting company for the Retail industry.

Giga Information Group - research and consulting for the IT industry.

Stephen Hawking

Joe Frank Program Details
Joe Frank is a radio artist I was first exposed to in Los Angeles. While flipping radio stations I came across his show on KCRW. His combination of musical riffs, phone conversations, buddhist teachings, and spoken word monologues hooked me from the start and continues to intrigue me. I saw his show at UCLA in '98, which was a retelling of some of his old material.

The University of Iowa Writers Workshop

Privacy tips from CNet to check out:

More books:

Hooking Up - Tom Wolfe
Screwjack and Other Stories - Hunter S. Thompson

Media Metrix - consulting company with Internet industry metrics.

Nielsen//NetRatings

Now if these guys MADE their own videos to sell, that would be cool...

Stumbled upon this screenwriter's resource while looking up reviews for Big Trouble, which looks like a forgetable film.

Went to Feedmag.com, clicked on Icebox, read about how they ran out of funding, clicked on Loop at the end of the article, clicked on layoff message, clicked on news about Gore.

Day by day, the web reveals itself to me as that bottomless pit they're going to throw the beast in when Revelation finally comes true... I spent 3 hours in Wordsworth in Harvard Square, as I arrived for what I thought would be a 10am show of Buckaroo Banzai IMDB at the Brattle, only to find out when I arrived that the show's at 10pm. It's annoying when they don't differentiate morning times from night times like that. Like I should have known...

So I browsed through the stacks for three hours, picking up various books, starting with F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Love of The Last Tycoon, his final, and unfinished novel about a movie mogul, based on Irving Thalberg. I got distracted tracking down books by Dover Publications, which has a whole line of cheap classics ("thrift" editions). I went through the entire fiction lineup looking for these books, which range in price from 90 cents to $1.80, including works like Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground, Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, Herman Hesse's Siddhartha, and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. About halfway through my search, I see that the store has collected the Dover paperbacks in a rotating display that I didn't notice until I just about bumped into it. I tried to convince myself that it was worth the trouble browsing the stacks, but I still have my doubts.

I was prepared to buy the Dover books, a collection of Hemingway's short stories, F. Scott's This Side of Paradise (Dover Thrift Edition), and Zadie Smith's White Teeth, of which I've heard so much about. But since I couldn't justify a $40 impulse buy, I dropped the Dover's except for F. Scott's, and bought the rest.

Spending three hours to browse the stacks was not a complete waste of time, as I had my Visor with me, on which I recorded a list of books I'd like to read. And the Last Tycoon's good. So far I've only read F. Scott's outline, and I'd like to learn more about Thalberg. He started running MGM at 25, and died at the age of 37.

Getting back to the bottomless pit of the Internet, curious about the fate of Scottie, the daughter of F. Scott and Zelda, I looked her up on the Internet, and the first link I find is for her gravestone. Her children are listed, so naturally, I search for them. This brings me to Princeton's memorial for Thomas Addison Lanahan (Timmy), who committed suicide in Hawaii on October 18, 1973. No mention is made of his famous grandparents. Next, I looked up Eleanor (Bobbie) Lanahan, the granddaughter of Zelda, who is now a writer, artist, and ardent promoter of her grandmother's work (incidentally, Bobbie was born in 1948, the same year her grandmother died). I didn't get a chance to find out about Samuel Jr. or Cecilia, Scottie's other children before I stumbled upon Jess Barron's Zelda page, which I instantly filed away as I checked out her root page, then followed links to her description of her meeting with Monica Lewinsky at the Lava Lounge in LA in 1999, pictures on her narcissism page, and numerous blog sites (f(r)iction, nostalgia for the present, and instant messages). Her multi-faceted page drew me in, causing me to abandon my prior search through F. Scott & Zelda's lineage. So I thought about blogging my train of thought, and wondered how long the links would stay current, which brings me to my next paragraph.

With the transient nature of the web, all these places I refer to can be gone tomorrow, or converted to pay sites, where you have to pay to view the content, or just as bad, register. Imagine if Amazon or IMDB did this -- you'd have to use your registered name before you could look anything up, thus invalidating all my links. Apple Computer has already done this with their knowledge base. A couple years ago, anyone could download software patches for their old emates, now you have to register and log on to do it. So my dilemna is, do I copy and host all web pages I refer to from now on? Or do I let this stand as a transient page, soon to be expired when all the links do? I'll leave the answer to when I have the time/motivation to do something about it. By the way, is anyone "backing up" the Internet? Wouldn't want to lose all of these beautiful connections.

Some final thoughts I couldn't include in the overlong blog above:

You can probably can get many of the texts in the Dover Thrift Edition paperbacks from Project Gutenberg.
Mary Shelley's middle name is Wollstonecraft.
Frances "Scottie" Fitzgerald Lanahan attended Vassar, as did Jess Barron.

Bountyquest - search for patents online - make sure your patented ideas are not stolen.

Cool site

Google's getting more sophisticated. They now have a page that lists their Special Search Features.

"New Ritalin formula to be sold next quarter!"

I caught this on the Business Wire. What will they think of next?!?!

Fluoride in the lunchbox

Don Cheadle, who seemed to pop out of nowhere, and is starring in Steven Soderburg's upcoming blockbuster Ocean's 11, was actually on Hill Street Blues way back in '87. This got me thinking about how many people who are still working were in that show, and also got me thinking about that other famous TV drama, St. Elsewhere. I'd like to see the shows that inspired LA Law, ER, and NYPD Blue...

Episode Guides

If I can't see them, at least I can read about them.

Every once in awhile I want to buy a book, I find that if I write it down, I tend to forget about it and the urge passes, so here goes:

I was reading the 14th edition of Economics by Paul A. Samuelson last night that I got from the library. Today I checked out Amazon and Copernic to see what the latest edition was. He's up to 17 now. I also found the 50th anniversary edition, and a critique about the author. The critique recommended reading Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman or Understanding the Difference Between Democrats and Republicans (A Republican Perspective) by Edward Baiamonte.

Book Crazy

I went book crazy on Amazon, searching for books by Derrida and came across a bunch of "...for beginner books" on Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Saussure (a linguist), Structuralism and Poststructuralism, and Postmodernism. Following someone's Post-Modernism 101 list which included Structuralism and Poststructuralism for Beginners as one of it's recommended titles, I found some more obscure philosophy which attempts to provide a model for our time, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Two other books in the same realm, written by the same authors or translator popped up in the "Customers who bought this book also bought" section:

One reviewer said the concepts are hard to follow, and not well explained.

Three titles had tables of contents I could peruse: Derrida for Beginners, Lacan for Beginners, and Postmodernism for Beginners

Jon Haddock's isometric screenshots - art created in the Sims style of computer gameplay, depicting tragic or controversial moments in history.

Reading this in the New York times led me to look up Michael Foucault's "What Is an Author?" essay on Google, which brought me to this link, which referred to Derrida, who I looked up on Google and found this bio.