American Madness

	Image from Pirated Movie.

The Motion Picture Association of America hit a bit of a snag this week. In their continued efforts to attack movie piracy and cut down on P2P (That’s Person to Person) sharing on college networks they developed a “University Toolkit” asking universities and colleges around the country to download the software they were supplying to curtail the peer sharing of movies over networks.

What happened wa that back in October the MPAA sent a letter to 25 universities that have been “identified as top locations for downloading of pirated movies” and asked them to install the software. From there an internal report would be generated and sent to the Chief Information Officer at the university. (more…)

I’m a complete freak for organizational tools. I don’t subscribe to a particular system (such as Franklin Covey, which my friend Rick has mastered), but I do give a lot of thought to ease of use and effectiveness, especially as compared to slickness and coolness.

So I was a little too excited at running across D.I.Y. Templates, which features a directory of To Do List templates. They range from the quirky (the note card template seen here) to more complicated layouts that include daily or weekly timelines and checkboxes. There are forms for work stuff, finances, money, blah and even blahblahblahblah (spoken quickly).

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Do you ever find yourself with a bunch of time on your hands, wishing you had something to do or something good to read? Checking your email on a regular basis, hoping for a well scribed note that gives you joy to read? Well, now there is a solution to these problems, well sort of…

DailyLit is a website inspired by serialized novels, the aim is to give you the time to catch-up on some of the classics you may have missed or have been meaning to get around to. Offering over 400 titles that are in the public domain, DailyLit breaks each one down into sections readable in about 5 minutes of time. ce you set up your account you can choose how often you get installments and at what time. Find yourself with a few extra minutes on your hand? Well, you can request the next installment immediately.

Books are easy to sort through and arranged by title, by author and even by category. So, what are you waiting for? Now is your chance to read War and Peace, broken down into 675 easy to read emails.

I’m obsessive about making lists. That doesn’t mean I actually do the tasks on the list, but it’s nice to know I have written them down in 20 different places.

Lately, I’ve been using a task list widget on Google Homepage to keep track of personal tasks. For work items, I just keep on open Word document or for more immediate tasks I make a note in my Outlook calendar. But all are very unsatisfying. The Google widget doesn’t tell me what I’ve done (just what I have left to do), Outlook is very annoying, and Word is bare bones. So I went hunting for an online solution.

The best site I’ve found so far has been Remember the Milk, which offers a fair amount of functionality, but not enough to drive me crazy. You can specify tasks in a variety of categories that you define, and either set definite due dates for those tasks or not. It’s free and there don’t appear to be any annoying ads (so I have no idea what the business model is…ads to come, maybe?). The site keeps track of when you’ve completed tasks and can even email reminders and let you share parts of your list.

Ahh the world of instant gratification. At midnight last night, I thought it would be a good idea to start a podcast covering the events of the transit strike. At 3:30 am, I had one.

I want to have wordpress’ babies.

All the hundreds of fans who packed the Philadelphia streets Saturday for an open casting call for extras for the new Rocky movie needed was a picture, a resume and a simple message that would have made the fictional ex-champ proud: “Yo, pick me!” Fifteen years after starring in Rocky V, Sylvester Stallone is reprising his role as the boxing champ from South Philadelphia in the upcoming movie “Rocky Balboa.”

I didn’t know Rocky was getting back into the ring, did you? I thought Rocky V showed an aging, brain-damaged puncher who was headed for an early demise. How can this character perform a comeback?

Does Balboa move around the ring with a cane? A walker? Does he wear Depends?

If he was finished in 1991, how does the 2006 version fight anyone with a pulse? Maybe that’s it: Rocky fights Max Schmelling. With one hand behind his back. No problem, because one good kick and Schmelling’s bones will role off the canvas.

I’d pay to see Rocky kick Max Schmelling’s bones. I’d also pay to see Rocky fight in one of those motorized wheelchairs that run over your toes. That hasn’t happened to you? Just wait.

Rocky was a great series that jumped the shark after Mr. T’s Clubber Lang. I wish they wouldn’t keep these things going on and on forever like they did with Planet of the Apes.

First came the great Charlton Heston movie. Then came the the great sequel where the world blew up. Then the next one where the Apes went back in time….well, that was pretty bad. Then the fourth one where the apes stated a small boutique in Bloomington, Indiana which grew and grew until it was able to take on WalMart…I thought the whole premise was unrealistic. Apes hate Indiana.

I hope Rocky fights Dr. Zais. I’d pay to see that. The could both trip over Max Schmelling’s bones, and then the Ape could throw a bone up in the air like one did in 2001: A Space Odyssey. A great monolith could rise from the center of the ring, and Sylvester Stallone could be shown as a space baby, sucking his thumb.

I’d pay to see that.

I thought that once you publish a book, the next order of business is to propel yourself into the life of the touring author: parties, book signings, adulation and groupies (with teeth, preferably).

What has surprised me about the launch of Stooples: Office Tools for Hopeless Fools (St. Martins Press) is the complete lack of sock-em, rock-em excitement. Yes, you conduct interviews, but they are by telephone, which you can do in your underwear while your dog farts next to you (a picture of this very thing is on page 63 of Stooples: Office Tools for Hopeless Fools, St. Martins Press).

And yes, you do sign autographs in stores, which the publisher encourages you to do. But unless you are a BIG author, no one shows up to your book signings, and you end up sucking on Cheese Doodles with very bored looking cashiers who want you to stop telling them what?s on page 63 of Stooples: Office Tools for Hopeless Fools (St. Martins Press).

So what?s the upside? Well, when you go to your class reunion, you can say ?I?m a writer?, to which the reply might be, ?great, did you bang Cameron Diaz?? Always say yes, except when talking to Cameron Diaz?s father.

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Ever eat a lemon?

Picture a series of lemon-eating, funky-lip faces, a wonderful Andy Warhol montage. I would pay $400 Zlotys to see it at New York’s Whitney Museum. I would pay $280 Zlotys to see it at the San Antonio Museum for the Arts. In Burkina Faso you might have to pay me to see it, as there is no direct flight and the rebels have captured all the artists.

I once read that Texas dentists were trying to get children to stop eating lemons. There is a tradition of Southwest lemon eating that goes back generations: cut a hole in a lemon, shove in some dried, salted piece of fruit called “Chinese candy,” and then squeeze the tangy, salty juice all over your tounge and your fringed rodeo shirt and your alligator boots and everything else you?ve got on.

Well it seems lemon eating plays hell with your tooth enamel, and Texans have been urged by their dentists to cease and desist and watch Lemony Snicket movies instead. Which is not to say that Jim Carey is a favorite of Lone Star dentists either, but at least he doesn?t promote tooth decay. They think.

On the other hand, a chat room poster I know named Green Hell reminds us that ?lemons rock, brilliant when your slamming tequila and you just eat one! Gobble…?

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Picking up on John Battelle’s concept of the database of intentions, I was thinking yesterday about where Google and its rivals will eventually end up in the business world. All the major search portals are adding new features everyday, and acquiring new companies in a race to become the most sought after site on the Internet. This basic model is what you’d expect, because more visitors and more users means more advertising revenue. However, advertising seems like it could eventually become just a side business for the giants of search, a stopping off point in their development.

There are a number of things happening, which lead me to the conclusion that search advertising, while a lucrative business, is really just the beginning of something huge. I haven?t read Battelle?s book just yet, but I believe that his thesis is similar. According to Battelle the database of intentions is, ?The aggregate results of every search ever entered, every result list ever tendered, and every path taken as a result.?

Google stores everything that it possibly can store about its users, and if you use Gmail, Google stores and scans all your most personal information as well. When properly analyzed, all this data reveals what people are interested in at a particular moment in time. This includes their wishes, desires, passions, fears, everything. All other databases and information sources are being made public domain by the big search companies, but the one database that they are all keeping to themselves is this one precious database, or at least their piece of it.

These companies covet their precious piece of the pie, because with this database of intentions they can predict markets and make the right business decisions with a much higher accuracy than ever before. The possibilities of what might come out of this database have only just begun to be explored. Right now, Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL talk about targeting advertising to their users, so that results are more relevant. Come on, really, is that all you?ve got?

How about advising Wall Street on where the markets are headed. A 1% improvement in accurately predicting financial markets would net billions, maybe trillions a year in revenue. It would make all Internet advertising revenue look like chump change. It?s only a theory, but it seems that capturing and analyzing this database of intentions might just make some of the fickleness and eccentricities of freewill a little predictable, at least to the extent that the weather is predictable.

The basic scenario that I am thinking of is that Google Labs: Wall Street sends daily data on market directions and consumer interests to the businesses involved in these markets. In this way, the business managers and investors will have a virtual weather report on what is coming in the next day or week, and they?ll know whether to bring an umbrella.

It?s a far out concept for now, but I think that in the near future it will start becoming much more real. There are some scary implications for the future, as the world’s knowledge is slowly consolidated into a few hands. For now it?s anyone?s game and the owner?s of the database of intention seem to be a bunch of fairly well intentioned geeks.

It will be interesting to see what happens when these well intentioned geeks have the power to make and break world markets, industries, etc.

For me, the great downfall of technology has always been that writers and publishers encounter so many technical issues whenever they venture online that they have no time left to actually write. This has been my unfortunate situation for the past few days, as I attempted to redesign my website to incorporate some unobtrusive advertising.

Being somewhat skilled at webdesign, I thought that the redesign would be a snap. Obviously, I’m still not skilled enough to remember that no programming task is ever a snap. There is always a glitch. Always.

Changing the layout was a snap thanks to Liew Cheon Fong, who has released a great 3 column revision of the default Kubrick theme.

The particular issue this time is that the Google ads display perfectly fine in Explorer and Safari, but they do not display in Firefox. The strange thing is that using Firefox I can see Google ads on other sites, but not my own site. So, it is not, as Adsense support suggested, a problem with my Javascript or adblocking settings.

I am thinking that the problem may have to do with the Kubrick theme itself, since ads do not display on either the default or the three column Kubrick design. Also, after looking through the WordPress support forums I have found a number of posts on this issue, but the problem still remains unresolved.

Here are two links on the WordPress forums relating to this problem:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/40709
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/31020

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

P.S. Liew, I noticed that you have Google ads displaying on your site, and I can see them in Firefox. How did you do it?