July 2011
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Many years of now
“When I’m Sixty-Four” is 44 years old. I was 20 when it came out, in the summer of 1967, one among thirteen perfect tracks on The Beatles‘ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. For all the years since, I’ve thought the song began, “When I get older, losing my head…” But yesterday, on the eve of actually… Continue reading
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Deficit reduction by spectrum auction?
So I took up David Weigel‘s challenge in Slate: Read the Reid Plan. Read the Boehner Plan. Get Back to Me… and got as far as this stuff in Reid’s plan: (Sorry, I had to take a screen shot because the original is a .pdf and the copied text takes too much work to fix.)… Continue reading
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Tools for Independence
So I signed up for Google+. I added some friends from the roster already there (my Gmail contacts, I guess). Created a small circle to discuss VRM. Nothing happened there that I know of right now, but I haven’t checked yet. I’m about to (see below), but first I’ll go through my other impressions. First,… Continue reading
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iPaddling PCs
I wrote my first iPad post on January 28, 2010, and my second one about three months later — both prior to the arrival of the iPad itself. I think both those early posts nailed the iPad, Apple’s strategy, and the emerging market spaces pretty squarely on the head. The only clear miss was this:… Continue reading
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Earth to Microsoft: Don’t sell Bing.
In the New York Times, Robert Cryan and Martin Hutchison of Reuters BreakingViews suggest that Microslft sell its Bing search engine, either outright or in exchange for stock in a company that can do more with it than rank a distant #2 to Google while piling up billions per year in losses, which is what Bing… Continue reading
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Boil on
Saw Pom Wonderful Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold yesterday*. Brilliant work. I like the way Morgan Spurlock is both respectful and gently mocking of all points of view toward the movie’s subject: product placement in movies. That approach is why I prefer his movies to Michael Moore‘s. Spurlock explores moral conflicts by living through… Continue reading
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Taking the heat
That’s how hot my car thought it was today. I understand it hit 103° at Logan. Right now it’s 10pm and still 95° on our back porch. It’s hotter indoors. Up in the attic, where I work, two window AC units bring the space down to about 82°. They can’t do much better. We have… Continue reading
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The Long Tale
I wrote A World of Producers in December 2008. At the time I was talking about camcorders and increased bandwidth demand in both directions: And as camcorder quality goes up, more of us will be producing rather than consuming our video. More importantly, we will be co-producing that video with other people. We will be… Continue reading
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Free ways
The first time I heard the term “Sepulveda pass,” I thought it was a medical procedure. I mean, I was still new to The Coast, and sepulveda sounded like one of those oddball body parts, like uvula or something. (Not speaking of which, I no longer have an uvula. No idea why. It used to… Continue reading
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All the statues eat there
… so you know it’s gotta be good. (All’antico Vinaio, on Via dei Neri, in Firenze.) Continue reading
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Curing the commercial Web blues
Last week we spent a lot of time here, in Venice: The triangular marble plaza on the edge of the Grand Canal of Venice is known informally as Bancogiro, once one of Italy’s landmark banks, and now the name of an osteria there. The plaza is part of Rialto Mercado, the marketplace where Marco Polo… Continue reading
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Venice in a glass
That was shot (and enjoyed) here, at Banco Giro, a triangular plaza by the old marketplace. This was roughly where The Merchant of Venice was set, where Marco Polo did his business and where Luca Pacioli learned about and then shared with the world the essentials of double-entry bookkeeping — in a form that hardly changed over the… Continue reading
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The bigger picture
Since writing What if Flickr fails? six months ago, my photography has dropped way off. I still shoot, but not as much. And I don’t upload as much to Flickr as I used to. It’s not one thing, but in a way it comes down to that. First, I’ve been writing a book, which I’ve… Continue reading
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Why I love flying
Air travel has taught us to hate flying, and that’s a huge bummer, because flying is just freaking amazing. Yesterday I flew from Rome to Brussels, in a window seat on the right side of the plane. I knew if we were lucky, we’d see the Alps, as well as other geographic and geological wonders.… Continue reading