Saturday, June 21, 2008
Finnish business presentation
Finnish business presentation. This is why Europe will soar ahead of the US in the near decades.
Giving away money
Man throws money in the street.
He may have succeeded in spreading a little sunshine as was his intent.
(I think twenty thousand pounds sterling is way off, though, probably more like two thousand.)
I suspect one might be more successful at it, though, if one gave away one twenty-pound bill at a time, personally. For one thing I know that while I would pick up money on the street, I would feel foolish about it, especially being in competition with strangers. For another thing, I think most people feel guilty getting something for free, and I think they are more likely to be able to feel good about a twenty-pound bill, where more substantial amounts would be troublesome. And for a third thing, I think that the personal contact of somebody deliberately handing you something as a gift will make it mean a lot more than cash you pick up from the asphalt because somebody had so much he threw it away.
He may have succeeded in spreading a little sunshine as was his intent.
(I think twenty thousand pounds sterling is way off, though, probably more like two thousand.)
I suspect one might be more successful at it, though, if one gave away one twenty-pound bill at a time, personally. For one thing I know that while I would pick up money on the street, I would feel foolish about it, especially being in competition with strangers. For another thing, I think most people feel guilty getting something for free, and I think they are more likely to be able to feel good about a twenty-pound bill, where more substantial amounts would be troublesome. And for a third thing, I think that the personal contact of somebody deliberately handing you something as a gift will make it mean a lot more than cash you pick up from the asphalt because somebody had so much he threw it away.
Friday, June 20, 2008
April Bowlby - Toes Are People
April Bowlby is a genius. And for how hot she is, see related YouTube vids.
Internet addiction
Internet addiction.
"Block explained: "The relationship is with the computer. It becomes a significant other to them. They exhaust emotions that they could experience in the real world on the computer through any number of mechanisms: emailing, gaming, porn."
Yes indeed. The healthy life to lead instead is to talk on the phone, frequent casinos, and watch the porn channels.
"Block explained: "The relationship is with the computer. It becomes a significant other to them. They exhaust emotions that they could experience in the real world on the computer through any number of mechanisms: emailing, gaming, porn."
Yes indeed. The healthy life to lead instead is to talk on the phone, frequent casinos, and watch the porn channels.
Pain au chocolat
Image by Luc Viatour. Once in a cafe, I pointed at a pain au chocolat and said I wanted a "chocolate pain". This consternated a well dressed lady next to me, who wanted to know why I called it that. I said that I couldn't pronounce it in French. This almost upset her, she couldn't see how that was hard.
Like John Cleese says, humor is brittle.
Damien informed:
It's called a 'pain au chocolat' in most of France.... except in the southwest where it's a 'chocolatine'. And people would get very upset if you used that word in a parisian bakery ;-)
However you may have better luck with this one, it's pronounced [shockolattin]. No weird nasal vowels ! Not sure they will know it though.
Be carefull when asking for a "chocolate pain", you might end up shackled in a dungeon and flogged with confectionnery.
No, I can pronounce it in French, I just think "chocolate pain" is a funny term. It hints at the love/hate relationship many of us have with chocolate.
LEGO Death Star
Isn't it amazing how immortal the Star Wars universe is? OK, the hardcore fans may be considered geeks by some, but that's just ungracious, donchaknow.
Electronic Device Stirs Unease at Book Fair
Electronic Device Stirs Unease at Book Fair, NYT article.
"But excitement about the Kindle, which was introduced in November, also worries some publishing executives, who fear Amazon’s still-growing power as a bookseller. Those executives note that Amazon currently sells most of its Kindle books to customers for a price well below what it pays publishers, and they anticipate that it will not be long before Amazon begins using the Kindle’s popularity as a lever to demand that publishers cut prices."
Let's hope! It's greedy and bad business to try to stick to old prices when your expenses are suddenly cut drastically. Not only may low prices very well increase your profits by multiplying sales, they will certainly increase your exposure, and they will help combat piracy (copying and unauthorized selling) and "piracy" (free copying).
"But excitement about the Kindle, which was introduced in November, also worries some publishing executives, who fear Amazon’s still-growing power as a bookseller. Those executives note that Amazon currently sells most of its Kindle books to customers for a price well below what it pays publishers, and they anticipate that it will not be long before Amazon begins using the Kindle’s popularity as a lever to demand that publishers cut prices."
Let's hope! It's greedy and bad business to try to stick to old prices when your expenses are suddenly cut drastically. Not only may low prices very well increase your profits by multiplying sales, they will certainly increase your exposure, and they will help combat piracy (copying and unauthorized selling) and "piracy" (free copying).
"All Marketers are Liars" - Seth Godin speaks at Google
"All Marketers are Liars" - Seth Godin speaks at Google.
It's a good speech, but the video presentation is almost worthy of Seth's own "this is broken" label. Somebody decided to put subtitles on the video. I am all for that, except I can't turn them off, and they are distracting. And Seth speaks really clearly. To make it worse, they are messed up. Special characters are replaced with a little diamond, making them more distracting and harder to read.
Further, when something is actually hard to hear, like a faint question from the crowd... there are no subtitles! And further yet, there are several mistakes. For example, one man says "and be ebay'ed", and it's transcribed as "and be delayed". And Seths says "I'm a big fan", and it's transcribed as "have a big brand", whatever that means.
Seth and Google are the biggest names in their respective field, and since this supposedly was produced by Google and they supposedly paid a lot for Seth, you'd think they would take care to do it properly.
It's a good speech, but the video presentation is almost worthy of Seth's own "this is broken" label. Somebody decided to put subtitles on the video. I am all for that, except I can't turn them off, and they are distracting. And Seth speaks really clearly. To make it worse, they are messed up. Special characters are replaced with a little diamond, making them more distracting and harder to read.
Further, when something is actually hard to hear, like a faint question from the crowd... there are no subtitles! And further yet, there are several mistakes. For example, one man says "and be ebay'ed", and it's transcribed as "and be delayed". And Seths says "I'm a big fan", and it's transcribed as "have a big brand", whatever that means.
Seth and Google are the biggest names in their respective field, and since this supposedly was produced by Google and they supposedly paid a lot for Seth, you'd think they would take care to do it properly.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
tOP's recommendations
Like Mike himself sez, this list is sure to be outdated soon, since new Canons and Nikons are expected any day now, but still, if you wan't a camera right now, look at tOP's recommended list.
I have been reading and linking to The Online Photographer since it was born a couple years ago, and I'm very pleased that it has grown into such a presence on the web (and I think even a half-decent income for Mike), because I've been a fan of his writing for much longer. I can prove it, I ordered his book The Empirical Photographer at least a year before tOP was born. Before the book was published, in fact.
I think Mike's writing combines several qualities which you rarely find together: it's entertaining, it's personal, it's relevant, it's sharp, and it has perspective. Oh, and an underlying wry humor. And he does not strain to get to any of these qualities, they are there because of who he is and what he believes, he can't do it any differently, and he wouldn't, no matter what anybody would pay him.
I have been reading and linking to The Online Photographer since it was born a couple years ago, and I'm very pleased that it has grown into such a presence on the web (and I think even a half-decent income for Mike), because I've been a fan of his writing for much longer. I can prove it, I ordered his book The Empirical Photographer at least a year before tOP was born. Before the book was published, in fact.
I think Mike's writing combines several qualities which you rarely find together: it's entertaining, it's personal, it's relevant, it's sharp, and it has perspective. Oh, and an underlying wry humor. And he does not strain to get to any of these qualities, they are there because of who he is and what he believes, he can't do it any differently, and he wouldn't, no matter what anybody would pay him.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
DVD region coding
I should have known that wikipedia would have an article on DVD region coding.
"There are many purposes that region coding can achieve, but a primary one is price discrimination. Price discrimination is the economic principle of demanding a higher price from buyers who are willing to pay more. Price discrimination is especially applicable to movies, because the marginal cost of selling one copy (or viewing) is quite small, giving the seller great flexibility in pricing. There is great disparity among the regions of the world in how much a person is willing to pay for a DVD, and region encoding allows a publisher to sell a DVD for less money in the regions where the demand is low and more where the demand is high.
Another purpose is controlling release dates. One of the traditions of movie marketing that the advent of home video threatened is the practice of releasing a movie (to theaters) later in some countries than in others. The threat from video tape was muted by the coincidence that television broadcast standards, and thus video tape formats, were for historical reasons regional. But apart from region coding, the DVD format is meant to be playable everywhere."
Until about two years ago, there were hacks for Macintosh computers to allow changing the region indefinitely. But now we seem stuck with being able to change it five times. The "VLC Player" app will play any region DVD, but it does not do a good job, for instance on my machine it freezes when I try to fast-forward. Does anybody know a better solution?
(Found this article.)
By the way, I'm surprised Apple has bowed to the movie studios on this one, they usually come down squarely on the side of the end users, and what with this being purely a business issue, not a legal one...
More from wiki:
"Region code enforcement has been discussed as a possible violation of World Trade Organization free trade agreements or competition law.[6] The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has warned that DVD players that enforce region coding may violate the Trade Practices Act.[7][8][9] The government of New Zealand is also considering a similar ruling.[10] This, supposedly, means that all DVD players sold in their territories have to be region-free.
Movie publishers misused region coding when they released older material with full region coding—there being no requirement, per the stated cinema-blockout justification provided, to restrict sales to certain countries. There are concerns, voiced by organizations such as the European Union, that region coding was solely an attempt to enforce price differentials."
"There are many purposes that region coding can achieve, but a primary one is price discrimination. Price discrimination is the economic principle of demanding a higher price from buyers who are willing to pay more. Price discrimination is especially applicable to movies, because the marginal cost of selling one copy (or viewing) is quite small, giving the seller great flexibility in pricing. There is great disparity among the regions of the world in how much a person is willing to pay for a DVD, and region encoding allows a publisher to sell a DVD for less money in the regions where the demand is low and more where the demand is high.
Another purpose is controlling release dates. One of the traditions of movie marketing that the advent of home video threatened is the practice of releasing a movie (to theaters) later in some countries than in others. The threat from video tape was muted by the coincidence that television broadcast standards, and thus video tape formats, were for historical reasons regional. But apart from region coding, the DVD format is meant to be playable everywhere."
Until about two years ago, there were hacks for Macintosh computers to allow changing the region indefinitely. But now we seem stuck with being able to change it five times. The "VLC Player" app will play any region DVD, but it does not do a good job, for instance on my machine it freezes when I try to fast-forward. Does anybody know a better solution?
(Found this article.)
By the way, I'm surprised Apple has bowed to the movie studios on this one, they usually come down squarely on the side of the end users, and what with this being purely a business issue, not a legal one...
More from wiki:
"Region code enforcement has been discussed as a possible violation of World Trade Organization free trade agreements or competition law.[6] The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has warned that DVD players that enforce region coding may violate the Trade Practices Act.[7][8][9] The government of New Zealand is also considering a similar ruling.[10] This, supposedly, means that all DVD players sold in their territories have to be region-free.
Movie publishers misused region coding when they released older material with full region coding—there being no requirement, per the stated cinema-blockout justification provided, to restrict sales to certain countries. There are concerns, voiced by organizations such as the European Union, that region coding was solely an attempt to enforce price differentials."
Intermediate glasses
Man, I've bought a lot of eyeglasses in the past couple of years. (Especially when you consider that my dealer sells two pairs "for the price of one" and you don't get it cheaper if you only want one pair (strange practice).)
Middle age hit me like a ton of chicks, and I started having problems with tiny text. So excitedly I went to my opticians last year and got varifocals. Sadly it seems that varifocals have the problem that the view is not really sharp when you look even a little bit to the side, so they are not very good for reading, the whole page/line is never sharp at once.
So last month I got proper reading glasses. And they are great for reading books with small print.
But they are not good for computer use, because the view is blurred beyond about 50 centimeters, and since I use a 30-inch screen, I use it at 70-80 centimeters.
So back to my opticians I went, and asked if there was such a thing as glasses for that distance. It turns out it's a common thing, they call it "intermediate" glasses.
So I got those glasses today, and as it happens, they are great. Not only are they perfect for the intermediate distance, but I can even see near-perfectly at the furthest distances (over 20 meters). And not only that, they work well for 99% of my reading.
So now I have glasses great for computer use, and they work great for almost anything I have need for, so I don't need to change glasses around.
You'd think this would be a good solution for many people, and that the opticians would use it often. Of course you could be cynical and say that I've used much more money at their place because they don't, but I generally find that the people you deal with in the world usually want to sell you the best product so you're happy the first time.
Anyway, just a little tip for ya, if you've reached the "trombone playing" reading age (you know, when you move a page in and out several times trying to find a good reading distance).
Middle age hit me like a ton of chicks, and I started having problems with tiny text. So excitedly I went to my opticians last year and got varifocals. Sadly it seems that varifocals have the problem that the view is not really sharp when you look even a little bit to the side, so they are not very good for reading, the whole page/line is never sharp at once.
So last month I got proper reading glasses. And they are great for reading books with small print.
But they are not good for computer use, because the view is blurred beyond about 50 centimeters, and since I use a 30-inch screen, I use it at 70-80 centimeters.
So back to my opticians I went, and asked if there was such a thing as glasses for that distance. It turns out it's a common thing, they call it "intermediate" glasses.
So I got those glasses today, and as it happens, they are great. Not only are they perfect for the intermediate distance, but I can even see near-perfectly at the furthest distances (over 20 meters). And not only that, they work well for 99% of my reading.
So now I have glasses great for computer use, and they work great for almost anything I have need for, so I don't need to change glasses around.
You'd think this would be a good solution for many people, and that the opticians would use it often. Of course you could be cynical and say that I've used much more money at their place because they don't, but I generally find that the people you deal with in the world usually want to sell you the best product so you're happy the first time.
Anyway, just a little tip for ya, if you've reached the "trombone playing" reading age (you know, when you move a page in and out several times trying to find a good reading distance).
For Lease
I just find this very humorous. It's been for lease for over two years, I wonder why there are no takers...
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