Month: March 2007

Yearlong chat ends

Although the show generally ran only 3 minutes long, it could be hard to digest. It used foul language. Frank posted it at different times each day. It was full of inside jokes that discouraged new viewers from jumping in midway through the year; for those who wanted to try to catch up, his website offered an archive, which will stay available. Ze Frank preferred to play for what he calls the proletariati.

Artists look different

So why do artists look at pictures — especially non-abstract pictures — differently from non-artists? Vogt and Magnussen argue that it comes down to training: artists have learned to identify the real details of a picture, not just the ones that are immediately most salient to the perceptual system, which is naturally disposed to focusing on objects and faces.

not just look different, but they see the world differently

SK Monoculture

So we end up in 2007, 9 years after SEED was created for Korean users, and one legacy of the fall of Netscape is that Korean computer/Internet users only have an Active X control to do any encrypted communication online. Korea will only get beyond this problem by 1) applying Korean laws on open standards to the certificate authorities, 2) reassigning new certificates which work with open web standards to all Koreans, 3) reprogramming all Korean websites to support 128 bit SSL which will allow for a heterogeneous marketplace of operating systems and web browsers. This is a herculean task and thus Korea stays hostage to Redmond.

wow, i did not realize the south korean internet is completely fucked

Non-Google search news

Doh! Ask doesn’t have even a single page from its own ad campaign site, and Google indexes the “information revolution” much better than Ask does. So this entire advertising campaign puts Ask in an awkward position:
– If Ask crawls the domain now, it’s open to questions of search favoritism, e.g. “Did Ask do any special crawling for information-revolution.org that other webmasters don’t get?”
– If Ask doesn’t crawl the domain, the whole campaign may collapse in self-referential irony. Every time you see a TV commercial urging “search sleepers” to wake up or posters advertising the revolution, people may instead chat about how Ask did worse than most competitors on the domain that it created (Yahoo had 3 results when I checked today and Live had 0 results).

desperate measures?

Walmart banking

Wal-Mart is withdrawing its application for a bank charter, which aroused widespread opposition from banks, lawmakers and consumer groups, and spurred debate within Congress and before the FDIC

a sad win for the incumbents. they sure could use that competition.
2007-08-27:

Walmart failed to get approval for a bank. But the giant discount chain is effectively building one anyway. Wal-Mart said yesterday that it would rapidly expand the financial services offered in its vast network of stores, extending the reach of its retailing empire into its shoppers’ wallets and the traditional turf of the American banking industry.

i hope they can do that. this sclerotic industry needs some disruption. plus capturing the unbanked has upsides all around

Greg Stein Roast

So we’re in Vegas. Most good “Greg Stories” start that way. It’s really late and we’re at the Blackjack table with Herman, the 80 year old dealer. He’s telling stories about the early days in the casinos and we’re just wishing he would just shut up and deal. Herman isn’t paying too much attention and instead is watching the ladies walk past. Greg starts to doze off at the table and puts his head down. Just to catch a couple Zs. The dealer says, “Sir, you can’t sleep at the table.” Greg wakes up and his cards are stuck to his forehead like he’s playing Indian Poker. The dealer grabs the cards and throws them down on the table. Now it wouldn’t be so bad if that were the end of the story. Herman must have had a”senior moment” because Greg had blackjack and didn’t immediately pay him. As Herman is sweeping the cards, Greg starts yelling about not getting paid. Herman starts yelling back and accused Greg of not knowing what his cards were. Here is where it got ugly. The pit boss comes over and paid Greg for a win but not a Blackjack. More yelling. Lot’s of “just look at the video tape” at the $5 table. Needless to say, we were no longer welcome at the Blackjack tables of the Mirage. No great loss.

heh. the man who introduced me to manhattans