Iyow - in your own words

This sort of stuff sent me straight to the Land of Nod in college, but it looks like political markets may be more accurate predictors than the entertaining-but-often-wrong talking heads on TV.

Justin Wolfers at the Wall Street Journal
reminds readers that the political markets figured out the Democratic takeover of Congress during the midterm elections an hour before the talking heads assimilated all the data coming.

Some fun ones to watch:

Hillary Clinton’s going price/chances for the 2008 Democratic nomination.
Barack Obama’s for same.

Hillary’s chances of winning the CA Democratic primary.
Obama’s for same.

Tim Wu of Slate says that Google is trying to take over the world with its Android Gphone, but its really just another front in its war against closed, proprietary systems. Taking over the world may just be a side effect.

Who cares? In short, everyone should care – the results of Google trying to take on the big bell companies could have major benefits for consumers, small entrepreneurs, and every kid curious enough to try to make something work a little better.

Viva Net Neutrality! – for as long as we can make it last.

We’re just cleaning up server startups and such where I work on 2nd St. in SF, where we were just hit by an hour-long-ish wave of power outage.

Amazingly, there are rumors that there may have been a malicious or drunken human event causing server outage at 365 Main, one of the city’s main server hubs!

Is this true??!? Or just the fantasy of disgruntled workers everywhere, bubbling to the surface?

Valleywag reports, awesomely, that A drunk employee kills all the websites you care about.

Potential victims would include Craigslist, Six Apart’s TypePad and LiveJournal blogging sites, local listings site Yelp, and blog search engine Technorati. Hmm, sites I care about… sites I care about… thinking, thinking… sites I care about….

As a frequent Muni rider, I must say that sometimes I’m bored by my iPod. Yes, I love music, but how many times can I listen to my “38 AM” playlist? So, I was excited to finally give the podcast a go. Yes, I’m a little late to the scene (at least for San Francisco), but I am now a fan.

If you are unfamiliar with podcasts, I like to think of them as radio programs that are ready when you are (but, basically, they are media files). Many podcasts are weekly radio shows (like NPR’s popular Fresh Air) that are syndicated on the internet. Thus far, I have used the iTunes Store to download them for FREE (yea!) to my iPod. You also have the option to subcribe to many of these podcasts – iTunes will automatically download them to your computer when they are available.

Since I am obsessed with food and cooking, I did a quick search for podcasts on Chowhound. Then, I did a quick search on iTunes under Podcasts. This is just the beginning in my podcast listening, but Good Food on KCRW has already set the standard. This fantastic show was even included in Saveur’s recent Top 100 issue as the “Dishiest Radio Program”.

Until I’m able to upgrade to video (and, thus, the vodcast), the podcast is my latest adventure. If you’ve never tried it, give it a go. There are many, many topics to choose from. In fact, it’s a bit overwhelming.

If you have a favorite podcast you’d like to share, please post a comment. Thanks!

Have you experienced the thrill and agony of a first date recently? If not, you may be unaware that suddenly it has become common practice to ask someone out via text message. To clarify, I am not talking about high school students, but men and women in their 20s and 30s. We’re talking about first dates, not established couples deciding to meet up at their favorite Thai place after work. The would-be suitors most likely used “primitive” telephone dating rituals in their early days on the prowl – but have since abandoned this labor-intensive effort for the detached and impersonal texting future.

U want to go out w/ me 2night? ;-)

Now just when did this become acceptable? I’m assuming that by asking someone to dinner that your intention, at the very least, is to get to know them a little better (and let’s be honest here, the hope for naked activity). But with all those high hopes it seems that it has become too much work to actually make a phone call to invite the object of your slight affection. It’s a dismal sign of the state of dating today. We are all so overburdened with demands on our time and so technology-dependant that courtship, as well as what – only three years ago – were considered basic good manners, has evaporated. If she doesn’t answer that text—who cares?! It’s easy to forget you ever sent it.

Dating has become a matter of scheduling an appointment. Would you send a potentially lucrative client a text message to set up a time to meet? Probably not. The possible reward is too great, so you make the extra effort to give them a ring. Don’t your potential dates deserve some of that time investment? Or has dating declined to a series of miniature interviews with sexual encounters scheduled at a convenient time and location? Just think of how original and retro-cool you’ll be when you pick up that strange machine tethered to the wall of your home, take a deep breath, and have a conversation in “real-time”. I dare you.

The Economist had an interesting article on the emerging boom in South Asian Indian art, as a result of its rising middle and upper classes. This is a good sign. The renaissance of tech is visibly raising the wealth level in developing countries – or, more likely, the continuation of the tech boom in places where the profit margins have continued to be juicy.

It’s also heartening on another level – it speaks to some universal need to push one’s culture forward after basic needs are met. It’s so common to hear news about wholesale economic re-investment in India and China, that one would almost think that the only thing people in developing countries do or care about is drilling their young in math and science and importing business into their country. Of course not.

In college, my native-born Chinese language tutor and I used to spar over values differences between the West and the East, as well as about the importance of wealth. I kept insisting that it was essential to people’s happiness that government took pains to ensure their freedom. My language partner laughed and said, “If you had to choose between freedom or food, what do you choose? Food, of course.” Uh, yeah. When you put it that way. But the follow-up to that, is once you have enough food, you don’t want more food, you want your freedom – and art, or maybe just something that reflects you.

This is sort of sad, but one of my favorite things to do now is to delete all the email in my Inbox. Um, after making a best effort at reading and keeping the important stuff. Best effort, best effort.

(Is it email or e-mail? My first dot-com job involved knowing the proper form for that word. I don’t remember anymore, and what’s best, I don’t have to!)

After the defeat of incumbent Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman by political newcomer Ned Lamont in the Democratic primary this week, some pundits are decrying it as the beginning of the end of The Democrats in this election cycle, again.

This theory is cock-a-mamie, and actually signals a deeper, more structural change – one I think that benefits the real political moderates. Why? Well, among other things…

Ned Lamont is not Howard Dean.

‘NetRoots’ is the grassroots.

Iraq is not Vietnam.

What’s with the conventional wisdom’s love affair with Lieberman? Dunno, as he’s come out on the wrong side of his last three elections. But Eric Bohlert at The Nation has some good theories.

... of what? I used to poo-poo technical certifications, admiring people who figured stuff out on the fly. And now more than eight years after I embarked on my tech career, I find myself signing up for them and angling for ways to maintain my tenuous toehold in the bobo class.

But, “if you need a cert to continue practicing your profession, you’re in the wrong profession,” a friend recently posited to me.

Agree? Disagree? Don’t care anymore?

This is hardly news but flagship newspapers all over the country have been downsizing staffs and slimming down publication costs, attempting to keep up with the rapidly changing media landscape.

This includes my hometown paper – and first professional publisher – The Chicago Tribune, as well as the other big five or six: The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many more regional papers. In the above-cited article, Slate columnist Jack Shafer’s analysis is blunt, yet optimistic that newspapers can retain profitability over the long-term even as their audience share shrinks, especially those serving ‘the chattering classes’ (media, government, consultants). Newspaper companies can also stay afloat by co-opting the new technologies. (For example, Slate was bought out from Microsoft by The Washington Post Co. a year and a half ago.) Shafer’s right that papers have been challenged ever since radio, then TV – really, anything that takes people’s attention and time – came on the scene.

Yet, will it ever be as pleasurable to receive large amounts of information over computer/TV screen, rather than through tangible printed media that we can thumb through, skim over, bring to the breakfast table, or the bathroom? Probably not, but it sure is faster. The printed word and image is an artifact that’s both treasurable and perishable. But the news and media world is all about Information Now, and the Web has brought us so much closer to that.