September 2008

From YouTube via Daring Fireball

Amazing YouTube page of Wario Land: Shake It for the Wii.  This is such a great use of the web technology for advertising.

Palin-bot was interviewed by Katie Couric yesterday in this clip.  After a few minutes of the clip, I half expected her to start spewing smoke and start saying “error, error”, “does not compute”, or “I am not programmed to answer that question”. 

It’s painful to watch her as she strings together sentences that barely make sense and don’t remotely answer the question being asked.

“I’ll try to find you some, and I’ll bring them to ya”

To make Sarah Palin, the Palin-bot more understandable, I’ve drawn a simple logic tree that explains how she answers questions.

Here’s Palin-Bot 1.0(beta)

From LATimes.com: Letterman chides McCain for suspending his campaign

The Republican presidential nominee was supposed to make his 13th appearance tonight on Letterman’s show, the venue where he originally announced his White House bid in 2007. But he backed out late Wednesday afternoon, saying he was suspending all campaign activities to focus on getting a financial bailout plan through Congress.

During the taping of tonight’s show, Letterman told the audience that McCain had called him personally to apologize for standing him up and said he was rushing to the airport to get back to Washington.
…
Things got worse for McCain when Letterman, in the midst of interviewing substitute guest Keith Olbermann, learned that the GOP candidate was actually still in New York. Not only that, but McCain was about five blocks away at the CBS News headquarters, sitting down for a last-minute exclusive interview with Katie Couric.

Incredulous, Letterman interrupted his chat with Olbermann to show the audience a live shot on the internal CBS news feed of McCain getting touched up by a makeup artist as he waited to talk to Couric.

“He doesn’t seem to be racing to the airport, does he?” Letterman said, shouting at the television monitor: “Hey John, I got a question! You need a ride to the airport?”

Just saw this on TV.  Boy, was Letterman hacked off, especially when he saw the live feed of John McCain sitting getting made up for his interview with Katie Couric.

From FoxNews.com: Palin Media Blackout Continues

It has been widely reported that Sarah Palin has yet to give a news conference or even answer a few questions from the traveling press that follow her from city to city on her plane. But, today the Palin camp went to new lengths to control the media, which is covering the GOP Vice-Presidential nominee.
…
It is traditional for the press traveling with a candidate to have some relationship with the candidate and special access because of all the hours logged on the plane and on the campaign trail. But, Palin still has not come back to answer any questions or talk to her press corps. The only time the press has met the Alaska governor is on her first solo flight three weeks ago and it was off the record. We shook hands with Palin and she was quickly ushered back to the front of the plane behind a gray curtain where she has remained for the three and a half weeks she has been a candidate.

It seems like Palin’s just like a collector’s Barbie doll, left in a box to look pretty and not to be played with.  McCain’s obviously keeping her away from the media because he’s afraid that in a non-controlled situation, she’s going to say something stupid. 

Images from the newly announced Canon EOS 5D Mark II are hitting the web and it’s no surprise that it’s a pretty amazing camera in low light settings. 

But, what’s been a total surprise is the quality of the video that the 5D can take.  I thought that at best the video would be for capturing some quick clips for convenience.  Boy was I wrong. 

Check out this stunning video:
REVERIE, an independently-produced video by Explorer of Light Vincent Laforet

From NYTimes.com: Stocks Fall as Rescue Plan Is Negotiated

“When there’s a fire in your kitchen threatening to burn down your home, you don’t want someone stopping the firefighters on the way and demanding they hand out smoke detectors first or lecturing you about the hazards of keeping paint in the basement,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said in a speech on the Senate floor. “You want them to put out the fire before it burns down your home and everything you’ve saved for your whole life.”

Mr. McConnell added: “The same is true of our current economic situation. We know that there is a serious threat to our economy, and we know that we must take action to try and head off a serious blow to Main Street.”

This fire has been burning for over a year.  Until last week, the Bush Administration has been saying that the economy is fine.  Now, they say we’re facing a serious threat to the economy and that we don’t have time to work out and discuss a real bailout plan.  We have to pass a “clean” bill with only what the administration wants and we need to do it immediately.

700 billion dollars is not an amount that you give a blank check for.  We’re supposed to blindly trust Treasury Secretary Paulson, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs to bailout companies and not just give handouts to all comers.  We need financial “experts” to get us out of this mess, they are also the ones that helped create it.

Strict supervision is necessary and it’s Congress’s job to do its due diligence on this no matter if the markets drop.  The markets will bounce back once a bill is passed, but its important to make sure that the taxpayers aren’t just stuck with a bunch of losses so banks can profit.

Buy a PC or Microsoft CEO will kill a kitten.

Maybe they should have just run this classic video instead.

From NYTimes.com: Feasting at the Table of Taipei

…food is one arena where Taipei — the world’s most underrated capital city, according to Monocle magazine — blows Beijing away. Its food incorporates more influences, spans street food to haute cuisine with greater aplomb and is out and out more delicious than that of its mainland counterpart.

When I was in China for business, the businessmen that I worked with were all from Taiwan and apologized profusely for the food we were about to eat.  They all said it was OK, but not nearly as good as the food in Taiwan.

From Salon.com: Sarah Palin’s dead lake

Some frightening insight into Sarah Palin’s job as mayor of Wasilla.  A must read article.  Here are a couple of the lowlights.

Palin recently told the New Yorker magazine that Alaskans “have such a love, a respect for our environment, for our lands, for our wildlife, for our clean water and our clean air. We know what we’ve got up here and we want to protect that, so we’re gonna make sure that our developments up here do not adversely affect that environment at all. I don’t want development if there’s going to be that threat to harming our environment.”

But as mayor of her hometown, say many local critics, Palin showed no such stewardship.

“Sarah’s legacy as mayor was big-box stores and runaway growth,” said Patty Stoll, a retired Wasilla schoolteacher who once worked in the same school with Palin’s parents, Chuck and Sally Heath. “The truth is, Wasilla is just plain ugly, it’s not a pleasant place to live. It’s not thought out. And that’s a shame.

“Sarah fouled her own nest, and I can’t understand why. I hate to think it was simply greed or ambition.”
…
“I try to avoid driving to Wasilla so I won’t get depressed,” added the official, who asked for his name to be withheld, to avoid Palin’s “wrath.”

“You get visually mugged when you drive through there. I take the long way, through the back roads, just to avoid it.”

Wasilla City Council member Dianne Woodruff hears the same lament about her town all the time. “Everywhere in Alaska, you hear people say, ‘We don’t want to be another Wasilla.’ We’re not just the state’s meth capital, we’re the ugly box-store capital. Was Sarah a good steward of this beautiful valley? No. I think it comes from her lack of experience and awareness of other places, how other cities try to preserve what makes them attractive and livable.