From the looks of it, this thing is about 150 feet long and 30 feet wide! The Germans are sending in the air force to exterminate this oversized pest.

How awesome is Google Maps?

If you don’t trust somebody, that means you don’t have confidence in them. If you don’t have confidence in yourself, that means you don’t trust yourself.

I loved the book, but the movie just didn’t cut it. I watched both the theatrical version and the extended version (which David Lynch disowned). Absolutely do not watch the extended version! Fans of the book might enjoy the theatrical version, but it is still seriously lacking. I think David Lynch was not sure what to do with such an epic project… there was too much focus on meaningless details, and seemingly no attention to an overarching theme. As much as I wanted to like this, I am giving it 1/5 stars.

I doubt anyone who didn’t already realize that we’re far worse off having invaded Iraq will care much about this, but a CIA intelligence report just came out which shows that we are in far more danger than we would have been had we not invaded Iraq. Did anyone seriously think that the rest of the world would just bow down submissively? By invading Iraq, we spread a feeling of terror throughout the world. Terrorists had more reason than ever to attack us after we threw down the gauntlet.

I read recently that the number of US soldiers killed while fighting our war on terror has surpassed the number of people killed on September 11th: 2,973. The war on terror has produced a net loss of life, a debt of billions of dollars, and turned us into the most hated government in the world. What will it take to get the administration to admit that they are incompetantly leading us in the wrong direction? Seriously, is there anything?

I saw this movie for the first time just recently, and I was glad to see that it lived up to the hype. Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Ray Charles, and Cab Calloway all have parts in this production. A very fun movie with some killer car chases and great music. 4/5 stars!

I have been saying it for quite some time now, so I was glad to read Mark Cuban’s most recent blog post about how the YouTube party will soon be over. It may sound shocking to those who know Mark Cuban as the lunatic owner of the Dallas Mavericks, but he has amazing common sense when it comes to business.

What makes the YouTube controversy especially interesting now is that despite the looming threat of a lawsuit from Universal, Warner Music has decided to partner with YouTube and has granted them the rights to use all of the music videos from the Warner Music library! Warner seems to be thinking that the free viral marketing will lead to some actual music sales if people get a song stuck in their head. Not a bad deal for Warner, since YouTube is the one paying for all the bandwidth!

In the end, it all boils down to the bandwidth… I don’t know who in their right mind is funding them, but by some estimates, YouTube is spending over one million dollars per month on hosting and bandwidth! I just dug up this relatively old post by my former boss Jason Calacanis where he, like Cuban, compares YouTube to Napster (i.e. it is too good to be legal). He also makes the very wise comment that if legitimate content producers put advertisements in front of their videos, they would be able to make money from it. As far as YouTube making money… I just can’t fathom how they could possibly afford their bandwidth. As much as I love YouTube, I have to agree that it is on its way out, one way or another.

I was reading this article by Windows fan Paul Thurott, who was very harsh on Windows Vista RC1, and I thought to myself… I bet Microsoft is purposely going to release a bad operating system. That way, everyone will be eager to upgrade to the next version of Windows. Who would buy a bad operating system? Everyone who buys a new computer… because they have no choice. Talk about abusing your leverage!

Microsoft has the convenience of not needing to care about how their customers perceive them. I’m always blown away when I see people who love Microsoft and its products. I don’t trust Microsoft products and I generally find them to be a rough and inconsistent experience. I think it is very telling that Microsoft, usually extremely lax in patching critical vulnerabilities in its software, patched a DRM flaw in its Windows Media decoder faster than anything they have ever patched before. Read this great article on Wired.com for more on this. In short, somebody cracked the Windows Media Digital Rights Management Codec, so that people could strip the copy-protection on their protected files and then play them anywhere. There was absolutely no risk of viruses or any kind of danger to the user. This is what Microsoft decided to patch as fast as possible: 3 days. Meanwhile, security vulnerabilities which allow users to compromise your entire computer remotely… those take them about 3 weeks to patch, and trust me, it’s not because it’s difficult.

Recently, the social networking site TheFacebook.com got itself into some hot water with its own user base by launching an amazing new feature. This feature is the “feed” which comes up on your homepage and tells you about every little thing that was changed on your friends’ pages. In short, people are pissed because they don’t want the whole world knowing every time they change something on their page.

According to the founder, Mark Zuckerberg, people’s privacy has not been violated because the information that is available on a person’s feed is the same information they could have gotten by visiting each of their friends’ pages. It has always informed you when one of your friends updated their page, but it just never told you exactly what had changed. I think this is kind of funny because all those people who have hundreds of people listed as friends are now broadcasting their personal lives to all of those people… most of whom they hardly even know!

I personally dislike social networking sites because I feel they objectify people’s social lives in a way which makes me very uncomfortable. If I don’t have you on my friends list, does that mean we’re not friends? What if I do have you on my list but I’ve never even met you before? If you break up with someone, it’s not easy but you will likely remove them from your friends list. I personally got into hot water with some of my high school classmates who invited me to be their friends on Friendster. I had not seen them in years and I was never close friends with any of them, although I was cool with them. At the time I was rather paranoid and antisocial so I said “no”. One of them got very angry at me in real life when she got my rejection (I didn’t think it would be a big deal since she already had hundreds of friends on her list). I realized that I was foolish to take the site so seriously so I invited all of those classmates onto my friend list. Some of them were remorseful and agreed, although friend requests do not allow for any of your own words so I could not really apologize without hunting down their e-mail addresses.

This whole experience, however ridiculous, made me realize how nice it is that in real life, you cannot quantify a friendship. Friendster and TheFacebook take it even beyond quantifying it… they make it binary: you are a friend or you are not. To avoid any weirdness in the future, I accept ALL friend requests

A very entertaining and thoughtful novel. Also very short! This is a great introduction to H.G. Wells (I also read The Invisible Man), so check it out if you like sophistocated classic sci-fi. 4/5 stars.

This Pulitzer Prize winning novel is a real gem of a book. A verbose tale of two young relatives who dream to make it big in the comic book industry… definitely worth a look. 4/5 stars.

I think the old “glass half empty” analogy can apply to complex systems as well:

Do you see a system as a group of interconnected components which will fail to perform if any of the components fails? or do you see a system as a group of interconnected components which, by working together, can produce something greater than the sum of its parts? or maybe a little of both?

How do you tend to view things?

What is your role? What do you contribute?

What are your demands? Do you contribute enough to deserve those demands?