email me: chris@chris-karath.com
August 2008
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No Heroics
Interesting looking British sitcom about superheroes who hang out after hours at a bar.
I want to hear your 
Aiden 5
Neat Short Story Indy Sci-Fi Film. Live action actors shot on green screen and superimposed on hand drawn backgrounds. Very Cool. Watch the whole 5 minute film below.
Odd custom mail flyer. Sorry Comcast, I'm happy with my *package* that I have.
Random Non-Sequiters
Superman Returns Again There's alot of talk online about relaunching the Superman franchise as a dark Dark Knight type movie. When there was talk of WB bringing some DC Comics writers out to Hollywood and talking with them about the character, there was some positive buzz that maybe W was "getting it". Saying that you are going to make Superman a 'dark knight' just shows that they still don't get it at all.
Joe Biden I like the Joe Biden VP choice. I also liked Joe Biden when he was a candidate, but i never thought he'd be able to take he top slot. The media is still obsessed with only the election on this topic though. Joe Biden seems to me to be the guy you want if you actually want to govern. Obama is too new to have the power structure he needs to get things done. His strength is that he's young enough to still have the vision and the belief that things can change. Picking someone with Biden's experience is a great choice. Biden will know how to implement the change that Obama wants to make. Biden seems like the anti-Cheney to me. If Cheney is Darth Vader, Biden is going to be Obi-Wan.
Nancy Pelosi Listening to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on Meet the Press. After the next election they might want to look at replacing her too. She's way too much of a political creature. Obama is going to need a gutsier partner in the House, or maybe not, if Obama's poll numbers are high enough, Pelosi might not challenge him any more than she's challenging Bush. We need to move toward governing, and not just focusing on campaigns.
Tablet PCs Seen a handful of Tablet Netbook PC related posts on the tech sites recently. Nothing to get too excited about yet, but the sucess of the iPhone is certainly moving touch into the "sexy specs" requirement to generate buzz about new projects. There are some choices up around $800 right now, which isn't a very high price really. But I'm still waiting to see a Linux Tablet PC in the $500 or less range.. preferably with a 8.9" or 10" screen. I think that will be a reality fairly soon.
Google Phone The Google phone releases on T-mobile soon. I've read as early as September 17 in some places. Not sure if that is still accurate or not.
I'm much more interested in the open nature of the Google Phone compared to the Walled Garden of the iPhone, even though right now the google phone buzz seems to be strictly on a small geek fringe. I'm less excited about the Google Phone initially only being on T-Mobile. I don't know much about T-Mobile and would just as soon stay with Sprint which has worked very well for my area over the years.
There is a developer emulator for the Google Phone, I may get around to installing that soon, just to give it a spin if it doesn't come out soon.
My Sprint phone upgrade comes up by January 2009, hopefully they have the Gphone by then but it's not looking good at the moment.
At somepoint it would be nice if the carriers let you use whatever hardware, you'd like on their network.
Click the Picture to Play the Video
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Amateur Anti-McCain Ad
Supposedly this is an amateur Anti-McCain Ad. It's pretty well done for the genre.
Video about Twitter
Just saw a pretty good video that describes Twitter, which can be a difficult thing to do.
People either grok Twitter or they don't though. If you like to share and get feedback on the small little details of your day and idle thoughts, you *get* Twitter, if that's not your thing, the usefulness of Twitter will probably elude you. And that's ok I think.
Comic picks for 8/13/08
ACTION COMICS #868 $2.99
BATMAN #679 RIP $2.99
BOOSTER GOLD #11 $2.99
GREEN ARROW BLACK CANARY #11 $2.99
GREEN LANTERN CORPS #27 $2.99
TINY TITANS #7 $2.25
TRINITY #11 $2.99
WONDER WOMAN #23 $2.99
TOYFARE #134 MATTEL SKELETOR CVR $4.99
The light is dimming as the sun is lowering in the sky. My ossilating fan blows across me as I lay facing the wrong way on my bed typing on my netop.
Sometimes I make life more complicated than it needs to be.
Life is more complicated than it needs to be.
Breathe, eat, drink, sleep, sex.
Security.
Friendship, family, intimacy.
Self-esteem, confidence, achievement, respect.
Morality, creativity, spontaneity, tolerance, acceptance of facts.
Hmmm... maybe it does have to be complicated. Maybe those are a lot of things to balance in harmony.
Eighteen things on that list alone. And that's only Maslow's List. You could arguably add even more concepts to the above. Love, charity, empathy-- the list can go on and on.
At best our brains are designed to hold 7 separate items or concepts in mind at a time, before grouping them or simplifying their arrangement. Twenty-one items listed above, and there are so many more, 3 times 7 and it's not even a nuanced list. Three times more complicated than our brains are designed to handle and the above list is still missing so much.
Maybe I don't make life more complicated than it needs to be. Maybe I just try to contemplate a mass of it that exceeds the brain's designed parameters.
Maybe just the B-E-D-S and S would suffice, but what are those without the next S or the F or F or I-- already back up to 9. Two more than seven, already too complicated. Eighteen on Maslow's Pyramid-- which from here looks more like a house of cards. remove one and the others can all come tumbling down.
B-E-D-S at least then. Can contemplate the rest later I suppose.
Ain't it cool News has a good interview with the creator of Journeyman on where the the season and show was going had the show not getten cancelled.
Sigh, Journeyman really was one of my favorite shows last season, and I was very disapointed that it didn't continue.
Let's Go Surfing
• app-stick.com nice list of portable apps that can run from a USB stick or without a full install. Portable apps has better direct download links though.
• infinitube.net is kindof neat. You can enter in keywords and it will just keep play an "unlimited" playlist of videos with those keywords. even quicker type "http://infintube.net/your+keywords+seperated+by+pluses" and you can start the videos instantly.
• Nowdothis.com ridiculously simple online todo list. Enter your items and then click them off one by one.
• hearwho.com is a nice simple text to MP3 converter.
• Seetoo.com is a very neat site. One person downloads the browser plug in software. That person can then play a video file that can stream to other friends web browsers. There is an integrated chat window too.
• tvweb360.com seems to be a decent TV aggregator with live streaming channels in many languages around the world.
• Tinypaste.com is like tinyurl but for text. You can type a long message in tinypaste and then paste the tinyurl-like link into twitter. Let's you get around that 140 character limit a little bit without linking to a blog.
• Nice Watercolor type drawing of the Batman Characters done Kiddie style
Owwwwwwwww
I had an interesting trip to the ER last night.
Woke up in the middle of the night, in extreme pain. My upper left side of my back.
Tried to deal with it for an hour or so, but then it just got worse. Like bent over wimpering like a baby worse at one point ;)
Fortunately, I was able to call some good friends of mine that live nearby. After they drove me to the ER, I was not able to drive myself, it turned out to be a kidney stone. First time for that, and a unique experience let me tell you.
Very painful until they pumped me full of some pain medication or another.
The pain reliever IV completely dulled the pain for the duration of the experience. After coming back home and resting for 6 more hours, I awoke to only a dull pain in my side as if I had done alot of sit-ups the night before.
Hopefully the episode is over now. I read a little bit online, and not really sure what in my diet may have caused it as the categories of cause are so broad and my diet has generally been very consistent. Perhaps it was added stress recently or something as well that contributed.
Lesson's learned, have some good friends on speed dial, ER IV pain medication can be a wonderful thing, and Kidneys are not something to be trifled with.
• Darla from works' Chihuahua, Frankie, Youtube video. Darla just got a new Mac Laptop with iMovie.
New Comic Picks for 8/6/08
DETECTIVE COMICS #847 RIP $2.99
FINAL CRISIS #3 (OF 7) $3.99
MANHUNTER #33 $2.99
NIGHTWING #147 RIP $2.99
ROBIN #176 RIP $2.99
SUPERGIRL #32 $2.99
TOR #4 (OF 6) $2.99
TRINITY #10 $2.99
FX #6 (OF 6) $3.99
Paris Hilton responds to McCain's Campaign Ad.
Not bad.
McCain shouldn't pick fights with celebrities... It's not a fight he's likely to win...
It ain't a jet pack but...
• Toyota Winglet. Now that's pretty cool. Click below, watch the videos. Want.
Mobile internet
• Listened to a two hour Mobile Web Application Panel (scroll to the bottom and watch the full "Ustream" video) Very interesting talk. But I think there is a sea change that they haven't quite got their arms around yet.
Rambling follows:
There is alot of talk about building businesses online. But IMHO the mobile web is not a business platform, it's a relationship platform. Monetizing relationships is very tricky. The moment you start to monetize relationships is the very moment that the people in the relationships you mediate monetarily begin work on moving you out of that mediating and monetized role. People don't like middlemen "taking a cut".
It's eaiser to be a middleman in a physical situation. You can control the land and the objects involved in the activities people are participating in together. Online however, all those middleman things that can be controlled are virtual and unlimited and the very nature of the internet makes it a point to point, a to b system. A to B to C systems, where B is the middleman, just aren't practical in the long term, they fight against the very fundemental nature of the network.
Blogging about blogging
• Put up the August blog page today. Looking at last months, I think July 2008 was one of my lightest blogging months since I've started this activity.
Twitter continues to take up the majority of my blogging energies. Doesn't really matter either way really.
Every one has a blog now. And the majority of the personal ones are no longer very interesting unless you are already interested in the person writing them. There's a finite number of personal blogs a person is going to follow generally 6 to 12 a week I imagine.
RSS feeds make following the big category killer topic blogs easy enough to follow more than that. But those are more information streams than an actual sense of following.
Organizing
• Did a little Hard drive organizing today. I really need to beef up overcoming loss aversion so that I can delete more. Alot of the stuff cluttering my harddrives are probably unnecessary on any practical level since it can be faster just to re download alot of it rather than categorize and store it.
Be a happy person
I've posted this before but today I found myself rereading this article from a 2006 August issue of WIRED:
Prozac can't fix everything. Harvard psych professor Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, suggests several other ways to brighten your life.
»Indulge in small pleasures. Sure, a trip to the Bahamas is fun, but the thrill wears off quickly. Fill your days with little doses of sugar, fat, sex, exercise, family, and friends and you'll be content.
»Lower your cortisol level. The happiest people have the lowest levels of cortisol, a stress hormone that raises blood pressure and weakens the immune system. Cut the stress - more yoga, less road rage - and you'll cut your cortisol production.
»Eat the same foods. You'll get more pleasure from consistently eating what you enjoy than from eating different foods just for variety's sake.
»Give up the rat race. Once people have food, shelter, and clothing, their happiness curve flattens out. The extra effort to earn a six- or seven-figure salary has a low ROI.
»Don't reproduce. People are happier when napping or watching television than when taking care of kids.
»Settle down. Deep, satisfying relationships enhance the immune system. Tying the knot may add four years to a woman's life and eight years to a man's.
Newish computers
Mostly have the two new computers set-up now. I'm actively trying to resist installing anything I don't absolutely need, and I'm trying to use no-install portable programs whereever possible to fight program cruft.
All for now
All for now, maybe more upbeat or link blogging later. Or maybe not, y'never know with these sorts of things :)
I got alot in my head, just alot of it's not suited to the blog right now. harumph.
Wonder Woman Animated Trailer
Click to watch the video at Yahoo.
The trailer ends with "Some heros are made, and some are born" implying that Wonder Woman was born to be a hero. But she was also literally made from clay and given life by the Olympian Gods... so um I hate to be a fanboy here, but Wonder Woman was sort of "made" to be a hero.
Other than that, still hard to tell. I've never really read a Wonder Woman solo comic that I thought was spectacular, so I'm not sure how a solo animated adventure will fare either. The DCU Direct to DVDs have been so much better than the Marvel ones though, so I'm looking forward to seeing what they pull off.
