When You Make the Cover of Time

The shark has been jumped.

John Battelle calls it.

John Battelle's Searchblog: When You Make the Cover of Time

the Data Fortress, a steel-encased hard drive that can hold up to 640 GB and is completely fire-, water-, impact-, earthquake-, and ninja-proof. It can withstand heat up up to 1550 degrees Fahrenheit for about 30 minutes and looks like a great way to keep backup data safe and sound in deluge, mudslide, and fire-prone areas

The Data Fortress - Gizmodo

So what is it, do you want be transparent about what you are doing or do you want to be opaque? How come the Time interviewer doesn’t say “hey, you just said you don’t want to confuse anyone and now you are saying you do? What’s up with that?”.

Jeff Nolan has the same consistency issues I have with regard to Google making claims about best practice business ideas and yet working in a different direction.

This is a clean example. If a business is transparent, it means we can see what they're doing, what they're going to do it, and why they're going to win. In Google's case, this is -- or was -- totally possible. They've lost some of the karma and mindshare, but previously if they had said "we're going to take over video distribution, with the intent to roll out IPTV"... IPTV companies would fold. Maybe not that directly, even.

But with Southwest, JetBlue, NetFlix, etc: you get a pretty solid idea of what they're up to, how they make decisions, and even how they operate. The Southwest business model is very well documented and they haven't really deviated from it in their 30 profitable years. They win because they're in the better position, with better technology, more reasonable decision makers, and an appreciation for what it takes to own their space. I don't get that confidence, as much, from Google, and I certainly can't deduce which of the directions (people have sussed out) they are going to take (except, most likely "all of them"). Are they aiming to be The Internet Connection? The Advertising Sales company to all media? The Distributed Operating System/Application Platform? Yes.

Venture Chronicles

Maybe I was the ideal person for the job, seeing as I was not distracted by issues that would have troubled the common fan, such as how faithful/unfaithful the film was to its previous incarnations. (None of which are faithful to each other, so I’m told.) Unlike the majority of viewers, I would be able to evaluate the film according to what it attempted to be—the drollest of droll outer space comedies, what Mel Brooks’ Spaceballs would have been had it been funny and made by the Brits. More to the point, however, I believe my ignorance also allowed me to see something in the film that I never expected to discover, something that may have escaped everyone’s attention until now. In short, I think I have discovered nothing less than The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Gospel.

Ford Prefect as Lord and Saviour? It is an interesting interpretation; the nice thing about cultural criticism is that it doesn't matter if Douglas Adams was even a Christian.

explore faith : Focus on Film - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

While I don't use the handle that much anymore, I decided to search for some images based on my long time online name: Corvis. Here's what I found.

Looking through my logs... that's my dog!

Thoughts from the Oasis amidst the Corn: February 2005

The system called SNAP (SNAil-based data transfer Protocol(, uses biological carriers, and, for the first time, taking advantages of the unique merits of the wheel for data transfer.

קצה - RIM - Ami Ben-Bassat's Blog

Two passenger planes of Macedonia's national carrier MAT were stacked above Skopje airport until a pack of stray dogs could be cleared from the runway to let them land safely, officials said Thursday.

Oddly Enough News Article | Reuters.com

The Trader, realizing he would have another valuable trading tool if hypothesis held true, graciously funded my research into this theory. For a month I did nothing but read back issues of fashion rags and the Wall Street Journal. I developed what I call a flesh gradient; it’s a measure of the amount of skin showing in proportion to the woman’s torso. I charted both the historical measures of the flesh gradient (as determined by back issues of Vogue, Elle, In Style, Cosmopolitan, and other fashion magazines) and the corresponding historical measures of market strength (as determined by the Dow Jones, S&P 500, and the NASDAQ 100).

Long or Short Capital » The Down Low on Low Cut: Cleavage Hypothesis

While taking a break from updating his World of Warcraft server Ross turned me on to wankr. With a little more AJAX I think this could be fundable.

Venture Chronicles

wankr will be a place for web 2.0 people to gather together in one humongous circlejerk so they can masturbate each other into a sticky frenzy over useless, meaningless bullshit.

If you're an idiot VC who is willing to throw money at any website that features the words "collaborative", "social", "tagging" or "AJAX", then please get in touch with us at: wankr@flat3.org. Please set the subject to "I have more money than sense".

wankr beta - collaborative masturbation network