Author: BillSaysThis

Just saw a commercial for Kicking & Screaming and I am confused. Is Will Ferrell so hot a commodity that Robert Duvall isn’t even worth a mention?

Cake PHP framework: “Cake is a framework for PHP, based on Rails.” This is definitely a project I want to see flourish, I think Rails is terrific but then again I do have four years invested in PHP.

How is it that The Political Teen got accepted into Google News and Dave’s Scripting News can’t? Google Bloggers, let’s see some answers.

Does it strike anyone else as odd that Jon Udell seems to tag all his articles to del.icio.us? Is this going to be the next egoboo? I hope not. Jon’s stuff is usually interesting but the next 10,000 people to have the same idea are less likely to achieve the same quality, and then there’s the ticking time bomb of spammers.

Jon Carroll’s recent column in the SF Chronic, Unitarian Jihad, is really funny. Carroll says something important, that I want to say, but with far more humor than I’d be able to muster. George Packer pointed out last year that The Revolution Will Not Be Blogged and I agree with him yet for the time being this is our platform. Some good examples: Matt’s rant yesterday on privacy, Garret’s bit today on Frist, Karl’s on the bankruptcy bill expose the lies from the other direction.

These movie set photos of Brandon Routh as Clark Kent don’t do much to get me excited about the upcoming Superman Returns flick. Did Routh get cast because he looks so much like a young Christopher Reeve? Given that the film is directed by Bryan Singer, should be plenty good. Just sayin’.

For the first time in a long time, with the possible exception of the most recent Mustang, I’ve seen an affordable American car that looks hot: the Saturn SKY. Should show up at dealerships next (2006) Spring as a 2007 model year offering with a price tag around $25,000. One question, at least for now, is: How come none of the pictures feature the convertible top closed? All the websites have the same half dozen photos. Not claiming this sporty coupe will compete on performance or overall with ‘low end’ Mercedes, BMW or Toyota models (does the Solara convertible fit here?) but if General Motors can produce a decent quality car this should sell.

NBC is putting Third Watch to sleep after a few more episodes but from the promos being run you’d think this was the proud end of the second coming of, oh, Hill Street Blues rather than the nearly invisible petering out of just another mediocre series. Not to be singling out this show or even NBC because almost every network does it for every show that lasts more than two seasons. And the more times the suits do this, the more annoyed I get.

I’ve watched the first two shows of new PBS globalization newsmagazine Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria and can only say that the idea is great but the execution is less so. Zakaria, who’s come across as a pretty intelligent guy on The Daily Show and elsewhere, isn’t (yet) a graceful presence and since his background is writing that’s not too surprising. But it does take focus away from the content, the way a nail on blackboard does.

The second and possibly more significant problem is that the producers are trying to shove too much into their 23 minutes. PBS may not have commercials but that doesn’t mean shows get the whole time slot. Instead of covering three or four topics splitting the time 2/3-1/3 on two should work much better, especially if the two pieces covered different aspects of one larger issue. The video report last week on the American woman living in the Russian wilderness, for instance, was kind of sweet and not the usual reporting but, seriously, who cares?

Like I said, Zakaria is an intelligent guy. That’s a big plus. He knows how to present complex stories and (in two episodes) has brought in other smart people to discuss and present the material. The story selection is also very topical. Probably the team needs to get a few shows under their belts and work through this stuff. Good start.

Who is Kristi Leskinen and why haven’t I seen her before?

Sun Microsystems stock is trading down a couple of cents as I write this, at $4 even, so I guess this means Wall Street is not expecting much from today’s after the close quarterly earnings announcement. Sure those were the days of the dot com bubble but I remember when the share price was surging almost every day. If the change was only 25 or 30 cents we’d be grumbling after work. Up, up and split, up, up and split. The stock was $48/share on Sep. 1, 1998, the day NetDynamics offically became part of Sun and peaked at a (split-adjusted) $514.56 exactly two years later. Just reminiscing, not likely to ever see such things again. Except that investor psychology does get caught up in itself and so maybe we will.

I installed WordPress at work today and man, that was unbelievably easy; can’t point you to it since it’s behind the firewall. They claim to have a Blogger import tool, the instructions are pretty straightforward, and if it doesn’t choke on my 3,000+ entries this might be the time I change systems. We’ll see.

I don’t know what they did but Comcast made some change in their broadband net access system and instead of improving speed we are now seeing constant service interruptions. Swell.

Full-time Report: Juventus 0 – 0 Liverpool. Liverpool played to a scoreless draw at Juventus in the second game of their home and home Champions League series without Steven Gerrard but with the surprise early returns of Xabi Alonso and Djibrille Cisse from injury. Since they won the first game last week 2-1, the Reds make it to the Final Four. Of course, the competition doesn’t get any easier because the next opponent is Chelsea (best team in the EPL by far this season) in two weeks and then the week after, the day before my birthday–what a wonderful birthday present winning this match up would be! But W00T for today, because almost nobody expected us to come home from Italy with this result.

Rising Son, part of the post-television relaunch of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, is an example of how publishers force (mainly) science fiction writers to fit stories into a marketable, brand name universe to get published. Sometimes, despite the formulas required by such structure, the author’s talents and ideas meld with the characters and we get a story well told. S.D. Perry made that happen with this book, published in early 2003.

Set in the months after his father Benjamin returned to life with the Prophets, Jake Sisko has found an ancient prophecy and then been tossed an enormous distance into the Gamma Quadrant. Nearly dead, Jake’s crippled ship is snatched out of space by the crew of a freebooting ship named the Even Odds. Perry has put together an interesting, diverse crew and framed the situation in the GQ that doesn’t ignore the Dominion but doesn’t put them in an overwhelming position.

Overall, this reminds me of the New Frontier books by Peter David, at least the first few of which (I think I stopped reading after nine or ten) at least were decent. Other than Jake, and an ‘guest starring’ appearance by a long lost Bajoran religious leader, all the characters are new with this title, all the settings are new. I have no doubt Paramount and Perry would’ve been happy to make this into more than one book but for whatever reason that didn’t happen.

recommended

My two buddies: Garret gets a digital smooch from CJR Daily while Karl gets an even bigger one from Jay Rosen’s PressThink. Rosen especially is on target with his suggestion to stop inviting the same usual suspects over and over.

File under small world: A fellow MeFite is in media all over the world as he is the next groom after Charles to be wed at Windsor Guildhall.

Economic View: A Tax Increase That Bush Didn’t Mention: “By about 2008, Mr. Burman estimates, the alternative minimum tax will generate so much money that it would be cheaper to abolish the regular income tax.” Basically, this will turn into another way the Bush Crew will put one over on the masses by claiming to do otherwise will raise taxes. ReformAMT, indeed.

HyperHistory Online, a very interesting experiment in UI design and definitely something not possible before the web; one wonders if this presentation style could be (easily) applied to a bigger data set (I’m guessing) like Wikipedia. Not that there isn’t a useful quantity of information already at HHO with more added regularly but one wonders if merging would be in the best interests of both projects. Wikipedia doesn’t have an article on the project so after hitting the big orange Publish Post I think I’ll break my cherry by adding one. [via paradox1x]

Later: Well, let’s just say that for all the pages of helpful material and tutorials, creating a (good) new page on Wikipedia is less than easy. Searching again, however, shows that several pages already mention this site and so I didn’t go futher than adding it to the Themed Timelines page.

The New York Times has a brief interview with Steve Van Zandt, The Boss: A Rocker Redux, about how many years in the music business it took him to understand the money side. Probably would have been different, taken less time, if his (amazingly underrated!) solo records had sold better.