Category: Personal

Or not, perhaps. On the one hand George Mitchell says his role as chairman is not the usual strategic leadership but instead will be focusing on winning back dissafected shareholders. On the other, still-standing CEO Michael Eisner says he “would address shareholder concerns by focusing ‘100 per cent of my time’ on rebuilding earnings at the company.” Eisner further said Eisner said: “It allows me and the rest of the management more time to run the operations of the company and give up a lot of the responsibility I had as chairman.”

If you ask me, these two statements of their respective responsibilities are in pretty direct conflict with each other and I believe the Disney PR staffers better get the leadership talking from the same script ASAP. The two will have a tough enough time getting shareholder confidence back as it is without this kind of muck-up.

To the Mercury News, in regards to a Letter printed today written by an election field inspector:

Janis Lassner writes from an informed but biased position regarding her experience with Tuesday’s voting process. While I would not question her veracity, she conflates her limited anecdotal experience with statistically valid evidence. Further, her observation that using the machines is “fast, fun and easy” for many voters in no way addresses the security issues that many researchers have found.

I do agree with Ms. Lassner that the Mercury News should expand coverage of this issue, though, and would especially appreciate articles that look at open source projects like (http://open-vote.org/) Open Vote Foundation. and (http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/) Open Voting Consortium. Only when the voting public can examine the source code and hardware designs used in our voting machines will we truly be able to trust the results.

I was drinking a Big Brew this morning when Foo pointed me to SMALL, MEDIUM, LARGE but fortunately there was no coffee in my mouth when the squirrel started ranting.

VC Ed Sim says something I’ve been saying ever since I started writing software: Build your business around customers. [via the Scoblemeister]

You have to love the cluelessness that corporate directors sometimes show. Enron, Adelphia and Tyco were simply out of control, illegal to the core. While no one is accusing Michael Eisner of malfesance, the man who has ruled the Mouse Kingdom for 20 years is certainly not making many friends lately. The Roberts family have made a so-far inadequate takeover offer and Walt’s nephew Roy has been campaigning to SaveDisney.

What did the board do today as part of today’s annual meeting? After 43% of the shareholders withheld their votes to re-elect Eisner to the board, they took away his Chairman title. Who did they give it to in his place? This is where the entertainment comes in, stay with me. Former US Senator George Mitchell. And why is this funny? Because over 20% of the shareholders also withheld their votes from Mitchell! (Hint: if the independent board members actually had a clue, they would have brough in someone new from outside the empire.)

I’m listening to a live recording of Bruce and the E Streeters doing a beautiful version of Jimmy Cliff’s Many Rivers to Cross right now, very calming and uplifting! Slow, gospel backup vocals, Danny providing the primary instrumental backing on organ and some very subtle guitar strumming but not nearly long enough at 3:37

Plenty of people have written and spoken out against the current proprietary electronic voting systems. During the Morning Coffee Walk we discussed the idea of an open source system to replace Diebold et al. However, others have fortunately had the idea and gone to work already:

Open Vote Foundation and Open Voting Consortium (related Wired News article).

Campaign Desk: What You See is Not What You Get, very interesting behind the scenes at major newspaper websites.

I usually avoid stuff like this page like the plague but what the heck, it’s so sweet and funny.

I you live in one of the 10 states holding primaries today, don’t not vote. That is, VOTE. Don’t use lame excuses, especially the one that begins “My vote doesn’t matter because…” Too many people felt that way in 2000 and look where we are. Think of this as a practice run for November, to ensure that GWB is shown the door.

I had the privilege of escorting a first time voter to the polls this morning. She was a little nervous about the whole thing but afterwards admitted that her fears were groundless–she even thanked me for the encouragement. Very nice.

VOTE!

Pandora’s Star: Peter F. Hamilton, who wrote what I consider one of the masterworks of recent science fiction, starts a new series of books. I’m referring to The Night’s Dawn Trilogy, which sprawled over 3400 pages or so and was actually published in America in six separate volumes. Looks like I missed a standalone novel last year but since it’s now out in paperback…

11 for 11, what a fucking triumph for Peter Jackson and Crew! As the ceremony went on, with win after win, I started wondering if the voters were giving the team lots of lesser awards to make up for losing the important ones. But no, Return of the King went all the way!

To wrap up, Vivian and I were correct on Best Picture, Director and Actress, Vivian got Sean Penn and I had Baldwin and Zellwegger. Nicely done show, Billy Crystal was really funny, though I’d like to know where the rock music went, even a bad Aerosmith tune like their Armeggedon thing from a few years ago. Two from Cold Mountain was one too many but can’t quibble with another RotK trophy. Anyone else think they had to put a gun to Jackson’s head to get him into the suit and tie?

My nephew Brad and his band A Second Attempt have a decent new website. They rock.

I’m working on a small commercial website and running into a few CSS issues which I sure could use a little help corralling, if anyone out there can help.

First, IE doesn’t respect the min-height property. Oh well, one could rant or rave but with little practical application. Scoble suggests a one pixel wide image and it does the job, I suppose, but really violates my sense of (err) propriety. I’d really like to find a CSS-based solution.

Next, when I set the width for a <div> which is only one line long to 100%, the displayed width of the element varies (wildly) depending on the text used. Even though none of the possible texts are anywhere near as long as the linewidth. Why and how do I avoid this? Two examples are <p>[Products]</p> and <p>[Consulting]</p>. Setting the width to a specific pixel count doesn’t have this problem but then I get into a guessing game as to just what number to use. (The CSS is {position: relative; margin: 0; background-color: lightblue; width: 671px; font-size: 75%;}, although the margin: 0 doesn’t really do anything but that’s another story.)

Similarly, if I set <body> to have a width of, say, 685px in the stylesheet and then set another style, used to control a <div>, to the exact same number, how come the body is wider than the div? (I can tell by setting a border around the body). Strangely, a different div using a different style but also with width set to that same number, does stretch to the size of <body>.

Thanks for the assist, Rob.

Forgot to record last year’s but did get the 2001 picks from Viv and me. How did those stack up against the results? We both got Halle Berry for Actress and Jennifer Connolly for Supporting Actress and Vivian was right on Ron Howard, not great. Nonetheless, here we go again:

Award	Bill’s Picks	Vivian’s Picks
Best Picture	Lord of the Rings: Return of the King	Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
Actor	Bill Murray	Sean Penn
Actress	Charlize Theron	Charlize Theron
Supporting Actor	Alec Baldwin	Benicio Del Toro
Supporting Actress	Renee Zellweger	Holly Hunter
Director	Peter Jackson	Peter Jackson

After waiting out the lines at crowds at the box office, plus not wanting to fork over hard cash for two tickets, we finally saw last year’s Best Film Oscar winner the night before its successor is named. Seems like we made the right choice: Chicago was enjoyable but not great.

The quality of the singing and dancing by stars Catherine Zeta-Jones, Renee Zellweger and Richard Gere was quite good, certainly better than I expected. Then again, as Rebecca Traister points out in an article in today’s Times, most actors start out doing these kinds of productions in high school and college, and Zeta-Jones did quite a bit of work on the London stage before hitting Hollywood. Zellweger was a powerful beam of light during her productions numbers, more so for me than the others. Props to John C. Riley for his role as Zellweger’s patsy husband and his performance in the Mr. Cellophane number and to Queen Latifah for a very smart job too.

But the performances were not the problem. I can be a big fan of movie musicals–I love a ton of the older ones, though have rarely found much to enjoy post-1970 or so–but here I felt like director (and choreographer) Rob Marshall spent all his energy figuring out how to stage the song and dance bits and not enough on creating a compelling movie. I never could connect with Zeta-Jones’ Velma and Gere’s lawyer was nearly repellant. Perhaps if Marshall had stayed closer to the simplicity imposed by the constraints of a theater and avoided using so much glitz and flash, I would have liked the movie better; as produced, I felt like I was watching a concert with some thin wrappers.

recommended–good but not great

Get ready for The Sporanos Season Five: An interview with David Chase.

I suppose that there aren’t too many films made for domestic consumption in New Zealand but I was still very surprised to see that Scarfies won Best Film, Actress, Supporting Actor, Screenplay and Director in 2000. I mean, it was decent, enjoyable, but not that much more than what I’d expect from a low budget Hollywood effort based on the same ideas.

Which are: college students squat in an empty house and discover a big bunch of pot plants growing in the basement, they sell the pot and party with the proceeds only to have the tough guy who set up the plants show up wanting his money. The kids are able to trap him in the now-empty growing room but then have to decide what comes next.

The return of the grower, the turning point in the film, comes about a third of the way in; a classic transition from Act 1 to Act 2. The tone of the movie completely changes too, from college party comedy, to psychological thriller. A Lord of the Flies type situation develops among the five students while the tough ass tries to use whatever divisive chatter he can come up with. That only pushes the students deeper into aggression though.

Overall I found the direction and editing not really up to the quality of even your average art house film; the lack of consistent tone and pace also lost several points as did the subpar production (poor lighting and even sound). Nice first effort for young writer/director Robert Sarkies but he did not go net.

not recommended

The Saudis are our friends, right?