The journey to this morning’s Winter Farmer’s Market was beautiful, but quite cold. Madison’s Frank Lloyd Wright inspired Monona Terrace never fails to provide an interesting vantage point for the photographer.
The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts)
Act I: The act of buying
When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.
Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author’s Guild, 2002
You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.
Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service, 2007
Great Web 2.0 Video
An Extraordinary VR Journey – The Latest VRMAG
Editorial Director Marco Trezzini, via email:
Since I believe we have created the best issue of VRMAG ever, I’m writing you with the hope you will accept to dedicate 5 minutes of your time to explore our online magazine dedicated to photographic virtual reality exploration of people, places and events around the world. Almost forgot to mention, VRMAG is a no profit publication, with no ads.
This issue features the closed zone of Chernobyl, Wired NextFest in Los Angeles, Cuba’s capital city La Habana, Red square in Moscow, the Palaces where European Royalties lives, New York’s Tribute in light, the island of Cyprus’s Aphrodite beach, Valentino’s exhibit Ara Pacis museum in Rome, the Mayan ruins Chinkultic and Tenam Puente in Mexico, Vienna, the Copenhagen Opera House, Seattle, RedBull AirRace Abu Dhabi ….
For VRMAG showing panoramas of the physical world is not enough,
so we’ll take you to Second Life in order to visit Anshe Chung’s Picture Gallery Dresden, and to DanCoyote’s Full Immersion Hyperformalism and get behind the scenes on the creation of next generation interactive screenshots for the gaming industry, take a visit to an “wellenkreis” an art installation of an endless sine curve in real space …
You will experience the view a sleeping pill has from it’s medicine bottle,
watch the world as a coca cola would do, transport you into a washing machine and feel like your sock. Be a fish and be intrigued by a guy ironing underwater,
enter the head of Hermann’s sculpture, chat with Jonathan livingston, experience a bubble party, feel the thrill of extreme canyoning, and much more …
Visit www.vrmag.org now.
Top 100 Wines – 2007
A dash of the old, a dash of the new – that’s the theme of this year’s Top 100 Wines.
The Chronicle Wine section tastes wine from all over the world, but our Top 100 Wines are a showcase for the most compelling winemaking on the West Coast. We tasted thousands of wines this past year from California, Washington and Oregon. We recommended hundreds. You may recognize some of the lucky 100 from our weekly Wine Selections, but instead of simply choosing the best of what our panels tasted, we sought out a balance between quality, price and innovation – particularly innovation. So while many of our top contenders are familiar names, this year we also kept an eye out for new faces, new locales and new types of wine.
Consider, for example, the Pinot Noir made by Stewart Johnson of Kendric Vineyards in San Anselmo. A few years ago, uttering “Marin County Pinot Noir” would have prompted the same stare as “San Francisco suntan.” Now Marin has proven its potential as a wine region. (No such luck on the San Francisco suntan part.)
Snowblower Zeitgeist, or the Best Urban Snowblower
I’ve manually moved snow for the past 14 years – my entire post UW time in Madison. Always thinking that the act was a bit of exercise until a neighbor mentioned his back difficulties and said “it’s not worth it”.
Last spring’s deluge, a particularly wet and heavy snowstorm, was the impetus to turn over the shovel, fire up my browser and shop for a snowblower.
My first stop was Ariens’ website. Ariens is a classic family owned Wisconsin based firm that manufactures snowblowers and lawn mowers.
Most serious snowblowers, defined as two stage models from the likes of Ariens, John Deere, Honda and Toro among many others are at least 24″ wide (Toro has a 22″ model). That width is a problem for small garages like mine.
Ariens offered a useful 20″ model that featured a multiple speed transmission – perfect for a variety of snow conditions and available at a reasonable price. Conveniently, their website offers online ordering which made it simple for me to enter a bit of information and a few days later the snowblower arrived at my home. Ariens customer service was great, as was their local dealer – Middleton Power Center.
About the snowblower zeitgeist. The owner of a working, somewhat powerful snowblower on a day like today (crunchy, heavy snow) quickly has the opportunity to converse with the neighbors. Typical conversations include:
- “Can I pay you to clear my driveway (no, if I have enough gas and time, I’ll be happy to)
- “My snowblower won’t start.”
- “I attempted to purchase a snowblower yesterday, but just before I said that I’ll take the last one, someone else grabbed it.”
- or, Chaplin moments when a neighbor is somberly pondering the large, heavy pile of snow recently deposited by the City plow in his driveway as I’m clearing another neighbor’s walks and driveway.
There you have it. Living in a cold climate subject to snow, we should never turn away from neighborhood social opportunities. Buy a (two-stage) snowblower.
I would be remiss if I did not point out the powerful prose at work marketing such machines. Arien’s description of their model 624E:
624E Compact
After 9 months of hibernation, this compact monster, has an appetite for the cold and crystallized.
When the white and fluffy flakes begin to fall; the corners of the 24” clearing width begin to salivate. The 120 volt electric start quickly awakens the 6HP Snow King® OHV Engine. You fear nothing! Snow fears this trusted Sno-Thro® midsized monster. Keep the snow afraid and out of your way.
A Glimpse of Pottersville
THE 1946 MOVIE IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE has become a holiday favorite for many Americans. The heart-rending story of George Bailey (played by Jimmy Stewart), who in his hour of despair is vouchsafed a glimpse of what the world would be like if he’d never been born, holds great meaning for many Americans. So does the drama played out between George and his father, Peter, and their professional nemesis, rich old banker Henry Potter (Lionel Barrymore), which provides a vivid look at the dramatic changes that had taken place in American finance in the years leading up to the time the movie was made.
The recent problems in the mortgage market bring the story and its characters to life once again. The Baileys and Old Man Potter disagreed about a number of things, but principally about the credit-worthiness of what Potter calls “the riff-raff,” the average citizens in their home town of Bedford Falls. The Baileys believe they are credit-worthy, and Potter generally does not.
Potter remembers the recent past, when lenders made the rules, insisting on repayment in gold coin or its equivalent, on big down payments and short terms. Most important for middle-class folks, Potter sees residential real estate as illiquid, mediocre collateral. George and Peter Bailey and their Building & Loan envision a future of suburban development, of small down payments and decades to pay. When George looks at the world had he never been born — and sees a vacant field instead of the Bailey Park housing development financed by the Bailey Building & Loan — he is looking at what would have been Pottersville.
A Company is the Sum of its People
Compound this with a very astute tweet by my friend Chris Heuer (another budding author) a couple of weeks back:
Companies don’t really have conversations with customers, their employees do. People talking to people is real, beyond marketing and spin… 10:56 AM November 01, 2007
“The” way vs “a” way (Japan v China dept)
James Fallows offers up an interesting contrast between Japan and China.
Ministers of Silly Walks
Put yourself at Bernanke’s shoes; better yet, get Paulson’s shoes too and combine them: wear Ben’s shoe on the left and Hank’s on the right. The goal is to try and walk a straight and narrow a line for the economy, without embarrassing yourself. I submit that this is, in fact, impossible.
On the one foot, the Fed is getting screamed at to lower interest rates by at least another 200-250 basis points: PIMCO, Greenspan, The Conference Board, every bank and broker in town and abroad – they all demand and expect cheaper money for a variety of reasons, all immediately and extremely mercenary. The bond fund managers are salivating at the potential of capital gains from short and medium treasurys, the banks and brokers need the massive cash bailout to stanch the bloodletting from their toxic paper and real estate portfolios, the businessmen need the consumer to keep spending and Greenspan wishes above all to remain relevant – even in retirement.