Must. Not. Flip. Out. It's not like I don't have plenty of other shit to get on top of. Gahhh!  7:06:50 PM  (comments [])   

There's a lot of kvetching about 3D animation vs. traditional "paper" animation in this piece. This of course, completely misses the point that even more traditional cel-oriented animation now uses computerization behinds the scenes in a very deep way.

I don't know as much about the details of animation as I would like to, but I suspect that for even the more traditional 2D approach, it's still better and faster to get away from actually painting on cels and taking photographs, and instead use the computer to composite.  6:52:16 PM  (comments [])   

On a recent United Airlines flight from Chicago to Washington, D.C., Capt. David Miller stepped from the cockpit to speak to his passengers, who included Tribune reporter Jeff Zeleny. Here is what the captain said.

I fly often enough to take some comfort in this piece.  11:52:59 AM  (comments [])   

I've been fascinated to watch the transmutation of the Internet over the '90s. During the early nineties, I was on a mailing list called "com-priv" that I thought was going to about privacy issues, but really turned out to be about Internet privatization issues. There was a lot of stuff about how the 'net was really managed, arguments about whether or not you could use the Internet for commerce (if the phrase "acceptable use policy" means anything to you, give yourself 10 extra Internet points), a discussion of the CIX -- the first commercial friendly exchange point, etc, etc. It was fascinating, and I expect that this book will have more of the same kind of information.

Of course, all of the arguments back then seem kind of charming, since they were pre-spam and pre-popup ads. Back then, the most ominous threat (to those of us who still thoughts terms of college, anyway) was the advent of "eternal september".

The Salon article is somewhat alarmist, and I think with reason -- the current ICANN structure has yet to demonstrate that it doesn't just care about a small portion of its constituency, and it lacks any kind of accountability. Still, the specific examples Leonard gives are underwhelming. Having the ICANN be supportive of trademark protection is clearly good; the alternative isn't some kind of libertarian utopia, it's just anarchist mishmash. And he claims the resistance to .biz, .info, etc was an attempt to keep the .com space lucrative. Again, this is just stupid. Because the seven new domains are just stupid. We should be moving away from top level domains like that; they aren't human friendly, and expecting humans to remember that as part of branding is just naive. So if seven different organizations own the same "name" on seven different TLDs, you haven't struck a blow for disruptive technology -- you've just made it harder to find things.

Let's be honest, Google is an order of magnitude more useful than DNS in helping people find websites.  10:17:15 AM  (comments [])