Bob Morris @ Oct 10th 2006 13:06 - Category: Unfiled ;
Bolton: U.S. won’t bend to North Korean bullying
This is a kid with a peashooter against an adult with an AK - and the adult complains of being bullied? This is especially hypocritical when the adult is known to be a vicious, nasty bully himself.
Bob Morris @ Oct 10th 2006 11:51 - Category: Unfiled ;
The contest was to write a caption for that massively-blogged photo of Bush and Foley.
Bob Morris @ Oct 10th 2006 09:34 - Category: Uncategorized Tags: Sri Lanka;
I received a strange and disturbing report today from one of my contacts: Eyewitnesses say that Tamil civilians in the North of Sri Lanka have attacked the LTTE (Tamil Tigers).
Bob Morris @ Oct 10th 2006 06:45 - Category: Unfiled ;
Internet Explorer 7.0 will roll out this week. It’s supposed to pop up a screen asking if you want to install it, but to be safe, disable Automatic Updates (Start/Control Panel/Automatic Updates) and wait a few weeks.
That way, tens of millions will do the final beta-testing for you. If/when it looks like there’s no monster bugs lurking, then you can install it - and disable all your IE6 add-ins before doing so (Tools/Manage Add-Ons.)
FireFox is still smarter, more intuitive and more secure. However IE 7 does have nice features.
Bob Morris @ Oct 10th 2006 00:23 - Category: Unfiled ;
The Socialist party in Belgium has now edged ahead of the hard right anti-immigrant party, due primarily to immigrants voting socialist. In fact, many of the elected socialists are Muslim immigrants.
This from a conservative blog which sees Europe turning sharply leftward with anti-immigrant parties gaining strength in rural areas while socialists and the Left will continue to build support in the cities.
While I don’t know this for certain, it would seem a Muslim socialist would almost by definition be secular and not hardcore religious.
Bob Morris @ Oct 10th 2006 00:15 - Category: Unfiled ;
Tower Records, the once mighty record chain, is bankrupt and will be sold off in pieces. Podcasting News says Digital music, Wal-Mart kill Tower Records but it was Amazon too. The easy search at Amazon makes buying easy. You can’t do that thumbing through the CD racks at a store
Unless, maybe, they have listening stations, a huge selection, knowledgeable staff, live shows, and lots of CDs displayed with written description of what the music is about - then the store can attract customers in a big way.
Amoeba Music, who has stores in Berkeley, San Francisco, and Hollywood, does this. The Hollywood store is mammoth, it’s at least the size of the nearby Virgin mega-store. Amoeba has everything, all genres, too. Plus, they sell used CDs, and buy them at reasonable prices.
Since Amoeba opened the Hollywood store, two venerable long-time music stores, Aron’s and Rhino, have gone out of business. Both were great stores, however the deciding factor was, I think, that Amoeba Hollywood physically has 10-20 times more CDs for sale than the others did.
So, a store like Amoeba will survive because they understand digital, offer a huge selection, and make the stores fun to be in. But long-run, Podcasting News is right. Digital killed the record store. Sure, Wal-Mart may sell a zillion CDs, but they have limited selection of manicured mainstream music. You’ll not find death metal, or Steve Roach, or probably not even Steve Earle there. For a genuinely huge selection from all manner of artists and genres, you need an Amazon, an Amoeba, or digital.
Plus, with digital and the web, you can release your own music. Steve Roach, while not well-known to the general public, has released dozens of CDs in the ambient, tribal, electronic, and soundscape genres. His website lists them, and I bet he makes a pretty good living off the site too.
The Net (and digital) allows all sorts of creativity to flourish that might not have existed at all without it.
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