Surprise, surprise…the owner of HD.net sees big things for TVs in the future…In 3 years the mainstream TV will be 70″ and cost less than $1500. In 5 years, it could be 100″ for $2500 dollars . Yes, you will make room for it. You will redesign the family room or your bedroom to make room.. Hmm…

Don’t get me wrong…I very much enjoy reading Mark Cuban’s blog. He’s got a great vision. But I dunno about that What’s Next…Watch TV deal. A good point is made in the comments section; Mark talks about the PC and the Internet being old news now…but TV is even older, and more boring! Definitely worth reading, though.

Note: I don’t have an XBox 360 (or and XBox Live acct). But I do enjoy a nice game of multiplayer Halo/Halo 2, with my buddies, on the XBox. So this is pretty sweet: Halo 3 Multiplayer to Be Released May 16. Nice highlights/interview video included. (And I’ll never have Vista on this machine, so no Games for Windows Live; but Team Fortress Classic rocks!

I’m still working through a fascinating Washington Post article from this past Sunday. Back in January, the Post tried a test…they took a world-renowned violinist, had him enter the L’Enfant Plaza Metro station posing as a street performer, toss some coins into his (Stradivarius) case, and play some of the world’s finest music for about 45 minutes. And secretly videotaped the passers-by. Who mostly ignored him. A really well-thought out piece of journalism, discussing beauty and it’s context, perception, and expectation.

thanks to Susan Crawford for the link!

Found two great posts on this already, so I don’t even really have to talk about Tim O’Reilly’s Draft Bloggers Code of Conduct. Matt from 37 Signals nails it with Living In The City, and Dave Slusher agrees and expounds in Code of Conduct.
So…I’ll stick with these guys, and take a pass. Thanks anyway, Tim. Good books, though!

UPDATE: props to Tim on the lessons learned so far. He’s trying to get to a good place, I think. I’m not sure I agree with all of it, but I hear what he’s saying.

Finally! After much anguish over whether or not I had a proper design, I finally just sat down, stopped worrying, and put some code in place. It’s a first pass, but it’s finished. I guess part of the downside of doing database administration for a living is that I have difficulty letting loose a schema that I know isn’t quite right; for example, the present db relationships allow for scenarios that aren’t handled well. But I’ve been on the failure is cheap mantra at work lately, so I should practice what I preach. This iteration is good enough to use, and implementing it has already started more creative juices flowing. Always good!

So now, my reading list is classic db-backended, rather than being a through-the-web edited page of dynamic HTML. (which actually had to be kept in sync on two pages…the readinglist and the home page. Ick.)
That’s just the start, as I’ll be storing and managing many other types of media in the same tables; podcasts, movies, and Myth-recorded shows, etc. It should help me stay more up to date with my ratings, encourage me to write reviews (and allow others to comment on them), and eventually allow a collaborative recommendation/filtering sorta thingie. Very Web 2.0…w00t.

I had to whack the formatting on the readinglist page a bit, unfortunately, but that’s temporary. A nice one-page monthly hierarchy will take a bit more data wrangling that I was up for today. But that’s all in the view…the db has the right data now. Joy!

UPDATE: as always, if you’re interested, the source is in my repository. Code is here, templates here. (Present revision is 176, in case I’ve moved forward.) Comments are welcome!

Wow…last Thursday’s (2007-04-05) New York Time’s op-ed, Spinning Into Oblivion is a great high-level examination of the changes in the music industry over the past 15 or so years, and label’s persistently wrong-headed responses. The authors, who started an independent music store in NYC back in 1993, describe how technology changed the way their customers acted, and how music industry response to those changes burnt down the village in order to save it.

The major labels wanted to kill the single. Instead they killed the album. The association wanted to kill Napster. Instead it killed the compact disc. And today it’s not just record stores that are in trouble, but the labels themselves, now belatedly embracing the Internet revolution without having quite figured out how to make it pay.

Great read. Thanks to Kevin Meyerson for posting the link to pho!

I’m working on a longer post on this, but I haven’t blogged in a few days. The more I read, the more I listen to, the more I think about it, the more I want good, kick-ass defense. Prohibition doesn’t work: doesn’t work for keeping bombs off of airplanes, doesn’t work for DRMing media, doesn’t work for keeping people safe from getting killed here, or in far away places. There isn’t even a good body of work on these things EVER working…false positives cause problems, the protocols aren’t robust in the face of failure, and the unintended consequences can be dire.

Play defense. I don’t want Total Information Awareness, I want nanotech. Not Active Denial Systems, friggin’ force fields. Working cyronics. Limb regeneration. Virtual reality. Let’s protect people, not enslave them. Let’s make things safer by making our society harder to hurt, not by taking away anything that can possibly do damage. Enhance safety; don’t restrict rights. Increase transparency, don’t reduce it.

About a month ago, Cory Doctorow started releasing as a podcast the audio from the class he’s teaching at USC this semester: Pwned: Is Everyone on Campus a Copyright Criminal? (direct feed link here. If you’re a Cory-fanboy like me, this is like mainlining his brain…Cory lecturing and discussing copyright with a smart and interesting group of undergrads. It’s awesome. There were some minor format issues with the RSS feed early on, but things are golden now, and I’m loving it. I’ve listened to #s 9 and 10, and I’m heading back to start at the beginning now.

Another thing…I /really/ dig the format. Which might be a surprise, since it’s (from what I can tell) a single microphone near Cory; his volume is perfect, but the remainder of the class varies from soft to barely audible. But believe it or not, I kinda like it…I’ve been listening to more audio recently that has a sort of ambient feel (recordings I grab at cons, for example), and I really find it pleasant to listen to. It’s very natural. Sure…I miss some of the student comments if I’m not listening carefully, but I grok the context, and you can always rewind if you need to. I don’t know if the format is intentional or not (to give the students some pseudonymity, perhaps), but thumbs up from me either way.

Here is the blip.tv page, and direct MP3 download link for the March 24th episode.

I share info on appliance replacements, my Nokia 770, ubiquitous Net access, some thoughts on my site organization, how I read RSS feeds, and p2p reputation. It’s a mess, like the inside of my head often is!

(sorry for traffic noise)

Here is the blip.tv page, and direct MP3 download link for the March 23rd episode.

I worship at the altar of Bruce Sterling today, with a bit of a rant on his SXSW closing speech. Awesome stuff. Broadband eats everything, baby!

• Bruce Sterling’s blog
• Bruce Sterling’s SXSW speech
• Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks wiki