Shanti’s Dispatches

Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert (aka “Ted Hitler”) tackle the blogosphere in this hilarious video clip.

Originally aired 2/16/05.

Are we back in the year 2000 or something?

Reuters:

The New York Times Co. on Thursday said it will buy online information portal About.com for $410 million from publisher Primedia Inc. as it looks for new ways to build advertising revenue over the Internet.

Primedia bought About.com for $690 million in stock in late 2000, as it worked to meld its traditional publishing business with online media. But the publisher struggled to steer About.com through the Internet downturn and noted on Thursday that the portal is “completely distinct” from its other Web sites.

Full article here.

A Swedish BitTorrent site has posted the legal threats they have received by dumbass US companies seeking to export US laws abroad.

The threats, and counter-threats:

Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2004 18:21:43 -0100 (GMT)
From: anakata
To: KMWLAW@flash.net
Subject: Re: Unauthorized Use of DreamWorks SKG Properties

On Mon, 23 Aug 2004 KMWLAW@flash.net wrote:

> Dennis L. Wilson, Esq.
> KEATS McFARLAND & WILSON, LLP
> 9720 Wilshire Blvd., Penthouse Suite
> Beverly Hills, CA 90212
> Tel: (310) 248-3830
> Fax: (310) 860-0363
>
>
> August 23, 2004
>
>
> VIA ELECTRONIC MAIL
> AND U.S. MAIL
>
> ThePirateBay.org
> Box 1206
> Stockholm 11479
> SWEDEN
>
> tracker-40-aa-5f-03-412675c8@prq.to
>
> Re: Unauthorized Use of DreamWorks SKG Properties
> http://www.thepiratebay.org
>
> To Whom It May Concern:
>
> This letter is being written to you on behalf of our
> client, DreamWorks SKG (hereinafter ^”DreamWorks^‘).
> DreamWorks is the exclusive owner of all copyright,
> trademark and other intellectual property rights in
> and to the ^”Shrek 2^‘ motion picture. No one is
> authorized to copy, reproduce, distribute, or
> otherwise use the ^”Shrek 2^‘ motion picture without
> the express written permission of DreamWorks.
[Ö]
> As you may be aware, Internet Service Providers can
> be held liable if they do not respond to claims of
> infringement pursuant to the requirements of the
> Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). In
> accordance with the DMCA, we request your assistance
> in the removal of infringements of the ^”Shrek 2^‘
> motion picture from this web site and any other sites
> for which you act as an Internet Service Provider.
> We further declare under penalty of perjury that we
> are authorized to act on behalf of DreamWorks and
> that the information in this letter is accurate.
> Please contact me immediately to discuss this matter
> further.

As you may or may not be aware, Sweden is not a state in the United States
of America. Sweden is a country in northern Europe.
Unless you figured it out by now, US law does not apply here.
For your information, no Swedish law is being violated.

Please be assured that any further contact with us, regardless of medium,
will result in
a) a suit being filed for harassment
b) a formal complaint lodged with the bar of your legal counsel, for
sending frivolous legal threats.

It is the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are fucking morons, and
that you should please go sodomize yourself with retractable batons.

Please also note that your e-mail and letter will be published in full on
http://www.thepiratebay.org.

Go fuck yourself.

Polite as usual,
anakata

My favorite part is the “rectrable batons”… You gotta love those Swedes Always polite in the face of moronic US copyright hegemony.

Link courtesy of Serafini.

By the time you read this, Ed’s little one will probably be born.

But right now, as of 7:29 PM on Friday, 2/11/05, it appears Ed Adkins is blogging about his wife going into contractions.

Here’s the first post, and the second post.

Good luck, Ed & Heidi!

(Footnote: Ed and I met at gnomedex this last year. He literally had me laughing so hard (when we weren’t supposed to be) during one of the presentations that I nearly pissed my pants. You can check out some of his standup appearances (downloadable) here.)

Popdex is back up. Luckily, the hackers were not of the lets-delete-this-site’s-hard-drive variety.

Google Maps dissected

How much does a Science Fiction writer make? The answer: not much (but you probably already knew that).

Jeremy Zawodny talks to the Google employee who was recently fired for being somewhat critical of his new employer on his blog.

Merlin Mann on the cult of productivity sweeping the ‘Net right now. Just realized he’s also author of the incredibly funny 5ives website - Merlin’s Lists of Five Things.

VentureBlog on the RSS space

In case you’ve been living in a cave the last few days, yes it appears Ask Jeeves has acquired Bloglines.

CNet launching a web-based RSS/News Aggregator, Newsburst? Appears so…

ACM interviews the creator of the Smalltalk programming language (Smalltalk is supposed to be, like the grand-daddy of OOP)

FeedDemon 1.5 is live - this is the RSS reader software I use. (haven’t quite upgraded to 1.5 just yet, but the betas have been excellent)

A little late, but iFilm has the Super Bowl ads in case you missed them.

Wizbang has the scoop on the not-shown “too hot for TV” second Go Daddy ad

Study finds that Smart people tend to crack under pressure

37 Signals, the creators of the the exceptional Basecamp project management web-app, have some advice over on their blog, Signal vs. Noise.

They recommend not writing functional specs. I agree completely.

Jason Fried says:

We talk a lot about our ìGetting Realî process at the Building of Basecamp workshops (next one to be announced shortly ó sign up for the mailing list at the bottom of the sidebar to be notified).

Getting Real is all about starting from the user interface and customer experience and then building out. Visual design first, programming second. The more traditional process is starting from the abstract (documentation, diagrams, charts, etc.), coding a skeleton app, and then homing in on the real by finishing it up with an interface. We think thatís backwards.

Over the next few weeks Iíll be writing more about our Getting Real process, but I wanted to jump in by first talking about step 1Ö

Read the full article here.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the GTD (Getting Things Done) method suffers from the all-too-familiar shortcomings of diets, personal accounting regimens, and any system whereby you become “hyper-aware” of your situation.

This is not a knock on the system - just an observation.

When everything is going fine, sure, the system works incredibly well. When things begin to fall apart, obviously, you are not actually practicing GTD at that point. So you could say it’s not the GTD system that is at fault, it’s you. But that’s the case with just about any “system” out there.

The key is finding something that you will actually stick with, or come back to eventually.

Anyway, after becoming so incredibly Hyper-Aware of how much stuff I had to do… it just became incredibly overwhelming. It’s much too easy when going through life in non-GTD mode. You are blithely unaware of your commitments and to-dos. It’s only when you make an effort to get back into integrity that you realize where you’ve been slacking off and not Getting Things Done.

The problem is… for me, sometimes I need to take a bit of a break from it all before I can go back and get into the swing of things. I won’t look at my to-do lists when I come home. I’ll just veg out in front of the TV or take a nap… anything to avoid the thought of so much responsibility.

Anyway, let this be a word to the wise: GTD is not for the faint-hearted.

The same goes with just about any such “system” that you’d like to implement in your life. Whether it be a new exercise regimen, financial budgetary Jiu-Jitsu, or what have you.

I don’t think you can create from suffering, pain, misery, stress, etc. You first have to get yourself to a place where you are comfortable in your surroundings, and can really see the possibility of your end game.

Know that you will still slip back into that place where you see no possibility… but that is only a temporary state.

You will not know when the state of incredible, seemingly effortless productivity will come back to you. You could be out for a morning jog. You could be driving your car back to the office after a nice lunch outside in the sun. You’ll just never know - but it will come back to you.

When that happens, the GTD system (or any system that focuses hyper-intention on a situation), will be there, ready for you to take action.

I’ve had friends in the Alcoholics Anonymous work… this all reminds me of a saying they would use: “It works if you work it.”

That’s true of just about any of these systems for improvement out there. The problem, as my tech support friends like to say, is between the keyboard and chair.

Note: this is a mental note to myself as much as it is a useful reminder for anyone reading out there.

It seems my old baby, Popdex.com, has been hacked.

I’m not going to dignify the crackers with a link to the 0wn3d version, though you can find it in the Google cache if you’re really curious.

I didn’t really discuss this much at the time, because I didn’t want a bunch of “blogosphere” attention being drawn to the deal. But I’m no longer the owner/operator of Popdex.

It was acquired by InfoSearch Media in the fall of ‘03, while I was working there. They are more commonly known as Traffic Logic and operate a very large About.com-like content portal, Article Insider.

If you need some quality keyword-based traffic and/or SEO services, I would definitely give them a ring.

Anyway, they are currently publicly traded now, and are seeing quite a bit of volume for a company of their size.

I hope we can get Popdex back online, but depending on how much work will be involved, it may be a while before we can revive the fallen blog index.

Darren Johnson has compiled a “Top 5″ list of insights from his meeting with Warren Buffett.

1. Be Grateful -

There are roughly 6 Billion people in the world. Imagine the worlds biggest lottery where every one of those 6 Billion people was required to draw a ticket. Printed on each ticket were the circumstances in which they would be required to live for the rest of their lives.

Printed on each ticket were the following items:

- Sex
- Race
- Place of Birth (Country, State, City, etc.)
- Type of Government
- Parents names, income levels & occupations
- IQ (a normal distribution, with a 66% chance of your IQ being 100 & a standard deviation of 20)
- Weight, height, eye color, hair color, etc.
- Personality traits, temperment, wit, sense of humor
- Health risks

If you are reading this blog right now, I’m guessing the ticket you drew when you were born wasn’t too bad. The probability of you drawing a ticket that has the favorable circumstances you are in right now is incredibly small (say, 1 in 6 billion). The probability of you being born as your prefereable sex, in the United States, with an average IQ, good health and supportive parents is miniscule.

Warren spent about an hour talking about how grateful we should all be for the circumstances we were born into and for the generous ticket we’ve been offered in life. He said that we should not take it for granted or think that it is the product of something we did - we just drew a lucky ticket. (He also pointed out that his skill of “allocating capital” would be useless if he would have been born in poverty in Bangladesh.)

2. Be Ethical & Fair

Continuing on the analogy above, consider this scenario:

Imagine that you were selected as the one person (out of 6 Billion) to create the systems of the world. This includes the type of government, social programs, tax systems, military systems, job markets, laws, regulations, etc.

The only catch was this: You had to come up with systems that you believed were fair and that you wanted to live with, before you were allowed to look at your ticket.

When Warren talked about this it made me reconsider the definition of ethical behavior - what type of system would you create if you didn’t know what ticket you had drawn? Would you take a different position on some of the programs you are for or against if you were surrounded by a different set of circumstances?

3. Be Trustworthy

This may be a minor point that Mr. Buffett was trying to make, but he told a simple story that affected me greatly. He told of the Founder of the Nebraska Furniture Mart, one of his companies, and how she came from a poor Jewish family and couldn’t read, write or speak English. She was had survived the Holocaust, spent 16 years bringing her family to the U.S. (at $50 per person), and grew the Nebraska Furniture Mart from a $500 initial investment to do $350 Million annually from a single location in Omaha.

She told Warren at one point that the way she evaluated people was simple: She simply asked herself, “Would they hide me?” What a great way to judge your instincts about whether to trust someone or not.

4. Invest in Your Circle of Competence

Warren talked at length about investing within your circle of competence. This applies as much to entrepreneurship as it does to investing in public securities. One thing that continually amazes me is how much discipline Warren has in never letting himself get excited about a deal that he doesn’t understand. He understands his weaknesses, limitations, and the types of businesses that he gets.

He said that it is crucial that people clearly recognize what they don’t understand, and place their effort and energy on businesses or career paths that allow them to bet big on themselves doing something that they do understand. He said that it’s “not so important how big the circle is, but it’s important that you know where the perimeter is, and when you’re outside of it.”

5. Do What You Love

Perhaps the reason that we’ve heard this a million times is that it’s true. Warren talked at length about how excited he is to wake up in the morning and to do what he loves. He talked about how important it is to have the freedom in your life to paint your own canvas any way that you like. He said that many people talk about how they are going to just work at a high-paying job “for a little while” and then go do what they love - he equated that to “saving up sex for old age.” He said to “never do something that doesn’t excite you or that you dislike.”

Not the advice you’d expect from somebody worth over $40 Billion?

I only hope that as I gain success throughout my career that I can mirror the image of humility, charity, intelligence, optimism and justice that Warren Buffett represents.