Shanti’s Dispatches

Someone at work just old me about Visor, a very cool application by the same guy who developed Quicksilver.

Set a hot-key (a la Quicksilver), which when pressed will trigger a Terminal.app console window to pop down from the top of the screen. When finished, use the same hot-key to pop the terminal window back up. (would be nice if ESC worked here, like QuickSilver, but I can’t complain =))

I’m not really plugged into the gaming industry. But everyone is always throwing around stats bout how big it is… bigger than the film industry, etc.

World of Warcraft, a single MMORPG developed and operated by Blizzard Entertainment, has more than 8 million subscribers (as reported by the BBC).

Ok — let’s run a few numbers.

8,000,000 subscribers x $14.99 per month (rounded up to $15 to keep the numbers simple) = $120 million per month

$120 million x 12 months = $1.4 BILLION per year

I don’t know about you… but that’s a lot of freaking dough. Of course they have to pay an army of developers & graphic artists, bust still!

A friend back in the day first turned me onto DJ Z-Trip’s Uneasy Listening which was an instaclassic.

Since then I’ve picked up his Live in LA 2003 album off the pink moo, which also rocks the house. (mod+1 on tracks 7,8 & 11)

But the other day I finally hit the motherload — a huge stash of Z-Trip downloads (free for downloading). This guy has my $35+ concert ticket any day of the week.

Great list of anecdotes on the trials and tribulations here, from some very well-known success stories.

The first on Abraham Lincoln:

As a young man, Abraham Lincoln went to war a captain and returned a private. Afterwards, he was a failure as a businessman. As a lawyer in Springfield, he was too impractical and temperamental to be a success. He turned to politics and was defeated in his first try for the legislature, again defeated in his first attempt to be nominated for congress, defeated in his application to be commissioner of the General Land Office, defeated in the senatorial election of 1854, defeated in his efforts for the vice-presidency in 1856, and defeated in the senatorial election of 1858. At about that time, he wrote in a letter to a friend, “I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth.”

Another one of my favorite quotes:

“If you want to succeed, double your rate of failure.” ~ Thomas J. Watson.

I’ve been debugging some email deliverability issues with Hotmail. It appears that Hotmail is losing mail — as in, not delivering it to either your inbox or spam folder. This is a really baaaad idea due to the all-too-real possibility of false positives.

In some parts of the web right now some very bright people are making much ado about the Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web.

I was chatting with someone yesterday who is a proponent of some of these ideas & the “open social graph” thing — i.e. somehow export (or grab) your data off MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

It’s all very well and nice in theory, but I am hard-pressed to find scenarios where this would actually benefit me all that much. Is it a case of the classic Solution in search of a Problem?

I try has hard as possible not to log into MySpace anymoere, maybe checking my account once every few months. I am on The Facebook and check it once every few days, though I don’t understand why people love messaging each other through a third-party app when they could email each other directly.

Vested Interests

Too many of the proponents of these “open source social graphs”, etc. have vested interests. Microsoft? Facebook competitors? Your startup that seeks to leverage Facebook’s user data? (they didn’t just grow it on trees, y’know — they got 25+ million people to add it)

Doomsday Scenario

If it was revealed that Facebook were in fact some sinister plot by the CIA to gather all of today’s youths social hookup information. (Skylar is hooking up with Alexis but she’s also two-timing him with Aiden)

There would be a big uproar and then a bunch of people might migrate to the newest coolest social network, until it was later revealed they ended up being just as evil too.

This is exactly the plot in Southpark’s Something Wall-Mart This Way Comes episode, well worth a looksy for all the Wal-Mart haters out there. It’s incredible how 100% right-on the Southpark creators are on so many targets they choose to lampoon.

These are some of the best songs on the album, and this guy has made a YouTube video of how to play them on the piano!

Interlude:

Exitlude:

His DVDs are available for sale at PlayPianoDVD.com.