Kerim's Lifelog

The opinion spectrometer seems like a great idea! http://is.gd/Mil

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 11:27:38 GMT

The opinion spectrometer seems like a great idea! http://is.gd/Mil

Twice a year I have to use Windoze to file my grades. I face these days with ...

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 06:15:56 GMT

Twice a year I have to use Windoze to file my grades. I face these days with dread.

Those scanners which check your temperature at Taipei's airport. They don't w...

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 05:14:49 GMT

Those scanners which check your temperature at Taipei's airport. They don't work. http://is.gd/IDl

Its facinating how much the conservative movement ows its success to Viguerie...

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 04:51:58 GMT

Its facinating how much the conservative movement ows its success to Viguerie's direct mailing operations.

FriendFeed Room Directory

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 03:12:37 GMT

http://ffrd.appspot.com/

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research - JVWR - http://jvwresearch.org

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 03:06:18 GMT

http://jvwresearch.org/

I Met The Walrus

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 02:46:00 GMT

In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon's hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview about peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it. Using the original interview recording as the soundtrack, director Josh Raskin has woven a visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon's every word in a cascading flood of multipronged animation. Raskin marries the terrifyingly genius pen work of James Braithwaite with masterful digital illustration by Alex Kurina, resulting in a spell-binding vessel for Lennon's boundless wit, and timeless message.

CHAINSAW MAID

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 02:45:57 GMT

THEY are coming for your FLESH and BLOOD!Now the last hope of the family rests on a sexy faithful MAID! The most brutal clay-animation you've ever seen! ご主人様と少女を守るため、メイドさんがチェーンソーでゾンビ軍団に立ち向かう！ポップな色彩の中で展開する衝撃の人体破壊内臓グチャドロのウルトラ・スプラッター・ゴア・クレイアニメ！邦題：チェーンソー・メイド

Indian newspapers suck. No two papers will agree on the most basic facts of a...

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 02:10:28 GMT

Indian newspapers suck. No two papers will agree on the most basic facts of a story. Seems that fact checking is nonexistant...

A 14 year old boy interviews John Lennon - beautifully animated years later. ...

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 01:54:23 GMT

A 14 year old boy interviews John Lennon - beautifully animated years later. http://is.gd/Ma1

Taiwan blogs | Taiwanderful - The Taiwan Guide

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 00:57:33 GMT

http://www.taiwanderful.net/taiwan-blogs

Cool! Evernote clipper now has tag-auto completion. The Evernote folks are am...

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 00:00:54 GMT

Cool! Evernote clipper now has tag-auto completion. The Evernote folks are amazing.

"Mad Men" is good TV (the director used to write for the Sopranos). Very Sirk...

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 15:52:44 GMT

"Mad Men" is good TV (the director used to write for the Sopranos). Very Sirkian.

Hundreds of Thousands of Laptops Lost at U.S. Airports Annually

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 14:20:38 GMT

This is a weird statistic:

Some of the largest and medium-sized U.S. airports report close to 637,000 laptops lost each year, according to the Ponemon Institute survey released Monday. Laptops are most commonly lost at security checkpoints, according to the survey. Close to 10,278 laptops are reported lost every week at 36 of the largest U.S. airports, and 65 percent of those laptops are not reclaimed, the survey said. Around 2,000 laptops are recorded lost at the medium-sized airports, and 69 percent are not reclaimed. Travelers seem to lack confidence that they will recover lost laptops. About 77 percent of people surveyed said they had no hope of recovering a lost laptop at the airport, with 16 percent saying they wouldn't do anything if they lost their laptop during business travel. About 53 percent said that laptops contain confidential company information, with 65 percent taking no steps to protect the information.

I don't know how to generalize that to a total number of lost laptops in the U.S.; let's call it 750,000. At $1,000 per laptop -- a very conservative estimate -- that's $750 million in lost laptops annually. Most are lost at security checkpoints, and I'm sure the numbers went up considerably since those checkpoints got more annoying after 9/11. There aren't a lot of real numbers about the costs of increased airport security. We pay in time, in anxiety, in inconvenience. But we also pay in goods. TSA employees steal out of suitcases. And opportunists steal hundreds of millions of dollars of laptops annually.

Wolf Totem: A Novel

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 11:57:39 GMT

(27 March 2008)

**An epic Chinese tale in the vein of _The Last Emperor_, Wolf Totem depicts the dying culture of the Mongols-the ancestors of the Mongol hordes who at one time terrorized the world-and the parallel extinction of the animal they believe to be sacred: the fierce and otherworldly Mongolian wolf** >
Published under a pen name, _Wolf Totem_ was a phenomenon in China, breaking all sales records there and earning the distinction of being the second most read book after Mao's little red book. There has been much international excitement too-to date, rights have been sold in thirteen countries. Wolf Totem is set in 1960s China-the time of the Great Leap Forward, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. >
Searching for spirituality, Beijing intellectual Chen Zhen travels to the pristine grasslands of Inner Mongolia to live among the nomadic Mongols-a proud, brave, and ancient race of people who coexist in perfect harmony with their unspeakably beautiful but cruel natural surroundings. Their philosophy of maintaining a balance with nature is the ground stone of their religion, a kind of cult of the wolf. >
The fierce wolves that haunt the steppes of the unforgiving grassland searching for food are locked with the nomads in a profoundly spiritual battle for survival-a life-and-death dance that has gone on between them for thousands of years. The Mongols believe that the wolf is a great and worthy foe that they are divinely instructed to contend with, but also to worship and to learn from. Chen's own encounters with the otherworldly wolves awake a latent primitive instinct in him, and his fascination with them blossoms into obsession, then reverence. >
After many years, the peace is shattered with the arrival of Chen's kinfolk, Han Chinese, sent from the cities to bring modernity to the grasslands. They immediately launch a campaign to exterminate the wolves, sending the balance that has been maintained with religious dedication for thousands of years into a spiral leading to extinction-first the wolves, then the Mongol culture, finally the land. As a result of the eradication of the wolves, rats become a plague and wild sheep graze until the meadows turn to dust. Mongolian dust storms glide over Beijing, sometimes blocking out the moon. >
Part period epic, part fable for modern days, _Wolf Totem_ is a stinging social commentary on the dangers of China's overaccelerated economic growth as well as a fascinating immersion into the heart of Chinese culture.

ScribbleLive...live blogging

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 11:52:38 GMT

http://www.scribblelive.com/

George Packer on Hitchens' Waterboarding Experience

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 10:40:00 GMT

Over at The New Yorker, George Packer on Christopher Hitchens' account of being waterboarded:

The new essay about his voluntary waterboarding in the woods of North Carolina has the usual degree of exhibitionism, but it also shows why Hitchens’s weaknesses are almost inextricable from his strengths. As in the piece about the soldier, he describes his sensations and emotions with admirable exactness; he strikes a balance between self-presentation and self-effacement (always apologizing for mentioning his own feelings); he moves easily between the particular moment and the larger concern. And as with the earlier essay, he pulls up short. “If waterboarding does not constitute torture,” Hitchens concludes when it’s over, citing Lincoln on slavery, “then there is no such thing as torture.” This is powerful testimony, but another writer would have made it his starting point. The fact that waterboarding is torture forces certain questions on anyone who has supported the war on terror as vehemently as Hitchens and who, in the past, has been far quicker to criticize its critics than its excesses. This is the beginning of an argument with himself—not craven self-denunciation, but a genuine effort to draw out and clarify the hard trade-offs and ideological confusions that the past years have forced on all thinking people. But instead of having this argument, Hitchens places it in the mouths of others: the waterboarders on one side, a specialist in interrogation named Malcolm Nance on the other. In other words, he gets out of the way just when one would want him to interrogate himself. Here is exactly the limit to Hitchens the essayist.

Oh, I remember what I was going to do (he says an hour later).

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 05:24:43 GMT

Oh, I remember what I was going to do (he says an hour later).

Identi.ca: May A Million Twitters Bloom

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 05:10:09 GMT

Shared by kerim
http://hewitt.controlezvous.ca/kerim/

Marshall Kirkpatrick via ReadWriteWeb shared by 19 people

Identi.ca is a new microblogging service that launched today - but it's not just another also-ran. The service is an Open Source, CreativeCommons framework for a distributed network of federated microblog

Óshlíð: A Visual Ethnography of Fear

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 04:43:08 GMT

http://www.oshlid.info/about_e.htm

Academia Sinica wants me to save boarding passes to prove I went to New Zeala...

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 03:18:39 GMT

Academia Sinica wants me to save boarding passes to prove I went to New Zealand. I asked if I couldn't just send them my travel photos?

Maps and Driving Directions - Everything Queenstown

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 01:12:27 GMT

http://www.everythingqueenstown.com/maps/

Cruising Milford Sound : Milford Sound Boat Tours & Milford Sound Nature Cruises

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 00:46:44 GMT

http://www.cruizemilford.co.nz/

The Profit Equation of Twitter-style Messages

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 23:25:34 GMT

Nate Westheimer’s piece “How Twitter Could Be Worth A Billion In A Year” got me thinking.

Nate’s idea was that instead of using @Name to indicate a reply, you could p Name $amount. Instead of reply to Joe, Pay Joe some $.

Nate is right: *is* a good idea, but it already exists. It was implemented by TextPayMe , founded in late 05, and acquired by Amazon in 2006. It’s still running, in fact. See it here.

Even with the backing of Amazon, this good idea never came to be worth a billion dollars. Maybe it’s that because that market size of “I-owe-you-$5-but-I-don’t-have-cash-to-pay-you-now” just isn’t that big. Or maybe transaction fees killed the convenience.

There’s Gotta Be a Pony in there Somewhere

Nick O’Neill expanded on the thought

“Micropayments are currently an area of rising importance. While I may not text my friends $0.50, I could easily see an API tying into Twitter to transfer small payments for a virtual gift or obtaining access to a premium blog post.”

Buying something you want? Now we’re getting somewhere! I seldom need to pay you back $5, but I do often spend $5. I buy physical goods via amazon, and digital goods via iTunes.

Money is the new message

Today’s Twitter users are about sending status updates. That’s great, it’s fun, etc., and the mobile + web integration is powerful.

But what if you could somehow sell those “messages”?

Wait a minute: iTunes has already sold more than 4B songs. Could a twitter-style service enable people to buy and sell all types of digital goods from each other? A sort of distributed iTunes store where you can sell what you want?

[all types of files]

Since d (direct) messages are private and only visible to the direct recipient, it’s not a far leap to imagine a $ (premium) message type that requires payment to access.

In other words, don’t just send a message that you’d like some money (i.e. tipit), but put access controls on the messages so that they are only available to paying subscribers.

Now, what if these ($) premium messages could be a bit more flexible? What if they even supported attachments, so people could send –and thereby sell–pictures, videos, even mp3s or pdfs, directly. Talk about a lightweight model to sell and buy content!

And then, to extend the messaging “platform” even further, users should be able to publish or subscribe via SMS, web and EMAIL. Email?? Sure, it’s the easiest way attach a picture and send via your iphone. For security purposes, perhaps the email don’t contain all the content, but is used as a notification + publication channel.

Messaging + Commerce + Community = Profitability

I could also imagine artists setting up whole streams or flows where most or all the messages are premium. It becomes, in a sense, a fan club. Instead of buying messages in an a-la-carte fashion, just subscribe by the month. Commerce comes on the heels of value and is closely followed by profitability. If there’s no real value, there won’t be any commerce.

What kind of person has the value to attract large numbers of fans willing to pay them money for messages and photos?

Celebrities are one obvious market.

Let Lindey snap her own pics of herself in the club and scoop all the tabloids. Get it direct and in real time.

Sports personalities are also interesting.

Imagine a bad call on your favorite player. He hits the bench, and busts out a short message on his phone. A few moments later, all his subscribing fans erupt in unison with a chant. Who wouldn’t pay a few bucks a month to be part of that?

And what about musicians?

Maybe their music is freely included to subscribers of their messages . And while few musicians can manage to faithfully write blog posts,it’s easy to bang out an SMS to your fans and show some love! Attach a pic from the tour bus, of today’s rehearsal, or alternate album cover art.

This casual / personal / raw message format couldn’t be easier for the stars to do, and holds great value to fans.

Bring Fans Together

After you get a coveted message from a star, what do you want to do next? You want to tell other people!

So give the subscribers–the fans–private rooms, aka “Owners Circles” where they can discuss and share with each other. Give them a robust commenting solution–something with threaded comments, and spam protection and ignore-this-annoying-user controls, and give them an inbox where they can see replies to their comments.

The stars will want to hang out in these subscriber’s room, too, since it’s a concentration of their true fans.

Someone has to be First

Bringing payments and commerce to twitter-style messaging is too large to ignore. You just can’t have mobile + web this close together and ignore the great potent for fans and stars with lightweight commerce.

There’s zero doubt that a secure commerce solution would enhance the value of Twitter and chart a path to profitability. But will one of the big web properties (Myspace, Facebook , Amazon, Microsoft) get into this new messaging plus commerce plus community space before Twitter?

I don’t know what those other guys are doing, but I do know Assetbar is going to that party, and we’re rolling with Chris Onstad’s Achewood Web Comic, TIME’s Magazines No. 1 Graphic Novel for 2007.

Connecting Fans and Stars? Oh yeah. It’s time to turn this motha OUT.

New Zealand Car Rentals,NZ Rental Cars and Auto Vehicle Hire- Ace Rental Cars New Zealand

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:17:27 GMT

http://www.acerentalcars.co.nz/

Jucy | New Zealand Car Rentals and Campervan Hire | Jucy Deals Sweet Prices

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:16:59 GMT

http://www.jucy.co.nz/

new zealand car rental deals - apex® car hire auckland wellington christchurch nelson queenstown | airport rental cars

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:16:59 GMT

http://www.nzrentalcar.co.nz/cars.aspx?vm=0&vid=1159

Free New Zealand Itinerary Planning and Touring Routes New Zealand Travel Reservations New Zealand Self Drive Tours

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:14:18 GMT

http://www.nzonline.org.nz/itinerariesstandard.htm#7Day

AA Maps - New Zealand Maps, Addresses, Businesses, Driving Directions

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:14:01 GMT

http://maps.aa.co.nz/

Travel Guide Queenstown Southern Lakes New Zealand Accommodation Adventure Milford Sound Queenstown NZ

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:14:01 GMT

http://www.nzonline.org.nz/queenstownindex.htm

Tour Itinerary - South Island Adventure

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:13:38 GMT

http://www.iexplore.com/itinerary/result/57110

North/South Island Itineraries: Self Drive Campervan/Rental Car Holidays

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:13:25 GMT

http://www.economy.co.nz/travel-guide/index.html

Queenstown forum: NZ South Island Honeymoon 10 day itinerary - Help?? - TripAdvisor

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:13:13 GMT

http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g255122-i730-k572089-NZ_South_Island_Honeymoon_10_day_itinerary_Help-Queenstown_South_Island.html

Neurophilosophy : 5 amazing feats of animal intelligence

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:01:17 GMT

http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2008/06/5_amazing_feats_of_animal_intelligence.php

How smart is the octopus? - By Carl Zimmer - Slate Magazine

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:01:10 GMT

http://www.slate.com/id/2192211/

The Minimalist - 101 Picnic Dishes to Make in 20 Minutes - List - NYTimes.com

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:38:37 GMT

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/dining/02mini.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Easiest way to start a blog http://kerim.posterous.com/

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 06:12:00 GMT

Easiest way to start a blog http://kerim.posterous.com/

Being very strict with myself, packing for a long trip but not bringing one o...

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:33:08 GMT

Being very strict with myself, packing for a long trip but not bringing one ounce of unecessary stuff.

Pulpos: suave inteligencia (Octopus intelligence)

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:05:10 GMT

La inteligencia de los pulpos se somete a tres pruebas: plasticidad, versatilidad y flexibilidad. El estímulo es su presa favorita, el cangrejo.

Elephant Part 2: Happy Tests Mirror

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:05:06 GMT

On her third day of mirror exposure, Happy engages in repetitive trunk raises while backing in and out of the mirror location. This behavior appears to be a form of mirror-testing, say researchers.