todd.tokubo.com

I was looking at a NYT article talking about the HUGE drop in CD sales along with the relatively small uptick in downloaded music.  It also has an amazing chart to go along with it.

So, I keep thinking… In the somewhat underrated movie “Demolition Man“.  The music industry was reduced to simply playing jingles over the radio.  If you take the music industry as a business to it’s logical conclusion with the trend noted above, a reasonable way to monetize music on any big scale is to have it as a marketing pitch (ie. the commerical jingle).  Somewhere along the way, the “art” was lost.

Which then lead me to: I really didn’t think “Demolition Man” was very good, until I went and read Brave New World again.  Then, I read this article titled “Forget Red vs. Blue — It’s the Educated vs. People Easily Fooled by Propaganda“.  (Criticism of this link: no references to the statistics used, so I’m not sure of their validit.  It’s slightly ironic, but the point is well taken.) Basically, I starting thinking that the movie’s dystopia might actually be the most realistic one in my lifetime.   It’s also one of the first movies I can remember with a truly overt product placement (Taco Bell) along with cross promotion commercials (you couldn’t tell if it was a Taco Bell ad or Demolition Man ad), which then goes and spoils the Transformers movie by making them all have to be GM cars.  (yes, I realize the original Transformers TV series was there just to sell more toys)

The article above points out that we’re in a culture of entertainment with politicians who only need to appear sincere.  It sounds like life imitating art, or at least what passes for art today.  We’re entertained by increasingly stupid shows on TV, and our society follows…  What ever happened to art?

Gee maybe my parents were right, Bart Simpson - underachiever, really isn’t a good message for kids.

Can it be true?  4 non-sequel / reboot sci-fi movies this summer.  And they all look worth seeing.  Will Avatar usher in the new age of movies?

Test post. I’m a total geek. I have now linked my blog with my twitter account.

traffic school done. authenticated online. completed test. case dismissed. no wasted Saturday.

This should always be our goal in terms of work.

This article is a great one on the topic of work.  I like the idea that the author start to put climbing the corporate ladder into perspective.  Here is quite possibly the best part of this article.

A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this.

Nor can big business or big government — those idols of the right and the left — reliably secure such work for us. Everyone is rightly concerned about economic growth on the one hand or unemployment and wages on the other, but the character of work doesn’t figure much in political debate. Labor unions address important concerns like workplace safety and family leave, and management looks for greater efficiency, but on the nature of the job itself, the dominant political and economic paradigms are mute. Yet work forms us, and deforms us, with broad public consequences.

stupid online traffic school

Okay.  This is getting just short of absurd.  I now into the 3rd day of trying to get my iTunes library under control.  The original folder size that I started with was somewhere in the neighbor hood of 120 GB of stuff!!!!  Which was in no way correct.

My actual music library was listed as 60 GB, but that included on average of 3 duplicates per song.

So, lessons:  Keep your original source music in different folders somewhere, and don’t EVER point iTunes to the music folder that your original content is stored in because it will simply start mixing it’s own organization system with yours, and since the WORST thing that could happen is that someone might accidentally delete a song you really want, it errors on the side of caution and simply start duplicating things.  UGH.  Scary.

Anyway, I am now on to the 3rd copy and optimize attempt.  Wish me luck…

After a nearly three year experiment, I have decided to go back to a desktop machine at home.

Reasons:

1) My Gateway M8510 was getting really long in the tooth.  When the new entry level desktops are coming out with miles of more performance, it was tough.  Oddly, I could still do 95% of my work on a 3 year old Pentium M 1.73 GHz with 2 GB of DDR.

2) I had last year’s low-end Gateway system sitting in my closet.  A quick peek at Passmark scores showed that even a sad Sempron 2.2 GHz beat the living crap out of my system.  So, I pulled that low end system out of the closet.  Slapped an ATI Radeon X1300 into it (I can already hear webmonkey laughing in the background) and exchanged the 1 GB of DDR2 with 2 GB of DDR2 from my home server and fired it up.

Between me and my brother we had two low-end 18.5″ displays, so I have an expanded desktop for the first time in forever.

Sadly, this system is enormously faster than my crappy Centrino system.  So I am starting to see Intel’s logic in rebranding their ICs going forward.  I also found out what will drive the need for higher speed systems, virtualization.  I’ll start playing around with virtualization and trying to optimize my distributed systems at the same time.

Now, my upgrade bug has started again.

While I’m not a huge fan of MLB, I think it’s fantastic that Boxee now has LIVE content from MLB.com streaming to their front end.  More importantly, you can now use Boxee on your Windows PC.  I’ll be using this shortly.

Along with Hulu Desktop (which incidentally brings my ancient Pentium M 1.73 to a crawl) and a bunch of kiddie front ends using Adobe Air.

It’s almost time to upgrade to support for my next killer app… Flash!!?!?!??!

As of today, broadcast TV in the USA is offically digital.  In an effort to close the “analog hole“, we now get all of our broadcasts coming in lucious 1’s and 0’s.  There’s a really good read (with suprisingly civil comments).

Summary: with digital broadcast TV being seen as one of the ultimate forms of DRM to preserve the broadcast TV business model, TV as a business is now officially in denial.  Much like the newspapers have been for the last 10 years.

What I find interesting is that I would basically agree that TV advertising revenues are basically out of whack, but what happens when they “normalize”.   The biggest victims will be the professional sports leagues and athletes.  Now, I love sports, but I don’t have much love lost for the outrageous salaries of pro athletes.  Wall Street got their come-uppance, and in a couple of years it will be sports’ turn.  The NBA has already started taking steps, they actually DROPPED their salary cap by 10% next year.

So now that the finance guys are no longer paid ungodly sums, and pro athletes are soon to follow, maybe being a professional geek (engineer) is not a bad thing.