Fortunes.

Yesterday's fortune cookie.

Learn Chinese - The Sun Comes Out
tai yaon chu lai
Lucky Numbers 3, 7, 15, 29, 4, 38

"Enjoyed the meal?
Buy one to go too!"

JM: I guess fortune cookie writers are striking too. (But I'm sure some PR flack crossed the picket line.)
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Amazing writing.
Busy worker bee.
24 days.
29 days.

Blog Action Day -- October 15, 2007

Today is Blog Action Day. This first, but hopefully annual, blogebration has lofty goals. Let's get everyone to post about the environment in their field of choice. I'll let the founders explain more:

On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind - the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. Our aim is to get everyone talking towards a better future.

Some notable blogs that commented today:

• Lifehacker did a post on top 10 user-submitted ways to live easier, greener.
• The Official Google Blog writes about how ideas of "small changes, aggregated on a large scale, can bring to people everywhere" work on both topics of environmental change and searching the web.
• Google Finance Blog discusses "The Green Stock Boom" for investors interested in environmentally conscious companies/industries that will benefit from rising oil prices.
• One of my favorite posts of the day, Copyblogger writes on "The Butterfly Effect" and how one action reverberates worldwide, forever.
• Kansas City blogger Mike Swenson writes "...unless we do begin to take all actions large and small to impact the future of our planet in a positive way, nothing else will matter someday. Most especially the economy."

These and 15,000+ other bloggers who have registered to make today a chance for a slight murmur across the blogosphere which, I hope, someday is a fervent yell for the cause of environmental concern. Folks, we got one planet -- it would suck to lose it.

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What I want in this space is a focus on the future of the newspaper industry.

Last Thursday, my friend Ben came in to OP to have a dinner with my folks and I. Among our varied discussions, I postulated "The newspaper industry will be radically different and almost extinct in 15-25 years."

My dad and Ben were not persuaded. They spoke of the tactile sensation of holding a double page spread, photos arrayed in designer layouts, graphics, and the walk down the driveway to to pick up the paper. This makes me sad and nostalgic too, one of my favorite things in the world is a dinosaur.

Unfortunately, these times are a changing. There are several reasons for that, but the simplest, easiest one is this: the cost of a digital medium will continue to go down to almost nil while the cost of newsprint, distribution, and printing will rise. Market forces will simplify this equation for newspaper publishers.

As more people get their news online -- there are fewer and fewer people wanting to deal with the hassle of getting news that, (believe this!) isn't updated on the minute like the CNN and NYT web sites.

Combining that, with as I'm sure most would guess, the fact that print newspapers aren't the most environmentally friendly:

Tyson Miller, director of the Green Press Initiative, said ... “Newsprint consumption is 9.2 million tons per year, and the average amount of that which is recycled material is 32%, so about 6 million tons of virgin fiber is used to make U.S. newsprint per year,” he said. “That’s more virgin fiber than the books, magazine and catalog business combined. So even though they use a lot more recycled content, and print circulation is dropping, the industry as a whole uses a lot of paper. The good news is that the industry has a fairly high recycled fiber use rate.”

Circulation is down, advertising revenue for the print product is down, and the discourse on environment first thinking is going up.

Hasta la vista traditional newspapers.

What will replace newspapers and how will we get our information? Check back Wednesday for my take on the future of media in this country.

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My very little thing I did this weekend was finally organizing my recycling at my apartment. Previously, my system involved me throwing all my plastics/aluminum goods in a trash sack haphazardly taking it to local recycling places when they got too smelly to keep in the kitchen. (At best, and more times than I'm proud of, a nearby dumpster) I think you'll approve of the upgrade.



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Thank you for taking one minute to think about the environment collectively across the blogosphere. If you are so inspired, write something on your blog/facebook note of choice and register with the Blog Action Day folk. Let's just hope we keep the dialog going to October 16 and beyond. Besides, don't you really know what October 15 is?

What "in rainbows" will do to the music industry

So, ok. I think just about everyone I know that I've seen in the past few days has to know how excited I was for today. Why, might you ask? Because today is the day that the music industry is changed forever (and for the better).

It would have been enough had one of my favorite bands, Radiohead, to release a hell of a seventh studio album, but they had to break every economic standard that the music industry has been counting on for the past five decades. In Rainbows stands to do that and more.

"How come I end up where I started?" the band asks in the opening cut "15 Steps." A legitimate question, and it is one record executives will be asking in the upcoming days, months, and years. Techcrunch guru and noted blogger Michael Arrington said:

2007 is turning out to be a terrible year for the music industry. Or rather, a terrible year for the the music labels.

The DRM walls are crumbling. Music CD sales continue to plummet rather alarmingly. Artists like Prince and Nine Inch Nails are flouting their labels and either giving music away or telling their fans to steal it. Another blow earlier this week: Radiohead, which is no longer controlled by their label, Capitol Records, put their new digital album on sale on the Internet for whatever price people want to pay for it.

The economics of recorded music are fairly simple. Marginal production costs are zero: Like software, it doesn’t cost anything to produce another digital copy that is just as good as the original as soon as the first copy exists, and anyone can create those copies (meaning there is perfect competition and zero barriers to entry).

Dorothy and Todo, we're not in Kansas anymore. Gone are the days of record companies holding rule over bands on how, when, and for how much will you make when we generously publish your music and make bank. Radiohead bucks this trend by announcing on their blog 10 days till the albums online only, digital, DRM free release.

Hello everyone.

Well, the new album is finished, and it's coming out in 10 days;

We've called it In Rainbows.

Love from us all.

Jonny

This is directly from the source, completely handled by the band, straight to the consumer. Record industry. It's time to wake up. N.I.N. plans to do the same, and more band will jump on this after they see how successful it is for the band and their fans.

So how is the album? Reviews, as expected, have been glowing.

The Guardian Unlimited gives it five stars:

Witty, romantic, life-affirming: you don't need to be an expert in the minutae of their back catalogue to know that these are not adjectives readily associated with Radiohead. But then, in the years since OK Computer propelled them to superstardom, you could say the same about the phrase "consistent album", yet that's precisely what In Rainbows seems to be. Whatever you paid, it's hard to imagine feeling short-changed.

My friend, and self proclaimed Radiohead addict, Nolan T. Jones said:

It’s a good album. Hell, it’s a fantastic **** album. It does exactly what a Radiohead album has always done—it makes you feel the whole way through. It’s an emotional journey, and it charts new territory for the band. Obviously an initial review of an album means very little—classics grow on us. New things appear in tracks we’ve heard a hundred times and amaze us. Also, in terms of my own words, the mysticism of music is interpretation.

For me? If you like Radiohead, you'll love In Rainbows. It picks up perfectly from where Kid A, Hail to the Chief left off. I'll let the band really say how I feel with the concluding verse from the final cut "Videotape":

No matter what happens now
I won't be afraid
Because I know today has been the most perfect day I've ever seen.

--

Today's M-W quote of the day strikes me as eerily similar to a certain group I've been with for the past few years.

"You get fifteen democrats in a room, and you get twenty opinions.

Senator Patrick Leahy, May 1990"

Hah.

An essay on childhood

From "Mimsy were the Borogoves":

"Neither Paradine nor Jane guessed how much of an effect the contents of the time machine were having on the kids. How could they? Youngsters are instinctive dramatists, for purposes of self-protection. They have not yet fitted themselves to the exigencies – to them partially inexplicable – of a mature world. Moreover, their lives are complicated by human variables. They are told by one person that playing in the mud is permissible, but that, in their excavations, they must not uproot flowers or small trees. Another adult vetoes mud per se. The Ten Commandments are not carved on stone; they vary, and children are helplessly dependent on the caprice of those who give them birth and feed and clothe them. And tyrannize. The wound animal does not resent that benevolent tyranny, for it is an essential part of nature. He is, however, an individualist, and maintains his integrity by a subtle, passive fight.

Under the eyes of an adult he changes. Like an actor on-stage, when he remembers, he strives to please, and also to attract attention to himself. Such attempts are not unknown to maturity. But adults are less obvious – to other adults.

It is difficult to admit that children lack subtlety. Children are different from the mature animal because they think in another way. We can more or less easily pierce the pretenses they set up – but they can do the same to us. Ruthlessly a child can destroy the pretenses of an adult. Iconoclasm is their prerogative.

Foppishness, for example. The amenities of social intercourse, exaggerated not quite to absurdity. The gigolo-

”Such savoir faire! Such punctilious courtesy!” The dowager and the blond young thing are often impressed. Men have less pleasant comments to make. But the child goes to the root of the matter.

”You’re silly!”

How can an immature human understand the complicated system of social relationships? He can’t. To him, an exaggeration of natural courtesy is silly. In his functional structure of life-patterns, it is rococo. He is an egotistic little animal, who cannot visualize himself in the position of another – certainly not an adult. A self-contained, almost perfect natural unit, his wants supplied by others, the child is much like a unicellular creature floating in the blood stream, nutriment carried to him, waste products carried away-

From the standpoint of logic, a child is rather horribly perfect. A baby may be even more perfect, but so alien to an adult that only superficial standards of comparison apply. The thought processes of an infant are completely unimaginable. But babies think, even before birth. In the womb they move and sleep, not entirely through instinct. We are conditioned to react rather peculiarly to the idea that a nearly-viable embryo may think. We are surprised, shocked into laughter, and repelled. Nothing human is alien.

But a baby is not human. An embryo is far less human.

That, perhaps, was why Emma learned more from the toys than did Scott.

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That is why, perhaps, I wish I was still a kid.

I wish I could write like that. But really, how many of us don't want to throw in a discussion on philosophy in the middle of our short stories. That, my friend, takes chops. I first saw this story when I was young, and reading this again now (at the ripe age of 22) blows my mind.

But I'm sorry, I gotta go. I'm off to paint in three dimensions.

Life on September 26.

Hi blog,

Long time no see. My bad. I take responsibility. I've been busy.

Work is going great. I am learning so much.

KU Football is rocking.

I gave a presentation yesterday on Web 2.0. Let me know if you want to learn more.

I'll be back, I promise.

Who I am, maybe, after escaping the raccoons...

My personalDNA Report

Free food for you, possibly

Hi world,

I know how much all of you love free food and me. We are talking about two great things, if you asked me about it.

I want to buy you dinner. But like all things free, this one comes with a catch.

Here's the deal...I am currently a salesman for the University Daily Kansan this summer. I am looking for clients and you, my lovelies, are my best connections to highly qualified prospects.

If you connect me with a decision maker at any business, organization, cause, or whatever that might want to advertise, I'm buying dinner.

Here are some talking points for your conversation (As I'm sure you all know).

Advertising in the Kansan is...
...the best way to reach the student body.
...read by the 10,000 students who take summer classes.
...easy, quick, and painless. I will guide a prospective client in creating the ad, placing it, and helping determine effectiveness.

Please feel free to let me know if anything comes to mind.