Cafe Bucky

With Microsoft’s “Evolve” campaign, the company toys with new heights of arrogance.

If you haven’t seen the posters & other ads, the campaign depicts a bunch of Office 97-using office workers. They all have dinosaur heads, and the ad suggests that they “evolve”. As in, “upgrade now”.

Maybe I didn’t take Sales & Marketing 101, but it seems to me that depicting your own customers as dinosaurs because they bought your product a while back is something of an insult. Making fun of your competitors is cool (Apple does this all the time, with posters such as “Redmond, start your photocopiers”). Giving your competitors customers a reason to switch is cool. But insulting your own customers, because they haven’t upgraded?

So what Microsoft is saying is “we have so much market share, and control so many of you, that we can peg you as dinosaurs, and that will prod you into giving us even more money!” Wow.

I do hope that Microsoft customers respond to the arrogance of the “Evolve” campaign. They can take a stroll over to OpenOffice.org.

I would like to do a cool sidebar of my ongoing media inputs. But since I don’t have that yet, I’ll toss off a few mentions while I am waiting for my boiling ravioli to achieve edible status…

Chasing Amy is a potty-mouthed romp, and a lot of fun. Ben Affleck is great in this one, and I was very charmed by Joey Lauren Adams. Of course now I gotta go back and check out Clerks, Mallrats, Dogma, and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (I realize that maybe some of this stuff might suck, but that’s always the risk - that maybe you got exposed to someone’s best work, and that everything after that is a bit of a letdown)

“Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by Philip K. Dick. The inspiration for Blade Runner. One thing I notice about SciFi is how outdated certain situations have become over time (like going to a payphone). On the other hand, it’s wonderfully futuristic for a book put out in 1968. I keep noticing the differences between book and movie (SF vs LA, for one). The desire for a live animal pet in the book is only hinted at by J.F. Sebastian’s creations in the movie. The best thing about reading the book at this point is that it’s part archeology, part SF, and a good entree into PKD’s works (now I want to read some more of his oeuvre.)

GT4. Best. Driving. Game. (of all time) I’m not much of a gamer, but I used to do many high performance driving schools. This is the closest I can get to being on the track without leaving my house. True story: While going for my Super License on the Seattle track, I misjudged the uphill transitions - my car spun a full 360 without hitting anything - I didn’t panic, and still got a bronze for the lap! I love that they included Suzuka, Sears Point, Circuit de la Sarthe (Le Mans), and, of course, the mighty Nurburgring Nordschleife (btw, back in the real world, the decal on the back of my M3 is the Nurburgring map, which I obtained from the trackside store in 1999 when I went to the European GP - among driving enthusiasts, just being able to go there and stand by the track is a sort of pilgrimage) The sheer variety of cars and tracks is overwhelming, the “feel” is accurate, and it’s truly an immersive experience. Ten Thumbs up.

“You don’t understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it. It was you, Charley.” - from On The Waterfront

“Do you spend time with your family? Good. Because a man that doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man” - from The Godfather

My favorite Brando role would be The Godfather, with Streetcar being a close second. There will never be another.

“You have the right to free speech, as long as, you’re not dumb enough to actually try it” - The Clash

Seen On Lisa Rein’s Radar (this entry not for the kids) - Eric Idle presents … The FCC Song

Catchy Ditty. Won’t ever hit the top 40 though :-)

In the 90’s, I spent some time in San Mateo, CA, working on AOL.Com. What we launched then was something to be proud of. The site would later deteriorate into a pale ghost of itself.

Or should I say a flashing ghost of itself? It became an embarassing
cornucopia of in-house promos and ads. Not something I wanted to be
associated with. For the most part, I was in a semi-retirement mode
from 1998-2003, and somewhat blocked out about the whole AOL.Com
experience.

The site has recently gotten much better. We’re launching 3 channels
today (the 22nd): movies, music, and tv. And I do mean “we”, as I have been
working on this since last December. My big part has been
transforming flash and html mockups of the photo gallery module into
what you’ll see on the site: living, breathing, dynamic, usable,
data-driven, real-world … you get the point (and I’ll reach for a
pint). It’s great to see a lot of content being made easily accesible
from AOL.Com.

I had a hand in a few other modules as well, but my focus has been on
the galleries. It has meant that I have put FlexiPhoto (which is my
personal, doesn’t pay me anything project) on the shelf, but have been
able to at least keep in touch with the idea of photo galleries (and
get paid for it). It’s not an all-singing and dancing module with
keyword searching and more (like FlexiPhoto), but it’s a pretty good
first cut. It should serve pretty well for casual browsing.

I’m too close to the resulting site to give an objective opinion about
it. A weak point is that it is driven by AOLServer and Tcl, as
opposed to Apache and PHP, Perl, and others of that ilk. On the other
hand, what matters most is the user experience. If you have any
feedback on the site, I would love to hear it. There’s a lot of
functionality to explore.

Some entry points:

• movies.channel.aol.com
• music.channel.aol.com
• tv.channel.aol.com
• epg.channel.aol.com

One of my all-time fave sites is imdb.com. More information than you could ever hope to absorb about every movie can be found there. The searching is amazing. My wife and I were able to dredge up a movie based on a vague recollection of where it was shot. I am constantly in awe of this site.

So movies are well covered …

But what about Music?

What qualifies as an Internet Music Database?

Maybe there is something out there that I’m just not aware of, but I doubt it. Amazon.com has a lot of retail information and reviews of music, but it’s not even close to the coverage that imdb.com provides for movies.

What started me thinking about this was a simple example. Take an individual musician, and think of all the work they have done in groups and on their own. Someone like Sting shows up in imdb.com as having been in some movies (Brimstone and Treacle, Dune, Quadrophenia). Over on the music side, there’s his long solo career and work with The Police. Wouldn’t it be great to seamlessly follow a performer through Music space, in the same way we follow an actor, writer, director, etc. through Movies?

So an Internet Music Database should enable you to follow the arc of a musicians career, how they intersected with various bands and recordings at different times, and so on. In the sense that an actor is listed with a movie, a musician is associated with a recording (and by association, lyrics, and links to something like the Apple Music Store)

Go one step further, and think of melding the Movie and Music databases. There’s no compelling reason I can think of to have an arbitrary boundary - almost any movie musical blurs the line as it is.

It’s not hard to imagine adding books and authors into the mix. And other media … The end result becomes a sort of performer information cornucopia.

The user of such a service can really be able to follow someone’s career, no matter what media output is being considered. If they choose to focus on a certain media (such as books by Steve Martin), then that should be easy to navigate,

So what is happening in this space? Are there any grand unified performer/performance databases out theere?

The hilarious machinima series Red Vs. Blue has an excellent Public Service Announcement #5. It takes aim at SCO and the RIAA, without ever having to say so.

Brilliant!

Ok, so my wife and I were watching the MTV Video Music Awards last night, and found ourselves rolling our eyes a lot. Some of this can be attributed to age and profound wisdom, but it’s more accurate to say that we are just being goofy.

In the 80’s, I watched MTV because it was fun, fresh, new, and crazysexycool. In the 00’s, I watch the awards out of a sense of nostalgia, and to see if I can spot any highlights whatsoever in the current crop of so-called “talent”. Coldplay is one of the notable buoys rising over the vast sea of musical vapidity.

About the Britney/Madonna kiss: nice to see that Britney has the guts to do something that would have been daring 15 years ago. Maybe some suburban mommies will freak out and get together a good ‘ol church parking lot Britney CD-burning party. They’ll make the 3 block trek from their McMansions in their Ford Excursions, bottles of charcoal lighter fluid at the ready. Now that the 10 commandments have been scooted in Cracker Courthouse Central, they have a new cause that’s been gift-wrapped for them. An open-mouth shiny bow flashing on their living room screens.

The effective kiss of the year was Tatu on the MTV Movie awards, surrounded by schoolgirls doing the same. Engineered, no doubt, by their psychologist/promoter with a knack for pressing buttons. If Madonna was out to copy that, she simply wasn’t paying attention. Nice to see that she’s in such great shape, though.

The saving grace of the VMAs was seeing Coldplay give a performance which actually had some depth and emotion. Nostalgia alert: l’d take Janet Jackson over Beyonce, Nirvana or Pearl Jam (with or without Neal Young) over Metallica, and Rage Against The Machine over some of the no-talent rappers that are stinking up the stage these days. Would have settled for the Foo Fighters or Queens of The Stone Age (just to see Dave Grohl do something) I miss Kurt Cobain - would have been interesting to see how he would have grown into his 30’s. Would he have sold out and guested with the chihuahua on Taco Bell ads?

Geez, I would have even settled for Courtney Love, circa 1997, planting her fishnet leg on a monitor, screaming her heart out (like I saw her do in her SF Fillmore days).

At least Mary J. Blige has that thing I call “presence”.

It may be that I am not paying enough attention, but it’s time for the musical pendulum to start swinging away from all of the commercial posturing crap and fake emotion. Bring back the Monkees :-)

p.s. updated: “nostalgia for what used to be” to simply “nostalgia”.

p.p.s. (March 29, 2004) Somehow I wiped out the original post - kudos to Google for having a cached version!