The Guardian has an article about movie trailers, which can be the best thing about going to the theatre. Unless it’s for Stealth, Jamie Foxx’s bid at Lou Gosset Jr. post-Oscar failure.
There’s an article in the CSR about an urban planner who says artsy, culturally focused improvements to a city don’t make it all that attractive to the middle class, who keep the place humming. For further good city reading, refer to “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” by Jane Jacobs, which is getting close to 50 years old and is still totally relevant.
Seems the Saudis aren’t quite the monolithic fanatics they’re made out to be. A few, usually younger members of that closed society are agitating for change..somewhat quietly.
The Washington Post has an article about Akihabara, the nerdiest place on earth (in a good way.) Apparently otakus not only visit but live there now, and choke up the streets with the pitter-patter of anime purchasing. I’ve been to Akihabara twice, and it’s plenty nifty, but there’s only so many pink minidisc players and chicks standing on boxes and ranting into megaphones in Japanese(presumably about the great deals to be had at “Crazy Hiro’s Transistor Emporium”)a brotha can take before you have to head to Shibuya and ogle kogai girls. 🙂
And there may be new geek neighbourhoods soon, as apparently India needs European expertise for the jobs that got outsourced from Europe and North America in the first place.
As everyone knows by now, Apple announced yesterday that they’ll be switching to Intel processors in the next year or two. For most users, I’m betting the change will be seamless, and I’m looking forward to owning a Powerbook in a year or two (my G4 still does what I need it to for now) that can dual boot both OS X (which I vastly prefer) and Windows XP for games and other assorted nonsense. Hell, I might even throw in a partition for Linux if I’m feeling especially jaunty.
But while I and a few other Macophiles have taken this change in stride, the true believers don’t seem to know how to take Uncle Steve’s latest move. After extolling the virtues of PowerPC for years, way past the point of any rational discourse, the backpedalling and navel-gazing is sure to reach fever pitch.
One thing I found really amusing is that for all their exclamations of authority and “sources inside Cupertino”, the Mac rumour sites completely dropped the ball on this one. Apple’s been running an Intel version of OS X for five years, and they had no idea. Makes me wonder what else Jobs has up his sleeve in the coming months.
A somewhat fawning but still interesting article about a guy who moved from Bell Labs, the think tank of yore for the computer industry, to the upstart brainbox playground known as Google.
(You have to go through a “please register” screen after the first page, but just click “not in U.S.” to continue to the second page.)
This site is in danger of becoming a “Greatest Hits of the NYT,” simply because I haven’t had a lot of time to read anything else. But that doesn’t stop this article about Silicon Valley’s repeat-offending entrepreneurs from being pretty interesting reading.
The verdict? Not so good.
So I’m doing my evening constitutional and checking out my new digs just off Robson, and I wander into Bang-On, a usually decent sarcastic t-shirt shop on Burrard. They had a series of “world leader” t-shirts, and I asked if I could get one of Richard Nixon. The young lady working there nodded, went off, and got me a picture of Ronald Reagan. Man, that’s pretty bad. Read a book, kids.
There’s a good article on the NYT today about Iraq’s version of the Ho Chi Minh trail, the shadowy network by which insurgents slap the American troops around. But if guerilla warfare isn’t your thing, try this slagfest aimed squarely at Coldplay.