I continued the 90s kick back here; I even started watching some really old music videos. Remember this one?

A couple of thoughts after watching this video:

• I didn't realize All-4-One was so ... unphotogenic. These guys would never be a group today. Unless they won some TV talent show.
  
• In that video, four guys run after a single girl and accost her. Is there something not creepy about that?! And even worse, as the video progresses, it looks like the four guys are hitting on her. I can tell you, in real life, if four guys were all trying to hit on the same girl, they wouldn't nearly be as friendly and break out into harmony.

About six months ago, a friend who was working closely along side adobe's flash application development team told me that they received a prototype of Flash for iPhone. The prototype allowed the iPhone to have less than half an hour of battery life using flash. They then sent the prototype to apple and suggested incorporating this prototype iPhone flash into the iPhone OS in the next update.

Apparently apple sent this letter back thanking them for being interested in developing a working version of flash for the iphone but because the prototype is so processor intensive, and awful for battery life, they would not include it with their OS because it is just not good enough. They suggested using the gpu instead of the processor to render flash. Then they suggested building a seperate app for flash and web browsing because there was no way apple could endorse flash integration on the iphone in its current state.

Adobe apparently didn't want to release the app under their name either and it never showed up in the app store.

A long story in short: Adobe sucks at programming, then apple told them they sucked at programming. If they want to release that shit under the name adobe so be it, but it sure isn't going to be endorsed by Apple.

That was the last they saw of that prototype.

Anyways, the new MSN.com homepage was the first MSFT property I saw and said: "Wow, they're really getting their shit together."

Check it:

Beautiful use of white space - incredibly content heavy, but doesn't feel like it. Great use of accent lines (I'm a sucker for that style). Fantastically clean ... wonderful use of grid design! 

And the logo is even passable for me! (It still feels a bit far to streeeetttched for me)

Does anybody remember me writing a post about the idea for a browser game I posted a couple of years back? I can't, for the life of me, find it anywhere. I vaguely recall it was like Gazillionaire for the web.

. . .

Catching up on the internets is hard, even after only three days!

Tomorrow afternoon I fly out to SD - get in pretty late. On Tuesday I start the grind again. Better get ready!

Another song that's hot right now: Britney Spears "3."

Are we back in 2001?

I'm a fan of Spike Jonze (loved Adapation and Being John Malkovich), so I figured him + children's book = awesome.

I didn't know what the movie was going to be about, so I didn't have any preconceptions.

Much like my earlier (controversial) review of Lost in Translation, I didn't like this movie because even an hour and a half into it, nothing had happened. There was no rich imagination or escapism - nor was there even decent cinematography to keep me interested. It just seemed angsty. I felt no emotional connection to the characters in this movie - geez, a kid is picked on and feels lonely!

Basically the story, when I left it: Max is angry and escapes into a land with these curious creatures and immediately bonds with a creature that is JUST LIKE HIM. The creatures do nothing except be sad and sullen, until Max comes up and offers them random advice to make them happy. I don't know what happens, but I'd imagine there's some discovery of Max not being a king, then for some reason Max returns home happy and not angry.

Maybe if I had patience, I would have "gotten it", but frankly I didn't want to stick around to find out.

That's not to say that I need plot-driven stories; I enjoyed Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter which is nearly devoid of plot and dialogue - but at least it makes a point and makes an emotional connection to the viewer.

Pan's Labyrinth is about a gazillion times better.

(P.S. I fully expect Crispdawg to pop-up and bash me in the comments. Don't disappoint me - I know you still read this site!)

An older post from Bronte Capital highlights the benefit for knowingly creating ginormous conservative banks. The gist of the argument is that along with creating these massive banks whose (monopolistic) tendencies create great wealth for its shareholders, you can ensure conservatism by straightjacketing these new huge entities with regulations.

You basically make the banks incredibly profitable, make them incredibly easy to run, and ensure their conservatism doesn't get them into trouble. You basically tap into the unwillingness of humans to give up a "good thing" out of fear of messing it up at a large $cale. (This reminds me of the Friends' episode where Joey and Chandler end up getting free porn on cable, and are so afraid of losing it, they refuse to turn off the TV - long after they've gotten sick of watching the porn)

This is an interesting point, but let's add in the op-ed by Calvin Trillian in the Times who claimed that the reason Wall St. failed was because "smart guys started going to Wall St." I'm too young to dispute the claim (although in my gut, it feels very wrong), but I will admit that smartness can work against you - this is a very common known problem in software development (the "not invented here" syndrome).

The narrator in the Times op-ed describes why this is problem: (emphasis mine)

"Of course it's accurate," he said. "Don't get me wrong: the guys from the lower third of the class who went to Wall Street had a lot of nice qualities. Most of them were pleasant enough. They made a good impression. And now we realize that by the standards that came later, they weren't really greedy. They just wanted a nice house in Greenwich and maybe a sailboat. A lot of them were from families that had always been on Wall Street, so they were accustomed to nice houses in Greenwich. They didn't feel the need to leverage the entire business so they could make the sort of money that easily supports the second oceangoing yacht."

While the op-ed is soft on facts, the logic makes sense to me. Smart guys made up some complex math which 'worked in theory,' then sold the "lower third of the class" on the notions, who foolishlessly went along with the plan since the "smart guys" made it up.

Within context of the Bronte Capital post, this makes a lot of sense.

Let's color in the recent debate over executive pay. As much as it pains the inner Libertarian in me to say it, capping executive pay for financials makes a lot of sense if you're trying to limit the risk that banks take. Executive pay will most certainly drive the "good" talent out, and that's a perfectly OK thing! They'll end up at hedge funds or a private company - they simply will stop gambling at the public's expense.

George Soros recently was quoted:

"That [executive pay caps] would push the risk-takers who are good at taking risks out of Goldman Sachs into hedge funds, where they actually belong, because hedge funds take risks with their own capital, not with deposits and not with government guarantees," he said.

Of course, this doesn't mean risk in the financial systems vanishes. LTCM is great example of a private hedge fund whose effects reverberated throughout the financial sphere - I don't think simply moving all that risk into the private sector alleviates all the problems, although it certainly does limit the risk of gambling at the taxpayer's expense.

People breaking out in spontaneous dance is always awesome. And as a reminder of the MC Hammer flash mob: