Listening to: Sanctify Yourself - Simple Minds

The new Stars Wars Trailer is doing the rounds… it looks great, but you just know
it’s going to be a crushing disappointment. If you haven’t seen it AICN has a set
of links.

On the whole expectations theme… I sat through House,
M.D. on Friday night. I have to admit that Hugh Laurie with an American accent
was something I thought I was going to have big problems with. As it turns out it’s
not that bad. Laurie is very good and you quickly forget that he’s a Brit. It’s definitely
not wonderful, but it’s not the dire car wreck I thought it was going to be.

Listening to: Random dub noises from Bob’s computer

For the GDC Will Wright, PeterMolyneux and Clint Hocking were asked to design a game
based on Emily Dickinson. Some of their concepts are utterly delightful. It’s such
a shame that can’t be said for a lot of the current crop of games. Wired has the full
article.

Speaking of games I want to play… I am now a good way through Mario 64 DS. After
spending the first few hours using the stylus to control Yoshi I have moved to the
little thumb nubbin. The game is a lot of fun and while I have been playing for a
total of about 10 hours I am still discovering things about the world and the characters.

Listening to:  Rainbow - The Nomad

Zillionaire were playing
at Bodega last night. I went down there to check them out and I was not disappointed.
The quality of the performance was fantastic and the music itself was great guitar
driven pop.

SXSW have provided a 2.6 GB MP3 archive of 700 odd bands that will feature at
the festival (more than 1300 bands will appear). It is available as a BitTorrent.
I’ll tell you what I think of it 6 days from now when I have finished downloading
the file. Check out the Wired article for
more details.

Listening to: Can I Get A… - Jay Z

The Hitchhikers trailers have finally made it into Quicktime goodness. For your viewing
pleasure:

• Hitchhiker’s
  Guide To The Galaxy (Trailer 2… the Amazon one)

• Hitchhiker’s
  Guide To The Galaxy (Trailer 3 … the Stephen
  Fry one… extended remix)

Listening to: Hannah

XBox 2 details are emerging from GDC. Nothing terribly specific but some interesting
general stuff. GamesIndustry.biz has a couple of interesting articles:

• GDC: Allard champions
  high-definition future in opening keynote
• GDC: Allard to blow
  lid on Xbox 2 tonight

Listening to: Disco Cortex - Ekto

Day 105 is now
online. It is about the green screen work for Kong in New York.

Listening to: Dum Dum Girl - Talk Talk

Found this on
Salon (grab a free day pass to read the whole article). It’s a story about the fact
that all wounded flown into the US arrive at night. The odd thing that the author
points out is that the reason supplied by the Pentagon is not the simplest:

It’s widely known that on the eve of the Iraq invasion in 2003, the Bush administration
moved to defy the math and enforced a ban on photographs of the caskets arriving at
Dover, or at any other military bases. But few realize that it seems to be pursuing
the same strategy with the wounded, who are far more numerous. Since 9/11, the Pentagon’s
Transportation Command has medevaced 24,772 patients from battlefields, mostly from
Iraq. But two years after the invasion of Iraq, images of wounded troops arriving
in the United States are almost as hard to find as pictures of caskets from Dover.
That’s because all the transport is done literally in the dark, and in most cases,
photos are banned.

…
John Pike, the director of GlobalSecurity.org, a
defense information Web site, has spent a great deal of time trying to tease out the
difference between facts and Pentagon spin. He said it is odd that the Pentagon hasn’t
done a good job of explaining the late-night flights. “It is puzzling because there
are perfectly sensible explanations for this, but those are not the explanations being
offered,” Pike said. “And the explanation being offered makes no sense. It makes no
sense.”

What ever the reason for the flight timing it is an interesting article.

Listening to: Talk Talk - Talk Talk

Found on O’Grady’s
Powerpage. It sounds like an Apple version of an OQO (a
company that includes Jory Bell the
guy who responsible (partly) for the TiBook line at Apple) type device.

The OQO is a completely lust inducing computer…

Listening to: Immortality - Pearl Jam

Found this over at Cardboard
Spaceship. An article by
an engineer how left HP in 2003. It starts with the rather chilling paragraph:

I snuck out of Hungary in 1973, one week after I was told that if I ever wanted
to advance as an engineer, I would have to join the Communist Party.

The article makes some interesting points about the impact poor marketing people can
have on an engineering company:

Bill Hewlett used to remind us that “The marketing guys said the HP-35 would be
a failure because it was too small, and then we couldn’t make them fast enough to
meet the demand. The marketing folks don’t know everything.”

The article echos a quote by Steve Jobs in a BusinessWeek article last
year:

People always ask me why did Apple really fail for those years, and it’s easy
to blame it on certain people or personalities. Certainly, there was some of that.
But there’s a far more insightful way to think about it. Apple had a monopoly on the
graphical user interface for almost 10 years. That’s a long time. And how are monopolies
lost? Think about it. Some very good product people invent some very good products,
and the company achieves a monopoly.

But after that, the product people aren’t the ones that drive the company forward
anymore. It’s the marketing guys or the ones who expand the business into Latin America
or whatever. Because what’s the point of focusing on making the product even better
when the only company you can take business from is yourself?

So a different group of people start to move up. And who usually ends up running the
show? The sales guy. John Akers at IBM (IBM )
is the consummate example. Then one day, the monopoly expires for whatever reason.
But by then the best product people have left, or they’re no longer listened to. And
so the company goes through this tumultuous time, and it either survives or it doesn’t.

I from personal experience know that some marketers, who because of their own ignorance,
can have a very negative impact on a company. The frustrating thing is that more often
than they refuse to educate themselves… or even let themselves be educated. I’ll
admit that I am bias on this issue… as I was bought up to put a lot of weight on
the thoughts of engineers.

Listening to: Immortality - Pearl Jam

New Zealand Topless Protester…. go figure.