Way to go, Oslo police!
“The Scream” and another stolen masterpiece by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch were recovered by police on Thursday, two years after gunmen seized the paintings from an Oslo museum.
“‘The Scream’ and ‘Madonna’ are now in police possession,” police chief Iver Stensrud told a news conference. “The damage is much less than we could have feared.”
6:00AM: Wake up with massive, somewhat irrational stress-out related to school. Be completely unable to fall back asleep. Eventually get up and decide to mess around on computer until I relax enough to back to sleep.
7:00AM: Realize I’m still wide awake but am feeling chilly, put on sweats.
8:00AM: Finally sleepy, but hubby’s alarm clock is about to go off. Decide the hell with sleep and make strong coffee.
There’s a lot of blogging going on this week about the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s taking down New Orleans and the surrounding communities. I haven’t weighed in yet, in large part because I feel like I don’t have all that much new or original to add to the vast pile of emotions, reactions, observations and condemnations swirling through the blogosphere (although Shakespeare’s Sister did a great job of rounding up relevent links here).
There is one thing that I’d like to call a bit of attention to, though. Some bloggers either overtly or covertly pat themselves on the back when it comes to racial issues. “It’s those nasty Republicans who are racists, not us!” the thought goes. Yes, there’s a lot of racist Republicans out there, and many of them are not as obvious about it as George ‘Macaca’ Allen. But you know something? When you point a finger at someone else, three fingers point back at you. Even in the bluest of blue states, racism still rears its ugly head.
Last month, before I left for Barcelona, I met a friend from school for a lunch and some shopping at a high end mall near her new apartment. We had a great time & I got what I needed to get for the trip. But as we rested and sipped lemonade late in the afternoon, she started telling me about how annoying it was for her to shop at times. Clerks would follow her around the store, stop her and ask to see her receipts, or not be willing to help her out. Her mother (a VP at a publicly-traded tech company, by the way) had the same problem, although she’d found that a different mall was overall better than the one we were currently sitting in.
What could I say? I sympathized and agreed that the mall workers were jerks. But inside, I was shocked. I had honestly believed that kind of thing didn’t happen in places like California, and I was wrong. Right here in the deep-blue, massively multi-ethnic SF Bay Area, my friend is being singled out by shop clerks as being more likely to shoplift because she’s black. And I am shamed by that, not only because it happens, but because I had no clue it was going on.
That’s something to think about as we point fingers at racist Republicans this week.
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Your Birthdate: March 1 |
 You are a natural born leader, even if those leadership talents haven’t been developed yet. You have the power and self confidence to succeed in life, and your power grows daily. Besides power, you also have a great deal of creativity that enables you to innovate instead of fail. You are a visionary, seeing the big picture instead of all of the trivial little details. Your strength: Your supreme genius Your weakness: Your inappropriate sensitivity Your power color: Gold Your power symbol: Star Your power month: January |
Some … person … decided that completely breaking my driver’s side mirror would be a fun thing to do on a Saturday afternoon, so tomorrow morning at 7:30AM I get to go to the dealership and have a new mirror put in.
No note from the [expletive deleted] person who did it, of course, and the cost is lower than my deductible, so it’s all on me. Very annoying. I had some plans for that $300 or so this is going to cost me.
On the bright side, I am glad that I could get an appointment so quickly, and that I don’t really have to drive anywhere today. I feel naked driving without being able to use that mirror.
This caught my eye while browsing through some blogs with my morning coffee:
If you’re not sure what that is, you’re looking at no fewer that twenty-five links to different social tagging / bookmarking services gracing the bottom of a blog post.
Can anyone say “lessons of the last boom not learned?” Social bookmarking as a market has not crossed the chasm. It may never do so. Why any entrepreneur (or VC for that matter) would think that yet another “me too!” del.icio.us copycat is the idea that will make them millions is just beyond me.
18 months from now, my bet is that no more than nine of those links will still work, and of those nine, three will be basically ghost sites. Even that sounds more generous than it actually is, because another three of those slots have in all liklihood already been filled — by Fark, Yahoo, and the Yahoo-owned del.icio.us.
If it sounds like I’m hating on startups, I am not. I’ve worked for several and even had one of my own back in the Dark Ages. I’m just a little frustrated at the rampant lack of creativity. No matter what Dharmesh Shah says about trendspotting versus trendsetting, only so many people can jump onto any given bandwagon before the wagon is too full.
When I think about startups that I’d like to see, I tend to think more about video than I do geek toys like social bookmarking. Why? Video has long since crossed over into mainstream America, but despite the plethora of video uploading services, the potential of video has not even begun to be fully tapped. As Michael Mace pointed out a month or so ago, home video is very popular, but despite its having gone mainstream well over a decade ago, video still has some significant unsolved issues.
What are some of the possibilities out there? What about the ability to tag not just an entire video, but parts of a video, for more efficient searching? Or the ability to embed text within a video and make the whole thing searchable? How about more / better video editing tools for consumers? Maybe even some kind of online classroom to teach video camera owners how to shoot more interesting home videos so that less editing is actually needed in the first place?
Perhaps some of those startups are out there & I just haven’t noticed them, or possibly all of these solutions have been thought up already and they’re all off in stealth mode. If I had even half a clue about video technology I might even try to do a startup in the field myself.
At any rate, those are my Saturday morning coffee thoughts.