LIFE IMITATES ART DEPT.: REAL LIFE APPALACHIAN E.R.

MULTAN, Pakistan (Reuters) - Fateh Mohammad, a prison inmate in Pakistan, says he woke up last weekend with a glass light bulb in his anus.... You can't make this stuff up...

FLASHBACK WEEKEND

Some (IMHO) classics from my past that I'm bringing up for review: CHILDISH. SOBER. ODD. PRESCIENT. PRESCIENT 2. MEA CULPA. MARRIED BY THE MOB. RETURN FROM HIATUS 1. THE IDEA.

ALSO: Shout out to all my peeps enjoying themselves at Savard's Summercamp '06. Burn the candle on both ends dudes. Light my lamp. Raise your cups to Towelie and don't forget to lime (liberally) after use.

HOW TO EAT FRIED WORMS

Do you remember the book from when you were a kid? Now it's going to be a movie! (So's Charlotte's Web.)

REMEMBER

Russel asked me to pass this on...

DEAR SASHA

An open letter to Sasha Baron Cohen:

Mr. Cohen,

When you inhabit one of your personas, are you totally in character during and after the performance? Do you remain in character in between takes? (In other words, do you get all Andy Kaufman on us?) Where you inspired to do Borat from Mahir? What do you make of the "Throw the Jew Down the Well" episode? I understand there's (at least) latent antisemitism in the room, do you think its more vicious than that? Or is it just good-natured bad taste gone wild? (Case in point: Hadji girl.) When the light bulb goes on in your, ah, victims' tiny little heads, do they realize that they're being played or do they just think that your character's an idiot? Do they then play along or become defensive? For each good clip, are there many "interviews" that don't pan out comedy-wise? Are there interviews that are just plain not entertaining that don't make the cut? If so, what is the average ratio of good to bad that you encounter?

If you're ever in New Jersey, would you come to us for a Shabbos meal?

Regards,
Jake

MOBY DICK UPDATE

The sage Richard Aboulafia weighs in on the magnitude of the Airbus A380 disaster that is shaping up.

HUZZAH!

Futurama returns!

RANDOM

My daughter's friend has a blog. What can I say, Basya's not quite the wordsmith.

Airbus' bad news just keeps getting worse. It's about time the laws of economics and every old saw about free markets comes home to roost at this European make-work project's doorstep.

Read IAGBlog. It's not as good as the dearly departed enplaned, but it will have to do for my daily fix.

The space shuttle's replacement takes shape -and not a moment too soon.

VIRTUAL COFFEE

WTF? If I saw this after drinking my morning cup 'o joe, you can bet I'd wean myself off the caffeine right quick! (hat tip: boing boing.)

CHASING SKIRT...

Steak, that is. Shout out to my buddy Russel, who introduced us to the wonders of grilling a juicy cut of skirt steak marinated in Jerk or Teriyaki, Mmmm, mmmm, good!

TWO WORDS

Two simple words: root and canal. Benign. Banal, even. Put them together, though, and they conjure up more fear than Al Qaeda. I feel like a series of small bombs just went off in my upper left quadrant. Oy.

THANK YOU

To the dudes that leave newspapers neatly tucked away in the myriad corporate commodes I have visited in my consulting career. You are the wind beneath my wings.

HOLIDAY

I don't usually celebrate the death of one of G-d's creatures, but when a genocidal, racist and -generally speaking- medieval maniac is finally tracked down and turned into Texas chili by some well placed explosives delivered courtesy of the U.S. Air Force, well, that's a good thing. Finally something to cheer about in Iraq. Rest in pieces Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi.

UNRELATED: Wanna buy a house? Three?

CLOUDS

It is becoming increasingly obvious to me that "cloud" computing is the next big thing (If indeed it isn't already the current big thing.) What I term cloud computing is the utilization of service clouds for our everyday computing tasks. More and more we turn to Google's cloud for watching and sharing videos, searching (of course,) mapping and such. We also use Amazon's cloud for retail transactions of any kind. (A great many of the retailers we use piggyback on Amazon's cloud to provide merchandise to their customers. Retailers such as Toys 'R' Us.) Amazon isn't just a store, it's a provider of e-store technology to other stores. The other great clouds of our time are Yahoo! and -in distant fourth- Microsoft. Yahoo! is the original cloud and has a hard time defining exactly what it does better than anyone else -the AOL of our time. Still, Yahoo! does many things well (search, mail, pictures and mapping) and is constantly trying to reinvent itself to latch on to a permanent niche -one it hasn't really had since Google took over the search crown so many years ago. Microsoft, via its MSN and Live properties is a poor provider of service -witness its lackluster search and mail offerings- but has the ability to steal revenue from the aforementioned pure web plays by virtue of its desktop markets hare. Also, Microsoft's map service Windows Live Local (who ever thought of that name?) is a brilliant but little known also ran in the mapping field.

What's next in cloud computing? Mashups. Mashups combine services from multiple sources into meta-applications. The services are exposed via public interfaces (API's) and enable sophisticated applications to be developed without purchasing or hosting much of the data componentry that does the heavy lifting of the application. Popular mashups include adding functionality to public mapping services such as Frappr and Cheap Gas which rely on Google's mapping API. A plethora of mashups exist for Amazon's cloud of API's and services as well. Future mashups will make greater use of Amazon's S3 Simple Storage Service to provide diskless data hosting services. I, in fact, intend to pursue this option for my next generation of application development research and development.

BLEAK

Fareed Zakaria paints a scary picture. Unfortunately, this scenario seems all too likely.

Que Sera Lee, watching you self-destruct in last night's Apprentice was tragic:

1. You picked a terrible team.
2. You handed Sean an advantage by not forcing the Englishman with 2 women and a Mensa snob to handle a hockey game instead of a Barenaked Ladies concert.
3. You really looked and sounded like a child in front of your task sponsor and in front of the Donald's lieutenant.
4. Pepi? Pepi?
5. Has Lenny contributed anything thus far?

Shout out to Isaac and Bara!

RANDOM THOUGHTS

• Sun Micro should concentrate more on services. They'd make a killing selling their superior stack to IBM shops if they half tried.
• I officially declare the Iraq intervention a failure. Mind you, I don't think it was a bad idea, but we can't seem to prevent the country from devolving. And no, I don't think the Democrats would have done a better job of it either.
• I don't see the point of Pontiac. Sure, the Solstice is nice and the G6 coupe is a stunner, but otherwise GM should probably let the division go quietly into the night.
• By personal experience, Chimney Tuna is Good Eats!

BY POPULAR DEMAND

The amazing Dancing Basya!

TOO MANY COOKS

<geekpost>I read with interest the latest in a spate of flame wars and “informed opinions” regarding the Java IDE brouhaha between the folks who like to code using the Eclipse IDE and those who think that NetBeans is the bee’s knees. (FULL DISCLOSURE: I’m both an Eclipse and a NetBeans user, although I’ve been using NetBeans pretty exclusively as of late.)  In Too Many Cooks Spoils the IDE, Robert Thornton posits that Eclipse’s successful nature is causing it to be a less capable IDE than NetBeans. While there’s some truth to the argument that the confusion of all the Eclipse plugins and such hampers usability, that’s pretty much admitting that Eclipse is a victim of its own success. I don’t hear anyone complaining that Linux’s myriad packages makes it a less appropriate operating system than, say Windows, although the exact same argument can be made. When (says I) the confusion of Eclipse packages and “personalities” (an Eclipse-ism) becomes an overwhelming issue (and I suspect it will, soon) subprojects will form to steer specific personalities into convenient distributions to alleviate the pain of the problem. It’s childish to complain that the phenomenal rate of Eclipse adoption amongst third party tools vendors gives it a distinct disadvantage, although clearly NetBeans’ simplicity and pretty much single-vendor involvement does give it more of a “designed under a single roof” feel. My take on the whole Eclipse vs. NetBeans war? In a nutshell, there’s room for two competing IDE’s but Sun needs to figure out what its value proposition is for its entire app dev and deployment stack is. Giving it all away doesn’t add to the bottom line and whatever strategy they are pursuing isn’t either.</geekpost>

2 QUIET

Two of my frequent reads seem to have gone silent as of yesterday. Benador Associates, a conservative think-tank and enplaned, a blog about the aviation industry both seem to have shut their doors at some point over the weekend. I hope it's only temporary in both cases, but I fear the worst. Sigh.

FALCON DOWN

SpaceX’s revolutionary inexpensive rocket, the Falcon 1, was lost 25 seconds into its inaugural flight. I got to watch the video feed of the launch and saw the rocket camera roll before losing the feed. Since it was just before the Sabbath, EST, that the launch took place, I had to turn off the computer and couldn’t find out conclusively what happened. Que Sera, although it’s worth noting that all the major rocketry attempts suffered from poor track records at their inception. At 6.7 million a copy, the Falcon is certainly cheap enough to plug on and keep trying. Keep the faith, SpaceX, you'll get there!