Posts from October 2004

Jeff Jarvis does a good job of flying through 14 other issues.

I agree with Jeff on all of them.

I am on the fence with this product. It does a great job of finding stuff on my desktop. It’s a lot better than the search built into Windows. It’s a lot better than the search built into Outlook.

But I am not using it very much. Old habits die hard and I still use the Outlook search feature a lot more than Google Desktop Search. It’s just more complicated to leave the email application, go to my browser, select desktop, and type in the search term.

And then there’s the issue of overhead. It slows down the launch of Outlook for sure. It also slows down the booting of my computer. I think its interfering with Norton Anti-Virus and it also messes up my online backup service, Connected.

And its murder on the battery life of my laptop with its constant indexing in the background.

I am not in a hurry to de-install it, but neither am I thrilled that I installed it.

I think Microsoft has a shot at doing this a lot better than Google. I read today that they will debut their desktop search tool in December. If they get it right, I’ll be happy to use their desktop search since it will certainly be more tightly integrated into Windows and Outlook.

Blogging will be light the next couple days.

I am off the LA. And then to Pittsburgh.

I wish I could vote during my stopover in Pittsburgh.

Not being able to make a difference with my vote bothers me.

I agree with Brad, I’d vote for Colorado Amendment 36.

I enjoyed the back and forth of the Issues 2004 posts that Jeff Jarvis started and I and others followed his lead on. But they stopped about three weeks ago. The Presidential election campaign isn’t over yet, and so I am going to add one to the mix.

The news yesterday that Chief Justice William Rehnquist has thyroid cancer and had an emergency tracheotomoy reminded me that one issue we all should care a lot about is the makeup of the Supreme Court.

There are two justices over 80 years old, Rehnquist and John Paul Stevens. Stevens is 84 and has been on the court since 1975, almost 30 years. Though none of the Justices is a youngster (Thomas at 56 is the youngest), most are in good health.

This is a Republican court. That was evident when it cast the tie-breaking vote in the contested 2000 election and gave the White House to Bush. But it’s equally obvious when you look at the appointments. Seven of the nine justicres were appointed by Republican presidents. Nixon appointed Rehnquist, Ford appointed Stevens, Reagan appointed O’Connor, Scalia, and Kennedy. Bush I appointed Souter and Thomas. The two democratic appointments were Clinton’s choices of Ginsburg and Breyer.

While this is a Republican court, and while its Chief is a conservative, its a fairly moderate court today. The moderate wing is made up of Ginsberg, Breyer, Stevens, and Souter (two of the four nominated by moderate Republicans). The conservative wing is made up of Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas. O’Connor and Kennedy make up the middle and where they go, so goes the court.

I’m fine with the court we have today. But I am worried that if Bush gets elected, we’ll have a move to the right which will take us places we probably don’t want to go. If Stevens retires or, god forbid, dies in the next four years, Bush is likely to replace him with someone more like Scalia than Stevens. If Rehnquist’s cancer is more serious than we know, Bush will replace him with someone similar, but will also in all liklihood appoint Scalia to the Cheif Justice position. And that’s a scary proposition, even if you are a moderate Bush supporter.

There are a lot of issues before the Supreme Court that are important. Issues like Civil Rights (Gay Rights), Due Process (Patriot Act), First Amendment (Free Speech), and of course the most emotionally charged of all Roe v. Wade – the woman’s right to choose.

Do we want a court that is pushed to the right? Do we want a court that will move to the left? Do we want something similar to what we have today?

Those are critical questions that each of us must ask ourselves as we go into the voting booth a week from today.

We haven’t got our 7100t phones yet, but the reviews keep coming in and for the most part they are raves.

Here’s Martin Tobias’ take.

We spent a good deal of time at our “exploding TV” lunch last week talking about how the concepts of paid search might find their way into the TV market, most likely via the DVR.

Well I can assure you that John Battelle wasn’t at our lunch, although we sure should have invited him, because his post on this stuff is spot on.

When I said in my original post on this topic that we want to invest in the “infrastructure” of exploding TV, I was thinking of the technology and platforms that make John’s vision a reality.

Just got an email from Wilco alerting me to the show at MSG this New Year’s Eve.

Wilco, The Flaming Lips, and Sleater-Kinney.

Wow.

Makes me wish I was going to be in NYC.

But that’s not happening.

If you are looking for something fun to do on New Year’s, I highly recommend this show.

It should be great.

Internet pre-sale begins Monday, November 1 @ 10 a.m. EDT. Public on sale is Friday, November 5 @ 10 a.m. via ticketmaster.

My new band of the week is The Dead 60s. Check out my prior post on them.

The other song I really like of theirs is You’re Not The Law.

So it’s my MP3 of the Week

We have a friend in the music business. He manages artists. He was over one night this week and told us of a trip he’d just made to Liverpool to meet a band he might want to manage. I asked him what made him do a 24 hour back and forth trip to Liverpool. He told me he heard their hit song and knew they had something special.

The band is called The Dead 60s and I spent some time this morning on the Internet and finally found their hit song Riot Radio available on Napster.

It’s a great song. And sure to be a hit here in the states eventually. They’ve got another song called You’re Not The Law which is also great.

They sound like the Clash with a little bit of the Specials thrown in for good measure. There are a number of young bands out of England that take their sound from the Clash. Another of my favorites are The Libertines.

Here is their hit single, Riot Radio, encoded at 64kbps. If you want to hear a high quality version, go get it legally on Napster.