Posts from July 2005

I have been getting into The Decemberists lately.

Their new record, Picaresque, has been in heavy rotation lately.

So I went searching for more Decemberists music.

I did a delicious search and found this cool blog called My Old Kentucky Blog with some good Decemberists covers.

I tagged some of them that sounded interesting with Fred’sPodcast and downloaded them to my iPod.

I liked them all, but the one I liked the best was their cover of Squeeze’s Up The Junction.

So I am making The Decemberists singing Up The Junction my MP3 of the Week.

• Dinnerbuzz
• The Power Of Us
  (tags: peereconomies)
• 03 Bring On The Dancing Horses (Echo & The Bunnymen).mp3 (audio/mpeg Object)
  (tags: fred’spodcast)
• 21 Up The Junction (Squeeze).mp3 (audio/mpeg Object)
  (tags: fred’spodcast)
• 01 Ask (Smiths).mp3 (audio/mpeg Object)
  (tags: fred’spodcast)

It used to be that being a VC was a pretty arcane profession.

My kids could never describe what I did to their friends.

Then my daughters saw A Lot Like Love and they knew what I did.

So last night we saw The Wedding Crashers. 

I loved the movie warts and all.  It was a perfect summer comedy.

Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn play two guys who crash weddings as a hobby bordering on an obsession.

They come up with phony names and occupations to provide them cover.

They decide to crash the wedding of the daughter of the Treasury Secretary.

And they decide to pretend to be VCs.

I have no idea what that says about the VC profession, but two movies in less than six months says something.

I’ve been reading a fair amount this summer, so I added a list to the left side column of this blog called Summer Reading.

I’ll try to review the books as I finish them.

The three greatest golfers of all time are Bobby Jones, Jack Nicklaus, and Tiger Woods.

Bobby Jones won 13 major tournaments in his short but brilliant career.

Jack Nickalus won 18 majors in his major tournament career which ended this week at St. Andrews, the home of golf.

And Tiger won his 10th major this week at St. Andrews.

There is something about golf and the way these things play out.

Bobby Jones loved St. Andrews and St. Andrews loved him.

The same is true of Jack Nicklaus.  He chose to end his career at St. Andrews and he did in classic Jack fashion with a birdie on 18. 

Growing up, I idolized Jack and he inspired me to play the game.  My family weren’t golfers, but I am.  Mostly thanks to Jack.  His victory at the Masters in 1986 is probably my all time favorite moment in sports.

When Bobby Jones saw the young Jack Nicklaus play golf, he said, "he plays a game that I am not familiar with".

Jack has passed on the torch to Tiger with the same words.

And someday, Tiger will pass the torch on to someone else with those words.

But today, Tiger reigns supreme and at the age of 29, you have to wonder how many majors he will win in his career.

I find myself rooting for Tiger the way I rooted for Jack as a youngster.  While I most often root for the underdog, I don’t do that in golf.

So it was with great pleasure that I watched Tiger win his 10th major today at St. Andrews, the same week that Jack made his departure.  The golf gods got the script right again.

There’s a new show up.

Song List:

Has It Come To This? – The Streets
The Sporting Life – The Decemberists
Upon This Tidal Wave – Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
Goin Home – Dinosour Jr.
Build Me A Buttercup – The Temptations

Listen Live Here.

To listen in iTunes or on your iPod, get iTunes v 4.9, then select Advanced, Subscribe to Podcast, and then enter this into the box:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Positively10thStreet

• Jess carrying Jo on Flickr
• The Clicker: Microsoft’s OPM for the masses – Engadget – www.engadget.com
  (tags: video)

This is my new title for anything that is really ridiculous in the Internet/technology world.

Today’s outrage is over Microsoft’s effort to give the content owners what they want and totally screw over all of us.

It’s called OPM and its a feature of the Longhorn operating system and it’s described here on Engadget by Stephen Speicher.

If for some reason you don’t want to click on the link, here are a few short snippets:

With Longhorn, Microsoft
will begin pushing opium. Well, technically it’s OPM. However, opium might be a good option for those livid that the
video content being sent to their pristine 24-inch Dell LCD monitors is purposefully being “fuzzied” (more on that
later).
…

So what will happen when you try to play premium content on your incompatible monitor? If you’re “lucky”, the content
will go through a resolution constrictor. The purpose of this constrictor is to down-sample high-resolution content to
below a certain number of pixels. The newly down-sampled content is then blown back up to match the resolution of your
monitor. This is much like when you shrink a JPEG and then zoom into it. Much of the clarity is lost. The result is a
picture far fuzzier than it need be.
…
If OPM determines that your monitor falls below the security
restrictions (i.e. isn’t DVI or HDMI w/HDCP), you could be greeted with a “polite message explaining that [your
monitor] doesn’t meet security requirements.”

This is the first time I have heard of this OPM stuff and I need to do more research before I truly believe that Microsoft is really going to do something this dumb, but there it is.

All the great RSS stuff that is coming in Longhorn won’t help me a bit because if I have to live with this, I won’t be using Longhorn.

Oy.

• Mandala Yoga Schedules
  great yoga studio on the east end of LI
  (tags: yoga)