Posts from 2005

I am going to post one record each weekday for the next two weeks.

They will be my top 10 records of 2005 in reverse order.  The list is already on the web as it has been a work in progress all year.

But hopefully there will be some value in giving you all a new pick every day along with some reasons for the selection.

Just so you know, the criteria is the following.

These are my favorite records of 2005, not necessarily the best records of 2005.

And they are heavily influenced by what gets listened in our home.  So heavy music like System of a Down, or R&B like John Legend, to pick three pretty good records this year (System put out two records in 2005), didn’t have a chance of making it.

I hope you like the picks.  It was a great year for music in 2005 and these ten records are all great and worth a listen.

I am enjoying reading Hackoff.com, Tom Evslin’s murder mystery that takes place in the Internet bubble and aftermath.  But I have found myself reading it like a book, not a blog.

I do not read each daily post as they come out.  I wait a couple weeks and print out at least a chapter and if I get behind, several chapters.

Plane time is great reading time and so I got through three chapters just now and am now caught up with the blog.

This story is getting really good.

In Chapter Eight, we start to get some clues to the murder.  We find out that Larry and his wife separated shortly before he died.  And we find out that he’s a wild mushroom nut and that he ate some bad ones before being shot. I am thinking the murder has something to do with the Palestinian characthers he met in Davos, but of course I could be dead wrong.

In Chapter Nine, we get a lesson in the economics of the "shoe", a slang word for the over allotment option that underwriters get in a public offering of stock.  The "shoe" allows the investment banks to oversell the deal in hopes that the stock will trade up. They effectively sell 10% more stock than the offering provides but get the right to buy another 10% from the company and selling shareholders (if there are any).  This effectively makes the investment bank short the stock at the closing of the IPO.  But, and this is a big but, they can cover their short by purchasing more stock from the company and shareholders at the offering price.  So it’s a no lose short.  Because if they stock goes down, they can buy in the open market at much lower prices and pocket the profits.  Because they have no obligation to purchase the "shoe".  This happened in the ITXC secondary and Tom tells the story as only someone who was on the losing end of an unfair trade can.

In Chapter 10, we smack right into 9/11. In Hackoff, Larry and his senior team are in World Trade South discussing a merger with their arch competitor.  Again, Tom takes liberally from the ITXC story. On September 11th, Tom and ITXC’s CFO Ed Jordan, were doing the exact same thing, discussing a merger with their arch competitor, but thank god that discussion was in the suburbs of another east coast city, and not anywhere near the WTC.  But you’d never know it by the way Tom tells the 9/11 story.

I have a feeling that Hackoff is going to be a great book.  If you’d prefer to read it in hard back, you can pre-order it on Amazon.  It comes out on February 1st.

I’ve read enough posts with this headline to know that getting online on airplanes is becoming a pretty normal thing on international flights.

But this is the first time I’ve ever done it.

And I must say its a wonderful thing.

In case you are interested, I am listening to Jason Chervokas’ Best of 2005 podcast.  I have never heard of any of these records.  But I am enjoying it completely. Thanks Jason for always being different.

After months of dancing with a number of potential partners, it appears that Time Warner has decided to keep things basically the same.  They keep their search partnership with Google intact, on probably much better terms though. And they get Google to place a $20bn valuation on AOL.

They remain a second tier player along with Microsoft and they continue to go it alone.

This may be the best course for AOL.  Time will tell.  I certainly can’t criticize the decision.

But a combination with Microsoft, whether total or partial, seemed to offer a number of tantalizing possibilities.  A real third option in search, a power to challenge Yahoo! in CPM ads (banners, etc), and a traffic monster.

With this scenario, nothing really changes.  Which is why this is a bigger victory for Google than anyone else, including AOL.

We (our family) are headed to Thailand tomorrow.

I hope to blog a bit here and there and have already posted a few things that will show up in the coming weeks.

But the posting will be lighter and the subject matter will change a bit too.

On the plane ride over tomorrow I plan to write 10-12 posts on my favorite records of the year. 

Each one will be a separate post that will run each day until the new year.

That’s assuming I can get online and post them when I land in Thailand.

Meanwhile, here is The Gotham Gal’s list of the best records of 2005.  There’s a bunch of overlap with my list.

The Gotham Gal and I went to see Walk The Line last night.

We have been Johnny Cash fans for years.  Jo’s brother Jerry turned us on to his music about 10-15 years ago and we’ve always loved him.  The kids aren’t so hot on Johnny.  I suppose its a generational thing.

Anway, the movie was good but not great.  It was too long and not very tight.  But the love story of Johnny and June is wonderful and Reese Witherspoon is just fantastic as June Carter.

The final scene (and the opening scene) takes place in Folsom Prison.

So this morning I got up early (as usual) and put the live record Johnny cut at Folsom Prison on Rhapsody.

This is an amazing record.

When he sings "25 Minutes To Go" or "Joe Bean", both songs about life on death row, to the cheering inmates it’s so real and so raw.  Add Johnny’s unique voice to the mix and you have live music magic.

I suppose you need to be a Johnny Cash fan to enjoy this record, but I’d suggest everyone give it a listen.

Johnny was a one of a kind guy.  An american icon.  And this record sums up everything he stood for pretty nicely.

As many people know, TypePad was down all night last night and all day today.

So I could not blog today and the posts that were up were a week old.

I feel badly for them as it must have been hell racing to get things back up.

Anyway, I am glad the service is back.

When I want to find music on the Internet, there are a bunch of places I go, but Google is not one of them.

I go to Amazon, Rhapsody, iTunes, last.fm, and sometimes Yahoo!, but never Google.

Today Google launched Google Music which could change that.

Here is my Google Music search on Mike Doughty

Frankly, I’d prefer this results page.

The album pages have links to iTunes and Rhapsody to buy the songs.

But the Rhapsody links don’t take you to the new Rhapsody web service even if you have it up and are logged in.

And what about Yahoo?  And Napster?  Where are the links to those music services?

Bottom line.  This sucks. I’ll stick with what’s been working for me just fine thank you.

My Treo 650 crashes about five times a day.  It’s an unlocked GSM version with a Tmobile sim card.
I run Goodlink on it and have a 1gig card in it.

Do others have this same problem and if so, has anyone found a solution?

It’s driving me crazy and will cause me to find another phone/email solution if I can’t fix this problem.