Admission Angst
It's the end of March, and like us, the NY Times is talking about :-) !!!! )-: !!!!!!! (-: What's All This? Admission Angst. Here's Sean's (semi-)final tally:
- Yes: UC Santa Cruz, UC San Diego, Tulane
- No: MIT
- Wait List: Cornell, Harvey Mudd
We're completely baffled about what to do next. There's only two things we know: some schools want more recommendations for kids on their waitlist (hint, hint; any volunteers?), and that Sean needs to make a decision by the end of April. Yikes!
Come to think of it, there are some other things we know: that's an impressive list of schools to be accepted by (neither Tom nor I could have gotten into them!), we're darn proud of him, and any school that gets him will be lucky.
Quote of the Day
Today's quote of the day is from Elliotte Rusty Harold:
OpenOffice flopped because the user interface was hideous: it was like something from the Windows 3.0 days. This is the sort of crap you get when you make the Mac an afterthought.
Note that I wasn't writing on the Mac. I was writing on Linux. However, if you don't make the Mac a priority, then you don't attract Mac developers to help you out, and they're the only ones who know diddly squat about user interface design.
Seven Samurai fans take note
My nephew, Chris Bevins, is a voice director and voice actor for animation. His new series is about to begin airing on IFC. Here's what he has to say about it:
My labor of love for the majority of 2005, Samurai 7, is premiering this Saturday, April 1 on the cable/satellite network IFC (the Independent Film Channel). The show is a sci-fi adaptation of Akira Kurosawa's classic film The Seven Samurai. The 26-episode series was animated in Japan in 2004 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the original film. My involvement in the animated series (for anyone who's not familiar with what I do) was casting and directing all of the English language voice cast (which is what you'll hear on TV; the DVDs have both languages available). I also played Gosaku, one of the villagers whom the samurai are hired to protect. For those of you who may be thinking, "Yeah, but it's just a cartoon," here's a link to IFC's site for the show:
Click on the "Video" button to see clips from the first 13 episodes. I think you'll see that this is no ordinary cartoon... Traditional "cel" style animation is blended with 3-D Computer Generated animation and amazing "lens" techniques that are rarely seen in theatrical animated movies, let alone TV animation. Combine all that with a classic storyline and vibrant, memorable characters, and I think you'll see why I loved working on this series so much. Hopefully all of you will enjoy it as well.
We've already set the ReplayTV to record. We say to check it out. Samurai 7 premieres right after the season premiere of The Henry Rollins Show, which will also be worth your time. A program note: for some reason, IFC seems to have a bizarrely fluid concept of scheduling, so you may want to set some padding on your recorder. We've seen shows from IFC actually start as late as 5 minutes past the scheduled time.
Blowing the whistle on blowing smoke?
In Dori's post below, she singles out a dumb move by Microsoft in announcing that Vista was going to be late Tuesday, 3/21 during Mix 06, a conference where MS was trying to pump up excitement for MS products amongst influencers and developers. Microsoft's blogger-in-chief, Robert Scoble, said in the comments to Dori's post:
The Vista news was leaked. We weren't in control of the story's timing. Sigh.
But unless Robert knows details that aren't public and aren't especially likely, I believe that he's engaging in a bit of spin to make his employer look better.
The New York Times, in this article, says this:
Last Monday afternoon [March 20 -- ed], James Allchin, the longtime engineering executive who leads the Vista team, held a meeting with 75 Windows managers and senior engineers to discuss the status of Vista. On Tuesday morning, Mr. Allchin met with a handful of his lieutenants and told them of the decision to push back the consumer introduction, a move that was announced publicly later that day, after the close of the stock market.
The Microsoft press release came out on Tuesday afternoon. So if Robert's correct, the decision was made to delay Vista Monday night or Tuesday morning. It must have leaked at warp speed to someone. To stay ahead of the story, Microsoft PR sprang into action quick as a bunny, whipped out a press release about a huge story that would surely result in significant negative financial effects for Microsoft and its partners, gathered quotes from execs at Microsoft, HP, and Best Buy, got it all approved at whatever multiple levels they use, and spat the release onto the wires right after the markets closed (no time stamp on the MS PR, but News.com ran their story on the delay at around 3 PM PST). Oh, and Allchin did a press teleconference around 2:30 PM, which would also have taken time to set up and to alert news organizations to call in. Frankly, it strains my journalistic credulity to believe that events moved that quickly.
I agree with some of Robert's other comments on his blog that reporters that irresponsibly spread falsehoods about Vista should be called on the carpet. So is he saying that the NYT quote above is false? Is he saying that the authors, Steve Lohr and John Markoff, got it wrong? If so, I hope that he works to either set the record straight with the Times, admits that someone in Redmond simply screwed up, or fesses up that he's spinning in our comments.
Dumb, Dumber, Dumbest, Dumbester
Yeah, I haven't blogged much lately, but I wanted to get a few things off my chest:
Dumb: the main reason I wasn't at Mix 06 was, honest-to-whomever, because Microsoft had a broken RSS feed. Okay, not actually broken, just obsolete and outdated, but with no way of telling that from reading it. Months and months ago I subscribed to http://mix06.com/blog/rss.aspx. At no point has that feed ever said, hey, you should be looking at http://blog.mix06.com/blog/rss.aspx instead. Dumb, folks. Really, really dumb. End result: I had no idea that it was coming up quite this fast, and whoosh, it went right on by.
Dumber: even dumber was what MS did during Mix — they were getting some good press, some good buzz, lots of big names out in Las Vegas, etc… and they went and stepped on their own PR by announcing (from Redmond, not from Vegas) that whoopsie, they're going to miss their Vista ship date by a couple of months. That's probably not a bad idea; sure, it's only March, but big companies move slow and if you can't ship it right, delaying makes sense. But honestly, how would it have hurt anything to wait a week or two to make that announcement? Consequently, nobody was talking about Mix anymore, just about MS's right hand not knowing what its left was doing.
Dumbest: the "journalists" who said that MS was going to rewrite 60% of Vista before they ship. I doubt that anyone who's ever written any code believed that one for a second unless they've really drunk the anti-MS koolaid. I'd believe that MS re-wrote 60% of Vista since they shuffled the deck in 2004, but 60% in two months? Programming just doesn't work that way.
Dumbester: yeah, it's not a word, and it doesn't completely fit in with the theme, but just to show that there are people even stupider than the ones mentioned above, look at the new slogan for Washington State tourism: SayWA. Say what? Responses: The Seattle Times, The Consumerist, The LA Times. All in all, it's pretty much agreed: these people wouldn't know a good slogan if it bit them in the butt. Wow, that's bad. And not "Healdsburg: Buckle of the prune belt" so-bad-it's-good; it's just bad.
All entries © 1999-2010 Backup Brain, LLC