Posts from 5 2003

• May 22, 2003
  kleiner garage

  “turn on extreme homes right now! the house down the street is on!”

  if you’re confused by the above quote, you obviously weren’t sitting here in my living room when my phone rang earlier. you see, there’s a house in my neighborhood, right down my block, that has the sweetest exterior i’ve ever seen. unfortunately, a copper and steel gate usually sits in the closed position, so i’ve rarely seen the actual house. we’ve all wondered who might live there: surely an architect, a designer, or just someone incredibly cool. well, thanks to extreme homes, i can finally get to the bottom of it.

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• May 19, 2003
  the return of napster?

  looks like napster will once again be a hot topic. today roxio announced that it has purchased pressplay (hailed as the “struggling online music service”) and will combine this new asset with the napster name (roxio bought this last year for $5M) to launch a new online music service.

  "Roxio's acquisition of Pressplay significantly accelerates the development of our online music business which is central to the strategic development of our company," said Chris Gorog, Roxio's Chairman and CEO. "With our acquisition of Napster we obtained the most powerful brand in the online music space. Now, with our acquisition of Pressplay, we have the most complete and scaleable legal technology infrastructure to use as a platform to re-launch Napster. After taking the necessary time to add features, enhance functionality and improve usability we will launch a new service with an extremely compelling consumer experience that builds on the qualities of the Napster brand."

  so, a legal and pay way to download music… never heard of that before! i wonder how difficult it’ll be to convince the world that they should fork over money for using napster…

• May 14, 2003
  flying "do's and don'ts"

  i went down to florida this past weekend for my cousin’s wedding, which was very nice, thanks for asking… along the way i picked up a few flying “do’s and don’ts” guaranteed to save you from instant and crushing ridicule.

  1. bring headphones do you really want to hear the mind-numbing comments from the next row? “wow, look at the clouds. so puffy.” “how long till we get there?” “where’s my damn tomato juice?!?!?!” didn’t think so. headphones will help you muffle anything and everything. granted the music selection isn’t always that great, but it’s better than the alternative. and while most airlines give you headphones, you don’t want to compromise your style with those big things, right? cute little earbuds always look nice, and go with just about any outfit.

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• May 08, 2003
  know anyone who uses os7?

  cause apparently gap.com does. or at least they’re half expecting a rogue user to come across their site, have problems, and submit technical support feedback… but first some background…

  while on gap.com tonight (shut up) i experienced firsthand a weird process-based snafu. i added a few t’s to my shopping cart, and then decided to go to bed w/out buying anything. i wanted to save my cart so i didn’t have to add the shirts again tomorrow when i go back to complete my purchase. lucky for me, gap has a sweet “save your shopping cart” option, so i clicked. simple, right? unfortunately, the link points to a registration page asking for the standard info and promising “personalized shopping services” and “fast and easy access” etc etc. but, wait a minute! i’m already registered @ gap.com! where’s the “sign in” form, instead of this “sign up” form?

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• May 01, 2003
  time interview with steve jobs

  there’s a great interview with steve jobs over at time.com, about the new itunes music store. what’s great is that jobs seems like a kid when he’s talking about technology, especially apple technology. even though he typically says “this is so cool” or “omg, check this out” in his keynotes, i especially enjoyed this interview. even if you have your issues with jobs and apple, you have to respect someone who says:

  "Downloading sucks on [listen.com's] service! You download a track and you can't burn it to a CD without paying them more money - you can't put it on your MP3 player, you can't put it on multiple computers - it sucks! So of course nobody downloads! You pay extra to download even on top of subscription fees. No wonder they have hardly any download traffic - they hardly even have any subscribers!"

  my personal favorite quote, though, is what jobs says in response to “Can you say anything about [Music Store’s] development costs or Apple’s investment?”

  "I had somebody comment today, "Now that you have introduced your store, do you expect a lot others?" And I guess our answer is no. This is really hard. Over the last several years we've created an infrastructure to pump oceans of bits out in the world for movie trailers and stuff, and that's tens of millions of dollars for server farms and networking farms - it's huge - and we've already got that in place. And to have millions of transactions, and to get our online store all tied into SAP and have the auditors bless it, that's tens of millions of dollars. We have one-click shopping, only us and Amazon have that, and then to make a jukebox - how much does it cost to make iTunes and make it popular? A lot! But we've got that. And then iPod, if you want to make an iPod, what does that cost? Well, nobody has done it but us, people have tried, but they haven't even come close. That's a lot of money. So we've already made these investments and we can leverage them. And then we've invested more on top of that to make a store. But to recreate this, it's tens of millions of dollars and years. That's why I don't think this is going to be so easy to copy."

• May 01, 2003
  "in progress" lives!

  tim released the new in progress yesterday. head on over and watch some xhtml/css wizardry. :)