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Off to Europe. BRB. (at International Terminal)
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The Great Google Goat Rodeo
Google is not “evil”. Google is too big to be evil. At its worst, Google is banal.
Lovely post which echoes a lot of my thoughts about Big G.
Google still has a handful of genius, best-of-breed properties and technologies, but it also has a muddled money-making side that makes me uncomfortable.
With every product announcement, you have to scrape away at the details to try and decipher the reason for its existence.
For example, at a time when they’re killing much loved apps like Reader in the name of simplicity, they’re hiring up couriers and shops to offer you free next-day delivery for purchases in the Bay Area. That can’t be a service they want to be in the business of, so why…? They must be wanting to get better data on offline purchases — to learn what I buy when I need things in a hurry and don’t have time to wait for Amazon Prime. And that kind of conversion data must be useful because they want to better serve offline brick-and-mortar advertisers and make more money. (This is almost certainly why they still battle forth with Google Wallet despite an almost total reluctance by the public at large to pay at Walgreens with their Android phone)
That’s the sort of faustian bargain they’re striking up with their users, albeit without telling them what’s going on. (For all you can say about Facebook, at least they are blatant about asking you for your information and how they’re using it to target advertising at you!)
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So Last Splash is a tight record that’s also alive with happy accidents. Perhaps the most famous example: the bassline’s hesitant entrance on “Cannonball”— and we’re talking about one of the most iconic basslines of the 90s— was actually the product of a fortunate mistake. In a rehearsal, Wiggs played the last note of the riff flat (twice in a row) but everybody thought it sounded cool, so it became a part of the song.
Hard to imagine Cannonball without that bass intro.
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‘I Just Wanna Get Along’ by The Breeders
“If you’re so special, why aren’t you dead?” - If you love doing something, under no condition should you start a VC-backed company to do more of it. You won’t. You are going to spend all of your time recruiting, fundraising, recruiting, aligning team vision, recruiting, and figuring out which fires you can safely ignore.
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The Breeders Perform “Cannonball” on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon (via Laughing Squid)
Gawd, I love Kim Deal.
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Ask any of the thousands of women that I’ve been with, before or after being Vice President. They’ll all vouch for Ol’ Joe. Doesn’t matter which side of the aisle they’re from. If there’s one thing Pelosi and Bachmann agree on, it’s that I can make the Congressional ladies room a lot more fun.
Highlighted by Rod Begbie in The President of Vice by The Onion
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I love when I idly comment “I want this on a t-shirt” and that actually happens. Ordered.
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Every Noise at Once, a rather wonderful way to explore musical genres.
This is an algorithmically-generated non-analytical map of the musical genre-space. Genres and artists are positioned by code and data, adjusted for legibility, but the underlying vectors are less interesting than the juxtapositions and clusters that they produce, so the axes have been deliberately left unlabeled and uncalibrated. You are invited to imagine your own qualities and magnitudes that the geometry might be expressing.
