blog.shrub

The Globe and Mail notes Tim Hortons’ expansion in to the US. Still: none in California.

The Economist, fresh off their SemaCode scoop, rips in to the music industry’s legal “strategy”:

But even if the entertainment business manages to coax more users into paying for legal downloads and succeeds in court against Grokster and StreamCast, its problems are unlikely to go away. True, a Supreme Court ruling in the industry’s favour would put paid to other P2P services. But it is not clear that curbing illegal downloading will translate into extra sales for the music business. A rush into legal downloading would hardly be good for sales of CDs: some cannibalisation is inevitable. And perhaps the decline in global sales is indicative of a far greater problem for the music industry—consumers simply think that many of its products are just not worth paying for.

Nation Press Photographers Association Best of Photojournalism 2005: Still Photography Winners.

Some handy tips from my friend Dennis:

• ExpoDisc (white balance/warm balance filter)
• white balance reference cards
• capture one
• noise ninja

More software

• Nik Multimedia software
• kodak software (digital roc, digital sho, digital gem)

Articles

• Nikonians on white balance
• TidBITS on Editing Photographs for the Perfectionist

In the TidBITS article, the author, Charles, points out a few tools:

• noise ninja
• focus magic
• focus fixer
• the imaging factory
• lensfix
• avisa plugins (he raves about shift+gain)
• polaroid dust and scratch removal
• photomagic (he raves about photozoom)

The Blog Cycle:

• What is blogging?
• Our community invented blogging!
• Blogging vs. Journalism
• Where are the women/minorities?
• You’ll get fired!
• Think about the children!
• The technology is boring/unimportant
• Will blogs change the world?
• What you do isn’t blogging — do it this way.
• They don’t deserve it!

Become the Idlewords.com Macropatron!

Gender Differences in Spoken and Written Communication:

For example, women tend to use more affective markers (e.g., “I know how you feel”), more diminutives (e.g., “little bitty insect”), more hedge words (e.g., perhaps, sort of), more politeness markers (e.g., “I hate to bother you”), and more tag questions (e.g., “We’re leaving at 8:00 pm, aren’t we?”) than do men. Men, on the other hand, are likely to use more referential language (e.g., “The stock market took a nosedive today”), more profanity, and fewer first person pronouns than are women.

what does it take for someone to verify your signature on a credit card?

i’m often asked for the names of venues for musicians to play in. i have a small list of my own, but it hasn’t been maintained lately. however, there are several great resources out there:

• venues in San Francisco from the Red Devil Lounge
• venues along the west coast (CA, OR, WA) from BAB News
• The Ultimate Address Book and its California clubs page.
• Few’ll Ignite Sound has fantastic database of venues, media contacts and promoters

Ryan pointed to a good article in Canadian Business on the MBET program at Waterloo. The article has makes a couple of interesting points.

First, a gym not on the cluetrain:

The computer program, which pumped out graphs based on body composition measurements, and strength and endurance test data quickly made Nickelchok the most popular trainer at his gym–and prompted his employer to ask him to stop using the tool, because other trainers were growing envious of his success.

“It was ridiculous,” says Nickelchok. “The company could have negotiated with me and bought the software. I would have developed it for them.” Instead, because it couldn’t figure out how to leverage Nickelchok’s entrepreneurial zeal for its own benefit, he quit, and the majority of his clients followed him.

And a student who gets it:

“I noticed that my friends in MBA programs, their goals are to be consultants or managers,” he says. “Everyone here wants to build something.”