Found some great new bands this summer.

Spread Your Wings - Queen
They don't make quality music like this anymore.
 

Vicious Delicious - Infected Mushroom
Trippy, calming, many things all at once.
  

Hey Jude - Beatles
Good tune.
  

Going Home - Kenny G
After many years, I finally found the name of this song I heard many times in restaurants, hotels and such. His music doesn't seem to have much variety though, and it gets old kind of fast, but it's always calming.
  

I've heard it said several times that atheists are driven to achieve more in their lifetimes because they know their time is limited. One day consciousness will simply end (), and knowing this, they will give it their all to create and do great things. But why would this be said at all? It seems that it is in fact for the purpose of achieving what atheism cannot - an immortality of sorts. Through achievement, they can immortalize their name, their creations, or something a little while longer than they can exist before they kick the bucket.

“Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” - Steve Jobs

This is not the way most will see it, but achieving immortality through achievement must be the unconscious, underlying reason. I cannot see any other purpose for being driven to achieve so much, except for the hope that what they create and establish in this life will last longer than themselves. This is something I wish to do, although I am indifferent as to whether my name is immortalized. I want to create something that people love, or at least like and use, whether it's a product or service or something, because this is a source of personal pride, as it proves to myself that I conceived something of value. It proves to me that my thoughts have value, and that makes me happy. I don't really care about getting my name out there or anything like that. The individual is simply a vehicle and source of ideas, and ideas are what matter most, because even though they flit about our minds, somehow they seem eternal because their existence is not physical. Ideas and thoughts are the person, and if the ones that you conceive are not valued, it would point to the scary possibility that others are indifferent to your ideas, and thus your existence is meaningless. (True, the person represents the thoughts, but it seems to place too much emphasis on the individual, which is usually not known for just thoughts, but a variety of other things, which deadens the achievement.)

But the apparent fallacy in all of this, which I've come to time and time again when thinking about this, is that in the grand scheme of things, nothing will exist at all. So ultimately what is the use of all this achievement when what you accomplish and achieve lasts only a few tics longer than anything else. It's a problem I can't seem to solve. But I suppose nothing is meant to be looked at in such a grand sweeping overview covering the universe and all. I'm looking too far out. When viewed in such a perspective, I suppose everything looks meaningless. And thus it is necessary to keep the mind on the now and a few distances past that.

As usual, this is probably a critical flaw in my reasoning I'm overlooking. Will need much more thought on this topic. Was like vomiting my disjointed thoughts into text rather than logically linking them together.

It appears YouTube is doing some split testing on designs. The other one is even more bland, and with less call to action on the upload button. It seems like they want to decrease the amount of videos uploaded. Just a random thought though.

Articles from Wired.com, regarding sweeping changes caused by the internet. These perfectly describe the revolutions that have occurred and will continue to occur in the next 20 years due to the equalization and potential of the internet.

The New New Economy: More Startups, Fewer Giants, Infinite Opportunity
Secret of Googlenomics: Data-Fueled Recipe Brews Profitability
The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online

I could be a hermit, with nobody to bother me. But introversion is simply not an option until then, and such a personality must be modified.

Realization came too late. The big monies are in the product and service ecosystems. Realization came after thinking about this other company, that will soon take over this particular industry for sure.

Microsoft has their software ecosystem, Apple has their consumer product ecosystem, Google has their internet ecosystem, etc. Each new product and service builds on the others.

Technology works best for ecosystems because it's so easy to connect the different products and services. But I can't think of any industry needing such an ecosystem. Unique ideas are more and more difficult to come up with as the easy stuff gets created.

Earth was pretty bad. It was just a bunch of random Planet Earth scenes stitched together, and at least 50% of it was the same. Lame. Better off rewatching Planet Earth again. Best part was probably the kid up front who asked his mom, "what's he doing?" as a cheetah took down a gazelle in slow motion.

This is probably the coolest magazine I've seen in a while. The designs are so unique and magnificent they melted my brains with their beauty. Architectural Digest. Someday.

Microsoft has been running a "Laptop Hunter" commercial campaign in response to Apple's "I'm A Mac". The Laptop Hunter campaign is probably even worse than the commercials with Seinfeld.

The "I'm A Mac" commercials attack PCs as being boring, uncool, generic, unstable, and geeky smart, while portraying Macs as just cool and reliable. However, there is also the less obvious acquiescence that PC users have more technical smarts. So already in the Mac versus PC battlefield, PC is down as "unstable, uncool, etc.", and these laptop hunters commercials essentially respond with, "But PCs are cheaper and they have bigger screens, which is why you should buy them," thus admitting to these flaws.

The comments that the laptop hunters make are also unbelievably inane. You would think the ad team would play up the geeky tech smarts of the PCs, by having the hunters list technical aspects of the PCs, but instead they decide to play the lower price game, which is a stupid move, especially when most consumers have the bad taste of Vista in mind. Most of the time consumers would rather have a more expensive, but higher quality product, as shown by Apple's skyrocketing profits.

So what do the inevitable PCs want? "Speed, a big hard drive, and good gaming computer."

Speed: That's pretty subjective. But it's no secret the Windows OS falls terribly short on every aspect of this. The times I have used a Mac, they were incredibly smooth, with very little lag. With Windows, everything is a tic slower, there are temporary freezes, and general instability. And they would hardly get the speed they want, especially with Microsoft Office getting slower and slower with each new version.
A Big Hard Drive: Even the lowliest Dell Inspiron packs 160GB of storage, so I don't even see how this is a concern.
A Good Gaming Computer: So Windows is better in this respect.
Also, who uses Blu-Ray on a laptop? Blu-Ray is for high resolution movies, and you'd hardly see any difference on a laptop screen.

Maybe these were good commercials, but I just saw a terribly planned response that fell flat.

Vista's Windows Movie Maker leaves a a nasty watermark on all the videos you make, which is frustrating to say the least. The OS is around $200, and yet the movie making software leaves a watermark on your videos unless you use a period as the file name, as I later found.

So I made the bright decision to download the fancy newfangled Windows Live Movie Maker. It has an extra word; it must be good. So the first time I run this, it asks me to update the program. Why wasn't this update included in the installer? I had to download the update, install that, and then run Windows Live Movie Maker. Who are the twits that code this garbage? And worst of all... it didn't even have a storyboard. Sure, it's beta software, but how are you supposed to make videos without a storyboard. This isn't beta. Maybe alpha. So basically, everything you can do in Windows Live Movie Maker, you can do in Microsoft Office PowerPoint. In fact, it was worse than PowerPoint. It had fewer transitions, timing features, and everything. It's embarrassing that they even release this. I'm having doubts about Windows 7 now too.

It seems that the Windows Live Movie Maker team's idea of "new" is changing the color scheme, adding a dynamic resizing scrollbar at the bottom (OMG it's animated resizing, so Vista-y and impressive!).

I gave up too quickly

You paddle up to an island where you know there are two types of people: Liars and Truth Tellers. Liars ALWAYS lie, and Truth-Tellers ALWAYS tell the truth. You see 3 people on the beach. Liars and Truth Tellers often hang out together, so these 3 natives could be any combination of liars and truth tellers.

You ask, "Are you liars or truth-tellers?" and the first guy answers your question, but a big wave crashes on the beach just then. The natives hear the answer, but you do not.

So you repeat the question, and this time the second guy responds. He says, "The first guy told you that he is a truth-teller". The second guy then continues, "The first guy actually is a truth-teller". Finally, the second guy states, referring now to himself, "I am a truth-teller".

At this point the 3rd guy decides to respond. He says, "No, the second guy is lying. I am a truth-teller."

Who's a liar and who's a truth teller?

Here are the only possible accusations, where x=impossible and o=possible. It is assumed each person knows the status of the others.
[x] L<--(T)--L
[x] T<--(T)--L
[x] T<--(L)--T
[x] L<--(L)--T
[x] L<--(L)--L
[o] T<--(L)--L
[o] T<--(T)--T
[x] L<--(T)--T

T<--(T)--_<--(L)--_
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