Monday, March 27, 2006

Trapped in the Closet in Canada on Friday night

From Andrew Sullivan’s email:

Just a quick note re South Park in Canada.  While it frustrates me that Canada’s Comedy Network is not yet showing the new South Park episodes (if they follow the pattern of previous years, they won’t start airing them until October), they are currently re-showing the episodes from last season. Your Canadian readers might be interested to know that The Comedy Network (according to my digital receiver TV listings, online TV listings, and the Comedy Network website) is planning to re-air “Trapped In The Closet” on Friday (9:30 pm Eastern/Pacific).

They’ve been re-airing season 9 in order, and this is NOT the episode that should be airing next.  They’ve undoubtedly adjusted their schedule based on the events of the last couple of weeks.  (It’ll be interesting to see if their plans change in the next four days...)

The Minuteman & the Mexican

In the midst of all the inflammatory talk about immigration, along comes Gustavo Arellano with a piece on Latino USA [MP3 Real] explaining why he genuinely likes Minuteman Project co-founder Jim Gilchrist:

I was one of the first reporters to interview Gilchrist. When I talked to him last February, I expected a frothy jerk. Now, Gilchrist did say some far out stuff. He thinks, for instance, that this country will devolve into warring tribes in about 20 years. And that Mexican immigrants can’t assimilate. Ever.

What a dope!

But, at the same time, I thought Gilchrist was one of the nicest people I’ve ever interviewed. He graciously answered all of my questions and when it was published he called and said it was tough but fair. Gilchrist, whose a Purple Heart veteran, even defended me when conservatives attacked my article. That was going beyond the call of duty.

You HAVE to listen to this. This is a model for all of us on the Left and Right - or those battling factions (bloggers take heed) within and without - on how to agree to disagree. And, most importantly, respect the people with whom we disagree, no matter how vehemently.

As to Gilchrist, his son-in-law is Mexican American and he likes fajitas. How bad could he be? Listen, too, for his views on the “capitalist pigs” (his words) that he calls “professional slave traders.”

Perpetual Partial Attention II

Here are O’Reilley Radar’s ”near-verbatim notes” of Linda Stone‘s talk last June at Supernove 2005:

I see twenty year cycles. Coming through in the cycles is a tension between collective and individual, and our tendency to take set of beliefs to extreme then it fails us and we seek the opposite.

1945-1965: organization/insitution center of gravity. We paid attention to that which we serve. Lucy paid full attention to phone conversations, Seinfeld does not. Belief that by serving insitution of (marriage|employer|community) we’d leave happy and well-ordered lives. Marketing, command-and-control lifestyle, parents and authority figures, all fit in. Service to institution would bring us satisfaction. We paid full-focus attention to that which served the institution: family, community, marriage. We trusted experts in authority to filter the noise from the signal, to give us the information that matters. As those things failed us, we embraced what we’d suppressed.

1965-1985: me and self-expression. Self and self-expression new center of gravity. Trusted ourselves, entrepreneurial. Apple, Microsoft, Southwest Airlines. Marketers said we have our power to be our best. Fashion broke free. We paid attention to that which created personal opportunities. Paid attention to full-screen software like Word and Excel. Willing to fragment attention if it enhanced our opportunity. Multitasking was an adaptive. Our sense of committment dropped: rising divorce rate, 3 companies/career, etc. Became narcissistic and lonely, reached out for network.

1985-2005: Network center of gravity. Trust network intelligence. Scan for opportunity. Continuous partial attention[*] is a post-multitasking adaptive behaviour. Being connected makes us feel alive. ADD is a dysfunctional variant of continuous partial attention. Continuous partial attention isn’t motivated by productivity, it’s motivated by being connected. MySpace, Friendster, where quantity of connections desirable may make us feel connected, but lack of meaning underscores how promiscuous and how empty this way of life made us feel. Dan Gould: “I quit every social network I was on so I could have dinner with people.”

Here’s the podcast of the full panel discussion. Here’s my first Perpetual Partial Attention post, which hints at my own future iteration of her observation. Her prediction and prescription for the next 20 years follows below.

* Much as I love the brilliance of her observations, I prefer and have been saying Perpetual Partial Attention for so long now that I’m going to stick with it.

Read the rest of "Perpetual Partial Attention II" in the extended entry.

More Katie speculation

Remember when I put Katie Couric in the same league as Edward R. Murrow? I stand by that post. I want her at CBS. USA Today:

The biggest guessing game in network news - whether NBC Today star Katie Couric will leave to anchor The CBS Evening News -has been going on for months now, and speculation has far outweighed any answers.

“I think this is one of those deals that isn’t done until it’s done, and right now I don’t think anybody really knows what Katie will decide,” CBS Evening News anchor Bob Schieffer says. “It’s up to Katie to decide, and when she does, we’ll all know.”

RELATED: Katie & Jimmy the oddest coupling since Fonda & Turner?

Why is Windows so slow?

Many reasons, but this is the one I was looking for:

Microsoft will not say so, but antitrust considerations may have played a role in the decision that Mr. Allchin called the right thing to do. As part of its antitrust settlement, Microsoft vowed to treat PC makers even-handedly, after evidence in the trial that Microsoft had rewarded some PC makers with better pricing or more marketing help in exchange for giving Microsoft products an edge over competing software.

In the last few weeks, Microsoft met with major PC makers and retailers to discuss Vista. Hewlett-Packard, the second-largest PC maker after Dell, is a leader in the consumer market. Yet unlike Dell, Hewlett-Packard sells extensively through retailers, whose orders must be taken and shelves stocked. That takes time.

Hewlett-Packard, according to a person close to the company who asked not to be identified because he was told the information confidentially, informed Microsoft that unless Vista was locked down and ready by August, Hewlett-Packard would be at a disadvantage in the year-end sales season.

RELATED: Scobleizer sez the 60% rewrite is bunk and that some bloggers are like the gossip magazines in the grocery stores.