blakerson.com

Here's an awesome theory on Google being Web 2.0. It makes a lot more sense than the current rumor mill stuff because it looks at Google's potential in a much bigger picture than as a worthy competitor to Microsoft. Strangely, however, they do get compared to Wal-Mart. But yet more strangely, it's much less evil. Give it a read.

Meanwhile, I've always wondered why something like this hasn't happened before. In the past, the world has been able to assemble itself and establish good standards for practice across the entire Internet. Hell, that's given us everything from HTTP to the .com domain register to the differences between IE and Firefox. But now, the whole world has finally come together to discuss the Net, and no one shut up. I guess kids from Xbox Live finally figured out how to get into international tech summits.

Gersh has requested to add you as a friend, but before we can
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Thanks,
the facebook team.

There are a lot of metaphors for life. The road of life, the story of your life, the movie of your life... they all refer to the same thing, but they especially have one little feature in common:

There's that one scene in every movie or video game involving a hero where the hero encounters an old man, who's very soft-spoken, and wise not out of intellect but experience. Then, that old man proceeds to hand down some advice that will come in handy far in the future, at a time you can't possibly see from the present, in a situation you can't possibly predict. It was nice to live that scene today, because it means that I just might be a hero.

I talked to an old man who was a proud grandfather, and an even happier husband. He was happily married for 43 years to the woman who's still his dream girl. He had a lot to say about love and a happy marriage. The thing that caught me most off guard was that they had never talked of experience. The 'who did you sleep with before me?' conversation never happened. I don't know if I can have a relationship where that conversation doesn't happen - to me it's weird to live with secrets - but he's certainly got a hell of a point. That's typically been a bad conversation between me and the girls I've dated, or at least led down a bad path. And there's no doubt it's worked for him. His name was Fred, and after shaking my hand he got into his wife's Cadillac which he was getting washed for her, and I stepped into my thank-god-it's-finally-clean car and we took off in different directions. I guess today was a "road of life" kind of day.

Go visit good old Phil, my high-school partner-in-crime. Together with the two of us and Syed, we graduated 1-3-4 in our class and spent the last two years of that experience doing each other's homework and having intellectual talks between classes. Come to think of it, those guys are probably my favorite guys that I actually went to Oakridge with.

Anyway. He's an economics major at Boston U, and as such his blog is pretty much exclusively of an economic slant. He's a libertarian, which makes for some fun conservative economics, but being a darn smart guy, he knows how to put together his arguments and really go at it with someone from the opposite side without losing an ounce of his professionalism. For those of us who go get Mongolian, he's that guy who joins us. So who's ready for some good Mongolian action after finals? :D

Another note (for Blogger users): how's the improved comments system? It looks good but if there's no IP address logging, I'm still out.

I've just started listening to it, but it's good enough to recommend.

Here's a recipe for Imogen Heap:
1 part Feist (Aroon's favorite musician, if you haven't heard her go give her a listen)
1 part Frou Frou
1 part Bjork
add Frou Frou's singer
---------------------
1 Imogen Heap

Sounds good, don't it? There's 2 albums, and each has a huge stylistic variety but there's still some connection to all the above named artists, especially Frou Frou - it's really that group's sound with just a few more rough edges. Recommended track: "Goodnight and Go."

I feel like this will be quickly crawling up my audioscrobbler profile, which I've conveniently linked on the right.

Edit: Apparently Imogen Heap is not the name of a band, but a person. It's the name of the lead singer from Frou Frou, and this stuff is her solo work.