Rove to Sheryl Crow: “Don’t touch me.”

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Sheryl Crow goes one-on-one (well, two-on-one) with Carl Rove. It happened last night at the White House Correspondents Dinner:

Rover, Crow and David“In his attempt to dismiss us, Mr. Rove turned to head toward his table, but as soon as he did so, Sheryl reached out to touch his arm. Karl swung around and spat, “Don’t touch me.” How hardened and removed from reality must a person be to refuse to be touched by Sheryl Crow? Unfazed, Sheryl abruptly responded, “You can’t speak to us like that, you work for us.” Karl then quipped, “I don’t work for you, I work for the American people.” To which Sheryl promptly reminded him, “We are the American people.”

Sheryl Crow and environmental activist Laurie David are wrapping up an 11-date “Stop Global Warming College Tour” aimed at inspiring students to become part of the movement.

Photo via Ann.

Life before YouTube, Flickr and Mac Book Pro

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I just wasn’t thinking ahead. When I started messing with websites and putting stills and video online, everything was just hard. Almost nobody had fast internet connections. YouTube, Google Video et al were somewhere over the digital rainbow. And hard drives had not become as cheap as they are today, so just “keeping” these big files was a problem.

And I was so intent in putting everything I did online, I didn’t bother to save high resolution still images. I rendered most of my video down to files sizes that could be downloaded.

I’m reminded of my lack of foresight every time I go back and upload a clip to (in this case) Google Video. Like this performance by Daniel “Slick” Ballinger, recorded in March of 2004.

And I should add that the iLife suite (iDVD, iMovie, iPhoto, etc) that ships with OSX just makes it so easy and fun to create. Who knew? Now we save everything. Uncompressed. Best quality. Word to the wise.

RIP-ware (fictional software)

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The following is from Boomsday (page 119) by Christopher Buckley (2007) Comment by Claude

BADMAP is an acronym for Bio-Actuarial Dyna-Metric Age Predictor. It works like this:

” A person’s DNA profile, family history, mental history, lifestyle profile, every variable –how many trips to the grocery per week, how many airplane flights, hobbies, food, booze, number of times per month you had sex and with whom, everything down to what color socks you put on in the morning– were all fed into the software. RIP-ware would then calculate and predict how and when you’d die. In the testing, they had programmed it retroactively with the DNA and lifestyle profile of thousand of people who had already died. RIP-ware predicted their deaths with an accuracy of 99.07 percent. In a simulation, it predicted the death of Elvis Presley — just four months from he actual date of his demise. The ultimate “killer app.” Continue reading →

Fictional Software: Spider Repellent

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“You loaded the software and typed in the search words. Say you’d been arrested for drunk driving or soliciting a prostitute, or you’d been in a gossip page biting the ear of some pretty young thing in a nightclub. Or, for that matter, you had been charged by the SEC with swindling your shareholders. You typed in your name, along with “drunk driving” or “prostitute” or “ear” or “embezzling.” Spider Repellent found all the references to you on the Web and –deleted them.”

— Page 117, Boomsday, by Christopher Buckley