Maybe Google views themselves as adept as Apple, and are convinced that cutting off any “weaker alternatives” is the only way to get, what they believe to be, the superior WebM codec into the real world. I bet they even believe that someday this decision will be heralded as a great step forward. Like Apple with the floppy drive.

A nice tidbit on Google’s “openness” stance:

If openness is so important that Google is willing to remove features from Chrome, there is no way that the company should be shipping Flash in Chrome.

And:

… <video> will now become: the iOS fallback tag. Flash will remain the preferred solution for “real” browsers, and the only people using <video> will be those catering to iOS.

Fallback tag? With the way things are going, iOS will NOT be considered the fallback!

Inside Job – Fantastic episode of This American Life, “the inside story of one company that made hundreds of millions of dollars for itself while worsening the financial crisis for the rest of us”.

A hedge fund named Magnetar comes up with an elaborate plan to make money. It sponsors the creation of complicated and ultimately toxic financial securities… while at the same time betting against the very securities it helped create.

Great photographs of New York / He Took a Polaroid Every Day, Until the Day He Died / Google makes a grand entrance into the embedded font game / The Only Summer-TV Guide You’ll Ever Need

The Delicious Tools extension for Google Chrome now has over 10,000 users and has been maintaining a rating of 4 out of 5 stars! Most recently we’ve added a customizable keyboard shortcut, making this a fantastic option for personalized, unobtrusive and simple bookmark saving in Chrome, on both the Windows and Mac platform. Thanks to pix0r for some big time contributions on this fun little open source extension.

View and share Flickr photos in the style of The Big Picture, Boston.com’s excellent photo blog, with the The Big Pictr Flickr mashup. A beautiful way to browse photos, here’s a set from a Susan and I tagged with ‘camping’ on BigPictr.com, a bit buggy but a great idea. If you’re like me, we now expect all photography online to be as big as the Big Picture these days. It’ll be tools like BigPictr.com that will bring that possibility to fruition. Speaking of photography, Divvyshot.com looks like a promising tool to pool your photos together based on a particular event. Round up your family’s digital shots in a single spot.

Randomness: Following up on 2008′s “Growing Up Online” comes Frontline’s “Digital Nation” good stuff / The best looking sites using Typekit / The New York Public Library Jazz Loft Project exhibition opened this week at NYPL for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center and will run through May 22, 2010 / Great television still exists, you just need to turn off your TV to find it: Party Down, available on Netflix Watch Instantly / ShadyURL.com, a great tool for making your URL’s suspicious and frightening / Take screenshots below the fold with the Webpage Screenshot Chrome extension / Chrome 4 now natively supports Greasemonkey / Pretty darn basic, easy to use, handy framework for iPhone web app projects: iWebkit / Constantly forget which veggies and fruit are most important to buy organic? This handy Shopper Guide to Pesticides iPhone app cuts right to the chase and gives me a list, plain and simple.

To express my hate for Facebook I created a couple of poorly designed, badly kerned T-shirts. Because just like Facebook, I too can offer up worthless crap: Facebook: Cultivating Meaningless Relationships and Facebook: The Cure For Culture. If you’re not afraid to express hate on an American Apparel Tee, then here’s your chance.

Fortune Magazine’s Why business loves Charlie Rose and some interesting words from the article: affectation: a deliberate pretense or exaggerated display. primacy: the state of being first in importance. protean: Exceedingly variable; readily assuming different shapes or forms. seriatim: in a series; one after another. canard: a deliberately misleading fabrication. | The banner image comes from the set of Holga images taken by Susan and myself during last summer’s cross country move.

Sometimes you never realize something is constantly done wrong, until you see it done right.

Most may know the difference between widescreen and full screen. But why not provide an example, like in the DVD menu of “The Visitor“. Fantastic!

I was so psyched on this, I forgive them for making it difficult to tell which option is currently selected. Does the red box indicate your current selection, or is it the yellow?

http://flickr.com/photos/soupenvy/3150304689/

It really makes you want to eat grass fed beef only, but god damn, In N Out burger is so good.

Susan & I weren’t able to attend, but my sister and her fiancee were able to catch Mark looking like Ryan Seacrest and behaving like Joan Rivers. There’s a couple more snapshots on Flickr.

I snagged the pics from my soon-to-be brother in law, Brian, who blogged all about it on: Live from Rodney Drive.

As far as the film itself goes, I certainly didn’t enjoy it as much as Roger Ebert did. However, there are a few songs that were done so well, that at that moment in time I really did love the entire movie.

In particular, Eddie Izzard as Mr. Kite in “Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite” from “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” (as seen in the trailer) is amazingly over the top with a great mix of animation and Big Top showmanship, it’s really quite spectacular. Another favorite is the performance of “I’ve Just Seen a Face” from “help!“, which happily tugs just a bit at the heartstrings of young love. These moments really make you want to dig through the entire Beatles catalog all over again.

While Across the Universe could have benefited greatly from some serious scene cutting, I still can’t help myself from saying I had a good time.

The savings quickly adds up:


$93 a month allows me to squirrel away a healthy $654 before I skip town. I’ve elected to keep my own internet connection and not leech off neighbors merely for the reliability my own connection provides. I’m willing to pay for that much.

My next step was to simplify the process of getting that must see TV via the internet, where this Cnet article I read a couple months back came in handy: TV Torrents: When ‘piracy’ is easier than legal purchase.

Within 10 minutes of setting up Miro and browsing tvRSS.net, my favorite shows were all queued up.

One of the definite drawbacks is all that money spent on an HDTV that will no longer receive HD programming. Seems like a waste. Perhaps a portion of the savings can go to upgrading that upconverting DVD player to a legit HD one. You know, just to round things out a bit.

The internet as a true content delivery network, what a time we’re living in!

By the way, as you might expect, I think I love My Wife isn’t very good, even if you are a Chris Rock fan.