apple juice

By the way, Senna is a great movie that you should watch.

Here is a video of Formula One great Ayrton Senna demonstrating the techique in a Honda NSX. You’ll note he’s wearing a button-down shirt, dress pants, Italian loafers, and no helmet while burying the speedometer on his way around the track.

(Via kottke.org.)

One of the things about our globalized world is that the realities of economic activities are not close to the places of consumption. It’s clear to me that if we simply had more information about the costs of our actions, more people would be concerned about nature.

This series of photographs from the oil sands of Alberta, Canada is pretty amazing. The scale of the operations is absolutely staggering.

Canadian Oil Sands Flyover

The size of the truck in the picture is 50 feet long. The lake on the left is waste water being skimmed for chemicals.

After selling our first-generation AppleTV a while back, I purchased the new 3rd gen 1080p version a couple months ago. We love it, and it is working great with the whole ecosystem.

There are holes, however, in the content. Obviously Apple has a TV, Movie and Music store that they do not want to cannabalize, but there is plenty of content available on the web that you can’t easily access on AppleTV.

If I were a betting man, I would place good money on Apple bringing the App Store concept (subscriptions and all) to the AppleTV in the coming months. The new grid of icons on the homescreen is just screaming for awesome 3rd-party apps.

I’ve blogged before about my internet options and linked to charts showing that Americans pay more money for less bandwidth than just about every other developed nation in the world.

Lawrence Lessig makes this point (among others) in this speech at WiscNet Future Technology Conference. The larger context of this speech is the corrupting influence of money in government, but I’ve started right about the section where he talks about broadband.

I think the solution in this case (at least for minneapolis) is to build out the network that was made for our municipal wifi. I want to subscribe on principle, but at 6Mbps, it is not exactly fast. However, if I could have fiber to my house, then we’d be talking!

Interesting to me that I have not received the push notification that the update was even available, and I hadn’t taken the time invoke it manually…

→ iOS 5.1.1 upgrade stats

”

David Smith’s iOS version stats from his apps:

The data for 4 days shows a clear and very consistent progression. Users are updating at a rate of roughly 7.5%/day, leading to a total adoption of around 30% so far.

30% of his userbase has upgraded to the four-day-old, no-new-features, not-marketed iOS 5.1.1 release. That’s incredible.

Also, if you’re a developer, listen to his podcast.

∞ Permalink

“

(Via Marco.org.)

In one sense, Patagonia’s current success stems from classic business-school principles. The brand has maximized what B-school types refer to as WTP, or willingness to pay. Patagonia’s perceived quality and do-gooder aura convince customers that its goods are worth a higher price.

Guilty as charged…

Read more: Patagonia’s Founder is America’s Most Unlikely Business Guru – wsj

Also, I’ve been involved in many discussions about this concept over the past couple years, which I don’t completely understand how to integrate into my current environment. (emphasis mine)

It’s not just the marketplace Chouinard is affecting—it’s the workplace. His flex-time policies allow workers to come and go whenever they want—say, when waves are high at the nearby surf point—as long as deadlines are met. There’s a yoga room available any time of day (I walked in on the head menswear designer meditating there at around 11 a.m. on a Tuesday.) At the prodding of Chouinard’s wife, Malinda, Patagonia was one of the first companies in California to provide on-site, subsidized day care. Even the chief bean counter, COO and CFO Rose Marcario, seems spiritually fulfilled. In previous jobs at other companies, she says, “I might have looked for ways to defer taxes in the Cayman Islands. Here, we are proud to pay our fair share of taxes. It’s a different philosophy. My life is more integrated with my work because I’m trying to stay true to the same values in both.”

(via kottke.org)

The Beastie Boys are one of the bands that I grew up with, and learning that Adam Yauch had passed away was more surreal than I expected. They bring back otherwise meaningless memories from my past that otherwise would have faded away. I haven’t listened to them regularly for a long time, but like a smell that transports you back in time, just hearing a few songs takes me back…

I remember having a long talk with my Dad about the lyrics to songs after a few of my latest CD purchases were discovered. The new Beastie Boys album Paul’s Boutique being one of them. We sat on my bed and read the lyrics out loud for about 30 minutes. I purchased Paul’s Boutique because it lacked the Parental Advisory Explicit Lyrics sticker that I was banned from bringing into the house. There was no sticker for metaphor and simile. Ultimately I lost about five CDs that evening, and in frustration I threw my brother under the bus for having purchased Nivrana’s Nevermind.

I remember shopping at Best Buy with Doug and purchasing Ill Communication. We saw two girls from our school, they were purchasing some other album. Doug and I put the CD on in my parent’s Ford Explorer, which had a subwoofer. We thought this to be pretty cool, Sure Shot bumping out of the windows as we rolled through the suburbs.

After some of the jazzy interludes from Check Your Head were featured in a Greg Stump’s movie P-Tex, Lies, and Duct Tape, I brought the Beastie Boys back into the public in our household, playing The In Sound From Way Out for the family one evening. I remember the reaction being tepid even though I loved it.

The Beastie Boys were on my list of concerts to see in my lifetime, and feeling like rappers couldn’t keep on rapping for ever, we started looking for them on tour. Ultimately, in an amusement park in Stockholm, Sweden, Sonja and I saw the Beastie Boys live. There were about 2500 people there. Most seemed interested in the punk beginnings rather than their latest hits, but we jammed away the afternoon.