Well, I saw The Incredibles yesterday, and, well, I just wasn’t blown away.

I expected to be blown away, and that’s part of the let-down. If you’re expecting steak and get hamburger, the meal’s a letdown, now matter how good that burger is.

I had the same experience with National Lampoon’s Animal House: I first saw this when I was in college, on campus, and the college had a pretty high-profile frat presence (so, for example, there were lots of togas in the audience). But after hearing all about it, enduring food fights in the cafeteria and so on, how could the movie live up to the expectations? It couldn’t. I liked the movie, but wasn’t blown away.

Today, however, it’s one of my (guilty pleasures) favorites.

Other factors prevented me from saying “This is the damn best thing ever!” about The Incredibles:

• I’m not a big fan of superhero movies: This is a superhero movie, and that’s just not my favorite genre. I never read the comic books or watched many of the cartoons as a kid; as an adult, I’ve still yet to see any of the Batman movies, and I’ve only seen bits and pieces of the first Superman movie on TV (and was unimpressed). Just not my bag.
• The animation “wow” effect not in evidence: This is not a knock against the movie, just a simple fact. When Toy Story first came out, that was a “wow” (and it had a good story, as well). And Shrek (the first) was the first movie I ever saw on DVD, so there’s that. I still remember the first song I ever heard on CD – Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” – man, that still blows me away. You really do remember your first time…
• Crappy Extras: Again, Shrek is the winner here. The entire disk of extras on The Incredibles were, for the most part, yawn-inducing. I was quite surprised.

But don’t get me wrong – the movie was fun to watch and I recommend it. It just didn’t measure up to my expectations in many ways, but that’s my problem, ya know?

Hmm…a steak does sound good…

LISTENING TO:
American IV: The Man Comes Around
Johnny Cash

As stated many times before, I’m not a country music lover.

Is this even “country” music? – Cash covers pop and traditional songs in his own inimitable way.

A co-worker told me about this CD.

She lent same to me.

I ripped/copied same.

And then I purchased same – giving back. This is good – BRILLIANT – music.

To me.

All music

I dunno. My musical taste seems all over the board.

I like classical.

I like blues.

Not a big fan of jazz.

Not a big fan of rap.

Not a big fan of country/country and western – yet a lot of what is interesting to me lately/recently is, I guess, sorta country based.

OK, I’m getting old.

Am I also getting to be a redneck?

Johnny Cash has a distinct voice that – sadly – I’m just “getting” today.

*sigh*

Yet I welcome the “country” infusion, most of which I’ve discovered over the last half-dozen years or so.

Strange. Weird.

Nice.

Yep, it’s Friday night, about 10pm, and I’m ready to pack it in.

Geez, how old am I???

Hectic week – all over the place – including loading a truck (yes, I’m a programmer. Don’t ask).

Some good code written; some good processes put into place/thought about.

Nice dinner this evening. Pasta. Mussels. Nice bottle of Pinot Noir (Oregon, not that California stuff…like I’d really know the difference [here I might]).

Mind racing; body racing in the opposite direction (toward the bed….).

All in all, good week and – especially – night.

Hmmm … Jason Kottke just announced he’s going into blogging full time. How will that work out? He has no idea. That’s part of the fun (and fear).

Dan Gillmor – probably the highest profile blogging journalist at the time – ditched the day job last December for some yet-unspecified grass-roots journalism project.

This is getting interesting.

Dorkage – n. A physical object that holds the attention and affection of a dork (see also geek). Often used collectively.

Ah, a little cleaning over the weekend unearthed the slide rule I used all through high school physics (this was PC – pre-calculators).

The damn thing is, I still remembered how to do a few (very few) things on it: Multipication, division, square roots, some trig.

Dorkage is oddly personal, but fun…

Steve Outing has a good, yet short, article about communication services (think Net access, cable TV, Dish TV, cell phones).

Obstensively, the article talks about how newspapers may get the short straw in the rush to get other communication/data subscriptions: News has become a commodity – so newspapers may well be cancelled in favor of, for example, NetFlix or whatever for those without unlimited budgets.

Newspapers have already become aware of this – slowly, but they are adopting and adapting (see Dan Gillmor’s blog on any given day for more on this). Large newspaper companies are starting to experiment with free newspapers for commuters and other city dwellers, betting the ad revenue for this non-subscription product will be great, as the target audience’s appeal to advertisers – younger, professional, conspicuous consumers – will feed the coffers.

Papers have also begun to embrace the blog mentality – that’s content that IS unique to a Web site. When Gillmor was at the San Jose Mercury – blogging daily for their Silicon Valley property – I’d read him daily. And there’s those ad impressions….

But the article also touched on the idea of “bundling” services (as Comcast has done with their Triple Play – VoIP, TV and Internet), but didn’t explore it much.

Bears more thought, methinks.

What are some of those thoughts? Consider the following:

• For the average consumers, a package is usually easier to consume than hand-picking parts to make a custom package. And there are far more average consumers than the opposite.
• Packages usually keep costs down. A Triple Play type package is usually cheaper than three subscriptions from different companies. That said, such packages often make people purchase what they don’t really need (“Gee, I don’t need high-speed internet, but for only $5 extra a month…”).
• So – as consumers – we need to make sure that unbundling – or lack of bundling – is supported. Who wants to go through a Microsoft-type lockin for communications/data subscriptions? Not me, that’s for sure.
• Related the the previous point: Bundling can be a good thing, but it can lead to monopolies, or – at least – a handful of large companies. There are upsides and downsides to such consolidation, but it bears watching. The rapid consolidation of the telco industry in the recent past (seems like there’s a $XX billion merger every other day) is both troubling (lack of choice) and welcome (telcos are so f’d up, some consolidation is welcomed).
• Outing is really talking – to a degree – about the end to traditional print media as we have known it. While print won’t disappear, it will be marginalized. Looks at the precedent of networkTV news dominance: CNN was scoffed at, but now is the first place the White House turns (OK, maybe FOX News first…). Talk radio came out of nowhere to be a right-wing staple, getting the message out. Then this thingee called the internet…with online news, blogs… To quote Bobby Zimmerman, the times (including the New York Times) they are a changin’.
• I’m a big reader, yet I’m also a huge computer dork. And I now subscribe to less magazines than at any post-high school point of my life, and that includes times when I really didn’t have a lot of money to spend on non-essentials. There’s little need for them for news – be it computer or world news. By the time it’s in print, I’ve read about it extensively online.
• I still subscribe to a newspaper, but I read it less and less. And I know very few (if any) younger co-workers who even subscribe.
• The explosion of data/delivery systems is great in that there is a lot of [whatever] out there. That doesn’t mean there is a whole lot of good stuff out (by any measure).

What this all means today, tomorrow or next decade I can’t say.

But it’s all a way different way of looking at a lot of things – data, content, delivery and distribution systems – than were not really even on the radar a decade ago.

A quarter-million downloads a day. Wow.

Go Firefox Go….

And – suddenly! – there is the pronouncement that Microsoft is backpedaling, and will offer a stand-alone IE update before Longhorn.

Remarkable coincidence…

I was driving home from work the other day (last week?) listening to NPR.

They were talking about some experimental (for lack of a better word on my part) newpapers. Basically, some metropolitan newspapers are experimenting with free, “lite” newspapers (news snippets, entertainment news) to hand out to commuters.

This is an effort to gain readers in the age bracket that traditional newspapers just don’t have a foothold – the young, but professional, crowd.

I’m really not certain what the target of this effort is – it could be to keep spooling out the free papers that are supported by ads (to an age group coveted by advertisers). Hence the OSN title of this post.

Or it could be an effort by the traditional papers to try to gradually get these folks hooked on papers, so they convert to the paying version.

Or a little of both. Whatever.

My point is this: This NPR report talked to some wanker professor at some well-known college who basically dissed the whole concept, trash talking the whole snippet concept of the newspapers blah blah…you’ve heard it before.

But it made me think. What’s about the most common intellectual/non-fluff newspaper out there consumed by professionals? Uh, The Wall Street Journal maybe?

What’s on its front page? SNIPPETS – with [hard-copy] links to the details. But you can peruse the top page and “be informed.” A fairly recent addition is color, and the color coding helps the, uh, non-newspaperish reader.

The WSJ. Stooping to OSN tactics.

Take that Professor Wanker.

And goodbye Mapquest/Yahoo Maps and so on.

Beta only, sketchy Mac support (Netscape/Mozilla) at this time…still kicks butt.

I saw this and kept pestering people throughout the day at work, showing it to them like I invented the damn thing.

Sweet….

Wired Magazine has a sorta brilliant, far-reaching article on the creator of BitTorrent, Bram Cohen.

It’s sorta brilliant because it’s the normal groveling Wired interview, but there are about four or five choice quotations that anyone working in any area of content creation/distribution/consumption[?] should at least read.

And Bram Cohen does not have an agenda, just tech smarts. Others will do the same or worse/better (depending on your politics).

Choice bits:

THIS is why the BitTorrent effect matters. Because it is a glitch in the Matrix, a disturbance in the Force.

What BitTorrent began will be continued/forked by others and so on.

Again, like Napster, the genie is out of the bottle.

Business models have changed. Get over it/get on with it.

Why BitTorrent is effective – and a protocol that I could not write in a zillion years – it’s claim to fame is that it allow faster downloads of stuff. To MPAA etc, that means faster pirating.

OK.

But as Cohen himself admits in the interview, the overall capability of folks to get access to stuff and store it is increasing at an astonishing rate. BitTorrent may be a good protocol, but when everyone has a 1 terabyte hard drive and a DS3 coming into the home, is the efficiency of BitTorrent necessary?

THAT’s why BitTorrent really doesn’t matter (in the LONG run).

Short run, it’s the [promise of]/[evil bastard] of Napster for large honkin’ files, which include films.

Long run – We’ll all be able to do this good/nasty stuff easily – much like a browser enable the delivery (and possible [gasp!!] storage/redelivery of same). BitTorrent shows us the potential of the future; it is not the future.

As Dylan sang, the times they are a changin’…