LookIt

Microsoft and naming failures

Bing. Oh, please.

"Hey, that's a cool web site you found! Where did you find it?" How many people of any age will want to say "I used Bing"? I would bet that most people who used the Microsoft product will instead say "I used Google" because it sounds much less lame.

Similarly, which sounds much more stupid: "I Googled it" or "I Binged it"?

Microsoft has a terrible track record with names. Oddly, the least horribly named product of the last decade, Vista, is one of their worst from a user experience standpoint. ("Excel" isn't a bad name, but that was an entire human generation ago. And it came at the same time as "Word", which was competing with "WordStar" and "WordPerfect". Yeesh.)

Where does this content come from?

Compare and contrast this YouTube video and the one that is likely to be the original. YouTube has clearly ripped off the video, including the overlaid ad for the original site. Over 50,000 people have watched it. I found the video from a link to the YouTube version, of course. If YouTube put garish ads on the page (or, worse, on the video itself as they seem to like to do these days), will they share the revenue with the originating site? Note that I cannot flag the video to tell YouTube that they are clearly stealing someone else's material: I can only do so if they are stealing my material (or it's pr0n or violent or the like).

Live music and iTunes

Now this festival sounds interesting. 62 bands with live performances on iTunes that did not come from existing CDs. And they are all free tickets to boot. This is so Apple (and so not Microsoft/Zune).

Dead, California-style

It took about a week, but the Dead at Shoreline, 2009-05-10 is now available for those of you who don't like futzing with BitTorrent.

Even if you're not a Deadhead, but want to hear what we all like in the long, loping, soaring, twisted jamming that the Dead do best, consider listening to Sugaree (yes, this one is really is 20 minutes, and worth every minute of it). But do maybe consider listening to the whole show...

Star Trek movie

Very good writing, a bunch of clever hooks, nice balance of action and dialog. Splosions, gunfire, shouting, fire inside the spaceship. Insultingly crass product placement (just one, near the beginning, but my friends who work for the company should tell their marketing people that it backfired, badly), gratuitous alien sex, unnecessary use of time travel. Well worth spending 2+ hours inside even on a beautiful spring/summer day, and would be significantly less fun on DVD.

Live music by dead folks

Some folks have asked me why I only post links to live music and don't talk about CDs that often. In short: good live music is almost always better than good recordings. If you want to do an A-B test, get a copy of The Definitive Otis Redding. Listen and groove to the first couple of CDs: wonderful soulful stuff. Then listen to the live tracks of the same songs on the other CDs. Even the least funky among us can hear the difference. Even on songs that normally would not be called "soul", like his cover of Day Tripper, are amazingly more fun live than from the CDs.

That's one way to update a classic

Jimi Hendrix' misogynist hit Hey Joe, completely transformed by the Lovell Sisters at this concert. The guitar run during the bridge rocks as hard as Jimi ever did...

Pete Seeger turns 90

He's always been one of my heros. No one can get everyone singing like Pete. More here.