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well, definitely not on rock’n'roll. paul graham, the lisp guy, has an interesting essay that got posted to slashdot (some of the comments are good. obviously some of these people actually live in silicon valley) about “how to be silicon valley”. it covers a lot of things i’ve been thinking about over the past couple of years regarding how you could build a new city and what would i want it to be like. he’s actually more focused on creating another silicon valley type atmosphere for startups than purely creating a new city from scratch though. i suppose it’s a subset as a silicon valley type environment would be important. he also mentions my perceived big downside for silicon valley in that it’s a sprawling suburb.

boston may be looking better. startups, m.i.t., m.l.s., but is it possible to get over the accent?

what he doesn’t mention, and critical to any desirable city, is transportation. that includes both getting around, a reasonably dense city center, as well as getting into and out of the city, either trains or planes. birmingham is seriously lacking in this department. the situation in birmingham, at least the city center, is unlikely to ever change because the current government seems useless in the right areas and it’s not going to change unless a large enough percentage of people move in that then elect a new government (preferrably libertarian). california is obviously a blue state so democrats as a party are not the problem. i would think that the issue is that both republicans and democrats in alabama are still old school. both prefer keeping things the way they are instead of moving forward. as an interesting related note, compare the 2004 election breakdown for alabama to this map of the black belt. notice anything? likewise, it would seem that the majority of money in birmingham is old money or related to large corporations, not conducive to startups.

in the end, all blathering about attracting the “creative class” aside, the question to be answered is why stay and create something when you could actually move somewhere else. unless you start in your 20’s you probably aren’t going to see any benefit of a reasonable amount in your lifetime.

of course, i could be completely uninformed about some of these issues in birmingham as i’m only partially engaged.

this is a decent lay-persons type interview with linus torvalds from cnn international. good comments on meetings and micro-managing at near the end. maybe all managers should pretend they aren’t paying their employees when interacting with them.

this is a good article from bruce schneier about privacy. the number of c.c.t.v. cameras in london is definitely a turn-off. the bigger question for me is how does a society get to the point where this is necessary? is it crime? is it really effective? since i’ve been here, in islington, i’ve seen at least 3 of these signs asking if people saw anything related to some sort of crime. i think actually in all cases, it was a single male getting attacked by multiple other males. supposedly, all 3 were caught on camera. of course, having footage of some guy getting his ass kicked doesn’t really do anything for you if you don’t know who anyone is. i guess that will all be solved when they have national rfid cards and monitoring your location at all times. in case you couldn’t tell, i don’t think they are useful at all.

this video is probably the funniest thing i’ve seen in a while. you have to give it to colbert, he truly does have balls as he claims. he’s slamming the administration and with bush no more than a few meters away. classic. interestingly, not one of the major news outlets has an article listed in google news. spread the word, because they obviously aren’t.

of course, this is another great example of how crap online video is with streaming. you have to wait until it’s completely buffered before you can view it without skipping. the quality is generally crap. the audio and video quickly get out of sync. and this is one of the better versions i found. not surprisingly, it’s not on the c-span.org website.

and europeans say americans can’t do satire. indeed.

update: here’s a torrent. it may be better quality, but i haven’t tried it. it’s apparently the whole thing so you have to fast forward to the colbert part. it also has the most likely stupid bit with bush and an impersonator.

so, if you slap the hand, you have to give a pat on the back. bush is at least making some attempt (alterior motives? still trust issues) to turn things around. removing $2 billion in tax breaks for oil companies reporting record profits would seem like a no brainer. although, he can’t actually do it, congress has to. maybe it’s a start. there’s some more today with congress getting oil companies tax records. how is this going to get prices to drop? it’s not. it may end up making the oil companies look bad, but it’s not going to do anything else. the only way prices will go down is if supply increases (not going to happen) or demand decrease. poor city planning and urban sprawl are part of the problem. even with gas at $3/gallon that’s still not really significant enough for people to change their ways.

on a musical note (man that’s bad), it’s good to see some musicians actually standing up for themselves. even if they are only canadian.

interesting english world cup blog. indeed, where is that u.s. world cup song?

one computer bit. after installing the new ubuntu i started seeing weird problems with random scrolling in firefox. it turns out that it’s because they enabled the scroll strip on the touch pad. how annoying. who ever though it was a good idea to integrated it right in the same surface? i’m constantly accidentally setting it off. i guess i’ll have to figure out how to turn it off now.