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Le
billet précédent est agrémenté d'une petite vidéo. Voici
son histoire, ou comment illustrer ses billets de vidéos en utilisant des
formats ouverts.
Obtenir le bon fichier vidéo Récupérer le fichier de la vidéo qui
nous intéresse
Au cas présent il s'agit de cette
vidéo hébergée sur YouTube et intitulée « Aldo Maccione" la
classe" ».
Pour récupérer cette vidéo sous GNU/Linux, il vous suffit d'aller chercher
le fichier correspondant dans le répertoire /tmp de votre système une fois la
vidéo intégralement chargée dans votre navigateur.
Pour la suite du billet, le fichier aura pour nom « source.flv ».
Réencoder la vidéo en Ogg Theora et la recadrer
Pour réencoder la vidéo dans un format ouvert, nous allons utiliser le logiciel
libre ffmpeg2theora, disponible sous la licence GNU
GPL pour systèmes GNU/Linux, MacOS et Windows.
Comme indiqué
précédemment, la résolution et le débit de la vidéo sont
à choisir en fonction du type de vidéo. Au cas présent j'ai choisi un
encodage à débit constant de 300 kbit/s qui est un débit
particulièrement faible compte tenu que la séquence est un film de 320x192 pixels
mais qui m'a paru – de façon complètement empirique
– suffisant en l'espèce si l'on considère que la scène
est assez peu animée et que les images composant la vidéo ont finalement assez peu
de différences (le
principe de base de la compression vidéo consiste à n'enregistrer
complètement que quelques images clés appelées « trames I » puis
à enregistrer les seules différences entre deux images clés pour composer
les images intermédiaires appelées « trames P »).
La séquence présentait des bandes noires horizontales de part et d'autre de l'image
qui nuisaient à la bonne intégration de la vidéo dans la page de mon billet.
J'ai donc demandé à ffmpeg2theora de supprimer les bords de la vidéo en
même temps qu'il la réencodait. L'opération n'est hélas pas
automatique, aussi j'ai dû tâtonner pour définir en pixels la taille des
bandes à supprimer (cette taille devant par ailleurs être, dans tous les cas, un
multiple de deux)
Au final la commande pour réencoder et recadrer la vidéo est la suivante :
ffmpeg2theora -V 300 --croptop 24 --cropbottom 24 source.flv -o fichiertemp.ogg
D'une séquence audio-vidéo de 320x240 pixels encodée dans un format
fermé (en H.264/AVC Video pour la vidéo et MPEG-4 AAC pour l'audio) nommée
« source.flv », on passe à une séquence audio-vidéo
recadrée en 320x192 pixels dans un format ouvert (Ogg Theora à débit
constant de 300 kbit/s pour la vidéo, et Ogg Vorbis pour l'audio) nommée «
fichiertemp.ogg ».
A noter qu'un encodage en deux passes (au lieu d'une comme dans l'exemple ci-dessus), toujours
à débit constant, vous permettrait d'optimiser la qualité de la
vidéo.
En savoir plus : consulter les commandes pour ffmpeg2theora ici et là.
Extraire la portion qui nous intéresse
La séquence téléchargée depuis YouTube et réencodée au
format Ogg est en fait une compilation de plusieurs séquences différentes. Nous
allons extraire le tronçon qui nous intéresse et qui correspond grosso modo aux
huit première secondes.
Nous utiliserons pour cela les Ogg Video
Tools (et spécialement l'outil oggCut), un logiciel disponible sous la licence GNU GPL
pour systèmes GNU/Linux, MacOS et Windows.
A noter que le tronçonnage va être effectué sans recompression, donc
très rapidement et sans perte de qualité. Les indications temporelles sont
exprimées en millisecondes. Elles sont toutefois indicatives dans la mesure où le
logiciel ne coupera qu'aux endroits des « trames I ».
La commande pour extraire la première séquence de la vidéo est :
oggCut -s 0 -e 8140 fichiertemp.ogg destination.ogg
D'une séquence audio-vidéo de presque trois minutes nommée «
fichiertemp.ogg » on ne conserve que le début en un séquence nommée
« destination.ogg ».
On obtient ainsi une vidéo de huit secondes dans un format ouvert, d'une
résolution de 300x192 pixels et qui pèse moins que beaucoup d'images sur le web :
à peine 348 kio !
L'intégration de la vidéo ainsi obtenue dans la page Web se fait au moyen des
balises multimédias de HTML5 (un format ouvert).
A noter que la spécification HTML5 permet d'utiliser, au sein de la balise video,
l'attribut poster pour spécifier une image à afficher en attendant que
l'utilisateur ne lance la vidéo (si vous n'avez pas défini cet attribut alors c'est
la première image de la vidéo qui sera affichée par défaut). Firefox
3.6 supporte cette fonctionnalité et il semblerait que ce soit le cas également
d'Opera 10.50. En revanche les autres navigateurs compatibles HTML5 remplaceraient
automatiquement cette image par la première image de la vidéo.
Sur le billet dont il s'agit, voici ce que vous voyez suivant que l'attribut n'est pas pris en
compte (première capture, effectuée sous Firefox 3.5) ou l'est (deuxième
capture, sous Firefox 3.6) :
Pour ma part je bénéficie de mon propre espace d'hébergement pour mon blogue
sur le Web (lire
ce précédent billet) de sorte qu'il me suffit d'y ajouter les séquences
audio/vidéo pour les utiliser sur mon blogue. Sinon il existe des services d'hébergement de
vidéos au format Ogg Theora.
Est-ce bien légal tout cela ?
Affirmatif. Quand bien même l'Å“uvre sur laquelle vous avez jeté votre
dévolu n'autoriserait pas expressément et préalablement sa libre utilisation
(au moyen d'une licence type Creative Commons), vous êtes
autorisé par la loi à en reproduire à de courts extraits (c'est le droit de courte citation, une
exception légale aux droits d'auteur).
Conclusion
Si vous avez mis en Å“uvre les différentes étapes décrites dans
ce billet, vous devriez avoir noté différentes choses :
L'encodage en Theora se fait à la vitesse de la lumière : c'est un des
encodeurs les plus rapides de sa catégorie (certainement le plus rapide)
La taille du fichier vidéo obtenu est particulièrement réduite : moins
de 350 Kio quand même pour une vidéo de huit secondes !
Malgré la vitesse élevée d'encodage et la très petite taille du
fichier obtenu, la qualité de la vidéo est tout à fait satisfaisante (alors
qu'il s'agit d'un réencodage !)
Qui a dit que Theora n'était pas un codec adapté au Web ?
The French four-piece talk to Hermione Hoby about ants, surrealism and creeping success
In a bar in the Opéra district of Paris, brothers and guitarists Laurent Brancowitz and
Christian Mazzalai – also known as one half of French band Phoenix
– are reflecting on a cover version of the band's single, "Lisztomania".
"It would... bring a tear to the eye of an SS officer," says Brancowitz, shaking his head with
wonderment. Later, speaking from New York, singer Thomas Mars agrees: "We all had tears in our
eyes when we watched it." Google "PS22 Chorus Lisztomania" and you'll find a video of an American kids choir whose members
look and sound like they've never loved a song so much in their lives.
It makes perfect sense that a bunch of elementary schoolchildren should have made such a
brilliant cover. As Brancowitz himself explains, the band's fourth studio album was written
without ties to a record label or manager because "we wanted to do something like kids again.
That's always what we're looking for."
The album's reception last year suggests they found it. As you might guess from the title (in
their words, "an equally glorious and stupid" one), Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix is a record
blessed with a breezy playfulness, though its songs are meticulously crafted. Ten years on from
their debut, the album has earned Phoenix two rather different badges of distinction: a Grammy
for best alternative album, and the perhaps even greater accolade of being the most blogged-about
band of 2009 (according to website the Hype Machine).
The band also has a fearsome reputation as a live act, something you can judge for yourself on
the Observer's live album giveaway (see panel, left), an exclusive recording of the band
performing in Sydney a few weeks ago.
They could be forgiven a spot of bumptiousness, then. Instead, they seem genuinely surprised that
their London Roundhouse dates later this month sold out so fast. Brancowitz jokes that "there's
been a lot of resistance from your little island; we feel like Napoleon trying to invade". Mars
agrees: "It's a mystery in the UK. I feel like it's a love and hate relationship. Most of the
things we were listening to come from the UK. But maybe before we weren't in sync with the era we
were living in..."
Brancowitz has another theory as to why this album has been such a success: "It was the album we
made with the most humility. The good things we do are the product of luck and not from our
personal songwriting genius." So modest! "No, but it's true," he protests gently. "It takes a lot
of courage to admit it. It's a long, chemical process. We just sit and a few thousand tries
later..."
That slow-burn approach to songwriting (they took two years to make the album so "a few thousand
tries" perhaps isn't too outrageous an estimate) is mirrored in the steadiness of their rise.
Gradual success has been, as Mazzalai puts it, "a pure pleasure at every step".
When I ask whether their inclusion of musical "naffness" (Alphabetical, their second
album, betrayed a penchant for 70s soft rock, for example) has been a conscious thing, Brancowitz
replies with a typically rococo turn of phrase. He concedes it's semi-conscious, but is, he says,
always based on "an instinctive ravishment".
Such un-English wording possibly accounts for the charm of their (English) lyrics. As Mars
explains: "We like doing lyrics that are cryptic and abstract, we leave out all the in-betweens,
everything that makes sense. That's impossible to do in French, because every word betrays what's
going on. In English you can put all these pieces together and create this weird, poetic thing."
He pauses. "It's very like French surrealism in a way."
As that mental leap from truncated English to French surrealism indicates, the band remain
utterly Gallic, despite their formative diet of My Bloody Valentine, the Smiths and any other
British band that, as Mars puts it, have "something about them that makes me lose my balance".
The two brothers, plus Mars and bassist Deck D'Arcy (all four are in their early 30s), grew up in
the conservative Parisian suburb of Versailles, a place where, Brancowitz says, "it's really easy
to be a rebel without a cause – you don't have to have a very crazy haircut.
It's very Catholic, so there are a lot of families of old nobility..."
"They're scary," adds Mazzalai.
Scary though it may have been, there's no question that being four kindred spirits in what they
paint as a cultural wasteland has gone a long way in binding them together. "Alone we are poor,
but together..." Mazzalai trails off.
Brancowitz, a man of many metaphors, continues: "You know ants? They have very minimal tasks but
in the end they build these very complex structures. That's the same for us. Really, I don't
remember taking creative decisions, they just happen."
They also insist they're "really bad musicians in terms of technique". "I don't even know how to
do a scale," claims Brancowitz, prompting Mazzalai to add: "We don't know how to play with other
musicians. I tried with friends to do sessions a few times and it's always a disaster."
Touchingly, Mars echoes many of these sentiments when we speak later. While the other three live
in Paris, he's now based in New York with his film director girlfriend Sofia Coppola, who is
expecting their second child in May. His relocation hasn't put any distance, musically, between
him and his bandmates though.
"On our own we are not really great," he tells me. "It's not that I don't believe in my friends
but the four of us have this thing, this balance of us all together."
Accounting for that balance, Brancowitz says: "Thomas has a very abstract vision of everything,
and Deck is more of a mathematician – when there's a decision about harmonic
complexities, he's there. He knows every equation."
There's a certain indulgent affection to the way they talk about their bassist, I suggest. "Ah,
but we're all weirdos," smiles Brancowitz. Mazzalai takes up the theme: "We're all fascinated by
mathematics, we love it. But you know," he adds with a shrug, "even beats are mathematical
– it's mathematics that makes people dance."
This is as perfectly Phoenix-like a sentiment as there can be. Cerebral precision and mindless
abandon are an irresistible combination – and those jiving elementary school
kids aren't the only ones to know it.
Charles Arthur investigates how the ways in which we watch sport, read magazines and do business
with each other could change for ever
Don't act too surprised if, some time in the next year, you meet someone who explains that their
business card isn't just a card; it's an augmented reality business card. You can see a collection
and, at visualcard.me, you can even design your
own, by adding a special marker to your card, which, once put in front of a webcam linked to the
internet, will show not only your contact details but also a video or sound clip. Or pretty much
anything you want.
It's not just business cards. London Fashion Week has tried them out too: little symbols that
look like barcodes printed onto shirts, which, when viewed through a webcam, come to life.
Benetton is using augmented reality for a campaign that kicked off last month, in which it is trying to find models from among the
general population.
Augmented reality – AR, as it has quickly become known –
has only recently become a phrase that trips easily off technologists' lips; yet we've been
seeing versions of it for quite some time. The idea is straightforward enough: take a real-life
scene, or (better) a video of a scene, and add some sort of explanatory data to it so that you
can better understand what's going on, or who the people in the scene are, or how to get to where
you want to go.
Sports coverage on TV has been doing it for years: slow-motion could be described as a form of
augmented reality, since it gives you the chance to examine what happened in a situation more
carefully. More recently cricket, tennis, rugby, football and golf have all started to overlay
analytic information on top of standard-speed replays – would that ball have
hit the stumps, the progress of a rally, the movement of the backs or wingers, the relative
flights of shots – to tell you more about what's going on. Probably the most
common use is in American football where the "first down" line – the distance
the team has to cover to continue its offence – is superimposed on the picture
for viewers.
But those required huge systems. AR took its first lumbering steps into the public arena eight
years ago: all that you needed to do was strap on 10kg of computing power –
laptop, camera, vision processor – and you could get an idea of what was
feasible. The American Popular Science magazine wrote about the idea in 2002 – but the idea of being permanently
connected to the internet hadn't quite jelled at that point.
"AR has been around for ages," says Andy Cameron, executive director of Fabrica, an interactive
design studio which works with Benetton, "maybe going back as far as the 1970s and art
installations that overlaid real spaces with something virtual." He mentions in particular the
work of pioneering computer artist Myron Krueger.
What's changed in the past year is that AR has come within reach of all sorts of developers
– and the technology powerful enough to make use of it is owned by millions of
people, often in the palms of their hands.
The arrival of powerful smartphones and computers with built-in video capabilities means that you
don't have to wait for the AR effects as you do with TV. They can simply be overlaid onto real
life. Step forward Apple's iPhone, and phones using Google's Android operating system, both of
which are capable of overlaying information on top of a picture or video.
Within the small world of AR, one of the best-known apps is that built by Layar, which – given a location, and
using the iPhone 3GS's inbuilt compass to work out the direction you're pointing the phone
– can give you a "radar map" of details such as Wikipedia information, Flickr
photos, Google searches and YouTube videos superimposed onto a picture you've taken of the scene.
For Americans, it will also pull in details from the government's economic Recovery Act
– so that if you're on Wall Street and want to see how many billions went into
which building, it will show you.
Or, more usefully, Yelp offers an augmented reality
application that will show you ratings and reviews for a restaurant before you walk in
– the sort of thing that could make restaurants quiver with delight, or
shudder in horror.
Or maybe it wouldn't need to know where it is; only who it's looking at. A prototype application
demonstrated at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February took things a little further
again. Point the phone at a person and if it can find their details, it will pull them off the
web and attach details – their Twitter username, Facebook page and other facts
– and stick them, rather weirdly, into the air around their head (viewed
through your phone, of course). "It's taking social networking to the next level," says Dan
Gärdenfors, head of user experience research at The Astonishing Tribe, a Swedish mobile software company.
And there are fabulously useful applications: at Columbia University, computer science professor
Steve Feiner and PhD candidate Steve Henderson have created their Augmented Reality for
Maintenance and Repair (Armar) project. It combines sensors, head-up displays, and
instructions to tackle the military's maintenance needs: start working on a piece of kit, and the
details about it pop up in front of
you. Imagine if you could put on a pair of special goggles when you needed to investigate
your car's engine, or a computer's innards, and the detail would pop up. That's the sort of idea
that Armar is trying to implement, though for the military at first..
Yet it's fashion which seems to have leapt quickest into this technology. The T-shirt with AR in
London Fashion Week was developed by Cassette Playa, a label that has been worn by Lily Allen,
Rihanna and Kanye West. Carri Munden, who designed it with the Fashion Digital Studio at the
London College of Fashion, described it as "mixing reality and fantasy". Adidas, too, has
launched trainers with AR symbols in the tongues: hold them to a webcam and you are taken to
interactive games on the Adidas site.
The process by which the strange symbols get translated into images is simple enough: the website
takes the feed from your webcam (you have to explicitly allow it to do so, so there are no
security worries) and analyses it for the particular set of symbols that the program is looking
for. (Some easy calculations mean the symbols can be detected whichever way up you hold the
item.) Videos and pictures are then sent back to you.
Andy Cameron says that the arrival of an open-source, hence free, AR tool kit has let companies
build their own AR applications, using Flash – the pervasive animation and
video technology used for many online ads and YouTube's videos – "which
immediately meant you had huge penetration, because Flash is everywhere". (Something like 98% of
all computers are reckoned to have Adobe's Flash Player installed.)
"If you build your AR application with Flash, then you can get it out to everybody in the world
with a computer with a webcam," says Cameron.
Benetton is using AR in its latest campaign, called "It's My Time" which aims to get members of the public to put themselves forward as
potential models, and uses AR to show more details about existing models. But its first most
visible use of AR was last year in issue 76 of Benetton's Colors magazine, a quarterly
fashion product. Dozens of pages have AR symbols: hold the page up to a webcam, and you see film
and more photos of the person on the page. "The Colors editor and the creative director
of Fabrica got very excited about it," says Cameron.
Cameron can see huge potential which could even revive the fortunes of print advertising. "Think
of a commercial page, an advert, in a fashion magazine. It's pretty expensive. With this
– and this is the way that the more hard-nosed people in Benetton saw the
advantage – it means that you can get more products on the page." Print an AR
code, get people to come to the site, and you can show them so much more, while measuring the
return from your effort.
The technical cost is a tiny part of the overall effort. "The printing and photography cost [of
the advert] is the same. And the development cost is pretty small."
And of course where advertisers go, the publications that house them are sure to go as well.
Esquire magazine in the US and Wallpaper* in Europe have done "augmented
reality" editions, with Robert Downey Jr coming to life on the cover of the former, and AR text
providing videos and animation in the latter. But there are more possibilities for journalism
using AR: for example if you "geotag" newspaper articles (so that you say that an item relates to
a particular place) then someone visiting a site could learn about events relevant to the area
via their smartphone.
Book publishers too are leaping in: Carlton Publishing will release an AR book in May, featuring
dinosaurs that pop out of the pages when viewed, yes, through a webcam. Future releases include
war, sport and arts titles which will also have extra AR elements.
Yet in media it's the advertisers who are most excited. The possibilities of geotagged, targeted
adverts – which in effect hang in the air until someone comes along to find
them with a smartphone – or of AR adverts which open up a whole new world of
opportunities (and perhaps discounts or loyalty bonuses) when you follow them through
– are yet another glimpse of the holy grail ofads that know exactly who and
where you are.
Is there a risk that we'll all become AR'd out – that it will become boring as
advert after advert invites us to hold it up to a webcam? "What's hot today is ancient history
tomorrow," says Cameron. "There have been a lot of bad uses of this technology with a rush to use
it. We have had the chance to reflect on what it means and how to use it. The key is that it
should be an enhancement of the stuff on the printed page."
Even so we're still in the early stages, he argues. "It's very primitive –
having to use a webcam, holding a magazine up to it. Obviously we're really interested in the
opportunities with handheld devices. It's very frustrating that the iPhone doesn't allow access
to the live video stream." (Nor does it run Flash, another problem for would-be AR designers.)
"People in design are very annoyed with Steve Jobs," he observes. "We don't really understand why
Apple won't allow that."
Given that access, he says, "you could hold your iPhone up to a billboard and get something
amazing right there". What about the alternative, such as Google's Android-based Nexus phone? "It
looks like you could do it on that," he says. But of course the iPhone is a target market. "Maybe
Apple wants to keep that for itself," Cameron says. "Maybe they're lodging patents. Or maybe the
processor on the iPhone isn't fast enough."
Yet there are some who think that AR has already had its brief time in the sun. At the Like Minds
conference in Exeter at the beginning of March, Joanne Jacobs, a social media consultant,
described an AR application that demanded you buy a T-shirt and then go and sit in front of your
webcam – so you could play Rock, Paper, Scissors. By yourself.
"It's hopeless," Jacobs said.
Cameron admits to some uncertainty about AR's measurable impact. "I don't know if it sells more
things, but it seems clearly a good thing if we can get people who may be customers to
participate in the adverts." But, he adds: "If people start to play with the adverts in a way
that exposes them to more products, that's got to help bring a commercial return."
With a new collection of short stories to his name and two of his plays currently showing in New
York, the notoriously private Pulitzer prize-winner discusses masculinity, his battle with drink
and his 'tumultuous' relationship with Jessica Lange
Where do you even begin with Sam Shepard? With his Pulitzer prize? His Oscar nomination? The fact
that he's routinely described as "America's greatest living playwright?" Or if you're going to be
superficial about it – and I am, just for a moment – maybe
the place to start is with the image of him as the tall, taciturn test pilot, Chuck Yeager, the
cowboy-ish character he played in The Right Stuff; a man whose life was spent exploring
the outer edge of what is and isn't possible.
But then I speak to Patti Smith on the phone and ask her what her impression was of Sam Shepard
the first time she met him back in 1970 (shortly before they began an affair), and it's the first
thing she says too: "He was just everything that one could want. He was –
still is – a very handsome man. And he had this animal magnetism. It was
almost visceral. He was so high energy and had a real glint in his eyes. He was born for
rock'n'roll. I had no idea who he was when I met him. He was a drummer in a band, the Holy
Modal Rounders, at the time and he just had something in him that made him a great, great
performer. I just thought he was the future of rock'n'roll. I had no idea that actually he
was this great writer too." If you had to invent an all-American literary hero, he'd be something
like Sam Shepard. With his slow, western drawl, and his love of the open road and the empty
badlands way out west, he's always seemed like the authentic voice of a certain sort of American
manhood; telling stories – of suffocating families and wretched lovers
– from the forgotten, inbetween places of the American outback. He wrote the
screenplay for Paris, Texas, the great, atmospheric Wim Wenders film, and played another
cowboy-ish character in Robert Altman's adaptation of Shepard's stage play Fool for
Love, fixing an image in the public imagination of both him and a remote, fly-blown America
a world away from the metropolises on either coast. But then Sam Shepard is that man. He
comes to New York for work but his heart is with his horses back at the ranch in Kentucky that he
shares with the actress Jessica Lange, his partner now for nearly 30 years.
All this, then, and a literary reputation that it's hard to overstate. According to Christopher
Bigsby, professor of American literature at the University of East Anglia, who I consult on the
matter, he's simply the most significant playwright of the past 50 years. His biography groans
with accomplishments, he's written nearly 50 plays, acted in dozens of films, directed others,
and written the screenplays for still more. And then there's the books about him, the academic
treatises on his art, a Cambridge companion to his work, critical exegeses of his themes,
analyses of his stagecraft... oh, the list goes on and on.
The one thing he isn't, though, is much of a talker. He doesn't often give interviews but when he
does he's routinely described as "taciturn" and "private"; his answers are "curt" or "terse".
He's "famously press-skittish". Worse, I read time and again of how he's "notoriously protective
of his privacy" and won't answer personal questions. Which is a shame because there are so many
personal questions I want to ask him. About his relationship with Jessica Lange, and his time
with Patti Smith, and his three children, and being on the road with Bob Dylan. He's spoken
extensively about his relationship with his alcoholic father before, but not about his own
drinking: last year he was arrested for driving under the influence and ordered to attend an
alcohol rehabilitation programme.
He'll talk about the work but there's nothing I read which gives much sense of him as a man. I
can't help but feel a pang for the journalist who asked him if, one day, he might turn their
conversation into dialogue in one of his plays. "We're not having a dialogue, this is question
and answers," he says curtly. "Dialogue is like jazz. Dialogue is creative.'"
I am prepared for the worst, then, and when he ambles into the restaurant he's chosen near New
York's Times Square, it seems this is probably just as well.
How long have we got, I ask, while fumbling with my tape recorder.
"Well," he says sitting down and ordering tea, "that all depends on the questions."
It's a heart-sinking moment and, as it turns out, a completely misleading one. Because it
transpires that Sam Shepard isn't actually cold or taciturn or intimidating at all. Or at least
the Sam Shepard I meet isn't, because it turns out that there seem to be several different
Shepards co-existing side by side. At one point, he says of Jessica Lange that her greatest
quality, or the one that struck him most acutely when he first met her, was her modesty. "I'd
never met anybody like her," he says. "She was astounding. One of the great things about her,
aside from her natural beauty, which was remarkable, was her humbleness."
But he has it too. He's dressed in country clothes – a checked shirt and a
nondescript jacket – and, unlike most writers, he has an outdoors complexion;
a lived-in face. But what's most noticeable is his sense of humour. It's a lovely, gentle thing;
he pokes fun at me, at himself; and when I listen back to the tape, I realise something more
shocking still: he doesn't just laugh, and on occasion guffaw, he actually giggles. Sam Shepard
is a giggler.
The private, difficult Sam Shepard is nowhere to be seen. Or at least not for a good three hours
of tea drinking and conversation that is remarkably relaxed. The restaurant, an unpretentious
place he's chosen, is deserted when we arrive. It gradually fills with the pre-theatre dinner
crowd, becomes loud and noisy, and has started to empty again by the time I finally blow it
and ask a question too far. Nice, easy Sam vanishes instantly, replaced in a second by cautious,
wary Sam. "Oh, he's a very charming guy," Patti Smith tells me. "Very compassionate and
thoughtful about other people's feelings. But he's not one for bullshit either."
But then I ought to know something of the idea of two Sam Shepards, existing side by side,
because it's how he wrote himself in his most famous play, True West: as two warring
brothers, Austin the Hollywood screenwriter, and Lee the desert drifter, two sides of the same
Sam Shepard coin, intellect versus instinct locked in an eternal battle for supremacy.
Perhaps the most astonishing thing of all about Shepard's talent is the sheer range of it. He's
risen to the top of his field in almost everything he's tried his hand at, but, despite all the
diversions, the acting and the directing and the music playing, he is, at heart, a writer. Who
simply can't stop writing. Not one but two of his plays are currently playing in New York
– Ages of the Moon, a new work, and A Lie of the Mind, a
modish revival directed by Ethan Hawke. On top of which, a new collection of short stories,
Day Out of Days, has just been published. It's the kind of success that most writers
would maim and kill for, although it's largely beside the point, says Shepard.
"The funny thing about having all this so-called success is that behind it is a certain horrible
emptiness. All this stuff is happening. And yet it is not what you are after as a writer. Even
though they are relatively successful. Ages of the Moon has sold out, the book is doing
well, and yet it's not The Thing. And then you're left... there's this feeling... what is it,
then? And, I guess, it's the writing itself which is important."
His sheer output is evidence of Shepard's drive to write. He burst on to the off-off-Broadway
scene in 1964, writing in his off-duty hours from waiting tables in the Village,
enthralling his audience with his exotic tales of the badlands way out west, puncturing the
greatest American myths, and he hasn't stopped writing since. It's the process, I say, not the
results, that makes you happy?
"Yeah, yeah, yeah. Although happy isn't the exact word. It makes you feel that you're not
useless. That you're at least putting your hand in. I think without writing I would feel
completely useless."
These days he seems to have it all: as much professional success as he can handle, a long and
steadfast relationship, three children, the ranch in Kentucky and bolt holes in New York and New
Mexico. And, in some ways, he's the American dream personified: he was born Samuel Shepard Rogers
in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, the son of a second world war bomber pilot. As a child he was "Steve
Rogers" but after a short stint at college studying animal husbandry he lit off across America,
finally landing in New York, where he emerged as "Sam Shepard". His life is the ultimate act of
self-creation; he came from nowhere, was little-read and poorly educated, and he turned himself
into one of America's leading literary lights.
"And yet still feel so unfulfilled?" he says, and ponders on it for a moment or two. But then
anyone with even the slenderest acquaintance with Shepard's work knows that "the American dream"
is to be treated with circumspection; in Shepard's universe it's a false concept to be blown wide
apart and splattered across all surfaces.
"The great thing for me, now, is that writing has become more and more interesting. Not just as a
craft but as a way into things that are not described. It's a thing of discovering. That's when
writing is really working. You're on the trail of something and you don't quite know what it is."
He writes on a manual typewriter, and refuses to so much as look at the internet. "I have a
cellphone but I have no Google, I have no gaggle."
Really? But everything you've ever wondered, ever, is out there, I say.
"No, no, no! The things that I wonder about most are not on the internet, I promise you that."
He's still, even after all these years, he says, an outsider. "I'm inhabiting a life I'm not
supposed to be in... and at certain times in my life I have felt a wrongness. And not a moral
wrongness but a sense that this isn't what I was born to be doing." The writers who he responds
most to are those who seem to share a sense of "aloneness", and "writing is almost a response to
that aloneness which can't be answered in any other way".
For Shepard, the heart of this, seemingly, and a recurring theme in his work, is bound up with
the relationship he had with his alcoholic, abusive father. It's there in True West,
Fool for Love, Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child and A Lie
of the Mind, and even now, at the age of 66, it troubles him still. In Fool for
Love, written almost three decades ago, the main character is haunted by the chilling
possibility that he is turning into his father. Back then it was a fear; now, he says, it has
become a fact.
"You think about it, you talk about it, analyse it, and then all of a sudden you have become the
thing that you were most vehement against. It's very Greek. They invented this shit. Or at least
gave it a name."
He's been sober, he says, since the drink-driving incident a year ago. "And prior to that I was
sober for four years and then I relapsed. It's a constant struggle. It's such a knucklehead
disease because you refuse to see it. It wasn't until the 90s that I actually started going to AA
and made a real compact with myself to quit. And I did quit for four years. And then I picked it
up again. It's like being a junkie. I think I have that sort of thing in my blood, in my psyche.
I can become addicted very easily, although the curious thing is that I have two sisters who are
not. So I don't know. Maybe it's just a toss of the dice."
It's the sort of thing a Sam Shepard character might say. In the new book, Day Out of
Days, characters wander through the pages, lost within their own lives (one of the most
memorable features a man trapped in a public toilet who is literally driven mad when he's forced
to listen to Shania Twain on an endless loop). They struggle for personal agency or a sense that
they're in control of their own lives.
"And they never are," he says. "That's the one thing about being an author as opposed to being in
one's life is that you have the illusion that you can bring some form to it. Which is the
beautiful part of it. You don't feel that you are so much in chaos. I don't know what it would be
like if I didn't have some form, short stories or plays or whatever."
He feels "blessed", he says, to have discovered writing. "It fulfils something in me that I don't
know how I'd serve otherwise." His father was a bright man, the winner of a Fulbright
scholarship, a fluent speaker of Spanish, but he never found that outlet. Or at least the outlet
he found was drink. He struggled with the return to civilian life after the war, moving his
family from airbase to airbase, training as a Spanish teacher, until he was sacked for drinking,
and then moving the family to Duarte, California, where he attempted to farm, his drinking
increasing year by year. "The alcohol just completely deranged him," says Shepard.
Roxanne, his younger sister, told People magazine back in the 80s: "There was always
this kind of facing off between them [Shepard and his father], and it was Sam who got the bad end
of that. Dad was a tricky character because he was a charismatic guy when he wanted to be. And at
the other side he was like a snapping turtle. With him and Sam it was that male thing. You put
two virile men in a room and they're going to test each other."
It's this quality, of a simmering, barely controlled violence that disrupts and distorts all of
Shepard's families, that is at the heart of much of his best work. In Shepard's world, romantic
love as the meeting of two souls and the family as the nurturing heart of American life are
nothing but delusions. "They're wonderful retreats from the illusion of being protected from
spinning off the planet. But I don't believe it. And I never did."
So you didn't celebrate Valentine's Day then?
"Oh yes. We just did. I bought her a couple of bottles of wine. I don't drink."
It's not the most romantic gift, I say.
"They were two really good bottles of wine. Really good ones. Oh, and a tape measure. Because she
was putting up a painting."
Love in Shepard's universe is never straightforward, never wholly life-enhancing; it's
life-destroying, too, a struggle for power or control; a curse as well as a blessing. He and
Lange have survived but the relationship was "tumultuous" from the outset. "I mean, we have long
periods of relative calm. But then you know..."
But you've always seemed like such an incredible match.
"Yeah, well, we're definitely an incredible match. But, you know, not without fireworks...
although at this point, you know, she's the only woman I could live with. Who could live with me!
What other woman would put up with me?"
She is, he says, the most honest person he's ever met. "I've never known her, ever, to lie about
anything. And I couldn't say that about..."
Yourself?
"About myself. About anybody. Men lie all the time."
Really?
"You don't know that?" he says and raises his eyebrows. "Whereas Jessica has this absolute
honesty. I think it's a direct quality of the midwest, of that background that she's from."
While the children were growing up, that's where they lived, in Jessica's hometown in Minnesota,
down the road from her mother (and with Jessica's daughter from her relationship with Mikhail
Baryshnikov, Shura). It's the equivalent, today, of Brad and Angelina deciding to settle in a
suburb of Wisconsin. But then, although Shepard and Lange have both appeared in movies, and been
nominated for Oscars – Shepard, one; Lange, six (and she's won two)
– they've always refused to be movie stars.
There's a couple of great quotes from Jessica about you, I say.
"Is there? My God. What? Actually, no. Just give me the good ones."
She said: "No man I've ever met compares to Sam in terms of maleness."
"Well, that's a double-edged sword."
Really? I took it as a compliment.
"This morning she had a conversation with me about France, because she was in Paris in the 70s,
about the gay scene in Paris, which she was very enchanted with. She was talking about a couple
of incidents, and at the end of it I said: 'Well, that's very charming.' And so I think she now
thinks I'm a homophobe because she said: 'Asshole!' and stormed out of the room. I thought, 'Oh
my God, well obviously I'm not sophisticated enough to talk about the gay 70s in Paris.'"
He was married once before, to another actress, O-Lan Jones. She was 19 at the time, he was 26.
Their son, Jesse, was born shortly after the wedding, and then Shepard met Patti Smith. The
attraction was instantaneous, as was their affair, an intense, full-throttle romance, conducted
mostly at the Chelsea Hotel. It was Shepard who encouraged Patti Smith to become a performer.
"She already had this incantatory, lyrical, chanting way of talking, all she needed was a little
shove. She was inhibited by not knowing guitar. I said: 'Guitar is just a back-up for your voice.
You're not going to be Jeff Beck, don't worry about it. Just learn these chords and you'll be
able to back yourself up.' And then it turned out she has this extraordinary voice too."
Reading about the Jones-Shepard-Smith triangle, it all seems very 60s somehow, an amicable
bohemian ménage à trois. When I speak to Patti Smith, though, she puts me straight:
"It was the early 70s. And it wasn't that amicable."
Shepard had decided to return to his wife and baby. "And it was painful," says Smith. "We knew it
was going to end and we were in a room at the Chelsea Hotel. And instead of sitting around and
moping, Sam said: 'Let's write a play.' And I said: 'I don't know how to write a play.' And he
said: 'I'll be one character, and you can be the other.' And we just sat up all night, him
writing a line and then pushing the typewriter across the table to me, and then I'd write a
line."
The result was Cowboy Mouth, which opened at the American Place Theatre with Sam Shepard
and Patti Smith playing themselves, in a double bill with Shepard's play Back Bog Beast
Bait in which O-Lan played a character based on Patti. It was too much, and without warning,
Shepard quit, and fled with O-Lan and Jesse to London.
There are so many of these ruptures in the story of your life, I say to Shepard. You're doing one
thing and then suddenly you're doing something else.
"I know. I don't why it had to be so traumatic. It very definitely felt like these were
earthquakes when they happened. They're terrible and yet on the other side of the coin they're
ecstatic. Like when I met Jessie. It was terrible leaving my oldest boy at that time. He was 13,
which is a really hard age. And, in one way, I can't forgive myself for that. And, in another
way, I'm glad of the life that I've had with Jessie. What's the trade-off? It's always felt like
that. The other thing that's kind of amazed me is that I've had absolutely no qualms about
setting off into unknown territory. I've never been afraid to just start something new."
It was on the set of the film Frances that he met Lange. I tell him that one critic I
read claimed that after meeting Jessica his depiction of male-female relationships became more
complex and interesting. He says that you started writing meatier parts for women.
"Hmm. I guess that's true. Fool for Love came out of my relationship with Jessica and
that's pretty powerful."
Fool for Love features a tumultuous relationship between two characters, Eddie and May,
who both attract and repulse each other. And who, it turns out, are half-brother and sister.
I was looking at photographs of you and Jessica next to each other and I was struck by how
similar you look, I say.
"We do, kinda."
Is the theme of incest in Fool for Love in some way borne out of that?
"I'm sure there's something about that. I'm sure when you're looking for someone, you're looking
for some aspect of yourself, even if you don't know it... What we're searching for is what we
lack. You lack something and your hope is that it'll be fulfilled by who you find."
His relationship with his father has had such a profound effect upon his life, his work, it's
inevitable that he must have reflected upon his own effect upon his children, Jesse, 39, Hannah,
24, and Samuel Walker, 22.
He hesitates when he replies. "I would like to think... you can never determine how you are going
to influence someone, particularly your children. I mean, they are all musicians in some way or
another, so I feel as though... I think that's a result... And my daughter is also a really good
writer. Really good."
The thing about your children compared to you, I say, is that they had a very stable...
"Stable?"
Oh, is that the wrong word?
"Well, relatively stable."
They haven't had the childhood that you had...
"They haven't had an abusive childhood. On the other hand, they have a different set of
problems."
Having a father who is very successful..."
"And a mother," he says. "Yeah. There's a lot of stigmas. My youngest boy is very, very shy. He
doesn't want anything to do with celebrity. And my daughter, she's not crazy about it. None of
them covet fame."
He shies away from speaking about his sons but he seems happy enough to talk about Hannah, his
daughter, currently studying for a PhD at the University of Galway.
"I never thought about having a daughter and then I had a daughter and it was a remarkable thing.
It was very different from having a son and your response to it. With a son, it's much more
complex. And it's probably because of my stuff in the past. With a daughter, I was surprised at
how simple it is."
It's to her, he says, that he intends to leave his notebooks, "because she's the one who's asked
for them."
He's obsessed with his notebooks, he says; they travel with him wherever he goes, "like
gremlins". And he fishes his current one out of his coat and shows it to me. On the inside back
cover he's written the places it's been to with him over the year – Sicily,
Kentucky, New Mexico – and then he flicks through the pages and says, "Look at
this! Look at these drawings." And he shows me some stick men, riding the sort of horses I drew
aged eight. "You know, I was sitting in the University of Texas where they have the original
manuscript of Watt by Mr Beckett and it was amazing because there were all these
drawings on them, so I sat there one afternoon and copied them!"
It's almost as if Sam Shepard has spent his life circling around Samuel Beckett. It was
discovering his plays as a young man that first inspired him to write, and Patti Smith says that
in those days he never went anywhere without a copy of one or other of his plays on him. "Of
course, now he's read everything. He's always discovering something new, whether it's Japanese
death poetry or some new Venezuelan writer or whatever."
Not meeting Beckett is his greatest regret, he says. "My greatest literary regret."
Do you think you're starting to look like him, I say, tongue-in-cheek, although there's an
element of truth to it; he's still recognisable from his cinematic glory days but his face is
craggier now, crisscrossed with experience. He guffaws, enjoying the joke.
"No! It'd be flattering if I did but I think my features are a little bit more savage."
Themes of regret and remorse, of time passing and humans ageing have started to creep into his
work. "I don't believe people who say, 'I have no regrets'. How can you not have regrets?"
Death, he says, changes all perspectives. When I ask him how old his father was when he died, he
replies immediately. "A year older than I am. He was 67."
Does that weigh on you?
"I think about it. But it doesn't weigh on me because of the way in which he died." His father
was run down by a car while drunk. "So I don't worry about it that way. I don't worry about the
way I'm going to die...
But do you think about death?
"Yeah. There's not a day goes by. But that has always been the case. We're all haunted by it in
one way or another. And it's the easiest thing in the world to push it away, you just get a
cappuccino. But, yes, you're haunted by it in a different way [as you get older]. I feel its
presence. I feel it in sleep, in dreams, in waking. Particularly in the morning."
Do you think about the things that you would lose?
"No. You feel that you're diminishing in some way. You feel that your senses are diminishing. I
don't see as well. I'm not as quick as I used to be. Things like that. Knock on wood, I'm not
sick. I don't how people deal with that... I mean life is tough enough. And now you're going to
die! Wow!"
In Ages of the Moon his central character, Ames, has been unfaithful to his wife. "She
discovers this note, this note from this girl, which to this day I cannot for the life of me
remember," says Ames. "Some girl I would never in a million years have ever returned to for even
a minor blow job."
"Minor?" asks his friend, Byron.
In his earliest plays, Patti Smith says, his characters had to act. "They had to do something,
kick a door down or whatever. Now they tend to be more introspective. They're more likely to
examine what they're doing and why."
And Shepard too. His life is in his plays, he's always said that. And so I ask him. About Ames's
infidelities. About whether that's been a source of regret for him too.
"I'm not going to talk about that. You're not going to sucker me into that one! When did you
think I was born?"
Oh dear. It's a classic interview mistake: the question too far. He's amicable enough, and we
carry on for five or so more minutes, but I've got the other Sam. He looks the same but I
can tell he's scanning the horizon for an escape route; it's Sam Shepard, the cowboy, the
character in all his plays; the desert drifter, shifty, cautious, suspicious of strangers.
The giggles are over. And then he's gone, with the briefest of handshakes and a rush to the
door. It's not an entirely inappropriate ending. Shepard's world is a place of blundering people
and blundered words; where plots are never neatly tied up and truths are only ever hinted at,
never fully revealed, least of all to the characters themselves.
This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable
regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small
business.
For local small businesses, Yelp isn’t
just an option — it’s a necessity. People in urban centers use it to
choose where to go to dinner, where to buy clothes, and where to be entertained. Users decide
where and how to spend their money using Yelp, so if your business is local, you need to curate
your Yelp page.
If your business has been around long, you probably already have a page; you’re just not
holding the reins yet. You’ll want to step in and take control of it as soon as possible,
because using it correctly can bring you new business and prevent any negative word of mouth from
hindering your growth and success.
Claiming or creating your Yelp business page
is easy; just fill out a couple of online forms and answer a quick, automated phone call. It
takes less than five minutes. Once you’re signed up, you’ll have access to tools that
will help you engage your customers and spread the word about what you’re offering to the
community. Here are a few basic tips for successfully leveraging the tools Yelp offers you for
the benefit of your local business.
1. Fill Out Your Business Info Completely
Customers refer to Yelp business pages to learn about a business before going out to visit in
person. If the information on the Yelp page is incomplete, they’re likely to move on to a
competitor that provides more details simply because they’ll better know what to expect and
are less likely to be surprised, be disappointed or have their time wasted.
The administration page for business owners offers a slew of fields and choices for sharing
information to make it easy for users to know exactly what to expect. If you provide the
information they’re looking for, they’re more likely to become reliable, paying
customers. So fill out as much information as you can, and keep it up to date.
2. Respond Constructively to Customer Reviews
Last Spring, Yelp gave business owners the ability to respond to negative reviews, either to
privately make apologies to reviewers or publicly correct misinformation. Don’t skimp on
using this feature because you’re afraid of making things worse; it can turn a bad
situation around. Dissatisfied customers will often give you a second look if you communicate to
them that you value their input and are making changes to improve your business.
Yelp allows you to share special offers and announcements not just with the people who visit your
page, but with members of the larger community who might not even know about your business. When
you create an offer or announcement on Yelp, it appears in the offers and announcements directory
for your city. People who have never heard of your business will see them there. They’ll
even find you in search results.
The more of these offers and announcements you make, the more likely it will be that Yelp users
will discover your business, so come up with creative ways to draw people in, then share the
news.
4. Display Yelp Badges on Your Website or Blog
Yelp provides badges that you can embed on your business’s website or blog that show that
you’re on Yelp and engaged with your community. They’ll even tell visitors how many
positive reviews you’ve had.
These badges give potential customers the impression that you have existing satisfied customers
vouching for you, so they’ll be more likely to trust you with their business. The badges
also act as links between your Yelp page and your other online outreach efforts. People can click
a badge to read reviews or get more information. If a satisfied customer visits your site or
blog, the badge might lead that person to leave his or her own positive review.
Is Advertising on Yelp Worth it?
You may also choose to advertise on Yelp. It costs between $300 and $1,000 per month
— it’s kind of like a premium account — but
there’s a chance that you’ll increase your exposure if you opt in, because
you’ll appear at the top of the list when users perform a search related to your business.
There are a few other benefits as well. For example, you’ll be able to feature one good
review of your choosing at the top of the list on your business page. You still can’t edit,
move or delete other reviews, though.
It’s difficult to measure exactly how much these premium benefits will help you; it depends
on a number of factors unique to your business and your city.
The conventional wisdom about Arsenal's title push is that they have the easy run-in. Compared to
Chelsea and Manchester United it is apparently a piece of cake. A home game against the team
above the relegation zone by virtue of goal difference was supposed to be one of the tastiest of
the lot, but Arsène Wenger's team came oh-so-close to suffering a terrible dose of
indigestion.
The game hinged on a critical incident a minute before half-time, when Thomas Vermaelen was shown
a red card for tangling with Guillermo Franco. Not so easy all of a sudden. But the way Arsenal
regrouped, resettled, and finished off West Ham showed they have the heart to take this adventure
as far as they possibly can. Their title rivals may have games in hand, but Arsenal wake up this
morning looking down on everyone.
The quest now moves to Birmingham. For different reasons recent games have all felt central to
the plot of this unfolding drama, but St Andrew's is a challenge that feels particularly pivotal
in terms of Premier League aspirations. Against the kind of direct opponents they have been known
to find unsettling, they will travel without their first-choice centre-halves. As a prelude to
Barcelona, its importance cannot be overlooked.
As much as it was natural for Arsenal to be thankful for the return of their captain and top
scorer Cesc Fábregas, the reinstatement of Alex Song after a two-match suspension was
equally reassuring. The Cameroonian anchor has been crucial, and has matured into an important
safety net in front of a back line with a tendency towards fragility.
Alongside him Denílson was chosen ahead of Abou Diaby. This was surprising. A more
creative player is the norm alongside Fábregas and Song in midfield, but Denílson
was favoured ahead of Diaby and Tomas Rosicky. Was this an experiment with Barcelona in mind?
Arsène Wenger was firm that West Ham was the absolute priority, and the Denílson
selection turned out to be an inspired one. The Brazilian provided his team with the gift of an
early goal. He was alert to the opportunity to pickpocket Valon Behrami and skillfully smuggled
the ball to Nicklas Bendtner. When it was returned to him, Denílson drilled a first-time
shot into the bottom corner.
Denílson has elicited his fair share of moans from the crowd this season, especially
during a period when he found the going tough in midwinter. But here he sparked. Maybe he had
borrowed some of Bendtner's enormous supply of confidence (there is plenty to spare). This was
his fourth league goal from 16 starts this season, and not for the first time it was an important
goal, too.
He might have had another soon after. At the end of a tippy-tappy move, Denílson chested
the ball down and volleyed goalwards. His flourishes were all the more valuable as Arsenal were
not at their fluent best in the first half. Fábregas took an early kick on the foot and
looked very unhappy with the perpetrator, Behrami, with whom he later had words. The Catalan was
not running freely at all and strained to exert any great influence. Samir Nasri and Andrey
Arshavin were a little flat, too.
West Ham had enough glimmers to suggest Arsenal would be foolish to take this at too much of a
presumptuous stroll. Junior Stanislas broke down the right flank and whipped in an inviting cross
which Mido couldn't reach, then Gaël Clichy and Sol Campbell made excellent interceptions as
West Ham built towards goal.
In the last minute of the half, the pendulum swung viciously. Franco surged onto a high pass and
Vermaelen missed the header, then in his desperation to retrieve the situation was clumsy as he
tussled with the Mexican. Although contact was minimal, Franco tumbled inside the penalty area.
The referee Martin Atkinson was so far behind the play he was closer to the centre circle than
the penalty box, but trusted the instincts of his linesman. Not only did he point to the spot, he
sent off Vermaelen. Wenger was infuriated, and waited at half-time to remonstrate with the
officials.
In the meantime, Diamanti struck his kick well, but Manuel Almunia plunged to produce an inspired
save. His record with penalties is one of his best features, and Arsenal were immensely grateful.
Interestingly, Wenger chose not to make a substitution and Song dropped back to fill in at
centre-half. He had his work cut out as West Ham set about the second half with attack in their
hearts. It was not long before Arsenal did make a change, with Diaby replacing Bendtner and
Arshavin leading the line.
Arsenal hauled themselves back again to force the game up towards the edge of Rob Green's box.
Emmanuel Eboué became increasingly influential, and his ability to win free-kicks kept up
the pressure. Campbell ambled up for a corner but headed too close to the keeper.
Gianfranco Zola, so desperate for points, sent on the attacking power of Carlton Cole and
experience of Benni McCarthy. With 12 minutes to go a sizzling left-footer from Cole shuddered
against the base of Almunia's far post.
Back came Arsenal, and Matthew Upson handled in the box inexplicably as Fábregas bore into
the danger zone. Another penalty. In the swirling rain, the captain steeped up to rifle in, Green
diving the wrong way. "We are top of the league," sang the crowd giddily. It ain't easy, but it
sure is scintillating.
THE FANS' PLAYER RATINGS AND VERDICT
LOUISE COWBURN, Observer reader I'm absolutely delighted. It felt so
good when we were singing "We are top of the league" – even if it is only for
half a day. It's been absolutely ages since we had that kind of atmosphere in the stadium and it
showed how resilient we are as a team to play for half a game when we were down to 10 men. That
totally dispelled the idea that we are all style above substance. We really ground it out. I
didn't see if Vermaelen should have been sent off but from the crowd reaction it seemed harsh.
But he walked off like a true gent with no complaining. After he went, Song was absolutely
brilliant when he dropped back.
TIM & TOM CONLAN, Observer readers Two words: utter disgrace. I
didn't like the selection – why Cole was on the bench was beyond me. It shows
the negative attitude of the entire club at the moment. There is no ambition: when you're in a
relegation fight you have to throw caution to the wind. Arsenal weren't that good, especially
after they were down to 10 men. Our midfield battled but there were no proper balls, no quality
round the box. Forget the penalty – even if we had scored I still think
Arsenal would have come back to win 3-1. It wasn't even a penalty to begin with. They were down
to 10 men and they were still the better side.
iCalamus 1.20iCalamus is a desktop publishing solution that allows you to create
documents with text, photos and other visual elements. Some demonstration videos are available.
The unregistered version of iCalamus already offers a cool feature: You can create professional
photo books and calendars like in the full version and order high-quality prints at the
Photographerbook company. The Photographerbook document service in iCalamus even supports iPhoto
calendars (and iPhoto books coming soon) which can be printed at Photographerbook at a lower
price.
iCalamus has been developed completely new for Apple's operating system. iCalamus is an excellent
choice for all layout purposes from simple posters and business letters over complex layouted
magazines up to books and scientific works. Complete Unicode support and the smart PDF import
offer easy access to creating and layout work. The reasoned user interface with its low learning
curve guarantees for fast success. iCalamus doesn't limit your layout freedom by offering
prepared layouts. Its practical tools offer all options for your own creative and productive
layout work.
iCalamus is a modular program which will grow in future by external modules, even from
third-party developers. Therefore invers Software will create an Open Development Area (ODA) and
publish the plug-in interface. iCalamus has been developed in Objective C with intensive usage of
Apple's Cocoa library.
You can import all image and text formats which are supported by Mac OS X into iCalamus
documents. Images from digital cameras scanners or iPhoto libraries can be imported as well as
whole web page content and PDF documents. Grab text content from large PDF documents easily for
further text processing. Elaborated masking options and many predefined, partly dynamically
changeable frame shapes offer freedom for creativity. Working in precise measurement units is the
other side of the iCalamus world. Use virtual copies for multiple document elements and change
them afterwards with a few mouse clicks.
Print output uses all printers which are supported by Mac OS X. Optionally output documents in
various PDF formats (e.g. PDF-X, encrypted PDF, PDF Fax).
WHAT'S NEWVersion 1.20:
Operating System Compatibility
New: [650], [651]: Snow Leopard is now supported.
Fix: Many memory leaks fixed.
Photographerbook
New: [655]: iPhoto 09 is now supported.
New: Leather books can be ordered.
New: Books can get book corners and wadded covers.
New: Books pages can get UV lacquer on both front and back sides.
New: Photographerbook's product prices have been lowered up to 40%.
Fix: Document uploads > 2GB are no longer allowed, due to PDF standards which do not allow
larger PDF documents.
Document Views
Fix: [639]: Images without embedded dpi resolution are no longer re-scaled to 72dpi by
default.
Text Style Inspector
New: [644]: Dialog Edit Text Style redesigned and enhanced.
New: [79]: The dialog Edit Text Style shows a font preview now, using all available text
style parameters.
Text Ruler Inspector
New: [640]: New function Create and Apply Text Ruler Styles from Selection in the action
menu.
New: [641]: Dialog Edit Text Ruler redesigned and enhanced.
Text System
Fix: [252], [253], [469], [658]: Text formatting rewritten and enhanced.
Fix: [593]: Text frames with page text field contents can be copied in all available methods
correctly.
Fix: [610]: Text frames with text field contents can be vectorized.
GUI
New: [418]: Three new Toolbar icons are available now: Document Grid, Page Guides, and Frame
Guides. These three icons are equivalents for the relevant View menu items.
New: [609]: Windows menu offers a Zoom entry now.
New: [642]: New View sub menu added to Context menus. It reflects the three View menu items:
Show Document Grid, Show Frame Guides, Show Page Guides.
New: A Swedish version of iCalamus is also available now, localized by Karl-Johan
Norén.
New: [671]: The Preferences window dispenses with the still redundant switch Show All.
Fix: [643]: Number of pages in dialogs New Document and Default Document can no longer be
< 1 and > 9999.
In the world of
technology, drama is a valuable commodity. Disruptive change may happen in the minutiae of
software code or the gradual execution of a business plan, but we see its effects in the dramatic
narratives of companies rising and falling, or getting locked in combat with each other. Which is
why the rivalry between Google and Apple is
such a compelling story.
It’s so tempting to get drawn into the ego battles
between Steve Jobs and the Google triumvirate while placing bets on who
will win that it’s easy to forget a deeper truth about this rivalry: Google and Apple
need each other.
They both have a deep desire to stake out claims on the mobile web, but the mobile web is in a
nascent stage. In order to develop, it needs to have both rigid structure and a sometimes
reckless creativity. Structure is necessary to provide a strong foundation and a set of standards
everyone can understand. And creativity is essential to bringing the innovative potential of the
mobile web into full bloom.
This dichotomy was present when the Internet began to develop in the early 90s. Many people who
came online then did so through America Online’s walled gardens, a safe little enclave
where consumers and content providers alike could create the rules of a new medium. Then the web
itself took off and sites like Yahoo and GeoCities offered a much more creative environment to
explore what else could be done.
Google’s approach is nearly the opposite, much more open and free-wheeling. Its Android OS,
based on the Linux kernel, has so many versions available the company is struggling
to consolidate them. The Android Market is such an unregulated affair that it’s
hard for anyone to count
the number of apps on sale.
Google’s culture has built into it a tolerance for the failures that come with creative
experiments. Its 70-20-10 rule
seems rooted on that spirit of tolerance — how many companies require employees to spend
time on something that may never fly? — and Google has floated so many failed ideas
it’s hard to keep track of them all. Apple, by contrast, starts with an instinctive idea of
how consumers will experience its products and fits everything, even the ecosystem of apps that
extends beyond its corporate walls, into making it work.
It’s in the tension between these two companies and their respective cultures that the
mobile web is being forged. But as America Online found out, the walls eventually come down as
consumers grow more comfortable with the new medium and desert the walled garden. That would
suggest the balance will tip in favor of Google.
But I would be surprised if Apple isn’t anticipating this evolution. Right now, iPhone
owners are experiencing the mobile web through the 150,000 or so apps it offers through the App
Store. But Apple has also backed HTML5, which allows a smartphone browser to have rich app-like
features without requiring any new software to be downloaded. Just as people stopped downloading
AOL’s software and switched to browsers, we may well abandon most of
the apps on our phones today.
Both companies will continue to play a major role on the mobile web, but I doubt either will ever
gain the upper hand. This dramatic tension between Apple and Google may be around for a long
time. So executives at both might as well get used to it.
When I
came to the U.S. in 1980, I was young and naïve. I used to think that corruption and ethical
lapses were just a third-world ill. Eventually, I became a tech CEO and learned the harsh
realities of American business. Yes, standards are much higher, and breaches are punished, but
the temptations are just the same here as they are in any other country. Ethical lapses (which
are a form of corruption) are quite common. You watch stories about these on TV
every other day and read about them on TechCrunch. It was the ethical lapses of our
financial institutions that threw our economy into a tailspin, and for which we are paying the
price, after all.
It is best to be aware of the temptations and to prevent the lapses from occurring. As Enron,
Bernie Madoff, and Lehman
Brothers have shown, it’s a slippery slope. Once you start compromising your values for
short-term gains, there is no turning back. Business ethics are not something you need to start
worrying about when your company reaches a certain size; they need to be sewn into the fabric of
your startup from the get-go. The lessons are the same for tech businesses as they are for
investment banks and for third-world economies.
Harvard Business School professor Michael Beer
researched the difference between companies that perform at high levels for extended periods and
those that implode when they reach a certain size. When analyzing the spectacular failures in the
recent financial meltdown, he found that:
· Of the original Forbes 100 (named in 1917), 61 had ceased to exist by 1987.
 Of the remaining 39, only 18 stayed in the top 100, and their return during the
period 1917 to 1987 was 20% less than that of the overall market.
· Of companies in the original Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index of 1957, only
74 remained in 1997; of these, only 12 outperformed the S&P 500 in the period 1957 to 1998.
· The average CEO tenure in the U.S. is 4.2 years, less than half the 10.5-year average in
1990.
Beer posited three core reasons for the failure of so many Wall Street firms in the fall of 2008:
the firms lacked a higher purpose (in other words, they were focused on short-term gains,
profits, and bonuses); they lacked a clear strategy; and they mismanaged their risk. Companies
like Charles Schwab and US Bancorp were able to avoid the fallout by having a laser-like focus on
customer service and on honesty and transparency. Neither company touched the subprime mortgage
securitization market, because they saw it as risky and simply not the kind of business that
served the company’s long-term interests.
Even outside Wall Street, companies like Cisco Systems, Southwest Airlines, and Costco Wholesale,
with the strongest sense of higher purpose, achieved the greatest success. Take Costco. Wall
Street analysts have long chastised Costco’s management for paying high wages and keeping
employees around for a long time, because this results in higher benefits costs. But the
company’s CEO, Jim Sinegal, lives by his belief that keeping good employees is strategic
for Costco’s long-term success and growth. The company’s per-employee sales are
considerably higher than those of key rivals such as Target and Wal-Mart; customer service at the
stores is phenomenal and fast; and Costco continues to expand, both in number of warehouses and
in products and services for business and consumer customers. The culture of the company flows
downward from Sinegal and his focus on employees and, by extension, to customers.
One of the problems that Beer found with the failed banks was that their employees lacked the
ability to “speak truth to power”. Employees felt intimidated by superiors; the
institutions’ internal voice of conscience and purpose was silenced by a maniacal focus on
short-term profits and whatever scheme would bring them in. The silencing of employees who sought
to challenge strategy and risk-management practices likely also undermined the banks’ moral
authority and emboldened those who already felt inclined to do the wrong thing. With a muted
internal voice, these organizations lacked a moral compass. As a result, they drove off a cliff
with astonishing speed.
The same things happen in Silicon Valley companies. Â I asked
management guru — and head of the CEO
Institute of Yale School of Management — Jeff Sonnenfeld for his advice on how
startups can sow the seeds for building a Cisco or Costco. Here is Jeff’s advice:
1)Â Create a culture of openness and welcome dissent
– Internal constructive critics are your best friends — too
often, founders are blinded by their own enthusiasm for their creative vision and then are
surrounded by sycophants, kissing up. Founders who fall out of touch rapidly lose their ethical
bearings. At Intel, founder Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore did not look for sycophantic followers
in selecting the brilliant, contentious, but relentlessly honest Andy Grove as their colleague
and successor. Similarly, Craig Barrett and Paul Otellini have consistently fought for different
points of view internally — without undermining the enterprise, and always
reinforcing Intel’s self-critical core ethic.
2)Â Lead by example. Â The authenticity of the
leader’s character is essential — if colleagues don’t believe you,
they will not take needed risks on your behalf — such as training subordinates
to be able to do their own jobs. Â Startups are often defined by the hip
clichés of VC firms, adoring press, and HR consultants — but the
startups don’t really practice what they preach.
3)Â Learn from immediate peers or distant models. Too often,
founders atrophy because they believe that the unique quality of their business or technological
mission means that they too are truly unique in leadership values. Steve Jobs has
patterned himself after Polaroid founder Ed Land — and tried to learn from
Land’s strengths and weaknesses. Henry Ford regretfully once claimed
“History is bunk” but in reality revered Thomas Edison. Michael Dell put
legendary tech entrepreneur (Teledyne) and educator Dr. George Kozmetsky on his board right from
the start to learn from this brilliant then septuagenarian.
4)Â Recognize your own fallibility as a leader, know your limits, and beware
of the myth of immortality. Entrepreneurs often are horrified at the
thought of leadership succession. The founders of great firms such as Google, Cisco, Amgen, and
Microsoft have known that they would need to prepare for a day when they no longer could be the
lone day-to-day internal boss, primary external ambassador, and symbolic cultural icon. The
founder of the original (pre-Starbucks) coffee house chain Chock-Full-o-Nuts started his first
café on Broadway 43rd Street in 1923 and was a great national
success. Sadly, sixty years later, as a dying man who had been flat on his back for
two years at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, he still clung to the job of leader of the
enterprise, his full-time physician serving as acting president.
5) Remember that institutional character — like a liquid
cupped in your hand — is fragile; easily lost; and hard, if not impossible, to
regain. Egomaniacal moves, personal grandiosity, greed, and deception create impressions
that are hard to erase. Whole Foods founder, John Mackey, sabotaged the integrity of
his own exalted brand, damaging the company’s internal pride and customer admiration far
more badly than any competitor could have, due to his self-inflating and his misleading
“anonymous” blogging, hiding his identity through an anagram of his wife’s
name, “rehodab.”
I’ll add another very important point: Establish an independent board.
Venture firms often demand a majority of board seats as a condition for their investments.
Conflicts invariably arise. The board begins to serve the needs of VCs and management, rather
than of the company itself, which loses the independent voice to warn it not to do the wrong
things. The inconvenient truth is that all board members have a fiduciary duty to act in the
interests of the company, and not in their own interests. Board members must not engage in
transactions in which they or their partners stand to gain. They are legally required to avoid
these conflicts of interest.
Finally, remember that in business, you have to make tough choices at every juncture. Though
business decisions usually have clear consequences and outcomes, ethical decisions are always
hard. Making the right choice doesn’t always bring success, but ethical lapses almost
always lead to failure. No matter what the consequence, doing what’s ethical and right is
always the better long-term strategy.
Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned
academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law
School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization
at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.
NEW YORK—The Recording Industry Association of America announced Tuesday that the combined
revenue brought in by Warner, Sony, EMI, Universal, and countless independent music labels in
2009 totaled $18. “The music industry is back,” RIAA representative Doug Fowley said.
“Not only was Kenny Chesney’s Greatest Hits CD purchased at a Knoxville, TN Borders
for $12.99, but we also had two songs downloaded through iTunes, and our ringtone sales reached
three.” Fowley added that as long as no one returns or exchanges the CD, the music industry
would continue to be a vital and creative force in American culture.
Report: Music Industry Made $18 In 2009 | The Onion – America’s Finest News
Source
The Good, The Bad, The Weird - Movie Trailers - iTunesI saw this film at FantasticFest a few years
ago, I am DELIGHTED to see it coming for a wider release! It is FANTASTIC fun, and RUN DON'T WALK
to see it if it comes to a theater near you if you ever liked a Western film.Creative and with
better stunts than any 5 Hollywood movies.-mike*and by HFS, I am NOT talking about Hierarchical
File System
Looking for a site that you can search in order to find images of a particular location? Then
Panoramio may fit the bill. Simply pop in your location and
up pops a Google map, with overlays of images that people have uploaded. Click on an image to see
it full size. No facility for downloading the image, and nothing to state if it's creative commons
or not. However, it's a useful site none the less.
It has a third of a million users who have uploaded on average 3 photographs each.
Yes, this is quite belated. I’ll explain why in a subsequent post.
linux.conf.au this year was in
Wellington, New Zealand. It just keeps getting better! It’s always great meeting people you
otherwise only know online. I was especially impressed by the OLPC NZ team.
Immediately following linux.conf.au, I jumped on a plane to Christchurch to embark on a week-long
tour of
the South Island. Long story short, it was the time of my life! I made some amazing friends. I
also saw and did incredible things, including:
awe-inspiring views of glaciers, glacially-formed landscapes, turquoise-coloured rivers and
lakes, beautiful skies and more
helihike: a helicopter
trip onto a glacier, then hiking on it
a night on a boat on Milford Sound, probably the most beautiful place on Earth
every extreme activity I could get my hands on, including:
I think what surprised me most was how adventurous I can be when I’m not in my
‘natural habitat’. I’m not normally a thrillseeker at all, but in NZ I made the
decision to take a holiday from myself as well as from work and home. I even made a
concerted effort to not touch computers at all. My phone was offline for most of the trip (I was
using it as a camera). I never thought that being cut-off could feel so liberating.
aucun rapport avec le libre mais bon, on a bien du cinéma et d'autres trucs, je me dis que
ça doit bien intéresser un(e) ou deux geek/moule.
Je profite de la diffusion du dernier épisode pour vous parler du visiteur du futur: une
web-série produite avec quelques bouts de ficelles et pas mal de talent. Je l'aime
particulièrement parce qu'elle est auto-produite et sort pas mal des nombreuses niaiseries
qu'on peut voir au cinéma (bon au passage Alice in Wonderland est très bien, mais bon
c'est un Tim Burton, alors forcément).
Un gars ordinaire glandouille dans un parc avec ses potes, quand un mec apparaît pour lui
dire de ne pas lancer sa canette dans la poubelle, que ceci pourrait avoir des conséquences
dramatiques !
Les premiers épisodes sont une successions de sketchs, le gars ordinaire ne peut plus rien
faire sans que l'autre ne vienne le perturber (pour ne pas écrire l'emmerder), par la suite
cela forme une histoire plus construite.
Vous trouverez pas mal d'autre vidéos vraiment sympas sur le site.
Voilà, encore une fois aucun rapport avec le libre (vous pouvez écrire vos 2
commentaires scriptés « mais ça n'a rien à voir avec le libre ! »
et « Les journaux sont destinés à des informations qui ne sont pas [...]
»), mais ça tourne un peu autour de la culture geek (SF), j'aime beaucoup tout ce qui
est auto-produit (d'aucun diront DIY) et j'ai tout simplement envie de faire connaître.
Plus qu'à espérer une seconde saison sous Creative Common :)
This week
we've got a book hot off the presses for your weekly dose of entrepreneurial reading as 37signals founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson are back
with their second book in four months. Released earlier this month, Rework, a no-nonsense rethinking of how to successfully
start and run a business, comes hot on the heels of their first book Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a
successful web application, which published in November of 2009.
Sponsor
This time Fried and Hansson take a more general approach to business by examining the ways that
new companies are disrupting traditional business practices and making a big splash. They cover
their entrepreneurial bases by reminding us that "no time is no excuse" and that "a business
without a path to profit isn't a business, it's a hobby," but then also elaborate on less
traditional practices that have helped them succeed.
The main theme of the book is to trim the fat and do fewer things better; simplifying every
aspect of your business and doing a smaller number of things at a higher quality is far better
than trying to do too much and a mediocre level. There were times when customers of their
products wanted more features and they refused to comply because it would slow them down and
decrease efficiency. They decry time-stealing meetings, lengthy contracts, childish office
politics and bloated inventories because they weigh down companies from reaching their full
potential.
Rework is a great read for entrepreneurs because it is very focused and
doesn't waste any time with lengthy use cases. The book itself is an example of the principals it
teaches; the quality of a written work is not based on it's length, so why should company be
judged by how many features it offers? Fried and Hansson admit that the book, which comes in at a
dense but brief 288 pages, was originally drafted to be nearly twice as long, but why say in 600
pages what you can say under 300? Another reason the book is a great read is because of the
authors' open and honest tone.
"Ever seen those weapons prisoners make out of soap, or a spoon? They make do with what they've
got," one passage humorously points out. "Now we're not saying you should go out and shank
somebody, but get creative, and you'll amazed with what you can make with just a little."
Other useful and easily digestible analogies for their unique business ideas include comparing
your company to a hot dog stand. They advise that the best way to trim down an inflated company
is to find the "epicenter" by asking yourself, "If I took this away, would what I'm selling still
exist?" The best hot dog stand doesn't worry about the decorations on the stand, or the
condiments - it worries about the hot dogs.
There are dozens of other valuable pieces of advice in Rework that are sure to inspire
any entrepreneur or small business owner. But as LeVar Burton famously said at the end of each
episode of Reading Rainbow, you don't have to take my word for it. Seth Godin, who has
authored several books on business and entrepreneurship including The Dip
which we profiled earlier this year, had nothing but high praise for Rework.
"Jason and David have broken all the rules and won. Again and again they've demonstrated that the
regular way isn't necessarily the right way," says Godin. "They just don't say it, they do it.
And they do it better than just about anyone has any right to expect."
This book is an obvious buy not only because the of the expert advice dispensed by the successful
founders of 37signals, but also because the book is an easy, quick and inexpensive read.
Personally, in a few short hours I was able to breeze through the audio version, which can be
found online for less than $10. But if you prefer reading words on a page, the Kindle version is
also $10, or a hardback copy is just $3 more at some online retailers.
Ah, leave it to The Onion to successfully encapsulate the state of the recording industry with a report that is basically as accurate
as most of the reports that come out of the RIAA these days: The Recording Industry Association
of America announced Tuesday that the combined revenue brought in by Warner, Sony, EMI, Universal,
and countless independent music labels in 2009 totaled $18. "The music industry is back," RIAA
representative Doug Fowley said. "Not only was Kenny Chesney's Greatest Hits CD purchased at a
Knoxville, TN Borders for $12.99, but we also had two songs downloaded through iTunes, and our
ringtone sales reached three." Fowley added that as long as no one returns or exchanges the CD, the
music industry would continue to be a vital and creative force in American culture.
In our latest
employment-specific round-up, we highlight some of the notable jobs posted in big sister site
Gamasutra's industry-leading game jobs
section this week, including positions from SCEA Santa Monica, WB Games and more.
Each position posted by employers will appear on the main Gamasutra job board, and appear in the site's
daily and weekly newsletters, reaching our readers directly.
It will also be cross-posted for free across its network of submarket sites, which includes
content sites focused on online worlds, cellphone games, 'serious games', independent games and
more.
Some of the notable jobs posted this week include:
Gameloft: 3D Graphics
Programmer
"As a member of our engineering team you will be part of the full development cycle of 3D video
games for iPhone from start to finish, primarily focusing on 3D graphics. Duties could include:
Analyze existing 3D functions in the engine and adapt them so they are compatible with current
conventions; Support 3D functions and systems conceived for the production; Work with Game
Developers, as well as Design teams to determine the different constraints of the game and put
all the elements together."
Guerrilla Games: Senior Game
Designer
"Guerrilla Games is looking to add a battle-hardened Senior Game Designer to its ranks for an
upcoming project. If you're recruited, you will play a pivotal role in formulating the game
design and guarding the game's vision. You will also act as a mentor, problem solver and source
of bravery and inspiration for your fellow troops."
Rockstar North: Graphics
Programmer
"Rockstar North, one of the world's leading video game developers, is a community of creative
individuals from a variety of backgrounds. We are based in Scotland out of modern, spacious,
purpose-built studios at the heart of Edinburgh. We develop original game titles and are proud to
be the developer of the phenomenally successful Grand Theft Auto series. Rockstar North has been
part of the Rockstar family since 1999."
Sony Computer Entertainment America Santa Monica: Senior Combat
Designer
"Join the God of War team! Be a part of the most exciting and innovating computer entertainment
in North America. Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) markets the PlayStationÂ@
family of products and develops, publishes, markets, and distributes software for the PS
oneâ„¢ console, the PlayStationÂ@2 and PlayStationÂ@3 computer
entertainment systems and the PlayStation Portable (PSPâ„¢)."
WB Games: Art
Development Director
"The Art Development Director develops art content staffing plans and monitors resource load and
schedule for the external outsource teams as well as the insourced teams. In addition, he or she
monitors content creation tasks in collaboration with production staff and art leads handling
communication and feedback between the external partners and the internal game teams."
To browse hundreds of similar jobs, and for more information on searching, responding to, or
posting game industry-relevant jobs to the top source for jobs in the business, please visit Gamasutra's job board now.
Here is the latest in our year-long look at one cool comic (whether it be a self-contained work,
an ongoing comic or a run on a long-running title that featured multiple creative teams on it
over the years) a day (in no particular order whatsoever)! Here's
the archive of the moments posted so far!
Today we take a look at Tony Isabella and Eddie Newell's run on Black Lightning...
Enjoy!
The second Black Lightning series debuted at the end of 1994, and very quickly, writer Tony
Isabella (who created Black Lightning about twenty years earlier) quickly established that this
Black Lightning comic book would be a lot different than most other superhero comics on the
shelf.
In the issue, Jefferson Pierce has moved to a new city, Brick City, and he is debating how best
he can help people - as a teacher? as a superhero? as a fellow with some (Bruce Wayne supplied)
money?
Ultimately, he decides that he is going to try to make some fundamental changes to the drug
trafficking system in Brick City, beginning with a dramatic "hello" to the neighborhood in #1...
Isabella also slowly populated the supporting cast with various students and teachers at
Jefferson's new school.
Early on, though, Isabella threw a total curveball when, at the end of #4, a member of a gang
bursts into a room where Jefferson and another teacher (Walter Kasko, a guy who seemed to be cut
in the "Steve Lombard" mold) were with a teen who had spurned a gang (through their help). She
opened fire, and Walter shielded the boy with his body, thereby getting riddled with bullets
(Jefferson also suffered terrible gunshot injuries).
That led to the absolutely brilliant #5, which was one of the most critically acclaimed issues of
1995, but sadly, since it has not been reprinted, a lot of people have forgotten how excellent of
an issue it was (although I featured it during the Year of Cool Comic Book Moments, so you might
be familiar with it by now!).
The issue shows Jefferson recuperating, and mostly feeling sorry for himself and mourning
Walter's death.
There's a great touch when Jefferson's ex-wife visits, and he talks about where he was when
Superman died...
Then we get a stunning sequence when a man (who had stared at Jefferson when he first came into
the hospital) comes by again...
Beautiful, huh?
That doesn't even fully give you the appreciation of how good #5 is - do yourself a favor and
find yourself a copy!
There's a good story arc in #7 and 8 involving Gangbuster, but sadly, that's as far as Isabella
ever went. Even before #1 had come out, Isabella had already been fired, with #8 being his last
issue.
And after he left, the book quickly fell apart and only last four more issues (which really paled
in comparison to Isabella's run).
But that eight-issue run by Isabella and Newell remains a wonderful read. Be sure to check it out
and maybe someday DC will put together a trade collection of the run (although I'm not holding my
breath)!
Crashed web sites, stolen credit
card info — imagine seeing the damage caused by Internet viruses and worms unleashed on a
fleet of vehicles. The results could include vehicle location data used with malicious intent,
the prevention of a plug-in vehicle battery from recharging, remote starting of a car, or even
— as a disgruntled young former car salesman in Texas has demonstrated this week —
stranding drivers with a car that won’t start and a horn that won’t quit.
Here’s what happened in Texas, as Wired and
the Austin News report: A
terminated employee from a car dealership called the Texas Auto Center logged into the
company’s web-based system and was able to remotely wreak havoc on more than 100 vehicles.
The dealership’s system is able to disable the starter system and trigger incessant horn
honking for customers that have fallen behind on car payments. It’s meant to serve as an
alternative to repossessing the vehicle, and the ex-Texas Auto Center employee, arrested Thursday
on charges of computer intrusion, was able to set off the horn command at will and make it so
drivers couldn’t start their cars.
Cars are growing ever more connected to communication networks, and upcoming generations of
electric vehicles will take it a step further with connections to the power grid. Already,
electric car makers have unveiled
smartphone apps designed to let users to remotely control certain vehicle functions and battery
charging. Down the road, we’ll likely see not only electricity flowing to cars from the
grid, but also the flow of data between cars, the grid, home energy management systems, utilities
and third-party service providers.
As Ford’s director of connected services Doug VanDagens told us
recently (GigaOM Pro, subscription required), “For electric vehicles, connectivity to
the web and data are “required over and above what gas engines require.” Apps can use
data — about topography, traffic, battery and vehicle health, infrastructure
availability, driving behavior — to help orient drivers in the nascent world
of electric mobility, both in and out of their vehicle.
While these tools and technologies could help reduce fuel consumption, make electric vehicles
more convenient, and enable utilities to prevent excess strain on the power grid as plug-in cars
create new demand, that shift to an increasingly digital transportation system brings with it (as
Katie has explained in the
context of the smart grid buildout) one of the banes of the Internet: hacking.
The stakes, of course, are very different. Certainly nobody wants a virus on their PC. But the
prospect of a hacker seizing control of some aspect of a car — a ton of metal capable of
going 60-plus MPH, that costs tens of thousands of dollars, and that maybe has a battery in its
belly that requires a
sophisticated system of thermal controls –Â is a far scarier thought.
The potential consequences of cyber attacks on a digital power grid could be similarly
frightening. Andy Karsner said
back in 2008, when he was with the Department of Energy: “This isn’t the
cyber-attacking that you think of just for passwords. This is the capacity to destroy hardware in
your home, at airports, at military bases, your car, if its connected through the grid.”
We should note that remote immobilization systems like the one involved in the Austin incident
have been in use for a
decade or more, and yet we have not seen vehicles crippled en masse by hackers. But companies
should realize this could be a sensitive issue among consumers, while both companies and
regulators need to recognize risks that go along with the transition to increasingly digital and
connected systems for transportation and power.
I don’t know anyone anymore that actually owns a record player. I still find
them interesting, but I can’t say that I’ve found much of a need to rush out and get
one. Well for those of you that would like to have something small and easily hidden
around, this record player is one way to do it. What was formerly nothing more than
a sleeve for a record gets reshaped and reused as a record player.
Sure, it’s nothing top of the line and it will probably need a little help from you, but it
would still work. In order to get it up and running, just assemble all of the
corrugated cardboard into the proper formation. Then just put a pencil in the center
of the record on the player. The vibrations will then go through the needle and
become amplified by the cardboard. It was just something that was sent out to
creative directors across North America in order to demonstrate GGRP’s sound engineering
capabilities.
A couple of us from MAKE attended an inspirational meeting on Wednesday at
Eyebeam in NYC with the most influential people in open source hardware including Limor Fried,
Bunnie Huang (Chumby), and the Arduino team. Legal counsel from Creative Commons brought answers
to many of our questions, and we discussed the future for open source hardware:
We all agree open sourcing hardware is important, and as practitioners, many of us have been
involved in work, research and talks about it. To date, no universal "right solution" exists.
While Creative Commons licenses are widely used for software, there is a growing number of groups
using the licenses for hardware, without necessarily accounting for the difficulties and
restrictions hardware imposes. In short, open source for hardware is not like open source for
software, and thus cannot use the same legal tools.
The purpose of this workshop is to create a direct dialogue between Creative Commons and some of
the most significant players in the Open Source Hardware Community . CC representatives will be
sharing their perspectives while listening to the needs and perspectives of this community, in
order to help form more appropriate licensing options for open hardware.
Thanks to Ayah Bdeir and Eyebeam for organizing/hosting. Pictured above is the group, and the
FIRST ARDUINO EVER MADE, toted
around in a box of prototypes by Massimo Banzi himself. Check out PT's Flickr photos.
Wish you had access to tools like milling machines, 3d scanners, and laser cutters, but don't
have the budget or space to keep them at your home? Well, if you are a resident of Manchester,
you might be in luck. The Manchester FABLAB, an
open workshop with all of the aforementioned tools and more, will be opening up next week. They
aim to provide a free place for people to build noncommercial projects:
The Manchester fablab is a creative workspace in Manchester where you can pretty well make
whatever you can think of. When we say anything we do mean pretty much anything. There's about 35
fablabs (fabrication laboratories) around the world so far and people have made all sorts of things
from T-shirts to robots. The fablab is open for use by individuals, community groups, schools and
companies.
The Manchester fab lab will be equipped with many different machines including laser cutters,
milling machines, 3D scanners, embroidery and sewing machines which are mostly controlled by
simple computer programmes, so you don't have to be an machining or computer expert to use them.
We are going to be open for use at the beginning of 2010. As always there are a hundred things to
think of and a few more we haven't thought of.
Fablabs Basics:
The fablab is free to use for non-commercial use. (A small charge applies if you are a
commercial company)
We aim to provide free basic materials like wood, plastics and electronic components for
non-commercial use (Not gold or diamonds!)
We have lots of different machines to use and don't worry we'll help you learn how to use
them
New to the Boing Boing Bazaar: the Tubby Amp Kit. It's easy to build and presents wonderful
opportunities for creative packaging. Will you put it in a coconut shell? An old DDT can?
Geronimo's skull? Tubby Amp Kit Previously:Aerogel chunks in Bazaar Chaotic Pendulums for sale in
Bazaar Get a P8TCH at the Bazaar The splendor of the Bazaar! Miniboss T-shirt in the Bazaar
Mustache crayons for sale in Bazaar Hine's felt camera cases in the Bazaar Tiny glass bell jar
display case Zombie shadow maker T-shirts: robots, aliens, and zombies galore! Hollow spy coins for
all your micro-smuggling needs Laser cut model rocket ship...
Rich Farrely, le senior creative director du prochain Medal of Honor, nous raconte en deux minutes
et des bananes dans ce carnet de développeur comment lui et son équipe ont
conçu ce nouvel épisode. Promis pour l'été prochain par Electronic
Arts, ce futur challenger de Call of Duty : Modern Warfare...
Les Creative EP-3NC sont les nouveaux écouteurs intra-auriculaires de la
marque singapourienne. Ils ont la particularité d’êtres dotés du
système Noise Cancelling (réduction active du bruit) via un petit boitier munis
d’une batterie dont l’autonomie peut atteindre 100 heures. Quand le système
n’est pas activé, ces écouteurs fonctionnent normalement, comme un casque
antibruit passif. Ils sont disponibles sur le site de Creative pour 99 euros.Voici un petit test de ces derniers.
First off, let's be crystal clear: this is a work of pure imagination, not some sort of leaked
image of the next HTC HD device. What's so impressive so me is the quality of the
mock-ups...you'd never know that this was a mock-up of a phone that doesn't exist...until you
look at the specs, because that's where things start to look a little too creative. The creator
wants a 1.5 Ghz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, but as far as I know, that speed of processor
doesn't exist yet. The 1 GB of RAM seems like overkill, but the 16 GB of internal storage sounds
about right. The 4.5 inch screen running at 800 x 1280 sounds cool, but that's not supported
resolution of Windows phone 7. 4G? Nah, we won't see that yet. USB host? Nope, not compatible
with Windows phone 7. 8 megapixel camera that can record 720p video? Maybe...just maybe. I've
heard rumblings about phones this year being able to do HD capture.
So that's the mythical HD3. What would your dream Windows phone 7 device have on it in terms of
hardware? Yeah, I know you want copy and paste, but what about the hardware?
Leyl Master Black is a Managing Director at Sparkpr, one of the world’s top independent PR agencies. Leyl has more
than 15 years experience driving high-impact communications programs for emerging technology
companies.
While more than three million businesses, brands and celebrities have created Facebook Pages, many are struggling to figure out
how best to use them. Companies are finding that even when they keep their pages updated with
fresh content, they still aren’t seeing steady growth in their fan base.
And yet there are many brands who’ve surpassed the one million fan mark, while their peers
have languished in the thousands. What’s their secret? These companies have figured out how
to move from “broadcast” mode into engagement. They have engaged people so well that
their fans even invite others along for the ride.
Here are four ways that savvy Facebook marketers are using the medium to engage with their fans.
1. Ask Their Opinion
If you post something on your Facebook Page, you might generate a good number of comments. But if
you post your content in the context of a question, you provide an easy call to action. With a
question, you engage people’s egos and provoke viral distribution of your content —
everyone loves to share their opinion!
At the DigiDay: Social conference
this month, social media marketing application developer Fan Appz highlighted an example of how a simple question can boost
engagement. One of their customers — a leading video content provider with over 300,000
Facebook fans — routinely posts videos on their Facebook Page. The company found that when
they paired videos with a question, video plays jumped by a whopping factor of 7 to 10. This
simple yet effective strategy also generated 100 times more Facebook media impressions, as people
posted videos to their walls in the context of their response to the question.
The NBA has also adopted this approach, issuing a steady stream of “Top Five” polls
and other engaging content that has propelled the organization to top the two million
fan mark, an unprecedented number for a sports league on the social networking site. The NBA
routinely invites fans to rank their top five shooters, point guards and more. During the 2009-10
NBA season, their Fan Page generated nearly 500 million status update impressions and more than
six million video views.
2. Test Their Knowledge
Consider testing people’s knowledge with a fun, relevant quiz, and even tying the results
to a giveaway or promotion (more on that later). A clever quiz is not only entertaining, but also
lengthens the time a user spends engaged with your brand.
One company embracing this approach is Molotov, a digital marketing agency whose clients include
comedians such as George Lopez, David Spade and Jamie Kennedy. Molotov worked with George Lopez
to create quizzes such as How Well Do You Know George Lopez? to push his fan base over the one
million mark and drive viewership for his TV show.
In another Molotov program to promote a client’s new TV show, the company ran a series of
quizzes about the celebrity in conjunction with a sweepstakes for signed merchandise. The quizzes
were tests of knowledge about the comedian, his comedy, his routines, even about what happened on
last week’s show. Giving people the opportunity to test their knowledge got them into a
competitive mode and provided an additional incentive to share their results with friends. In the
span of a little over a week, the campaign drove over 12 million brand impressions — and
the premiere of the show was the highest rated show on the cable network for the year.
3. Pair Promotions with Content
While a contest or sweepstakes may get you some e-mail addresses, simply posting these on your
page provides limited incentive to share with friends or even to participate. The way to boost
participation is by tying the offer to content. People taking a brand-related quiz are great
targets for your message. They may already have an affinity for the brand, so this is the best
time to make them an offer.
In the example mentioned above, Molotov gave fans a chance to enter a sweepstakes to win signed
merchandise — but the offer was made within the flow of the quiz. This strategy resulted in
a 50% conversion rate. For every ten fans who tested their knowledge, five signed up to
participate in the promotion, generating over 30,000 sign-ups for the weekly e-mail blast to
promote the show.
The offer doesn’t even have to be big. Before the Super Bowl, the NFL ran a How Well Do You Know the
NFL? quiz, with one lucky participant selected to receive a $50 gift card to NFLshop.com. Over 10,000 people took the quiz. If you
estimate that each participant has 200 friends, that’s a possible two million impressions
in the news feed with a relatively small giveaway.
4. Thank Your Fans
Giving your fans something of value — whether it’s as simple as a coupon, or as
flashy as tickets to the Tonight Show — is a great way to show that you appreciate
their continued support.
But what about picking one fan at random to get something really special?
The NBA again shows that they are on the leading edge. This brilliant strategy taps some of their
biggest stars to record personalized video clips thanking select fans. Here’s a picture of Shaq
thanking fan #385. If you’re an NBA fan, you could be next!
Put These Ideas Into Action
You don’t have to be a major brand like the NBA to turn your Facebook Page into an engaging
destination. Any business can take these ideas and get creative. A restaurant could pair a quiz
about famous restaurant movie scenes with a $100 gift certificate sweepstakes, or a Ford
dealership could run a poll gauging people’s reactions to the Toyota recall news and give
away interest-free financing to one lucky winner. The trick is to think about what your users
would be interested in, what’s trendy or fun, then try it out.
In what ways are you engaging with your Facebook fans?
The fact that many people love games isn’t really that new. Retailers and even our own
governments have used our love of games to sell us products and hook us on lotteries and whatever
else they can think of to boost revenue. But the rise of online games such as World of Warcraft
and the social and “casual” games popularized by Zynga and other companies on
Facebook, such as Mafia Wars and Happy Aquarium, has arguably made gaming a far bigger part of
our culture than it has ever been — not to mention location-based apps such as Foursquare
and Gowalla, which have explicit game-like features built in. Online payment giant PayPal said
that Zynga was its
second-largest merchant last year, and PayPal does business with some of the largest
companies in the world. And get ready for even more games: Flurry Analytics says that its
research shows almost
half of the apps that are being developed for the upcoming Apple iPad are games.
What is the impact of all that gaming on our society? One academic, Lee Sheldon of Indiana
University, says the generation that has grown up with ubiquitous online gaming is bringing that
culture with it into the educational system, and ultimately into the workforce. “As the
gamer generation moves into the mainstream workforce, they are willing and eager to apply the
culture and learning-techniques they bring with them from games,” Sheldon, an assistant
professor at the university’s department of telecommunications, told
ITNews. He said older managers will have to “figure out how to educate themselves to
the gamer culture, and how to speak to it most effectively.”
Sheldon is already experimenting with that: over the last year, he started grading two of his
classes (both involved with game design) using a system based on “experience points”
or XP, similar to the way gamers in World of Warcraft and other massively-multiplayer games award
points for various tasks. Students started the year at level one, with zero XP and then gained
points — and higher grades — by completing “quests” and
“crafting,” which corresponded to giving presentations and doing exams and quizzes.
Students also formed “guilds” similar to the gaming groups that rule WoW and other
multiplayer games, and Sheldon says that his students seemed far more engaged than they had been
before.
A similar phenomenon was the topic of a panel at the
recent SXSW conference in Austin, where Christopher Poole, the founder of the controversial
discussion forum known as 4chan, and Web historian Jason Scott discussed the site and its culture
— which in some cases consists of offensive material, but also involves public advocacy
through offshoots such as the Anonymous group. According to
a description from Austin360, Scott compared the behavior at 4chan to a game, but one in
which the objective was to come up with something more shocking and/or hilarious than your
competitors.
Scott noted that another site behaves in almost the exact same way: Wikipedia. And he’s got a point — the
“crowdsourced” encyclopedia relies in many cases on unknown and unpaid editors and
writers to produce and structure and verify its content, people who to some extent compete for
the recognition of their peers on the site, and in some cases wind up “levelling up”
to become senior editors and members of the internal Wikipedia “cabal” of site
managers. Although Wikipedia doesn’t explicitly award experience points, the concept is the
same, and it motivates people in similar ways.
The moderation of comments at Slashdot is based on a very similar system: users are able to
gain “karma points” through
positive actions such as posting sensible comments, voting on other comments and flagging abusive
comments. When they get enough points, they are selected by the site’s algorithm to be
official moderators, and can then “spend” the points they have removing comments. In
such a system, it doesn’t ultimately matter whether someone is anonymous or not, because
there is an incentive for them to follow the rules and behave properly (although there are always
users who don’t care about the rewards and try to “troll” or disrupt any site).
The bottom line is that good games take advantage of people’s innate desire to compete with
each other, but balance that with their need to receive rewards, including the approval of their
peers — rewards that in some cases can be used to modify their behavior in certain ways.
Those are principles that don’t just apply to games. Jesse Schell, a former creative
director at Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio, had a great presentation at the DICE 2010
conference last month in which he talked about the rise of social gaming and
what we can learn from it, which is embedded below.
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This week
we've got a book hot off the presses for your weekly dose of entrepreneurial reading as 
Rework is a great read for entrepreneurs because it is very focused and
doesn't waste any time with lengthy use cases. The book itself is an example of the principals it
teaches; the quality of a written work is not based on it's length, so why should company be
judged by how many features it offers? Fried and Hansson admit that the book, which comes in at a
dense but brief 288 pages, was originally drafted to be nearly twice as long, but why say in 600
pages what you can say under 300? Another reason the book is a great read is because of the
authors' open and honest tone.
In our latest
employment-specific round-up, we highlight some of the notable jobs posted in big sister site
Gamasutra's 
Crashed web sites, stolen credit
card info — imagine seeing the damage caused by Internet viruses and worms unleashed on a
fleet of vehicles. The results could include vehicle location data used with malicious intent,
the prevention of a plug-in vehicle battery from recharging, remote starting of a car, or even
— as a disgruntled young former car salesman in Texas has demonstrated this week —
stranding drivers with a car that won’t start and a horn that won’t quit.
Recommandations
)
and reject those that you are not interested in
(
)
