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StreamTransport Grabs Hulu Videos for Offline
Viewing (Windows) It may not stick around that long once the powers that be find out, so if downloading and
watching Hulu videos offline could help you out, grab StreamTransport. The tricky little app
provides full-quality captures of streaming shows and movies.
ExtensionFM Is a Very Cool Browser-Based Music
Library, and We've Got Invites (Chrome) Chrome extension ExtensionFM automatically collects MP3s from sites you visit and adds them
to a browser-based library within the extension, allowing you to find all sorts of cool, new
music without cluttering up your local library until you buy them.
NetBalancer Prioritizes Network Traffic by
Application (Windows) Ever wish you could guarantee your BitTorrent download didn't choke your streaming YouTube
video-or vice versa-but don't feel like setting up Quality of Service rules on your
super-router ? NetBalancer shapes bandwidth allocations for different apps on your PC.
Gnome Gmail Tightly Integrates Gmail into Linux
Desktops (GNOME-based Linux) There are work-arounds to set Gmail as a default mail app in Linux, but they don't cover
right-click file sending and complex mail links. Gnome Gmail does a much better job of
integrating Gmail.
MusicBee is a Powerful, Easy-to-Use Music Manager
(Windows) Despite the many great media players out there, MusicBee earns itself a spot high on the
list with super tagging, managing, browsing, ripping, syncing, and converting powers, all on
top of an intuitive interface familiar to any iTunes user.
WeatherBar Integrates Weather Forecasts with the
Windows 7 Superbar (Windows 7) Like to keep the eye on the weather but never been too keen on sidebar gadgets or system
tray apps? WeatherBar is a simple app that puts the weather in your Windows 7 taskbar, offering
quick access to the forecast.
TestDrive Virtualizes Brand-New Ubuntu Builds for Easy
Testing (Ubuntu) Want to try out the latest build of the next Ubuntu release with almost no hassle at all?
TestDrive is a one-shot tool that downloads, virtualizes, and keeps daily Ubuntu builds up to
date.
Etacts Adds Contact Info, Social Networking, and Handy
Statistics to Your Gmail Sidebar (Chrome/Firefox) If you ever thought previously mentioned Xobni looked cool, but you prefer Gmail to
Outlook, free Gmail plug-in Etacts adds many of the same features. You get social information,
conversation history, and advanced sending preferences right in your Gmail sidebars.
LastHistory Graphically Visualizes your Last.fm
History Through Time (Mac) Just when you thought you couldn't possibly need more statistics on your music listening
habits, free Mac app LastHistory comes along and graphically analyzes your Last.fm logs, over
time, while also integrating with other Mac apps like iPhoto and iCal.
StreamTransport Grabs Hulu Videos for Offline
Viewing (Windows) It may not stick around that long once the powers that be find out, so if downloading and
watching Hulu videos offline could help you out, grab StreamTransport. The tricky little app
provides full-quality captures of streaming shows and movies.
ExtensionFM Is a Very Cool Browser-Based Music
Library, and We've Got Invites (Chrome) Chrome extension ExtensionFM automatically collects MP3s from sites you visit and adds them
to a browser-based library within the extension, allowing you to find all sorts of cool, new
music without cluttering up your local library until you buy them.
NetBalancer Prioritizes Network Traffic by
Application (Windows) Ever wish you could guarantee your BitTorrent download didn't choke your streaming YouTube
video-or vice versa-but don't feel like setting up Quality of Service rules on your
super-router ? NetBalancer shapes bandwidth allocations for different apps on your PC.
Gnome Gmail Tightly Integrates Gmail into Linux
Desktops (GNOME-based Linux) There are work-arounds to set Gmail as a default mail app in Linux, but they don't cover
right-click file sending and complex mail links. Gnome Gmail does a much better job of
integrating Gmail.
MusicBee is a Powerful, Easy-to-Use Music Manager
(Windows) Despite the many great media players out there, MusicBee earns itself a spot high on the
list with super tagging, managing, browsing, ripping, syncing, and converting powers, all on
top of an intuitive interface familiar to any iTunes user.
WeatherBar Integrates Weather Forecasts with the
Windows 7 Superbar (Windows 7) Like to keep the eye on the weather but never been too keen on sidebar gadgets or system
tray apps? WeatherBar is a simple app that puts the weather in your Windows 7 taskbar, offering
quick access to the forecast.
TestDrive Virtualizes Brand-New Ubuntu Builds for Easy
Testing (Ubuntu) Want to try out the latest build of the next Ubuntu release with almost no hassle at all?
TestDrive is a one-shot tool that downloads, virtualizes, and keeps daily Ubuntu builds up to
date.
Etacts Adds Contact Info, Social Networking, and Handy
Statistics to Your Gmail Sidebar (Chrome/Firefox) If you ever thought previously mentioned Xobni looked cool, but you prefer Gmail to
Outlook, free Gmail plug-in Etacts adds many of the same features. You get social information,
conversation history, and advanced sending preferences right in your Gmail sidebars.
LastHistory Graphically Visualizes your Last.fm
History Through Time (Mac) Just when you thought you couldn't possibly need more statistics on your music listening
habits, free Mac app LastHistory comes along and graphically analyzes your Last.fm logs, over
time, while also integrating with other Mac apps like iPhoto and iCal.
· Liberal Democrat 'ready to be chancellor'
· Whitehall mandarins prepare for coalition
Vince Cable has held unprecedented and detailed talks with the top official at the Treasury about
the Liberal Democrats' economic policies – and declared himself willing to
serve as chancellor after the next election.
As Whitehall gears up for a possible hung parliament, Cable told the Observer that he
had been questioned by Nicholas Macpherson, the Treasury's permanent secretary, about what the
Lib Dems' demands would be in a coalition with Labour or the Tories.
Cable was unaware of such meetings having taken place with Lib Dem shadow chancellors before
previous general elections. The talks were a sign that the Treasury was "taking seriously" the
prospect of his party playing a leading role in economic policy in what could be the first hung
parliament since 1974.
"He wanted to know what we attached priority to. He wanted to know what we felt strongly about,"
Cable said, adding that his ideas on tax and spending were well received. He didn't say to me:
'Yes, minister, but you can't do that'."
Cable, whose credibility has grown throughout the economic crisis, made clear that, if he was to
be offered the chancellorship in a hung parliament, he would jump at the chance. He did not want
to be "the most unpopular person in Britain" as public spending is slashed, he said, but added:
"I wouldn't be in this business if I wasn't willing to take the responsibility if it was to come
my way."
It comes as two more opinion polls point to a hung parliament. An ICM survey for the News of
the World puts the Tories six points ahead on 38%, and research by YouGov for the Sunday
Times suggested the party enjoyed a seven-point advantage.
David Cameron and his shadow cabinet have already held talks with senior Whitehall mandarins in
preparation for a likely handover of power. But talks with a third party take place only where
there is a serious prospect of it holding the balance of power.
Downing Street and the Treasury said Alistair Darling would present a "budget for growth" on
Wednesday, portraying Labour as the party to nurse the economy back to health, with investment in
jobs and industry, and warning that the Conservatives would jeopardise that with premature
spending cuts.
The chancellor has little room for manoeuvre in pre-election giveaways, but one idea being
seriously considered is to delay a 3p rise in petrol duty. Darling will announce a £1bn
green infrastructure fund to invest in low-carbon technology and extend job schemes to help
unemployed young people into work.
While the deficit is expected to be as much as £10bn below the £178bn forecast in his
December pre-budget report, the Treasury stresses the focus will be on the chancellor's
commitment to halve the deficit within four years. "It's a boring budget," said a No 10
source. "He may extend the odd payment here and there, but it is about stability and jobs."
In his weekly podcast, Gordon Brown states today that the recovery remains "fragile and in its
infancy". The prime minister says that Labour's commitment to cut the deficit is
"non-negotiable", but stresses that investing in jobs and programmes for industry is a way to
reduce it in the medium term.
"It means not taking away the extra support too soon, which risks setting back the recovery and
tipping us back into recession... If we allow unemployment to run riot, as happened in previous
recessions, that will cost us more and add to the deficit," he says.
Cable made clear he would have serious reservations about working with either Labour or the
Conservatives. "I'm worried about both," he said. "If either of them came back, Gordon, given his
history, will be in denial about difficult decisions, and the Tories are in danger of doing
foolish, precipitate things that could make the situation a lot worse."
Cable was noticeably more critical of the Conservatives' response to the financial crisis, saying
that they should score "nul points" for failing to grasp the seriousness of the situation. "They
haven't done anything to attract praise, because they completely and totally misunderstood the
problems."
By contrast, Labour had had a "purple passage" in the autumn of 2008, when Brown led
international efforts to recapitalise the banking sector after the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
The Conservatives sought to seize the initiative on reforming the bloated financial sector this
weekend, promising to implement a US-style tax on banks if they win the general election, instead
of waiting for an international consensus to emerge, as Labour has promised to do. Cameron
spelled out the measure in a speech about taking on the "vested interests" in society, comparing
the battle to constrain the banks today with Margaret Thatcher's attack on union powers in the
1980s.
Lord Myners, the City minister, said: "This ill-thought-out Tory briefing has all the hallmarks
of a plan made up on the hoof."
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.
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.
It’s almost a cliché that great Silicon Valley entrepreneurs
don’t go sit on a beach when they make a lot of money, they get back to work building
another company or at least investing in other people’s companies. But what did eBay
founder Pierre Omidyar do? Moved to Honolulu where he can be found sitting on beaches.
But don’t let the top line narrative fool you, Omidyar hasn’t just been looking at
sunsets all these years. He’s been busy making good on his commitment to give away some 99% of his
multi-billion dollar fortune and lately has been launching Peer News, a new kind
of online news service that won’t have reporters or articles in the classic sense, nor will
it allow anonymous comments or make money off advertising. He’s definitely got at least the
media world captivated once again.
eBay, philanthropy and now a local Hawaiian news site may seem like wildly disparate ventures for
the same man to take, but as Omidyar explains in the video below they’re all connected by
the ideas of platform and community—two words that have also underlined much
of the Web 2.0 movement.
Just like eBay was a platform that gave people everywhere the opportunity to build out a business
and change their economic reality, so too does the Omidyar Network seek to give passionate,
would-be entrepreneurs an opportunity to change their world and their reality. As Omidyar puts
it, he doesn’t have a “cause;” he gets excited about other people’s
causes. Similarly at eBay he wasn’t a collector, but he loved hearing about other
people’s collections.
On community, eBay was one of the first places that pioneered trust online through its reputation
and feedback systems. Omidyar is hoping to bring that same kind of trust and fair-dealing to the
local news world with Peer News—which is the reason anonymous commenters will
not be welcome.
Omidyar talks about all of this and more in the video below, shot in his office in Honolulu. I
started out by asking him about that great founders myth that he started eBay so his wife could
trade Pez dispensers. (The one people claimed years later was just a good pitch for reporters.)
While surfing one of our favorite
websites, we came upon this little
jewel. We can’t really tell if this is hack-worthy, or just a deathtrap, so to help
decide…
Mechanics crawler + 80cc motor – safety concerns = deathtrap
It’s really that final “Brakes? Why would I need to
stop?” that puts this project over the edge. Regardless, check out a video after the break.
And please, do not try this at home.
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.
Researching topics such as health, diet, and
(especially) the effectiveness of dietary supplements can be hard and time-consuming. Obscured by
thousands of marketing tricks, finding the truth takes days, if not weeks of research.
So, when someone puts in the time to do the research and create an infographic that makes certain
aspects of these topics easy to understand, it can be a huge time saver. Read on for some of the
best health-related infographics we’ve found online.
As always, consider the figures in these infographics with a grain of salt. No one guarantees
that the numbers are correct, and some of them are definitely open to interpretation.
1. Dietary Supplements
This is, without exaggeration, the most amazing and useful infographic I’ve ever
encountered. It looks fairly simple, but it took many hours of research to create it, and it is,
to my knowledge, the best resource about the actual efficiency of various dietary supplements out
there. From the author:
“This image is a “balloon race”. The higher a bubble, the greater the evidence
for its effectiveness. But the supplements are only effective for the conditions listed inside
the bubble.”
The graphic shows the effectiveness of health supplements on the Y-axis (higher is better), and
uses the size of the bubbles to illustrate the popularity of that particular supplement among US
adults. Anything below the “worth it line,” doesn’t have enough evidence of
medicinal benefit and is probably not worth your time, according to the graphic’s creators,
who looked at data from over 1500 studies on both PubMed (US National Library Of Medicine) and
Cochrane.org. The infographic effectively
combines data on both popularity and medical benefits to create a resource that points out the
best health supplements, as well as which ones American consumers believe in the most.
Check out the interactive version, which lets you filter the supplements by function, here.
2. Should You Drink Tap Water?
This is a look at five most and least polluted water systems in America (in larger cities),
showing that not all tap water has been created equal.
If you’ve been struggling with the issue of drinking tap or bottled water, this info might
help you make a decision. Of course, the data in this infographic, created by GOOD, covers only 10 cities, but it
highlights an important point – not all chemicals that can appear in tap water are
regulated. The graphic illustrates how many pollutants are found in each water system, how often
they’re found, and what type of bacteria exists.
Obesity is a known problem in the USA, but which states are affected the most? This is the most
recent infographic on the subject we could find, listing obesity rates in all US states, as well
as obese and overweight children rates in the USA.
Besides these numbers, this attractive infographic highlights several important points; such as
overall high rates of obesity among high school students, as well as the direct and indirect
costs of obesity to the US budget.
Right now, one of the most debated topics in the USA is health care reform, and how much the
proposed health bill will cost individuals and business. But how much are people paying for
health care in other countries around the world?
This infographic, created in a collaboration between GOOD and Way Shape Form,
shows the average life expectancy in various countries (indicated by the fullness of the IV
bags), as well as several other health-related stats, such as infant mortality rates, and the
cost of health care.
This visualization was created by David
McCandless, the creator of the Snake Oil infographic mentioned above. It’s a slightly
morbid chart, showing the average fatality rates for known diseases — the size of the
bubble indicates how likely you are to die from a given disease (larger is more fatal).
It comes, however, with an optimistic second chart. The X-axis shows the fatality rate, but the
Y-axis shows how long the cause of the illness can survive outside of the body in ideal
conditions. Lesson: wash your hands!
Know of any other great health-related visualizations or infographics? Let us know in the
comments!
Zotac's H55 ITX was the first Mini-ITX motherboard to hit the market using Intel's H55 Express
chipset. Now, it looks like the board will be getting some competition from Gigabyte. SemiAccurate
has come across pictures of an H55N-USB3 mobo posted on the XFastest forums. Although no...
It's already
been pretty widely reported that Internet Explorer 9 will feature better
support for standards -- including HTML5. We
also know it's going to take advantage of your GPU via Direct2D and DirectWire. Now, a blog post
from the folks at AMD has revealed the IE9 will support Direct2D hardware acceleration for the
<canvas> element.
Here's what AMD's Robin Maffeo had
to say: "The MSHTML rendering layer has been enhanced to use Direct2D and DirectWrite instead
of GDI. Direct2D enables GPU accelerated 2D graphics and text, and allows sub-pixel positioning. In
addition, the GPU is used for scaling (bitmaps are mapped to textures), which is ideal for zooming
and moving images around the screen. This GPU support translates directly into improved readability
of pages, more precise placement of text and images, and smooth scrolling and zooming.
[...]The <canvas> element will be accelerated on the GPU via Direct2D and will enable
hardware accelerated rendering contexts for application development, improving visual display,
reducing CPU usage, and improving power usage."
That's great news if it's accurate, since <canvas> enables all kinds of graphical goodness --
everything from that 2D jigsaw puzzle you see above to more complex gaming graphics rendered
on-the-fly. As Maffeo puts it, "more fully utilizing the underlying hardware platform allows the
development of rich graphical interactions (using HTML5 and JavaScript) that were not previously
feasible."
If you enjoy the ongoing browser war, brace yourself for an exciting 2010.
In
continuing to look at the way that Facebook has become a driving force behind online news
consumption, Heather Hopkins of Hitwise has dove into the numbers again, this time examing
how Facebook users compare with others in return visits.
According to her article,
Facebook not only drives a high amount of traffic, higher than Google News, but its users are far
more loyal, as well.
Sponsor
Hopkins took a look at the data earlier this month, noting that Facebook drives
three times as much traffic to broadcast than Google News, and now we find that these users
are also repeat offenders. That is, they don't just visit once, they come back for more. From the
Hitwise
blog:
Hitwise data indicate that visitors from Facebook are more loyal to News and Media websites
than are visitors from Google News. In particular, among the top 5 Print Media websites in the week
ending March 6, 2010, 78% of Facebook users were returning visitors compared to 67% from Google
News. The figures are almost identical for Broadcast Media, with a 77% returning rate for Facebook
compared to 64% for Google News.
Why do we care about this metric? Because "visitors aren't as valuable if they don't come back.
Advertisers and retailers need some assurance that visitors will return again and again." Hopkins
notes that even visitors from Google.com, often the leading source of traffic to these sites, are
outpaced by those from Facebook when it comes to return visits. But why is this?
Hopkins doesn't get into the "why" behind the numbers, but we'd be willing to wager that it has
something to do with a few reasons. First, content posted by peers is more likely to be
compatible with an individual's world view. Second, their trust in friends as sources might lead
them to return for more.
Google, on the other hand, can give great results just the same as it can lead you to the most
worthless pages you've imagined. It doesn't offer that one thing we can all trust - the valued
opinion of a friend. It's also possible that the friend making the recommendation in the first
place is a return visitor who repeatedly recommends the articles they read.
Whatever the reason, the numbers tell us one thing for sure - news outlets need to focus on
making sure it is as easy as possible for readers and viewers to share content on Facebook. Or,
as Hopkins so succinctly puts it, "with recent Pew
Research showing that Newspapers have seen ad revenue fall 26% during the year and 43% over
the past three years, understanding where to find loyal readers is becoming increasingly
important."
This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable
regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small
business.
Google Apps for business has a number of
benefits over traditional business IT and desktop software. Using the full suite essentially
places all of your data and entire workflow in the cloud, meaning you can access it all anywhere,
any time, from any Internet connection.
At $50 per year per user, the fully integrated apps system is certainly cost-effective, and even
adding the free versions of Gmail, Calendar, and Google Docs into your workflow can keep your employees
coordinated.
For more casual users, or even those who might not be acquainted with Google Apps, here’s a
guide to how the software can benefit your small business.
The many advanced features of Gmail really make it a
leap forward in the web-based e-mail space, and a lot of these are ideal for business.
If you’re not ready to take the full plunge into the paid Google Apps suite, you can still
configure Gmail to function as your business e-mail client through your existing domain name by
following the steps outlined in my post, “How to Set Up Gmail as Your Business E-mail Client.”
The first big advantage of Gmail, like all the apps discussed here, is that it functions
in the cloud. You don’t have to worry about downloading messages to multiple
locations or syncing various devices. Your inbox will look the same from any web or mobile
connection. And with 25 gigs of e-mail storage per user (with a paid apps account), it’s
unlikely you’ll ever have to clean your inbox or delete old messages.
Gmail works a bit differently than traditional desktop clients and webmail services in that
conversations are “threaded.” This means that e-mails with the same
or related subject lines are grouped together in a thread so you can see all the messages sent
and received on a topic in one place. When a new message is received, the entire thread is bumped
to the top of your inbox, making tracking complex and multi-party conversations easy.
Gmail also has a chat feature built right into the interface that lets you send
a quick update or discuss a project with an employee if you’re not in the same office.
Chats are also stored in Gmail so that you can search and refer to them later.
Google search, the asset that started it all for the company, is of course built
right into Gmail, which makes finding information from e-mail conversations (even very old ones)
extremely efficient.
Additionally, Gmail Labs offers some extra settings for your inbox that can be extremely valuable
for business use:
Signature Tweaks puts your e-mail signature before the quoted text in a reply
the way that Outlook would.
Default ‘Reply to All’ allows you to reply to group e-mails with
one click, instead of from a drop-down menu.
Forgotten Attachment Detector will notify you if you’ve mentioned an
attachment in an e-mail, but forgotten to add one.
Undo Send gives you a few seconds after sending a message to click
“undo” in case you forgot something, or sent it to the wrong party by mistake.
Title Tweaks is a great feature that puts your unread message count first in
the title of the inbox web page. If you have many windows open while you’re working,
you’ll still be able to see when new messages arrive.
Google Docs is a web-based suite for word processing, presentation building (similar to
PowerPoint), spreadsheets, and web forms. All the work is done in a web browser, and all the data
is saved in the cloud.
The software can be a bit quirky at times, which may frustrate users of more stable products like
Microsoft Office, but the payoff in online storage, shareability, and collaboration options may
be worth the adjustment for many small businesses.
Because the data is online, streamlined document sharing and collaboration are
big perks with Google Docs. Any file you’re working on can be shared with individual team
members, or the entire group within the apps system. You can also set permissions for specific
users to view and edit documents. And, multiple users can simultaneously view and edit documents,
which can be useful for real-time collaborative projects or presentations during conference
calls. You can also grant permission for those outside your office network to view and edit
documents, which can be especially useful for sharing information and presentations with clients
or colleagues.
As you create and share documents, your Google Docs dashboard may start to get a little messy. Be
sure to create folders to keep your work organized just as you would on your
desktop. You can also share entire folders if you need to collaborate on multiple documents
related to the same project.
Google Calendar provides an efficient and intuitive way to keep appointments and events synced
across your entire business. With calendar sharing and permissions (similar to
those in Docs), you can add other employees’ calendars to your own, and vice versa, in
order to see and manage the big picture of your team’s time.
For example, if an executive has an assistant, their calendars may be shared so that the
assistant could manage his boss’s appointments remotely from his own account. It’s
also a smart tool for coordinating meetings, calls, and shift staffing for multiple employees to
avoid scheduling conflicts. Sharing multiple calendars with one “master calendar”
creates a color-coded scheduling table for the coordinator that updates automatically when users
make changes or additions.
The Calendar app can also be used to create events through Gmail. By adding your
employees’ e-mail addresses to an event, they will receive an invitation to respond.
Responding ‘yes’ automatically adds a shared event to your calendar that each invitee
can view and add notes to. It’s a smart way to coordinate meetings and keep everyone in the
loop.
Google Sites is a drag-and-drop web development tool that you can use within your
business’s apps to create online information hubs for employees. The
websites you create exist within your Google Apps domain, can be public or private, and
permissions for employees to add, change, and contribute information can be set from the main
account.
Beyond simply being a WYSIWYG web editor, Sites makes it easy to integrate data from
other Google Apps into dynamic pages that team members can use to collaborate on
projects. Integrating spreadsheets or data charts from Docs, a deadline schedule from Calendar,
and team-specific messages from Gmail could essentially create a one-stop project dashboard full
of dynamically updating information.
Sites here can be purely functional or informational, or with the aid of some built-in templates
or a good designer, a full-fledged dynamic public website for your business that
team members have easy access to.
Google Groups have long been public forums where users across the web gather to discuss specific
interests or get technical support. Groups for business brings that same functionality into your
private internal network.
E-mail can sometimes be cumbersome when coordinating a team. When you need a central space to
collect ideas and share documents (but you’re not interested in building a web page in
Sites), Groups offers a solution.
Employees can create discussion groups on their own and subscribe, either by
e-mail or via a Groups dashboard, which lists new posts like a news reader.
Rather than e-mails going out to individual inboxes, a group thread remains visible to all of
your subscribed team members, and users can go back to it for reference, to add more information,
and even share docs and calendars.
Using Groups for business discussions and project management creates a communal and
searchable database of information that employees can go back to whenever needed.
Google’s recently launched Google Apps
Marketplace allows developers of other business web apps to integrate their offerings with
Google and sell software directly to Google Apps users. The marketplace currently has over 50
partners, including Intuit, Zoho, and Aviary. This additional space for third-party software
means that Apps users will have even more options to tailor their suite for specific business
purposes.
Smart Integration Across the Board
While each app has worthwhile features, perhaps one of the best advantages is the way that they
all integrate with one another. Documents and appointments can be easily shared via e-mail, and
your inbox can be used as a portal for productivity via embeddable widgets, chat, and other
notifications.
If your small business is ready for a web-based, collaboration-minded IT solution, Google Apps is
certainly a cost-effective way to go, and you can investigate the free versions simply by signing
up for a Gmail account to determine if the suite is right for your workflow.
An anonymous reader writes "This week, Microsoft published a patch that allows Windows XP Mode to
run on PCs without hardware-assisted virtualization. Which begs the question: Why the bizarro
requirement in the first place? Was it an honest attempt to deliver an 'optimal' user experience?
Or simply a concession to the company's jilted lover, Intel Corporation — 'a kind of apology
for royally screwing up with the whole Windows Vista “too fat to fit” debacle,' as the
blog post puts it."
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