silentblue | Quantified

Here’s a fascinating thread on Reddit where a $20 million lottery winner was casually fielding questions, as long as no one probes for his identity.

Unlike most lottery stories I hear which tend to follow a tragic rags-to-riches-to-rags cycle, he seems to have a proper noggin on his shoulders.

He hired a lawyer, set up a blind trust, took the lump sum and paid off all his debts. Now his self-described pastime is travelling the world and buying drinks to people he’s met. He still keeps fiscally conservative – he flies coach, uses a rewards credit card, and keeps modest mutual fund investments.

My favourite question:

Question: How did you invest [your winnings]? Answer: a full time financial advisor who is in turn monitored by a full time accountant… who is then audited in secret by a team of auditors.

He also got a vasectomy, to avoid any costly “accidents”.

Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton recently had this to say in a meeting in Syracuse, NY:

“I’m a guy who doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet…(The Internet) created this notion that anyone can have whatever they want at any given time. It’s as if the stores on Madison Avenue were open 24 hours a day. They feel entitled. They say, ‘Give it to me now,’ and if you don’t give it to them for free, they’ll steal it.”

In other news, Sony has just announced a $1.1 billion loss, and expect to lose a further $1.2 billion by the end of fiscal 2009 . Sony’s Entertainment division, responsible for pushing proprietary disc-based formats such as music CDs, Blu-Ray and the PSP’s UMD discs, have seen decreased sales.

Is Sony focusing on selling entertainment, or little circular bits of plastic?

Recently, a PlayStation 2 game has come under criticism – not for gratuitous violence or sex, but for religious reasons. Called Hanuman: Boy Warrior, the India-made and released game allows players to roleplay the adventures of Hanuman, a Hindu deity famous for defeating the villainous King Ravana.  At least one Hindu leader has taken offence:

“In a video game format, the player would control the destiny of Lord Hanuman while in reality, believers put their destinies in the hands of their deities, [Rajan Zed, president of the Universal Society of Hinduism] wrote. “Controlling and manipulating Lord Hanuman with a joystick, button, keyboard, or mouse is ‘denigration’”, he added.

It should be noted that the game follows the ancient Hindu scriptures; one cannot make Hanuman steal cars or shoot bazookas. GamingIndians.com remarks that the real offence being perpetrated is that the game is pants.

I find this interesting. We’re going to see increased dialogue about these kind of topics as today’s interactive media is becoming more and more used as narrative devices. Is this truly different than tribal elders in ancient times, reenacting the great achievements of their gods in front of a raging bonfire?

Mind you, I’m sure Americans would be up in arms if you could roleplay Jesus in a video game – although no one raised an eyebrow when George Burns played you-know-who in the film Oh God!

Would the ancient Greeks have taken a dim view of God of War?

It will be a long road until videogaming is perceived from “callous pastime enjoyed by lazy youths” to a recognized genre of art. Until then, remember this – even the Gutenburg press was accused of the same, since people were busy using it to make pictures of naked people with it.

Before Facebook or blogs or cheap web hosting, netizens had GeoCities – the guiding light for those who wanted a website but couldn’t afford their own.

It quickly became the self-publishing printing press of the online world – there were personal pages, and sites on people’s favourite TV shows. Animated GIF backgrounds, blink tags and crackpot ramblings were par for the course. Let’s just say people often referred to it as “GeoShitties”, and it wasn’t an unfair moniker.

Perhaps PC World sums up most peoples’ reaction with the title of their article, “So Long, GeoCities: We Forgot You Still Existed“.

But, as a kid in the proto-WWW of 1996, I cut my teeth on HTML with the help of Geocities. Back then, GeoCities didn’t even have FTP access – you uploaded files via online form, one at a time. They only supported JavaScript – no SQL databases or widgets. We started out with a formidable 1 MB of webspace. And it was good.

That was 13 years ago. I hear Yahoo! has decided to put GeoCities to pasture later this year. I can’t say I blame them. I do have to thank them, for introducing me to the online publishing world.

The Internet is currently abuzz with Microsoft Office Lab’s video detailing their vision of how computing (and Microsoft) would look like in 2019.

It got me thinking on a different track, however. Microsoft is showing us what they think the world will look like in ten years, but what if they had made a video with the same idea ten years ago?

Then I remembered, they did. I went digging through my collection of CD-ROMs, and found this video on a promo disc a Microsoft college recruiter handed me in 1999.

Therefore, it is with great pleasure that I present you “Meet the Family” – a Microsoft video created ten years ago showcasing how a future family would partake in a trip to the zoo, high-tech Microsoft style.

Before you watch this video, you have to think back to what 1999 was like. The latest Windows was Windows ME; corporate types used Windows 2000. Microsoft Internet Explorer was fresh from its victory in the browser wars with Netscape. The dot-com boom was in full swing. Microsoft was about to launch a new video game console called the Xbox. Instant messaging was only a couple years old, and ICQ was top dog. There was no such thing as a smartphone; but if you were really hot stuff, you might have carried around an expensive email pager known as a Blackberry.

Oh, and kids listened to a band known as Fatboy Slim:

As you may have noticed, the 21st century has not been kind to Microsoft’s 1999 vision. Many things have come to pass in a limited fashion, such as the Tablet PC and Windows Mobile smartphones with location-based services. There are other things that seem embarrassing in hindsight, like the UI concept that resembled the quickly-forgotten MSN Explorer. Probably the only totally whiz-bang idea that actually made it to fruition was the face sculpting video game feature – and that took seven years.

Here’s Microsoft’s 2009 prediction of 2019, courtesy of Long Zheng @ istartedsomething:

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&amp;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5&amp;showPlaylist=true&amp;from=shared" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/video.msn.com');" target="_new" title="Future Vision Montage">Video: Future Vision Montage</a>

In 1999, it was all about the PC. Microsoft’s vision of 2019 is a future of portable devices wrapped in e-ink and flexible OLEDs. Time will tell if Microsoft’s latest crystal ball readings will pan out. Maybe it’s not the accuracy of predictions that count, but whether they are dreamt of at all.

Denver’s Rocky Mountain News closed its doors this month after 150 years. They blame the ascent of the Internet.

Ironically, they composed their farewell in the form of an Internet video:

Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

Seriously though, the newspaper industry is being hit hard, having newer audiences moving on to Craigslist, blogs and online content. 3The last time I bought a newspaper was the copy of the Globe and Mail on the day my son was born. I’m starting to think the sheer novelty of reading news on thin tarp-like spreads of greyish paper will be enough for him.

It doesn’t matter if your diet is low-carb or low-fat or “eat only white things”, according to a study by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute published in the New England Journal of Medicine, all diets work if they cut calories.

The study may seem daft, yet unfailingly we humans will latch on any scheme or fads that comes along rather than acknowledge the fundamental facts.  Most diets work at least temporarily because they involve sustenance denial – that is, the forbidding of the consumption of a particular food or nutrient. Unfortunately, apathy and metabolism compensation means these diets eventually fail in the long run.  In the end, it’s all about portion control.

Note to the Liberal Party: This is 2008. Video is serious business. Obama has his own YouTube Channel and pledges to release a video every week for crying out loud. Image is everything in politics, especially in controversial politics:

The Liberals have apologized for Liberal Leader Stephane Dion’s taped televised address, after it was delivered to Canadian networks almost an hour past deadline and in near-cellphone quality.

Second note: It’s not a good idea to stand up media – they will crucify you.

Copyright Callie Shell for Time Magazine

I must say, I don’t care for most of the ruckus around politics – I think it’s the last refuge for cults of personality – but in light of Tuesday’s historical event, I’d like to link to Callie Shell’s adlibbed photographs that were taken of President-Elect Barack Obama when he was campaigning.  They’re very genuine and very human.

There is one of Obama along with his volunteers cleaning up after a photo-op at an ice cream parlour, long after the media has gone back to their studios and bureaus to file their stories. It struck me as more telling of the man than any sing song TV special.

Those photos also beg the question: why don’t we see more of this kind of guerilla photowork of famous people? Are they too afraid of appearing too raw? In a world of processed media, ghostwritten words and retouched photos, I think it would be a nice change of pace.

As an after-election mint, you can also read how Obama won via campaign strategy, and online strategy.

Sometimes I stand in the darkness of your room late at night facing your crib and listen to you slumber. I am still in wonderment of it all. You’ve grown so fast in the past few months, and you learn something new every day. One day you discovered your feet. The next day you learned how to smile. It seems the very next day you were enjoying your first spoonful of mashed sweet potatoes.

But as I watch you rub your cute sleepy head with your cute sleepy hand – yes, you already have funny habits – I also worry, playing out my hopes and fears.  You look at the world with wonder and awe, and as we watch you innocently play we fancy aloud what man you will grow up to be. Maybe you’ll be an astronaut, a Olympic athlete, a doctor, a deejay or heck, maybe all of the above. The world seems completely accessible to you.

However, someday, that wonder and awe will be gone and be replaced with knowledge and resolve. We, your parents, will be your principle life tutors. We cannot fail you.

But for now, you’re just our little man, even if it always seems to be for only a heartbeat longer. You use me as your personal jungle gym. Watching the cat dozing is considered top tier entertainment. You must be basically dragged to sleep every night where you fight to remain conscious until the bitter end. And then you wake up every morning, all smiles, ready for a new day.