Sony Fantasy Festival – The Emperor’s new clothes

Sony and Last.fm launched a “Fantasy Music Festival” recently.

A conceptual rip of the good ole’ cult-status Fantasy Football run by / participated in by just about every bladder-following sentient and their dog, this one expects you to pick a list of bands to make a lineup for a fantasy music festival.  It’s quite easy to initially think this is a make-your-own-supergroup thing, but its not.

Scoring is a nice opaque only-Sony-knows-how thing called “buzz”, which has some connection to the amount of talk about the group online. (Are they watching t3h t0rrentz?? o_O). Here’s the official blarb:

“We calculate *Buzz points by working out the amount of plays your acts get on Last.fm and, by using Yahoo! data, how many mentions they get on blogs or social networking sites like Twitter”

And whoever created the page for adding bands needs to lookup the concept of “user-friendly”.

So all in all, what this achieves is:

1. More inactive members on last.fm (oh yeah, you need a last.fm ID for this)

2. More emails to send spam to. (Apparently you should not end a sentence with a conjunction. Feel free to append a swear-word of your choice to the end of the sentence)

3. Kanye West ends up on every list.

Link courtesy RubbishCorp, which is a really good site.

LOTR beats Star Wars

When we stick to the core episodes. (via Facebook via FastCompany).

I wonder how that would look if we added Silmarrilion, Hobbit, Lost Tales and Children of Hurin on the one side and the entire Expanded Universe on the other. Star Wars ftw?

Hunger

There’s a book running around Indian best seller list right now.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

I haven’t read the book. I don’t think I will. I’m not one of those chaps who reads books about other people’s take on life. My take on life works for me.

But I like the phrase. The first part. Hunger is a primal force. The metaphorical opposite of apathy.

I’m back. I’m hungry. Let’s stay hungry.

Soon: primal forces.

How cool do you need to be to use social networking?

Facebook. Twitter. Friendfeed. Friendster. status messages. retweets. augmented reality. location based services. Everyone’s doing it. All the time. We tell people what we’re doing, when we’re doing it, where we are, who else is around and prove it with photos.

Does anyone care?

I am both a very early adopter of the whole social networking thing, and also very much the “average” user. I’m not famous. I do not have or promote a business. I do not work in / on silicon valley and report on the happenings in this industry. In short, I am one of the many many people worldwide who caught on to Facebook, orkut, dA, twitter et all simply because everyone’s doing it.

Initially, there was the fad of “OMG! Let mayke a prohfyle”; then the “ooh, lets look at other peoples’ profiles!”; then the “meh”.

Yes, meh. There was a long hiatus when the entire first generation of social networkers kinda fell of the map. Helped not in the least by the opening of facebook (our de-facto network, as it were) to the entire universe. What had once been a fairly exclusive club where everyone knew (or knew of) everyone else suddenly became more akin to a mosh pit of vaguely familiar faces.

Let’s not even get started on the whole application thing.

Then the status update thing happened. and the “creepy” news feed. and Twitter. and we all came running back to listen to the thought-streams of our friends and tell them ours.

Does anyone care?

Without being overtly a pessimist, the average user leads a fairly average life and so do his / her friends. There is very little I need to tell people on a constant real-time basis on the happenings in my life. I get up. I work out. I go to work. I blog. I meet friends and colleagues. I surf the internets. watch TV. read. Nothing special. Nothing to write home about. Or write on Facebook / twitter.

The same applies to all the numerous blurbs on data (I can’t bring myself to call it information) that flow onto my screen. I have no interest in who’s stuck in the rain, who is waiting for the weekend, who’s moving and hating the experience, who is moving and loving the experience, who’s happy because their team won, who drunk, who’s sober, who’s bored, who’s happy, who’s done with exams, who’s done with homework, who’s done with partying, who’s surfing facebook, who’s standing in line, who’s cutting the line….

STOP.

Repeat after me. MLIA. My Life is Average. Unless there’s something worth saying, don’t say it. Use the IRL test. If you would say something  to everyone you see In Real Life, then say it on twitter. The only reason we feel this need to share is a strange voyeuristic fascination with seeing if other people are doing anything more interesting than we are.

Mostly, they are not.

Very very few people lead lives interesting and eventful enough to constantly talk about it. Even fewer can consistently write well in context-free 140-ish-character blobs.

Unless you’re that special, take it for granted that most people are not really bothered what you just said.

That’s not to say social networking is entirely crap. I have gotten back in touch with numerous old friends I’d have never seen again. It has been and still is a good source of storing and finding links to interesting stuff on the ‘net. It has, on the whole, been a positive influence. But some perspective helps.

Some may be tempted to apply this very same reasoning to blogs. I’ll  beg to differ. A blog only contains things which cross the “too-much-effort-to-bother” threshold; and thus, eminently more worthy of publication.

43 things

I took the 43 Things Personality Quiz and found out I’m a

Fun Loving Lifelong Learning Builder

yeah, i took the quiz. whoo.

You are a Fun Loving Lifelong Learning Builder

whoo?

I may be moving…

… the blog. Thinking about getting my own hosting and domain to host the blog, art and writing portfolio and other stuff.

I’ll be taking my first little baby steps in this thing..so more to come.

Now im sitting and looking at hosting solutions. fatcow looks NICE. But i’m not sure about the whole being-located-outside-the-US-when-i-need-support.

Oracle just bought Sun

Larry Ellison hasn’t lost his penchant for buying cool stuff. Oracle just bought Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion.

Presser blurb:

On April 20, 2009, Oracle announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire Sun Microsystems (Sun). The proposed transaction is subject to Sun stockholder approval, certain regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions. Until the deal closes, each company will continue to operate independently, and it is business as usual.

The acquisition combines best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems. Oracle plans to engineer and deliver an integrated system—applications to disk—where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Customers benefit as their system integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up.

There’s of course the big Kahunas – Java and Solaris, but lets not forget that they also get MySql and the ability to fully integrate everything from application to hardware.

This begs the question – is Oracle going to be the Apple of Enterprise IT? An Oracle financials application which runs off of an Oracle DB running Java (now Oracle’s) middleware on Oracle hardware. With the powerful presence that the Oracle DB has in enterprise storage, I would not be surprised.

I’m also curious to see just how much pain 2 very large, very powerful and very different companies go through to integrate things. Both product portfolios are vast and confusing and will probably get worse before it gets better.

correlation does not equal causation!!!!

So apparently, facebook messes with your grades.

I get quite irritated when so-called researchers, pull a survey and then ‘extrapolate’ results from it.

Get the point. People who work for a 3.5 – 4.0 are going to put it more hours than people who get 3.0 – 3.5. Whatever the environment.

Why? Because people who get those kind of grades work neurotically for them. As well put by a slashdot commenter, they ‘cannot see past their GPA’.

The crowd who get those grades got them  before facebook, and will continue to do so after. If they have a facebook account. they won’t admit it. facebook users will spend time socializing anyway, they dont need facebook to do so.

It’s times like these when I miss writing on actual paper and stabbing a writing instrument through the page.

Sunday Linkdump

I’ve not been posting very frequently this last month. There have been numerous reasons, all of them remarkably stressful. I, of course, am too manly to unload tales of woe on my blog and thus turn this into. well, a diary. eww.

anyway, I’ll slowly ramp back up to mightier than ever.For now, LIIIIINNNNKKKDUUUMP!!!

I’ve been wanting to post about this for some time. I come across a lot of seriously amazing images as a i trawl the ‘net, and visualizeus has turned into an ideal way to save them all. (without the pain of downloading them). A handy (if annoyingly slow on the download) firefox extension makes things easy.

Shaun Wolfe via FastCompany. witty, my Dear Watson.

Intel just ranked their processors. Nice and useful for people who dont want to care about FSBs, L2 cache and overclocking. My late-2006 personal laptop with a Core 2 Duo gets 3 stars. My newer work laptop running a single core celeron (a vintage piece with .5 mb L2 cache) gets 1 star. Now guess which one is running Vista. (Hint: its not both, and I’ve mentioned this before on this blog).

Elections are coming up in India. Politicians have gone berserk wooing the illiterate masses who overwhelmingly outnumber smart people. (note: this is a global phenomenon and not restricted to India). I will not be voting. I know there are a lot of ‘get-out-the-vote’ esque campaigns running across the country, i know the usual arguments about not having the right to complain if i dont vote when the time comes blah blah, I know the national-duty argument yadda yadda….but the vote is a powerful thing. It signifies support and agreement. It takes a stand. Not voting is not so much as apathy as taking a stand against everyone. That’s what I’m doing. I will vote when I come across someone worth voting for.

I’m very interested in the latest Cognitive Daily’s Casual Friday.

Brilliant take on the Global Recession

“When the balance sheet of a company does not capture the true costs and risks of its business activities,” and when that company is too big to fail, “you end up with them privatizing their gains and socializing their losses,”

- Nandan Nilekani. Co-Chairman, Infosys; talking to Thomas Friedman.

Sums up the whole sordid mess pretty well. But doesn’t really say anything for what needs to be done. After all the hoo and haah, it looks like still no-one knows what to do. One thing seems certain, a big cultural shift may be in order. It needs to be both at a common-man level (save more, live on credit less) and at a regulatory level.

Am I daft in thinking that a regulator needs to regulate? – Smoothen the bumps, both high and low?