Planet Nelson

Every once in a while a very cool thing comes along in the web world. Search Me, a visual search engine which is still in beta, is such a cool thing.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the results on this search engine are served up in a similar fashion to the iTunes “flip and find” for movie titles and album covers. I just love using it. It’s not as exhaustive as using Google, which I consider a much more “substantial” search tool. But for just fun searches, this one has real appeal to me. Bravo!

This amazing video from the organizers of Pangea Day has me excited about the upcoming celebration on May 10. The idea of Pangea Day is to promote better understanding of the “others”, the friends we haven’t met in different cultures, through a worldwide celebration of film.

I’m all for it.

Congratulations to Bob Dylan for his Pulitzer Prize “Special Citation.” It is well deserved.

Here’s the list of this year’s other winners.

Venerable tech blogger, Robert Scoble, wrote a short blog entry last week that changed me. I’m still trying to measure how much but it’s beginning to look like “a lot.”

It was The secret to Twitter. Twitter is a short-form blog post “thingie.” You can watch this video to get more of an idea. Basically you have 140 characters to get your message out.

“Stupid” was my first response. Then I started seeing people I sorta knew on Twitter. So I started to “follow” them. I had a list of about 15 people; only a couple were actual people I knew. I kinda cruised along for a few months until I read Robert’s piece.

A friend asked him, “why is the secret how many people you follow? Why is it important to follow so many people?”

His response was a thoughtful list:

But what does following a lot of people say?

1. You’re trying to learn more.
2. You’re trying to meet more people.
3. You’re trying to be a better listener.
4. You’re communicating to the world that you’d like to be listened to (golden rule: treat people how you’d like to be treated).
5. You’re trying to find out about more stuff. More events. More stories.

And so I did it. I started following more people. I now am following 81 people and I am going through some kind of a real change. I can’t wait to see what they’re saying. It’s completely addictive and there is just so much to learn. It’s not like “real” blogs in that you don’t have a lot to read. You get this wonderful smörgåsbord of humor (lots of that), tech news and opinion. Oh, bring it!

Here’s my Twitter home page. Give it a try yourself. Really.

There’s a great op-ed piece by Taylor Branch (author of the trilogy, America in the King Years) about (among many other things) the lost impact of movements on the country as a whole.

The watchword of political discourse has degenerated from “movement” to “spin.” In Dr. King’s era, the word “movement” grew from a personal inspiration into leaps of faith, then from shared discovery and sacrifice into upward struggle, spawning kindred movements until great hosts from Selma to the Berlin Wall literally could feel the movement of history.

Now we have “spin” instead, suggesting that there is no real direction at stake from political debate, nor any consequence except for the players in a game. Such language embraces cynicism by reducing politics to entertainment.

He has so much of value to say. I wished more people were as “awake” as he is. A terrific piece of writing and thinking.

Conspiracy theory for the weekend: Sonny Bono was killed to keep weapons and drug smugglers from exposure. His accident on the slopes of Lake Tahoe merely a way to disguise a severe beating. From news.com.au:

SONNY Bono, former husband and singing partner of superstar Cher, was clubbed to death by hitmen on the orders of drug and weapons dealers who feared he was going to expose them, a former FBI agent claims.

Ted Gunderson, now a private investigator, has told the US Globe tabloid that Bono, who served as mayor of Palm Springs for four years, did not die after hitting a tree on a Nevada ski slope in January 1998 as everyone believed….

“This was an evil plot that was carried out to almost perfection by ruthless assassins,” Mr Gunderson told the paper.

The former agent, who has been researching Bono’s accident for the past decade, said top officials linked to an international drug and weapons ring feared the singer-turned-politician was about to expose their crimes - so they had him killed on the slopes.

Funny it took the guy 10 years to go public but that’s not as long as it did for this guy.

Such a loss. I remember the day well. Interesting video interviews from Moblogic.TV.

Chez Spencer is a small and out-of-the-way restaurant in San Francisco. One night last week, my wife and my wife’s cousin and her husband, Rich, found our way to its unlikely doorstep at 82 14th Street. The neighborhood is mostly industrial with a pet hotel, Wags, at the other end of the block. It was an outstanding dining experience that both surprised and delighted us.

Rich first heard about Chez Spencer on Adam Curry and John C. Dvorak’s No Agenda podcast. Rich lives in Melbourne, Australia, and asked me to book the meal on the strength of what he had heard prior to his visit here.

The four of us arrived early for our table and took some time to sit at the bar. Quietly seated next to us was a short, older man, in a suit and dark glasses calmly drinking a cappuccino. From his awkward movements using his cellphone I understood he was blind. This gentleman turned out to be the evening’s entertainer, Alex Kallao, a piano prodigy who filled the restaurant with wonderful jazz from his upright in the corner next to the bar. A very classy act with terrific musical style.

Then there was the charming bartender. This young lady was conviviality itself. We chatted about our day and our travels and combed her dizzying list of exotic cocktails. Settling on a Kir and a Saint Germain for the ladies, Rich and I both had beers; he Sierra and me, alcohol-free Clausthauler.

I’m not a restaurant reviewer but it was a superb experience. The food: I ordered the cold Steamed Green Asparagus with Shaved Parmesan & Truffle Emulsion and followed it with a scrumptious Wood Grilled Flat Iron Steak with Morels a la Crème and Truffle Butter. In addition to delicious food, the wait staff understood how to be everywhere at once without being obvious; it was a pleasure to be served.

When we left, all we could talk about was how much looked forward to sitting at those tables again. Lucky for me I live so close but too bad the Aussie’s who live so far away.

From the SFist blog:

Looking to honor the forty-third President of the United States of America, George W. Bush, the recently formed Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco is looking to change the name of the Oceanside Wastewater Treatment Facility. It seems the group would like to rename the SF Zoo adjacent facility to the “George W Bush Sewage Plant.”

Not since the people of Melbourne, Australia, named a municipal pool after presumably drowned Prime Minister Harold Holt has there been a more deserved honor.

The New York Times recently profiled Mad Magazine’s 84-year-old artist, Al Jaffee. They also included a wonderful retrospective of his famous “fold-ins.”