People In Passing

I stumbled across this Honda Advertisement, which is actually much more than an advertisement.

Check out thier “Dream the Impossible” series here: http://dreams.honda.com

Color Me Katie: Thursday. – - Fun project of putting “thought bubbles” on various surfaces and taking pictures of people passing under them. Then photoshopping in the thoughts you think they were having.

Summer and I went to a performance a couple weeks back entitled “A White Album Christmas” and weren’t entirely sure what to expect.

They sold out every seat in the house and all of the standing room available. It was absolutely fantastic. Every song on the Beatles White Album was performed, as well as a few others, while performers fliped, spun, threw and flew through the air.

Here are a few shots I took from the sidelines (link):

Who is Dave Gingery you might ask? I don’t know either, but one night stumbling around on the web I came across a page written on the way he looks at things and it stuck with me.

http://www.lindsaybks.com/dgjp/dave/philos/index.html

“Most of my life was spent in trying to figure out how to do a $50.00 project for 50 cents, and the remainder of my time was spent in trying to scrounge up the 50 cents.”

I really like his perspective on “apparent obstacles”. Give it a read, maybe you’ll be inspired to pick up that project that you’d talked yourself out of and give it another shot.

Acquiring knowledge is a relatively straight forward process, and so is the development of manual skill. You can know what others know, and you can do what they do. Your level of performance is determined by a combination of opportunity, energy expended and available resource. You can provide your own opportunity, and you can decide how diligently you will apply yourself. So, we must deal with the problem of resources which is no small matter if you are the bird with 50 cents who needs $50.00 worth of stuff! Nevertheless, it can be done, so let’s get with it while we are yet young and eager.

Google started their foray into the Virtual Worlds game about five months ago with “Google Lively“, a cartoonish browser based virtual world complete with flying avatars. It was touted as a Second Life killer but it seems not to have been able to withstand the weight of its own hype.

Google announced today that it will be calling that experiment quits and returning its team back to the core search and advertising groups.

In July we launched Lively in Google Labs because we wanted users to be able to interact with their friends and express themselves online in new ways. Google has always been supportive of this kind of experimentation because we believe it’s the best way to create groundbreaking products that make a difference to people’s lives. But we’ve also always accepted that when you take these kinds of risks not every bet is going to pay off.

I’ve long been curious about what it takes to build and manage a virtual world although I don’t have the time to explore them. Yet I still have high hopes for what they could mean in the future. That being said it is a little sad to see such a significant investor and innovator give up so quickly.

More on the world of Virtual Worlds at TerraNova http://terranova.blogs.com/

I was noticing the DOW fell 700 points today after the Bailout Plan didn’t pass.

Then I was thinking about the collapse of Washington Mutual last week and it reminded me of a conversation from one of my favorite movies, “Sneakers”.

Cosmo: Posit: People think a bank might be financially shaky.
Martin Bishop: Consequence: People start to withdraw their money.
Cosmo: Result: Pretty soon it is financially shaky.
Martin Bishop: Conclusion: You can make banks fail.
Cosmo: Bzzt. I’ve already done that. Maybe you’ve heard about a few? Think bigger.
Martin Bishop: Stock market?
Cosmo: Yes.
Martin Bishop: Currency market?
Cosmo: Yes.
Martin Bishop: Commodities market?
Cosmo: Yes.
Martin Bishop: Small countries?

From Bloomberg News:

Sept. 25 (Bloomberg) — JPMorgan Chase & Co., the third- biggest U.S. bank by assets, agreed to acquire Washington Mutual Inc.‘s deposits and branches for $1.9 billion after regulators seized the thrift in the biggest bank failure in U.S. history.

Customers withdrew $16.7 billion from WaMu accounts since Sept. 16, leaving the Seattle-based bank “unsound,” the Office of Thrift Supervision said today. WaMu’s branches will open tomorrow and customers will have full access to all their accounts, Sheila Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., said on a conference call.