Peter Cooper - Bigging Up Ruby UK

Last night I listened to Jay-Z: From Brooklyn to the Boardroom on Radio 4 (you can listen to it using the previous link - there's also meant to be an MP3 but they've got the URL wrong). Alvin Hall, esteemed financial guru, interviewed Jay-Z and some of his business partners to get an insight into how Jay-Z made it from the streets to the king of branding, clothes sales, and the recording industry.

It was really interesting, and pretty funny as well. My favorite story was when Jay-Z talked about doing gigs and fans would turn up wearing the same clothes as him. He set up a meeting with his favorite clothing company and they thought he was crazy to want to get a slice of the action, so he set up his own clothing company.. with two sewing machines and no clue at all. Now, that clothing company turns over $800 million each year.

(Update: You can now download the show as an MP3 from here.)

This is one crazy story. A prank caller called a McDonald's pretending to be a police officer. He gave a vague description of a staff member who had supposedly stolen a purse from a customer. The deputy manager called in a girl who matched the description, and then she, along with her fiancé, complied with all of the sick whims of the prank caller. The caller was eventually caught, but the actual physical torturers claimed they were just 'following the orders' of a police officer.

This story appears to confirm the findings of the famous Milgram experiment, where participants were found to be willing to administer lethal electrical shocks to strangers after merely being ordered to do so. A large number of humans are clueless automatons, lacking rationality, and that's something you need to remember when dealing with the public at large. Many people are easy to program and control (as proven by Derren Brown), and the people who can do that without resorting to illegal acts have a lot of power in their hands.

I was amused when reading this Wikipedia article about early rock'n'roller Conway Twitty. He tried to found a chain of burger restaurants called "Twitty Burger", but it failed and he tried to pay back his initial investors while deducting those payments from profits. The IRS were not impressed, but ultimately Twitty won his case. Some poetry went back and forth during the case.. as follows:

In the case Harold L. Jenkins (a/k/a Howard Twitty) v. Commissioner, 47 T.C.M. (CCH) 238 n.14, Twitty sued to allow his repayment of investors in his bankrupted Twitty Burger fast food chain to be deductible as a business expense. The opinion closed with the following poem:

Twitty Burger went belly up
But Conway remained true
He repaid his investors, one and all
It was the moral thing to do.
'His fans would not have liked it
It could have hurt his fame
Had any investors sued him
Like Merle Haggard or Sonny James.
'When it was time to file taxes
Conway thought what he would do
Was deduct those payments as a business expense
Under section one-sixty-two.
'In order to allow these deductions
Goes the argument of the Commissioner
The payments must be ordinary and necessary
To a business of the petitioner.
'Had Conway not repaid the investors
His career would have been under cloud,
Under the unique facts of this case
Held: The deductions are allowed.

The IRS responded by allowing the judgment to stand while implying that if a similar case arose in the future their opinion would differ:

Harold Jenkins and Conway Twitty
They are both the same
But one was born
The other achieved fame.
The man is talented
And has many a friend
They opened a restaurant
His name he did lend.
They are two different things
Making burgers and song
The business went sour
It didn't take long.
He repaid his friends
Why did he act
Was it business or friendship
Which is fact?
Business the court held
It's deductible they feel
We disagree with the answer
But let's not appeal.

Source: Wikipedia. Licensed under the GFDL.

Lots of problems going on with EveryDNS this evening. Anyone know anything? I phoned David very briefly (didn't want to interrupt him, so I wasn't asking questions!) and he said he's on it.

I've been playing with Amazon's S3 for a while, but tonight I had a blinding flash of the obvious. To get higher levels of bandwidth, uptime, and reliability for Feed Digest (although they're pretty good already), all I need to do is render digests every 5/10/15/whatever minutes, push them to S3, and make users grab those versions. That way Amazon deals with the heavy bandwidth traffic, and the FeedDigest servers just deal with rendering and pushing digests to S3. I've no idea why this didn't occur to me sooner, especially since I have been planning a 'push' system like this for a while now.

Request levels are currently in the 100-150 million per month range, so I'm planning to test this system with a few beta testers first, but if S3 can stand the heat, this could be a great way to push FeedDigest's capacity up into the stratosphere. I need to see capacity of 1 billion requests per month next (peanuts, really, as Google dishes up over 30 billion per month, and FeedBurner about 8 billion per month).

It was with much interest I heard the story of Malachi Ritscher today. He was a Chicago resident who committed suicide by setting himself on fire beside the Kennedy Expressway earlier this month in protest at the Iraq "war".

An intriguing aspect to this story is that he wrote his own obituary (in the third person) and, boy, it's really melancholy. Some choice quotes:

The metaphor for his life was winning the lottery, but losing the ticket.

He had many acquaintances, but few friends; and wrote his own obituary, because no one else really knew him.

As a child, he was intensely afraid of many things, especially heights; he spent the rest of his life trying to face his fears, without ever coming to terms with his fear of people.

I often bring myself into focus by thinking.. what would someone write in my obituary? I read the obituaries in the newspaper and feel bad for the people who get nothing but a generic write-up with a mere list of events, rather than fond memories or any form of admiration. I admire this guy, but I certainly don't want to end up with his melancholy.

In a bizarre twist, a row between various surviving family members has broken out online.

All it takes is:

<script src="http://js-kit.com/comments.js"></script>

And you get this:

The music video quality from the iTunes Music Store is extremely poor. I hadn't bothered to buy one before, but I wanted the new Jay Z song and it was only available as a music video. The video quality is bearable, though far below DVD, or even other videos I've downloaded from other sources.

The sound, however, was okay on my iMac's internal speakers, but on headphones.. totally atrocious. It's worse than the AAC 128kbps used by iTMS music tracks, which makes no sense. I can live with 128kbps AAC, but when I came to buy the album on iTMS, "Show Me What You Got" is only supplied as a video. Therefore, the highlight of the album sounds like total shit, whereas the rest sounds okay (though still nowhere near CD quality). Since I already bought the album legitimately, I'm within my rights to go and download a high quality pirated CD rip, right?

It's crazy that we have to choose between convenience and quality on something so easily digitized. I'm not buying a custom-built car on 5 minutes' notice. All I want is a decent bit rate, well encoded, song or video, whatever that costs.

Seems Google are closing their Answers service down. I'm posting this because I only just got the e-mail and it might interest someone. After the fold so as not to bore people to death..

This thing is great. It all folds up, but you get a five inch screen, keyboard, camera, WiMAX and EV-DO support, and 30GB hard drive. The CPU is a 1GHz Transmeta, so it's no slouch either. Only being launched in Korea in early 2007 though..

I've just found out about the Cannonball 8000. It's an event like the Gumball 3000, but a lot cheaper to enter, and it's been running five years. There's a documentary about it on ITV tonight at 11pm, if anyone wants to check it out.

Why is something seemingly always broken with Technorati? When I click on my personal blog from my profile, I get this:

About Ruby Inside they say this:

It says Ruby Inside was "Updated 25 days ago". I post to Ruby Inside several times a week. PubSub started playing up like this in the months before they went out of business.

I'd been using Technorati as a source of leads for blog posts, but it seems like a waste of time if they're not indexing everything properly. What's going on guys?