Saturday, June 1, 2002

Just got back from seeing Art at the San Jose (CA) Rep. If you'll be in the area between now and June 16, it's well worth the price of admission. At the after-matinee discussion period, a number of people in the audience said they had seen the play in London and New York, and this was the best performance of the lot. In general, the Rep is one of the highlights of San Jose, with a beautiful new 550-seat theater, a brilliant artistic director, and excellent plays and casts. 8:00:27 PM     Doc Searls is on a Geek Cruise in Alaska. Lucky guy. Start here and work forward. 2:01:39 PM     Steve Gillmor has a fine overview of the film/music industry versus technology squabble. The Valley makes the argument that the Hills were similarly hostile to the analog VCR, only to eventually derive the bulk of revenues from the new device. Both camps point to Napster's erosion of the music audience: Hollywood sees piracy as the cause, while Silicon Valley sees new fans shut off from an intuitive distribution model they've grown up with. Hollywood has figured out how to cut down on piracy by making mind-numbingly stupid movies that aren't worth copying let alone paying to see. But they get their investment back anyway by playing that material off on cable and eventually broadcasting where the price is bundled as part of the real service -- a conduit for sports and news. 1:55:36 PM     Iceland is planning on converting its entire energy base to hydrogen. In the relatively near future, Iceland's cars, buses and ships will be driven by electric motors powered by hydrogen-fuel cells that produce nothing but water in their exhausts. Unlike other countries contemplating hydrogen power, Iceland has a chance to develop a genuinely carbon dioxide-free system, since the electricity to make hydrogen from the electrolysis of water will come from hydro or geothermal power, not fossil fuel. Good plan. Maybe, considering the politics of oil, the US should be spending a bit more on alternative fuels research beyond what's going on at places like the California Fuel Cell Partnership in Sacramento and the renewable energy efforts at the Department of Energy. 12:15:16 AM

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