Saturday, 5 June 2004

Fire Danger   7:42:03 PM  comment []   A Cosmik Conversation And these two by Tim Owen are from the Santana tour we did in 1996. The colors, the shades! I think I bought those sunglasses in Milan in the Summer of that year, when we toured Italy. And somebody flipped that photo on the left...   5:20:28 PM  comment []   Pics Ottmar Liebert at the Keswick Theatre in Philadelphia, PA, April, 1996. Photo by Jay Matsueda. I Found this photo on the web recently. What a busy year that was! During the Spring of 1996 we were touring in the USA, in the Summer we played in Italy and Greece (I have some hilarious home-video of the band on the bus traveling through Italy!), in the Fall we toured with Santana for a long time, and in December we played in Istanbul, Turkey.   5:11:09 PM  comment []   Toadhouse @ James Kelly Contemporary Went to this art-opening yesterday. The drawings are clever, and the above image, for example, consists of the word Ease written thousands of times. But clever does not mean beautiful or touching, and I soon left.   8:46:37 AM  comment []   Water Voodoo 50 It hasn't rained in Santa Fe in months and I am bringing back the water voodoo series. These photos were all taken by a pool in a tiny town in Tuscany, Italy, in 1999.   8:33:53 AM  comment []   Desert Cooking Music: Ojos de Brujo - Bari: Remezclas de la Casa Mood: bright When I boil pasta or steam vegetables, I never add salt or oil to the water. That way I can let the water cool down and give it to my plants outside.   8:19:27 AM  comment []   Blow your Mind! At present, the capacity of a postage stamp size memory is 1GB. In the future, it is planned to increase the capacity to 10GB in the same size media. A CD carries about 700mb of information. This is less than a tenth the size of a CD and weighs almost nothing. Instead of 1,000 songs in your pocket it will be carry 1,000 songs inside your watch.... In principle, media spinning mechanism is not necessary for data retrieval drive. Laser diode emits not continuos light, but light pulses only when data is read. It will need a lot less power since it does not need to spin, and the laser does not operate continuously! Right now the biggest part of any music player is the battery... Because the media is 100% plastic material (no metal used), it is totally recyclable. Old media can be made into a new media or it can be made into other products. Yeah! AOL won't contribute so much to the landfill.... Here is what Wired magazine had to say in their June Edition: And can you say recyclable? AOL, for one, could blunt a lot of environmental criticism by choosing Info-MICAs over CDs for its ubiquitous "1,000 Hours of Free Service!" throwaways. The eco-friendly spin also makes them a good candidate for electronic news readers - a user could plug the day's New York Times card into a handheld, then toss it into a recycling bin that night. NTT is shopping the technology to music labels, because the cards are tough to duplicate illicitly. So far, potential pirates have no access to thin-film holography equipment, and very few people possess the technical expertise necessary to convert two-dimensional images into computer-generated holograms. NTT also has plans to assign each Info-MICA a unique ID number to make it simpatico with any digital rights management schemes that Hollywood might develop. (Of course, anyone with an audio-out jack could still make analog copies.) Info-MICA's biggest problem, though, isn't technical. NTT has already locked up most of the relevant patents. Sony did the same thing with the MiniDisc in 1992, and that technology - as good as it is - hasn't exactly pushed other media out of the market. I think that last paragraph is especially important. It seems whenever a company tries to lock up world-wide rights, i.e. is too greedy, their product falters. The MiniDisc, the Beta video format etc. etc. I hope NTT is learning from the past, because info-MICA could really rock!   12:13:13 AM  comment []

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