Oliver Stone does W. On Saturdays Entertainment Weekly arrives in Vermont and I usually read it from cover to cover. Today I learned that Oliver Stone is making a movie on the life of George W. Bush. The cover story is online as well. Here's a great paragraph from Stone, "I'm tired of defending the accuracy of my movies. I'm past that now. JFK was a case to be proven, Nixon was a penetrating biography of a complex and dark man. But I'm not bound by those strictures anymore. Bush is not a complex and dark man, so it's different. This movie can be funnier because Bush is funny. He's awkward and goofy and makes faces all the time. He's not your average president. So let's have some fun with it. What are they going to do? 'Discredit' me again?"
Big Brother always wins. My wife was at a conference in Phoenix a few weeks ago. Yesterday I found a letter from Phoenix Traffic Control in our Vermont mailbox. In it was a traffic ticket for running a red light and a $203 dollar fine. There were the options of fighting it in court or attend Intersection Rehabilitation School or whatever for 3 weeks. What was impressive to me from a technical perspective was how automated it appeared, with 4 full-color photos, taken at night, clearly capturing my wife's rental car license plate, her face behind the wheel, and her car passing through the intersection with the light red. She said the light was yellow when she entered it, which a colleague with her in the car can confirm, but Big Brother always wins. What are we going to do, fly back to Phoenix to argue it in traffic court? It's like Joe Pesci in Lethal Weapon 2, "They F-you at the drive-through!" Still, pretty cool technology, Phoenix.
Subject-specific feeds are the bomb. I discovered Dave Campbell's Silverlight Cream link series earlier this week. Great Silverlight links. Interestingly, Dave posted today that he had requests to offer his Silverlight Cream series as a separate feed. Subscribed! (Actually, I'll stay tuned to Dave's full feed for now.) Subscribing to blog content by subject is valuable for both producer and consumer, and to that end I wanted to remind everyone that for almost two years now I've had a mirrored blog called "Everyday" that contains everything I post EXCEPT Community Server stuff. Here's the blog. Here's the feed. And for completeness, here's the feed that serves up nothing but Everyman Links.
Another .NET blog makes the cut. I rarely add new .NET blogs to my OPML file anymore, but Dev102.com makes the cut for instructional posts like "6 Useful Visual Studio Tweaks You Need To Know" and "5 Firefox Extensions Any Web Developer Must Have."
When ScottW talks .NET... When Scott Watermasysk talks about a .NET technology he's interested in, this guy listens. Here Scott describes Castle, an open source project that includes, among other tools, data mapping, control containers and a validation framework.
The Zune tops two million units sold. Microsoft has recently reported that they sold two million Zunes since their launch in November 2006. The Zune now has 4 percent of the overall US marketshare for MP3 players. The most telling statement in the article however was, "Apple in its latest quarter sold 10.6 million iPods, or more than five times Microsoft's cumulative sales to date." I think I'll stick with my Zune 80 anyway, thanks.
Scary looking Celebs. I was at abcnews.com reading legitimate news articles when I saw this "Rich and Famous Caught Off-Guard" link, so I clicked and couldn't even recognize some of these "beautiful people." Lisa Marie? We're talkin' double-bagger, girlfriend. Pierce? You were James Bond, dude! Val? What happened to the Ice Man? On the other hand, Goldie, Jack, you guys still got it. Screw 'em.