First, the Rodney King Cops. Then, OJ. Now, MJ. Southern California is
an awesome place to be guilty! Or not guilty. You know what I mean.
Category: In the News
Smoothest Asian on TV since Mr. Sulu! Click the photo to see the high-definition video or here to see the low-definition video.
I did an interview with CTV News yesterday for a David Akin piece on
upcoming changes to Canada’s copyright laws. I was the “Internet user”,
copyfighting lawyer Michael Geist was the legal voice of reason, Jay Thomson of the Canadian Association of Internet Providers was the technical voice of reason and Graham Henderson of the Canadian Recording Industry Association was the Sith Lord.
The story is summarized on this web page, and if you’d like to see the piece, here are a couple of links:
- High-bandwidth Windows Media (if you have a cable modem or DSL)
- Low-bandwidth Windows Media (if you have a dial-up modem)
Yes, that is a “Snoop Doggy Dogg” mechanic’s shirt I’m wearing, and yes, I wore it just for the interview.
The piece closes with me, delivering a pretty nice off-the-cuff quip. I am the sound-bite king! I can do anything!
I was 13 years old when AC/DC’s best-known and best-loved album, Back in Black, came out. When I was a DJ at Crazy Go Nuts University’s Clark Hall Pub, its biggest single, the rock anthem You Shook Me All Night Long was
a surefire way to pack the dance floor — even the most hard-core
alt-rock music snobs would do a jig and “throw the horns”. I was 31
when I first performed You Shook Me on accordion. I will not reveal the ages I was when I got to live out those lyrics. Even today, a good 25 years after the album’s release and probably thousands of plays, Back in Black still is on high rotation on my iTunes.
It makes me quite happy to know that Back in Black has, according to this CNN story, made it into the top 5 biggest-selling albums of all time. Congrats, Angus and boys!
Keith Olbermann summarizes Fox News astutely:
…it’s the newscast
perpetually running on the giant video screens in the movie “1984”.
Categories
My Favourite Headline
In the print edition of today’s National Post:
Three Days Until the Sith Hits the Fans
To kick off Star Wars week, here’s Bill Murray’s classic lounge rendition of the Star Wars theme from Saturday Night Live [1.0 MB MP3].
I wasn’t expecting much in the way of brainpower from the new free alternative paper Dose, but I did
expect them to have a reasonable grasp of the English language. That
grasp is a bit slippery, if the photo below is any indication:
From Dose’s Toronto edition, Wednesday, May 11, 2005, page 9.
It reads “PRINCE HARRY MAY be third in line for the thrown…”
(Memo to Dose: Dude, I shouldn’t have to point this out, but the word you’re looking for is “throne“.)
This sort of mistake goes beyond the garden variety “its/it’s” or “there/their/they’re” homophone trouble; we’re in “brain damage from inhaling solvents” territory here.
(Memo to Dose, just in case: A homophone is not a gay communications device.)
Cuban is on the cover of the May 9th issue of Barron’s and is featured
in a Q & A cover story titled Wall Street Maverick [link will be valid for this week only; paid
subscription required to read the online version]. A good chunk of the
story is dedicated to the companies in which he’s investing, and one of these companies is one I work for: Tucows,
where I work in the Research and Innovation department and hold the
company’s longest title: Techincal Community Development Coordinator. Tucows is on his “longs” list.
(Don’t know what “longing” is, in terms of the stock market? Check out this entry.)
Here’s the part of the interview that pertains to Tucows:
Q: You also own shares of Tucows, a bulletin-board stock that I remember mostly as a software download website.
A:
I met Elliot Noss, the CEO, at an industry event. We were talking about
peer-to-peer networking. I’m an investor in a company called Red
Swoosh, which is a peer-to-peer technology play. It turned out Noss is
a basketball fan, he has season tickets to the Toronto Raptors. I went
to a Raptors game with him, and we talked some more.
I’d
forgotten that these guys were a public company — and it wasn’t Elliot
who told me. It was someone else, when it came up that I’m an investor
in this other company called NetIdentity. NetIdentity lets you have
personalized email addresses, like eric@savitz.com.
Q: Not my actual address, I might point out [Eric Savitz did the interview — Joey]. Is it public?
A: It’s private. Anyway, those guys had a
relationship with Tucows. And it turned out they’re profitable, making
probably 12 cents a share this year, for a $1 stock, so a P/E of less
than 10. They were generating cash. They’ve been around a long time.
They do back-office domain registration services; they do wholesale
domain services. It’s not sexy, but it’s a low-cost operation. If they
keep running the business the right way, five years from now, I’ll wake
up and it’ll be a $10 stock. I’m not in any rush.
(The company may be “not sexy”, as Cuban puts it, but
let me tell you — that accordion playing guy who does the developer
relations stuff? He’s dead sexy.)
I plan to be one of the reasons why the stock price grows tenfold.