By ERIKA KINETZ (AP)
7/23/10

MUMBAI, India -- It looks like an iPad, only it's 1/14th the cost: India has unveiled the prototype of a $35 basic touchscreen tablet aimed at students, which it hopes to bring into production by 2011.

If the government can find a manufacturer, the Linux operating system-based computer would be the latest in a string of "world's cheapest" innovations to hit the market out of India, which is home to the 100,000 rupee ($2,127) compact Nano car, the 749 rupees ($16) water purifier and the $2,000 open-heart surgery.

The tablet can be used for functions like word processing, web browsing and video-conferencing. It has a solar power option too -- important for India's energy-starved hinterlands -- though that add-on costs extra.

"This is our answer to MIT's $100 computer," human resource development minister Kapil Sibal told the Economic Times when he unveiled the device Thursday.

In 2005, Nicholas Negroponte -- cofounder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab -- unveiled a prototype of a $100 laptop for children in the developing world. India rejected that as too expensive and embarked on a multiyear effort to develop a cheaper option of its own.

Negroponte's laptop ended up costing about $200, but in May his nonprofit association, One Laptop Per Child, said it plans to launch a basic tablet computer for $99.

Sibal turned to students and professors at India's elite technical universities to develop the $35 tablet after receiving a "lukewarm" response from private sector players. He hopes to get the cost down to $10 eventually.

Mamta Varma, a ministry spokeswoman, said falling hardware costs and intelligent design make the price tag plausible. The tablet doesn't have a hard disk, but instead uses a memory card, much like a mobile phone. The tablet design cuts hardware costs, and the use of open-source software also adds to savings, she said.

Varma said several global manufacturers, including at least one from Taiwan, have shown interest in making the low-cost device, but no manufacturing or distribution deals have been finalized. She declined to name any of the companies.

India plans to subsidize the cost of the tablet for its students, bringing the purchase price down to around $20.

The project is part of an ambitious education technology initiative, which also aims to bring broadband connectivity to India's 25,000 colleges and 504 universities and make study materials available online.

So far nearly 8,500 colleges have been connected and nearly 500 web and video-based courses have been uploaded on YouTube and other portals, the Ministry said.

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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It's fair to say that Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros brought some things to the 9:30 Club on Tuesday night that few would have expected. Pianist Aaron Embry kicked off the sold-out show by admitting that no one had a clue as to the whereabouts of vocalist Jade Castrinos. Frontman Alex Ebert rounded out the night, but only after making his way into the pit and inviting about 800 of his newest friends to have a seat on the floor with him for the second song of the encore. Embry did give fair warning from the get-go: they're just a bunch of hippies.

The band of ten, through all the commotion, managed to keep the focus firmly on their music. Though not widely varied in their structures, the tracks from Up From Below that worked their way into Tuesday's set were pure gold, rising and falling like the natural breaths that come with a joyous run down a neighborhood street. Every man and woman onstage had that same post-run glow, coupled with an easy stride that made the roar of their psychedelic folk-rock tunes bubble up from the corners of the room, rather than burst from the speakers.

It's easy to see why many get hung up comparing this particular band to hippies and the like, given less-than-wordy tracks like "Desert Song," which inspired several band members to sit in a circle around the collective's guest sitar player. Considering Ebert's easy way of controlling the crowd, those cult comparisons do carry some weight. But "Desert Song" was mesmerizing, and not just because of the smoke coming from the piano. (Incense, perhaps? Who knows?) When the words died out, a two-man percussion team drove the heartbeat of the room. "Black Water" was similar in its minimalism, although roles reversed as the men dug deep into prolonged vocal harmonies, seemingly asking the percussionists to hang back.

Better-known tracks were equally striking. Ebert stomped toward drummer Josh Collazo in time with the opening notes of "40 Day Dream," inspiring movement across every inch of the room. Before long, Ebert had made his way into the crowd, singing with the masses the familiar 'oohs' and 'aahs' of the bridge. Naturally, "Jangling" was a crowd-pleaser, as a barefoot Ebert gently conducted the chorus, inviting D.C. citizens to lend their support. But nothing shook the room like "Home." It took only a whistle from the opening line for the Magnetic Zeros to set the entire club, even the usually stiff balcony-goers, in motion -- dancing, clapping, jumping, hollering, then singing as Ebert and Castrinos began their playful give and take. Then silence, as a packed house listened to Ebert sing in his deep rolling voice, "Ah, home. Let me come home. Home is wherever I'm with you."

Sorry Sarah . I'm going to have to side with Mr. Ebert on this one.

The Best Links:

1. Via @ebertchicago

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It's no secret that Roger Ebert hates 3-D movies. The dean of America film critics took to the pages of Newsweek recently to make his case, calling 3-D "a waste of a perfectly good dimension." It has also dawned on Ebert, as it has others of us, why Hollywood studios have been falling over each other to convert their films into 3-D, even when it was something of an act of artistic suicide, as with the awful-looking "Clash of the Titans." As Ebert put it, the studios' mania for 3-D "is driven largely to sell expensive projection equipment and add a $5 to $7.50 surcharge on already expensive movie tickets."

So I guess it's not a surprise to see Ebert come out swinging again in his new review of M. Night Shyamalan's "The Last Airbender," which opens at theaters around the country Friday. The film, based on a popular Nickelodeon TV series, takes place in a dystopian future when man survives only in the form of beings endowed with magical powers that enable them to control air, earth, water and fire. (Dev Patel, pictured here, plays Prince Zuko.) Ebert ends his review by saying that he hopes the film's title will prove to be prophetic, but not before taking a whipping stick to the whole misguided project, especially its quasi-3-D elements. You can read the whole review here, but this is the core of Ebert's brief against the film:

" 'The Last Airbender' is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented. The laws of chance suggest that something should have gone right. Not here. It puts a nail in the coffin of low-rent 3D, but it will need a lot more coffins than that. Let's start with the 3D, which was added as an afterthought to a 2D movie. Not only is it unexploited, unnecessary and hardly noticeable, but it's a disaster even if you like 3D. M. Night Shyamalan's retrofit produces the drabbest, darkest, dingiest movie of any sort I've seen in years. You know something is wrong when the screen is filled with flames that have the vibrancy of faded Polaroids. It's a known fact that 3D causes a measurable decrease in perceived brightness, but "Airbender" looks like it was filmed with a dirty sheet over the lens.

Ebert isn't alone on this one. "Airbender" currently has earned an abysmal 6 at Rotten Tomatoes, which if that number holds could make it the worst-reviewed major studio film of the year. The critics have dinged it for its incomprehensible plot, laughable dialogue and -- oh yes -- horrible 3-D effects. My favorite jab came from the Detroit News' Tom Long, who got so worked up about the film's general overall stupidity that he said the picture looked as if it "could have been made by the spoiled son of a studio mogul willing to waste gobs of money."

We'll see what audiences think, but I fear that this cheesy attempt to exploit higher 3-D ticket prices will only put another nail in the 3-D coffin by generating even more public cynicism (or justifiable skepticism) about the real motives behind the 3-D revolution. Either way, the film represents another critical drubbing for Shyamalan, whose stock has continued to plummet after the phenomenal success of "The Sixth Sense," which is looking more and more like a flukish bolt of inspiration from a Hollywood hack, not a polished gem from a game-changing filmmaker.

Photo: Dev Patel at the premiere of "The Last Airbender" in New York earlier this week.

Credit: Peter Kramer / Associated Press

You find it at DraftSight with most 2D features you can need. Dassault Systemes and Graebert is behind it and makes it tougher for AutoCAD clones and possibly AutoCAD LT.

You can read more at Deelip.com and also an interview he made.

The product that is made public now is still Beta.

What we can't seem to accept is that the oil is leaking and we can't stop it. This doesn't fit the modern narrative in which we can fix anything if we get organized and throw enough money at it. An earthquake devastates Haiti? The world rushes to its aid. A tsunami wreaks havoc? Emergency teams descend. Swine flu? We get inoculated. The economy collapses? Bail it out.

This pattern has become embedded in cable news. First, the story is "Breaking News." Then it's assigned a catch-phrase, a graphic, maybe even its own theme song. Then comes an airplane crash, a hurricane or forest fire to change the subject. We mourn, we repair, we prevent, we blame, we pass laws, we raise standards, we know the drill.

But the oil keeps leaking. We learn it will leak for weeks, a month, two months, four months. It is leaking 10,000 barrels a day, 20,000, 40,000, 60,000. British Petroleum lowers a pipe to drain oil from the leak. Some oil does drain, but the latest news suggests the pipe may have "exacerbated" the situation. "Exacerbated" means "made it worse." Corporate spokesmen love Latinate words that make them sound as if they know what they're talking about.

I have no idea what to do about the Spill. Do you? Does anybody? We keep hearing that an enormous explosion could shift so much of the ocean floor that the leak would be plugged. That sounds like the system we used as kids to contain garden hose floods in a sandbox.

I follow the news, and a sense of frustration and futility grows. The Spill has become the subject of political debate. The Right, which makes a specialty of saying "we told you so!," says "We told you so!" The Left, which has the same specialty, says the same thing. Both Right and Left specifically did not tell us so. The Greens told us so. The Right is generally hostile to Greens, the Left not so much, but Greens belong to neither party, and believe they are speaking for everyone.

The fact is, we need oil. The world is running out. It costs us our treasure to buy it from the Middle East. So we drill off our shores and spend our treasure instead with multinational corporations.Why isn't that our oil? Much of the Middle East dislikes us. Corporations are worse. They don't care. Most modern corporations are managed with three goals in mind: Profits, dividends, and executive bonuses.

No modern American president can afford to halt offshore drilling. We liberals mocked Sarah Palin's "drill, baby, drill!" because she wanted to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. If there's anything liberals love more than Sarah Palin does, it's wildlife. Obama called for restraints on offshore drilling, but we see no sign of him doing that. Can he? The globe's oil resources are finite, but much more finite is the U.S. ability to increase its debt.

There's obviously only one remedy: An energy revolution. We must reduce consumption and develop clean energy alternatives. We try to avoid this overwhelming fact. By "we," I don't mean North America, but most of the world, specifically including China and India. In America, we can't even spend money on new energy without lobbyists making sure the money is spent with the right people in the right ways. The ethanol bubble is an example of that. We need to grow more corn no more than we need to burn more oil.

Obama is under relentless attack now from the Right. That's a great help. I have been arguing in his defense, asking, please, what can he do to "handle" the crisis? We are told he hasn't seemed "concerned" enough. He flies to the Gulf states for his fourth trip and is attacked for having a goddamn ice cream cone. He expresses concern. He says he's mad. He gives a speech from the Oval Office in which he comes up with no answers because there are none. "This is Obama's Katrina," shouts the Right, forgetting that they said Bush did a good job with Katrina.

The difference is, Bush could have done more with Katrina, but I don't see what Obama can do with the Spill. He's instructed: "Take personal command!" Should the President be our go-to guy on oil spills? "Express more emotion!" What is he, a head of state like the Queen, delegated to going places and looking concerned? He can try to pass some energy legislation, but both parties are in the pockets of Big Oil. Those few legislators who work for meaningful federal solutions are pilloried as "socialists." God help us if we should attempt to slow the eagerness of corporations to consume us.

And the oil keeps leaking. I fantasize that we will finally be reduced to trying that big explosion. What if the explosion disrupts a nearby oil rig? What if it opens a second reservoir? What, for that matter, if we don't do that, but there happens to be a coincidental explosion on another rig?

A great wound has been caused to our planet. The ecology of an invaluable region has been grievously attacked. Even state governors who are hostile to the Greens express themselves concerned, if not with marine life or birds or plants, with the "impact on tourism."

We humans as a species developed on a vast savannah without the ability to run and fight as well as the other beasts we found there. But we could think. In doing so, we built civilizations, spread to all the continents, and prospered. For energy we used fire and water. Then steam. Coal replaced wood and peat. We had a decent global civilization going before we started drilling for oil big-time. We had cities, transportation, education, religion, culture, entertainment, economies. Some people fared better, some worse, but it is always so.

Oil is a convenient fuel for things we have come to believe we need. Automobiles. Airplanes. Air conditioning. Electricity is useful for such matters as lighting, television, the internet and traffic signals, but although I am no engineer I suspect we could produce a great deal of our electricity from alternative sources. Why doesn't every house have solar panels? Why doesn't mine? If we had no oil and were "thrown back to the Middle Ages" would that mark our end as a species, or rather just a transition back to an earlier state?

Here's what I think right now. The President and Congress should declare an energy emergency. Some of you are old enough to recall the great oil shortage of 1973, when the OPEC countries shut us off. The national speed limit was reduced to 55 mph. Daylight savings time continued year-around. In Chicago's Loop, the skyscrapers no longer burned their lights all night long. At the Sun-Times, every other light was turned off. Automobiles grew so much smaller that many young people today can hardly believe the size of, say, a 1969 Cadillac.

That was long ago. Modern housing uses track lighting to beam spotlights into every nook and cranny. Kitchen appliances do everything that was once done by hand. I don't even want to know how much energy an electric dishwasher consumes. For the first 35 years of my life I washed the dishes by hand, and didn't feel particularly inconvenienced. People used to use clothes lines. I know it sounds incredible. My dad had a mantra: Turn out the lights when you leave the room! Now you drive down a street and see whole houses illuminated, room after room.

Obama could ask us to turn out our lights. He could move up a deadline for mandating hybrid and electric automobiles. He could impose restrictions on needless public lighting. He could make a real effort to improve rail transportation. He could pour money into alternative energy. We could learn to open the damn windows when it's a mild day outside. All of this would only be the beginning. Big changes are coming, sooner than we want. They have nothing to do with Republicans or Democrats. They have to do with learning to live without greed--in our personal lives, in our corporations, in our government.

I mentioned I've started a program of reading books again. I just finished that novel by Dickens. Good to the last word. It takes place just as the railroad was being introduced. The characters walk around London, or sometimes use carriages. Rooms are heated individually. Nobody thinks about these hardships; they're more concerned with their own happiness or sadness.

To get away from the internet, I find it works to physically leave the room with the computer in it and sit in another room. Last night, finishing Dombey and Son, I settled into a nice chair and turned on the floor lamp. I turned off no less than six lights that were embedded in the ceiling. I began to read, and it felt good. I realized I was seated in a warm cone of light just exactly right for my purposes. I remembered such a reading space from my childhood, when I sank into my dad's big old chair and started on some Edgar Allen Poe horror stories. They were better without a lot of light.

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I vowed I would never become a Twit. Now I have Tweeted nearly 10,000 Tweets. I said Twitter represented the end of civilization. It now represents a part of the civilization I live in. I said it was impossible to think of great writing in terms of 140 characters. I have been humbled by a mother of three in New Delhi. I said I feared I would become addicted. I was correct.

I am in conversation. When you think about it, Twitter is something like a casual conversation among friends over dinner: Jokes, gossip, idle chatter, despair, philosophy, snark, outrage, news bulletins, mourning the dead, passing the time, remembering favorite lines, revealing yourself.

Roger Ebert's name is synonymous with movie reviews. Many of us remember him bantering with Gene Siskel on the TV shows Sneak Previews and At the Movies. But he doesn't banter much anymore. He lost his ability to speak due to complications of thyroid cancer in 2006.

Ebert may have lost the lower part of his jaw, but he hasn't lost his voice. He continues to receive new acclaim and appreciation for the quality and feeling of his writing in books, newspaper reviews, and criticism.

It shows a deep sense of character. But it also shows a few other valuable traits we as content creators would be wise to develop in ourselves.

Keep a sense of humor

I'm sure Ebert must have some bad days. He can't speak, eat, or drink.

But it never affects the quality of his writing. His words continue to sparkle and shine with life.

He receives continual praise for the power of his insights and the humor sprinkled within his work. Ebert's recent criticism of Glenn Beck show that his wit and sensibility are still strong. He doesn't go for the laugh-out-loud moment, but he uses sharp observation and quiet humor to pull the reader in, as he does in The London Perambulator.

Lesson: There is little in life that's more valuable (to you and to your readers) than a sense of humor.

Focus on what you can do well

Ebert was a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer before becoming a famous film critic. Some people think his writing is even better since he lost the ability to speak. His ability to analyze and reflect on movies (or virtually any topic) is strong. He writes in a way that reaches both the average person and his peers.

Ebert is rarely in front of cameras any more (his recent appearance on Oprah is a memorable exception), but he remains a prolific writer. He uses notepad and pen to communicate in person and the keyboard for larger audiences, and he communicates constantly.

Profiled recently in Esquire magazine, Ebert offered up a journal entry to explain the power of writing:

When I am writing my problems become invisible and I am the same person I always was. All is well. I am as I should be.

Lesson: Be thankful for what you can do well. Do it as long and as vigorously as you can.

Be honest

Ebert has plenty to complain about. For that matter, so would a couple of other smart guys like, say, Jon Morrow or Stephen Hawking.

None of them is wasting his time whining, though. They've had their fair share of happiness and fulfillment. They all enjoy what they do and they are damned good at it. They don't look for pity. They are sincere when they say that they are doing what they love to do.

The Esquire article features a small picture of a Post It note written by Ebert:

There is no need to pity me. Look how happy I am. This has led to an exploring of writing.

In his post Putting a Better Face on Things, Ebert gives a frank and insightful look into his feelings about reconstructive surgery and prosthetics.

Ebert's journal has produced close to half a million words of honesty that are touching thousands, if not millions, of readers.

Lesson: Use your life experiences to fuel your work and offer others education and inspiration. Be forthright and frank whenever you talk about yourself.

Let your passion save and sustain you

Ebert makes this point loud and clear in the Esquire article: Writing is what saves him.

His journaling has led to a gripping and moving exploration of the art of writing. Writing provides him with continued purpose in trying circumstances.

How many people is he inspiring with this new phase of work? Millions?

Can you do the same? It's worth thinking about, isn't it?

Lesson: Your passion can carry you through hardships. If even a fraction of that passion spills into your content, the potential to build your audience and develop true fans is huge. Don't phone it in. Bare your soul. Engage.

And follow the examples set by the greats like Ebert. They know how it's done.

About the Author: Mark Dykeman is the founder and main brain of Thoughtwrestling, a blog devoted to developing ideas and bringing them to life. He is the author of the award-winning blog Broadcasting Brain. His work has appeared in numerous blogs, including Mashable.com, Dumb Little Man, Pick The Brain, Copyblogger, and more.

Many time management experts label procrastination in strictly negative terms such as the thief of time. But is procrastination always such a negative experience? Is there a positive side to procrastination, one that may even encourage you to procrastinate more often?

What if you could see procrastination from a more empowering perspective? What if you could even fall in love with procrastination?

The Anti-Procrastination Brigade

One of the reasons procrastination gets such a bad rap is because it's generally perceived as contrary to corporate agendas, which rely heavily on time-is-of-the-essence execution driven by command and control authority to hit financial targets. When employees procrastinate on key projects and tasks, it can cause delays that hurt the corporate bottom line.

Managers are typically held accountable for these delays. Managerial pay is frequently linked to the corporate agenda, so procrastination issues with team members can personally impact a manager's income. This incentivizes managers to turn procrastination into an enemy and to do what they can to squash it.

Consequently, you'll commonly find that anti-procrastination books are written by current or former corporate managers. I've read many books on this topic, and I have a hard time recalling one that wasn't written by someone with management experience.

Since I've managed a team in the past as well, I've also witnessed the effect of procrastination on team results, so it should come as no surprise that I too have been a member of the anti-procrastination brigade. One of my earliest article hits was Overcoming Procrastination. I wrote the original version of that article in 2001 while running Dexterity Software, three years before I started blogging, and for most of the intervening years, it has held a top position in search engines.

Anti-procrastination, however, is merely a perspective a lens through which we can view reality. In this article, I'd like to offer you a different perspective to consider. Instead of favoring what's best for the manager, the team, or the company, let's consider what's actually best for the individual.

What Do You Do When You Procrastinate?

When you're coming upon a deadline, and you seem to be putting off what needs to be done, what are you doing instead?

Some people tend to freeze in this situation, doing virtually nothing. They get some impulses for things they'd rather be doing, but then they guilt themselves out of acting on them.

However, if you were to set that guilt aside and flow with those impulses, what would you end up doing instead? And what might be the long-term consequences?

Perhaps the consequences of procrastination are not as negative as they initially seem. The pressure of the moment has a way of distorting your perspective, just as physical pressure can distort a glass lens.

When I was in high school, I used to procrastinate heavily on certain school assignments, almost always waiting till the night before the due date to begin working on them. Most often I'd procrastinate on writing essays and doing various reading assignments. I generally found them boring and tedious. Looking back, I don't see that this has hurt me at all over the long run. I still don't care about analyzing the works of Chaucer, and since then my mind has seen fit to reallocate the neurons once devoted to such tasks.

What would I do while I was procrastinating on school assignments? I spent many hours playing video games. I also read programming books and wrote small programs on my Atari 800 and then on a PC.

And this actually benefitted me in a huge way. Many years later I started a game development and publishing company and ran it for more than a decade. Thanks in part to my previous gaming experience, some of my games won industry awards. So while it seemed like I was procrastinating on the important stuff in high school, in truth I was putting off what was less relevant to me personally, so I could spend more time doing what actually mattered to me. Somehow I never got around to writing a computer game based on the life of Chaucer.

Years later, I found myself procrastinating on programming projects in order to read personal development books, listen to audio programs, and write articles. My early article writing was actually a form of procrastination. I always had to put off something seemingly more important to free up time to crank out a new article.

I'd also coach other game developers as a form of procrastination, helping certain people gain the knowledge and skills they needed to quit their corporate jobs and start their own indie game development businesses. But the funny thing is that further down the road, I ended up licensing and publishing games from some of those developers I helped.

In retrospect, this pattern of procrastination has benefitted me tremendously in the long run, although at the time it often seemed like a bad habit I needed to resist, and I'd feel guilty about it. It caused me some extra stress and a number of all-nighters. I've also had to deal with the occasional late fee or penalty now and then. But overall I have to say that all that procrastination wasn't such a problem after all. I can make a case that it's done me more good than harm.

Who's Agenda Are You Fulfilling?

Who's deadlines are you really working on? Are they your deadlines or someone else's? If the deadlines aren't really yours, why do you care so much about them anyway?

Quite often you'll find yourself procrastinating on someone else's agenda so you can spend more time working on your own. Much of the time, however, people aren't in tune with their own agendas. They spend more time fussing over what they think they should be doing as opposed to what they actually want to be doing.

So what if you're late? Do you really care all that much what your teacher thinks of you or your boss or the government?

Other people's deadlines are just that other people's deadlines. They won't always mesh with your desires.

Even if you choose to take on a certain project, and you're the one defining the milestones along the way, you may find that at some future point, you seem to be resisting your earlier decisions. You may have a hard time getting yourself to take action when you know that you should.

Where do you think this resistance comes from? What if this isn't a failing at all? What if your procrastination is actually a signal that your priorities are askew? What if procrastination is a sign that a greater intelligence is trying to nudge you in a whole new direction?

How Much Is Procrastination Really Hurting You?

When you feel that you're procrastinating, take a deeper look at what's going on. First of all, is your procrastination really hurting you all that much? Or are you making mountains out of molehills?

In the grand scheme of things, having to pay a late fee is hardly the end of the world. Same goes for doing an occasional all-nighter. The money can be recouped. You'll have a chance to catch up on your sleep later. You'll recover easily enough. The consequences are little more than a mosquito bite.

Even when something seems really bad at the time, years later you may look back and realize it wasn't such a big deal after all. And maybe it actually helped you get onto a better path.

For example, if your procrastination is so bad that you end up failing your classes and getting kicked out of college, initially it may seem like a huge blow. You may be inclined to beat yourself up with guilt, and the people around you may heap loads of disappointment onto you. But later in life when the emotional sting wears off, you may realize that this was a powerful step along your path of growth. You'll begin to see the good in those trying times.

Perhaps your procrastination helped you escape the wrong major. After all, how can you purport to be majoring in something that's aligned with your passion and talents if you got yourself expelled because when push came to shove, you consistently opted to do something other than tend to your studies? Maybe your real mistake was further upstream, and procrastination helped you escape a dead-end track.

Another possibility is that the timing just wasn't right. Maybe your procrastination is telling you that this is the wrong time to attend college. Perhaps you should travel the world for a while. Maybe you don't need a college degree at all. Maybe you should dive right in and get to work doing what you love. What if the decision to earn a degree was just a fear-based delay tactic?

The Benefit of Hindsight

Even when it seems like your procrastination habit is a purely destructive one, there may be hidden benefits that can be difficult to see at the time.

When I got expelled from UC Berkeley after 3 semesters I think that in my final semester, my GPA actually started with the decimal point it was a huge blow to me at the time. Even worse was that I'd just gotten out of jail after being charged with felony grand theft, and I was awaiting my court date. This was a major low point in my life. I was only 19 years old at the time, and I constantly beat myself up about the stupid mistakes I'd made. I thought I was a fairly intelligent guy, but apparently my choices had been incredibly stupid. I procrastinated endlessly on my studies, so I could do things like drink alcohol, go to parties, play poker, and shoplift.

My original plan was to earn my degree in computer science, then maybe go on to earn a Ph.D. Afterwards I could get a nice job as a computer programmer somewhere. That was my should path.

Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, however, the seemingly crazy path I ended up taking turned out to be tremendously valuable. It was very stressful at the time, but to this day, I remain immensely grateful that I didn't stick to my original plan and graduate from UC Berkeley. If I'd followed that course, I might be working as a computer programmer for the government or some corporation today. That wouldn't necessarily be a terrible outcome, but I'd much rather be where I am today than where I expect that path would have led me. I think my original plan would have been a heartless path for me in the long run.

Instead, my procrastination put me in a position where I had to learn entirely different lessons. Through shoplifting I pushed myself to face my fear again and again and to control my adrenaline response, so I could maintain my composure even when taking big risks. That has been of tremendous benefit to me ever since, especially in business. I really love that I'm able to look at something that scares me and motivate myself to plow right through it without freezing up. It's very unlikely I'd be doing public speaking today if I'd never learned those courage lessons via shoplifting.

Secondly, I learned how to handle negative social pressure. When I hit that low point in my life, everyone who knew me at the time seemed deeply disappointed in me. A lot of criticism was heaped upon me, and I can't say that it was unwarranted. But in order to make forward progress and turn things around, I had to learn to tune out unhelpful feedback, decide for myself what was best, and take action without the benefit of social support. Otherwise I'd have gotten stuck in a place of self-pity or defensiveness. This ability still comes in handy today. For instance, I feel quite comfortable opening up about topics that will predictably generate a lot of negative feedback (such as polyamory or divorce). It's hard for me to get worked up over anonymous Internet criticism after what I've already been through.

Thirdly, I had to learn to love myself unconditionally. The beating I gave myself at the time was worse than what anyone else could have done to me. I was terribly disappointed in myself, and I felt guilty about blowing everything that seemed important. As I recovered from those experiences, which took a long time, I gradually learned to accept myself in spite of my apparent flaws. I had to learn that I'm still worthy of love. We all are. By loving myself, I feel more inclined to care about others. A few days ago, I noticed that a friend seemed to be feeling down on herself, so I wrote her a note to offer her some support and to remind her that she's loved and appreciated. And of course I had to procrastinate on something important to do that. Perhaps our to-do lists should include more items like this to begin with.

Fourthly, I became more motivated than ever to do some good with my life. I was so disgusted with the way I'd been living that I pushed myself to the opposite end of the spectrum. I began spending a lot of time working on my character development. Changes were slow and gradual, but eventually I grew into a man who felt good about himself and his contribution to the world.

Fifthly, I became a lot less judgmental towards others. Given my sordid past, who am I to judge someone else for their choices? I learned that accepting others and accepting myself are two sides of the same coin; you can't love and accept yourself without doing the same for others. In my writing I will sometimes temporarily adopt a very opinionated position to stimulate people to think about the ideas, but that's simply a literary tool I employ to make articles more impactful and memorable. People who hang out with me in person know that I'm ridiculously accepting of others, regardless of their lifestyles. Consequently, I seem to have a habit of attracting friends who are often subjected to harsh judgment by society, including psychics, strippers, porn stars, polyamorous people, pot smokers, people with non-mainstream spiritual beliefs, and of course those crazy jobless folks. This has added tremendous richness to my life, including many fun and educational experiences that I'd have otherwise missed. Associating with such people has also helped me feel a lot more comfortable in my own skin.

And finally, I gained much more freedom. Since I had failed in such a big way, everyone else's expectations of me hit rock bottom. No one expected anything from me after that. This gave me the social and emotional freedom to begin taking control of my life without feeling that I had to live up to anyone else's expectations. Even though I was in a low place, I felt like I finally had the wherewithal to steer my life as I saw fit without worrying about what other people might think. I could hardly make things worse, so it was easier to take some risks.

To this day I'm immensely grateful for these lessons (and many more), which came about as a result of procrastinating on my studies in order to follow other impulses. I can't be sure where those impulses came from, but I've since learned not to reject such urges out of hand. Perhaps there is a greater intelligence at work here.

Stop Beating Yourself Up

If you have a tendency to beat yourself up for procrastinating, maybe you should stop doing that. It doesn't help you anyway, does it?

Perhaps procrastinating isn't such a bad thing after all. What if there are important growth experiences to be found within your procrastination?

Are the items on your to-do list really so important? Are they important to you personally? Why do you feed them so much energy?

Even the stuff that seems really important in the moment may look totally different with the benefit of hindsight.

You may be beating yourself up because your procrastination seems to be leading you astray. What if you're even at risk of losing your home? Is it possible that this may turn out to be a good thing in the long run? Who's to say that losing your stuff is bad?

Maybe you'll find newfound freedom in a life of minimalism. Maybe you'll end up living in a much nicer place down the road. Maybe the experience will help you develop more courage and self-acceptance. Maybe you'll gain a cool story to blog about someday, whereby you'll be in a position to help other people learn valuable lessons.

Realize that someday, all of this will be gone. Eventually you'll pass on and leave this world behind. What will matter to you most when you're on your deathbed? Will you wish you'd hit more of your assigned deadlines ahead of time? Or will you perhaps wish that you'd spent more time following your heart? Will you regret those late assignments? Or will you regret those amazing life experiences that you missed because you were too busy working to meet someone else's deadline?

Procrastinate Harder

What if instead of resisting your impulse to procrastinate, you threw yourself into it more fully? What if you dove headfirst into your biggest procrastination impulses? Where might they lead you?

Maybe procrastination won't seem like such a curse if you following those impulses without so much guilt and resistance.

You're probably going to procrastinate anyway, so why not do it in style?

When you feel the urge to procrastinate, what are you driven to do?

Do you feel like watching movies? Perhaps you could become the next Roger Ebert.

Do you prefer to play computer games? Maybe someday you'll start a game review site or become a game designer. Maybe playing games will evolve into a fun hobby that you can enjoy with friends and family. You might even find a new relationship partner via an online game.

Do you like to escape into books? If you read enough books in a certain field, you can eventually become an international expert. I learned a great deal about personal development by reading hundreds of books, but at the time it often seemed like I was procrastinating on something more important.

Do you invest a lot of time and energy in online socializing? Maybe you'll meet your next relationship partner that way. Or perhaps you'll become a highly paid social media consultant. Corporations are throwing thousands of dollars at such consultants just to learn how to use Twitter and Facebook like any teenager can. You may not even realize just how valuable your expertise can be to the right people.

Maybe you could do what the worst procrastinators in the world frequently do. Start your own productivity blog.

Having a Life

What would you rather be doing than working to meet someone else's deadlines?

Quite often when you procrastinate, you'll find yourself doing what it takes to have a life.

If you stopped resisting the urge to procrastinate and simply went with it, what new experiences would you invite into your life?

What other emotions are hidden behind those surface feelings of stress and resistance? Do you also see some potential excitement staring back at you? What about the feeling that maybe you could get all the so-called important work done in half the time you originally estimated while still carving out space to do what you love? Maybe it's not such a bad idea to blow off today and go have some fun.

Isn't it a more natural tendency to do what you enjoy first then do what you supposedly have to do as urgency dictates? Perhaps you should allow those have tos to build up a certain level of urgency-based pressure before you tend to them. Such pressure has some benefits, doesn't it? Once it reaches a certain level, you may be able to plow through tons of work with unrelenting speed and focus, drawing on inner resources that you could never bring to bear when you were swimming in extra time.

Maybe you've been over-thinking this problem, turning it into a phantom boogieman. What if you simply relaxed into the idea of following your heart? Let the procrastination happen. Let the pressure build. If there's something that really does need to be done, you'll find a way to get it done. You always do when it truly matters, don't you? It's not like you've procrastinated yourself into starvation. Despite all your worst procrastination episodes, you're still breathing, aren't you?

You may think that procrastination is hurting you, but is that harm actually real? Or is it just imaginary harm? Are you still whole and intact?

Perhaps there is some greater intelligence nudging you to delay tasks and activities that merely seem important but really aren't.

Having a life might just be what happens while you're procrastinating on something else. When you delay to the limit those uninspired tasks, you'll create more space in your life for inspiration and joy.

* * *

I hope you enjoyed this article since I procrastinated on lots of accounting work to write it. I'm sure I'll feel plenty guilty about that later.

In the meantime, please ponder these quotes from Geoffrey Chaucer:

• Love is blind.
• Forbid us something, and that thing we desire.
• The life so short, the crafts so long to learn.
• First he wrought, and afterward he taught.
• The greatest scholars are not usually the wisest people.
• The guilty think all talk is of themselves.
• Time and tide wait for no man.
• Women desire six things: They want their husbands to be brave, wise, rich, generous, obedient to wife, and lively in bed.

You had to procrastinate on something to read this article, didn't you?

Get unstuck and leap ahead in your career development, wealth creation, relationships, habits, health, and more. Join us at the Conscious Growth Workshop, July 16-18, 2010, in Las Vegas.

2010 by Steve Pavlina.

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After oil started spewing into the Gulf of Mexico following the BP oil rig explosion almost a month ago, a Twitter account launched purporting to be BP's public relations group, @BPGlobalPR. The account, which offers dark, satirical commentary about the spill and cleanup efforts, is run by an anonymous person (I know for a fact that he's a he), who responds to all media inquiries as Terry. Mashable contacted Terry in an attempt to find out more about the man behind the Twitter stream.

We were ardently hoping that Terry would drop the act (if it is, in fact, an act) and tell us who he really is. Unfortunately, homeboy kept in character throughout the entire e-mail interview, which we're pasting below.

We're fairly certain that the real BP is not behind the account the company said as much to CNN. In fact, it's far more popular than the official feed; after launching last week, @BPGlobalPR has more than 55,000 followers, while @BP_America has just under 7,000. (Although someone apparently hacked into the official account today and posted a tweet from Terry that says, Terry is now in charge of operation Top Kill, work will recommence after we find a XXL wetsuit. #bpcares #oilspill. The tweet has since been removed).

Check out our interview below and let us know what you think in the comments.

Hi Brenna! I really like being interviewed by women first of all. You know what I call men who are journalists? Pickledicks. LOL. The guys said I should be the one who does the interviews 'cause I'm the smartest, which is also why I do all the hard work. It does kinda suck, though, because the other guys have so much fun all day playing grab-ass and XBox and beer pong. Ah, well.

Why did you start this Twitter account?: I work for BP Global PR. The reason we do PR is very simple, it's the best job you can have. You see, corporations screw up all the time. They are very worried that the screwups are going to cost them a lot of money. They pay people like me a TON of money to make it look like they're doing stuff, but really we don't have to do much except talk. Our talking buys them time to figure out how they are going to sweep it all under the rug and go back to making lots of money. I get paid to talk and waste time and I get paid a lot. So why do we do this, because its our job and we love money!

How did you amass so many followers in such a short amount of time? What was the tipping point for you?: We got a lot of followers because we're really good at our job. Also Roger Ebert tweeted our tweet about how our oil wasn't good for dolphins and a lot of people like him for some reason. To be honest, the review he gave Transformers 2 (my fave movie of 2009) was a little out of line, but whatever.

Who runs the account? Is it just you or a few other people?: We've got a real brain trust running the account. The other guys do most of the tweeting, but I do most of the work and I also do a lot of dares every day. I guess I'm kinda the star, so that's pretty cool. I have my own Twitter I'm starting up @BPTerry, but I got so frustrated trying to get to the page today I gave up. Turns out I accidentally typed www.twitter.corn. The guys gave me hell for that one.

You appear to be selling BP Cares shirts via your Twitter account to benefit healthygulf.org. What's the deal with that?: I really messed up with the BP Cares' shirts. I wish we could drop it. Long story short, everyone was really mad at BP about the oil spill, so naturally we decided to make a ton of T-shirts to give to everyone to make them like us again. I got the design, put it in the T-shirt machine and I guess I spilled ink on it or something 'cause all the shirts are messed up. To make matters worse, I broke the controls and the thing wont stop making the damn shirts. No one can turn it off. Also, I signed some stupid paperwork that made it so I have to give all the money we make to www.healthygulf.org. I'll tell ya, everyone was so pissed about this. We are literally losing thousands of dollars to them. The only reason I still have my job is cause I ate some oil on a dare.

How much time a day do you spend tweeting/interacting with followers? What has been the most interesting interaction so far?: I work about five hours a day at BP headquarters and am always the last one in the office. Interesting interactions? Felicia Day liked our tweets; Alyssa Milano liked our tweets, too.

I was hoping i could maybe meet Felicia or take her on a boatride through the gulf, but she hasn't gotten back to us. Also, @Wired said some weird stuff about us, so we all decided they were pickledicks and we hate them.

I'll admit I'm not that smart, but they write a magazine about computers. They use PRINT to talk about new technology. I mean, that's some real pickledickery. I'll bet those idiots write letters about e-mails. Also, right when we reached 50,000 followers we noticed a fake account w/ a bunch of typos and we had to call them out.

What kind of feedback have you been getting from the public?: Everyone thinks we're funny. To be honest, we're all mostly confused by that. We're just trying to think of solutions for this stuff and report the news. But I'm told that we're doing great. Hoping for a bonus so I can invent the hoverboard.

And, finally, who are you really? What's your day job, where do you live and what are your goals with this Twitter account?: This question doesn't make sense. I'm Terry; I can't tell you my last name because a lot of people hate us. I work for BP Global PR and my goal is to get paid and shut down this damn T-shirt machine. Thanks, Brenna. Btw, are u pretty? Hope so.

Tags: humor, trending, twitter

When we say everything is going 3D, we really mean it. Roger Ebert notwithstanding, the world has gone gaga for 3D, from Titanic to the $100 bill and even Playboy Bunnies.

But wait, you say there's still a huge gap in terms of actually being able to produce 3D video thanks to the expensive new equipment outlays required. True, but consumer electronics manufacturer Sharp has plans to leapfrog over much of that gap by the end of this year by bringing the world's first 3D camera for mobile devices to a cell phone near you.

The camera module, designed specifically for small devices like cell phones and digital cameras, shoots 3D footage at 720p resolution. Samples of the new camera will be available by July before the real mass production begins, so by this summer we should be able to get our eyes on the level of quality we might expect from devices that will incorporate it later this year.

If Sharp is able to produce the modules at comparable cost, it might not be long until 3D video support becomes a commodity baked in to most smartphones and point-and-shoots. There are yet other problems to solve, not the least of which is ensuring everyone has the means to comfortably view 3D content whether it be via glasses or through the still relatively nascent glasses-less 3D technology. Nevertheless, Sharp's mobile 3D camera stands to be yet another important milestone in the march to ubiquitous 3D.

Would you be interested in the ability to record 3D video right from your cell phone, or do you think 2D will keep most people content for some time?

[via Engadget]

Tags: 3D, cameras, cell phones, Mobile 2.0, Sharp, video

Shared by phillip
Need to keep an eye out for this.

Exit Through the Gift Shop: A Banksy Film is a documentary film about street artists, in particular Banksy. The film began as the obsession of Thierry Guetta, a French immigrant in Los Angeles, who became fascinated by street art and spent years filming the art and its creators. The twist in the tale comes when Banksy turns into the film-maker, while Guetta decides to become an artist, under the name Mr. Brainwash. It premired at the Sundance Film Festival on 24 January 2010. The film includes footage of notable graffiti or street artists at work, including Shepard Fairey, Guetta's cousin Invader, and Banksy himself, though the latter's face is never shown, and his voice is distorted to preserve his anonymity.

It is narrated by Rhys Ifans. Music is by Geoff Barrow. It includes Richard Hawley's "Tonight The Streets Are Ours".^[1]

[edit] Reception and speculation

The documentary received overwhelmingly positive reviews, holding 95% on Rotten Tomatoes.^[2] One consistent theme in the reviews was the authenticity of the film: Was the film just an elaborate ruse on Banksy's part, or did Guetta really evolve into Mr. Brainwash overnight? The Boston Globe movie reviewer Ty Burr found it to be quite entertaining as a farce and awarded it four stars. He dismissed the notion of the film being a "put on" saying "I'm not buying it; for one thing, this story's too good, too weirdly rich, to be made up. For another, the movie's gently amused scorn lands on everyone."^[3] Roger Ebert gave it 3.5 stars out of 4, starting his review saying that "The widespread speculation that Exit Through the Gift Shop is a hoax only adds to its fascination."^[4] The New York Times movie reviewer, Jeannette Catsoulis, called the film a new kind of sub-genre, a "prankumentary".^[5]

Would I want to start over with a new face? Would I like to eat, drink, talk, and look like a normal person? Even if that person were a stranger? In theory, this is now possible. I've been thinking of it, on and off, for the last two weeks. I regularly visit several science websites, and from New Scientist, the invaluable British magazine, I happened upon this story:

"Yesterday it emerged that a farmer in his thirties in Spain who accidentally shot away the lower part of his face has become the first person to receive an entire face transplant. According to yesterday's press conference, he is

already recovering well. Previously, he could only breathe and eat through tubes. Now he is expected to begin relearning how to talk, eat, smile and laugh within weeks." This didn't involve simply placing a mask of skin over what was there, which is how I've always imagined such procedures. Keep reading:

"In a 24-hour operation, a team of 30 surgeons at the Vall d'Hebron University Hospital in Barcelona, Spain, led by surgeon Joan Pere Barret, started by removing what remained of the man's face - skin, veins and arteries - leaving just his eyeballs and tongue.

"The team then replaced this with practically the entire face of a dead donor, including all the skin, muscles and nerves, the entire nose, the lips, palate, all the teeth, the cheekbones and the entire lower jaw. These were grafted by microsurgery to what remained of the patient's own face, and the blood supply reconnected. In the final part of the operation, the surgeons transplanted bones and connecting nerves to the patient's own face."

In other words, I could be whole again. I have a great deal more remaining bone and tissue than the farmer had, although my mouth droops because of the removal of the mandible during cancer surgery. Both that surgery and two later ones were planned to restore my appearance to something close to normal. At first it was hoped my drinking, speaking and talking would return, for I still have my tongue and the necessary inventory in my throat. All three surgeries failed, leaving me as I am today, damaged but happy and productive. And in fact the surgery was a great success, because I appear to be cancer-free. Why should I complain?

Still...what if I had this big surgery? I'd need to undergo rehabilitation to learn to speak again, but a Cleveland doctor says one of her face transplant patients, after two years, "can say all her vowels and has such normal sensation in her face that she can feel a kiss." This is encouraging. After the day in first grade when Sister Ambroisetta taught us to chant "A, E, I, O, U...and sometimes Y," I never thought the day would come when I couldn't say my vowels. But I can't, and don't bother asking me about my consonants.

What if I could go to Spain and return with a complete face? If you passed me on the street, you might mistake me for a normal man. Small children would no longer stare, and ask their mommies about me.

Actually, the children, I might miss. These days children look at me frankly, with natural curiosity. I smile and wave, and they often smile and wave back. I'm not your everyday face. I provide entertainment value. I believe our society has grown more tolerant of disabilities; never once has a mother snatched the child away from such a sight as me. Usually we adults just nod understandingly.

All the same, I don't have any desire for a face transplant. I knew that even while I was still reading the New Scientist article. I knew it for so many different reasons that it was hard to sort them out. Let's set aside medical reasons, and assume for the sake of argument that the operation would be a success. I still don't want one.

I feel it would be an act of disloyalty to my own face. I have lived with it so long. In adolescence I studied it with fierce concentration in the mirror, convinced my nose was too long, my lips too fat, and my zits would colonize all available facial skin. Later, I saw it idealized in one of those unreal high school graduation pictures. Later still, recorded in states of hilarity during long nights of celebration and days with the friends of a lifetime. I saw my hair grow long and then longer. I saw sideburns appear and retreat. Twice I saw the beginnings of a beard and shaved it off. I saw it fatter and thinner. Siskel told me I had so many double chins I needed a bookmark to find my mouth, but by a gift of nature my chins never got really out of control. I saw my face grow smaller with diet and exercise. I saw it for the last time on the night before surgery, when I looked in a mirror and took this photograph.

For better or worse, that was my face, and today most of it remains. After a face transplant it would be somebody else's face. I fear something within me might recoil at the sight. Oh, I have no squeamishness about wearing another man's face after he has no need of it; I support transplants of all sorts, and when I die I hope my poor organs can be of use to someone. I wish happiness to the farmer in Spain, the woman in Ohio, and Steve Jobs with his new liver. I was tremendously moved to learn Robert Altman had lived for more than 10 years with a transplanted heart. Think of the films he was able to make, the joy he was able to bring. All of that is good. If I should someday need a heart or liver, I will seek one. But this face, however imperfect, is still mine. I own it. I look out of it. I'm rather fond of it.

For some time after taking that "final photo" of myself, I avoided looking in mirrors. I knew the first operation had gotten the cancer but the reconstruction had failed. I vaguely knew what I must look like, but I didn't want to know. I was still inside, right here, in my head looking out, and in my mind I still had the same face. I could even feel sensations in places I no longer possessed--the "ghost limb" phenomenon.

How did I know I'm in my head? How do any of us know? That's where my brain lives, and where my eyes sit. I am not in my chest, my hand, or my foot. I live in here, and operate all the rest like Iron Man. And in here, I still imagine the same face, no matter what you see.

Of course eventually I looked in mirrors, and grew to accept my new appearance. After the first surgery it looked...well, better than it does now. After the second surgery, Chaz said I looked pretty good. There was a vein running beneath my chin that carried a blood supply from one side of the jaw to the other. The surgeon showed my nurses a simple way to listen to the vein. If it was thrumming, it was working. It thrummed for several days. I could listen. Then it thrummed no more. The transplant broke down and was removed.

For the third surgery, I went to a famous man at a famous hospital in Houston. He labored for hours. My memory was cloudy after my surgeries, but a few days later I clearly remember Chaz holding up a mirror so I could see what looked like an acceptable version of myself. A specialist at the hospital had studied my tongue, professed herself satisfied with its motion, and told me I might even talk again. Things were looking up.

That surgery failed, too. They all failed, I believe, because of radiation damage before the first one. I sensed that my surgeons on all three procedures were personally saddened by the outcomes. I was not just a case for them. Microsurgery is painstaking, long and unimaginably difficult. I imagine the surgeon invests so much of his skill in the process that when a procedure fails, he mourns. I never thought it was their fault.

I've written before about how I've come to terms with my appearance. The best thing that happened to me was a full-page photo in Esquire, showing exactly how I look today. No point in denying it. No way to hide it. Better for it to be out there. You don't like it, that's your problem. I'm happy I don't look worse. I made a simple decision to just get on with life. I was a writer, so I was lucky. There was no question I would continue reviewing movies. And when I started writing this blog, it gave me even more focus, feedback, satisfaction. I plunged into it with sometimes desperate concentration. I wrote, therefore I lived. Another surgical attempt was proposed, but I said no. Enough is enough. I would look the way I looked, and express myself in print, and I would be content.

But then something came up. After the end of my involvement with "At the Movies," Chaz and I began planning to produce a new movie review program, true to the original values of Siskel and Ebert. We are more deeply involved in that than ever, which is all I want to say about it. Obviously I couldn't be a regular in the balcony. The show will feature other critics. Yet I wanted to be associated in some way. Cereproc, the software company in Edinburgh, is creating a computer voice out of original voice recordings of mine. That's coming along nicely. I began thinking I could perhaps do a segment on the show, a commentary or a DVD review. Maybe a film festival report. Maybe podcasts.

Sure I could, but how would I look? Being realistic, I believe TV viewers have a limited eagerness to gaze upon my face. One day Good Doctor Pelzer introduced me to Dr. David J. Reisberg, a professor of craniofacial medicine at the University of Illinois in Chicago. He proposed a prosthesis that would improve the appearance of my face. I told him, "Hell, Doc, everybody knows it's messed up. I could just wear a false beard." He smiled, said he recommended moving in another direction, and took a 3D photograph of my face. This was a rare case where 2D would not have been preferable.

Then he introduced me to David Rotter, orthotic and prosthetic director of Scheck & Siress, a company specializing in prostheses. David designed a device intended to compensate for my missing parts, and called in Julie Jordan Brown, a Milwaukee anaplastologist. I learned some new words during this adventure. They made a mold of my face and she began work as a sculptor, shaping a prosthesis which eventually came in two versions, firmer silicone and softer silicone. The two of them spent hours, working from old photos and a bust of myself an art student once made as a class project. Julie and David were working together as artists. They both had great skill and empathy. In the middle of this period, David flew to Haiti to fit some prosthetic limbs for children who had lost theirs.

In theory their prosthesis will blend with my face, and people won't easily detect it. I won't wear it all the time, but it will be useful for the television show. I'd rather viewers were thinking about my opinions than my chin.
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Here is the New Scientist article.

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In advance of this summer's G-20 summit in Toronto this June, today Mission Blue called on the G-20 nations to halt the growth of worldwide fishing subsidies.

In a letter delivered to Stephen Harper, prime minister of Canada, 67 participants in Mission Blue share their grave concern about the state of the world's fisheries, and point to government subsidies as a leading cause of overfishing by pushing fleets to fish longer, deeper and farther away.

Mission Blue participants Dr. Sylvia Earle, Chris Anderson, Andrew Sharpless, Leonardo DiCaprio, Glenn Close, Edward Norton, Chevy Chase, Mike deGruy, Bill Joy, Edith Widder, Jacqueline Novogratz, Fisher Stevens, Celine Cousteau, Jake Eberts and Daniel Pauly all signed the letter, which grew out of an onboard effort led by Oceana CEO Andy Sharpless. Governments are paying companies to overfish our oceans, says Sharpless, the head of Mission Blue's working group on fishing subsidies. It's taxpayer-financed ocean depletion, and it's crazy. Cutting government subsidies that produce overcapacity in the world's fishing fleets is the silver bullet to restoring our world's fisheries.

Read the full press release here >>

Download the letter (PDF) >>

This is a golden age for film criticism. Never before have more critics written more or better words for more readers about more films. But already you are ahead of me, and know this is because of the internet.

Twenty years ago a good-sized city might have contained a dozen people making a living from writing about films, and for half of them the salary might have been adequate to raise a family. Today that city might contain hundreds, although (the Catch-22) not more than one or two are making a living.

Film criticism is still a profession, but it's no longer an occupation. You can't make any money at it. This provides an opportunity for those who care about movies and enjoy expressing themselves. Anyone with access to a computer need only to use free blogware and set up in business.

Countless others write long and often expert posts on such sites as IMDb, Amazon, Rotten Tomatoes and in the comment threads of blogs such as this one.

Sean P. Means, my friend at the Salt Lake Tribune, has been compiling a dreary list of movie critics who have lost their jobs. Does anyone compile a list of first-rank critics now active on the internet? I suspect there are 20 or 30 for every name on Sean's list; some of them in fact, are on Sean's list. I'm discovering new ones every week. The world wide web is an enormous bushel, and you can hide a lot of lights under it.

Long ago, when this transition was first taking shape, I came across a young man named James Berardinelli, who had started reviewing films online from somewhere in New Jersey. We corresponded, and I found he was in his 20s, had a job as an engineer, a passion for film, and long evenings to fill because of a loss in his life. He said he traveled to New York or Philadelphia to see screenings or attend theaters. He was extraordinarily self-disciplined, and wrote more reviews than most "full time" critics. He began to attract attention.

Today, by some measures, Berardinelli is among the half dozen most-read critics in the world. He still works as an engineer. His site doesn't support him. The studios and other industry advertisers don't give a damn about film criticism, preferring to direct most of their online ad budgets to celebrity and gossip sites. Well, Jim has never made a living from his site, so he's used to that. He told me once his Amazon resale commissions helped to offset his out-of-pocket costs.

I knew from finding links on IMDb, MRQE, Metacritic, RT, MRI and other conglomerators that there many were good critics in the world. They were only the tip of the iceberg. When I started this blog two years ago, I decided to personally approve the comments because I didn't want my site to enable the subliterate goon squads infesting so many comment threads. I've received more than 600,000 comments so far, and not even 400 of them have been worthless. Goons don't bother, but intelligent posts abhor a vacuum.

I savored some of the comments. I looked forward to the next posts of their authors. I began to realize they were from all over. Not just America, but dozens of nations. They linked to their blogs, and I discovered a world of film criticism that thrived below the radar. These writers are never linked by the conglomerators, but one of their reviews might be better than anything linked on IMDb--and I include my own work. The conglomerators have little curiosity and limited quality control. I've gone to linked "reviews" on IMDb that consisted of a one-paragraph synopsis written from a trailer.

The sites link mostly to North American sources, with a few reviews from the UK, Australia, Ireland and so on. IMDb to its credit has a few links to France, Italy, Germany, Scandinavia, but in the local languages. Well of course they're in the local languages. But English is a de facto international language, and the writers I found through my blog not only write in English, but in elegant English.

Last fall I finally surrendered and joined Twitter. Ah, that's a story in itself. Sifting and following and unfollowing, I compiled an assortment of other Tweeters who met only one criteria: I considered them worth my time. If I clicked on their avatars, often they linked to blogs. Now I was truly astonished. I found them writing on all possible topics, and they were often more evocative and gripping than the usual mainstream sources. Most of these bloggers wrote for the joy of writing, because they wanted to and had something to say. What more do you want?

Eventually I recruited some of my foreign critics to contribute guest reviews to my site. They became the Far-Flung Correspondents. A week ago at Ebertfest, every single one of them attended (one was delayed by the volcano, but not defeated). They became the defining element of the 12th annual festival, appearing on panels, joining in Q&As, mixing at parties, simply sitting in the audience and chatting with those around them. They were from Egypt, Turkey, the Philippines, Mexico, South Korea. There were Americans of Pakistani and British origins. A Chinese-Canadian. I knew how well they wrote. That's how I found them.

Here's an interesting footnote. They paid for their own transportation. In other words, they had income that didn't depend on movie criticism. I had two lawyers, a city administrator, an I.T. expert, two students, an international marketing consultant, a university teacher. I enjoy Ebertfest beyond all measure, but they made this year's very special. Their transforming presence was possible because of the internet and discoveries I made through my blog.

I am obviously approaching the end of my own career. April 1 was my 42nd anniversary at the Chicago Sun-Times. I wouldn't bet on either one of us making it to 50. But the internet has transformed me and is transforming the Sun-Times. In the vast sea of the internet, readers need brands to help them navigate. The Chicago Sun-Times is a successful brand. I prefer the word "title," or, hey, even "newspaper," but "brand" has replaced "name," just as "market" has replaced "city." When TV people tell me "I came here from the Atlanta market," I keep my thoughts to myself.

Yes, I'm sad that traditional newspapers have come upon hard times, and traditional print venues for film criticism are disappearing. I thank God I got into journalism at 16, that I edited pages over turtles in the print shops of hot lead operations, that I felt the rumble of the building when the presses started to roar, that I worked beside reporters who had a hat on their head, a cigar in their teeth, a bottle in their drawer, and shouted "BOY!" when they needed a copy kid. All that belongs to the past in the same way as horse-mounted cavalry and India clipper ships.

But I'm feeling good these days. I love movies, and I love writing about them and reading about them. I feel like part of a truly World Wide Web (and what a magical term that is--worthy of science fiction). I know good movies are valued everywhere, and good writing. Michael Caine loves to say "Not many people know that." I know secrets not everybody knows, one of which is that a large part of the future of literary English centers on the Indian subcontinent.

Another thing not everybody knows is that some of the best critical writing on the web can found in seemingly specialist sites, devoted to science fiction, film noir, animation, horror, silent films, anime and so on. And video games, whether or not they're Art :). I haven't even mentioned drama, classical music, architecture, dance, photography, painting and on and on. Great critics have been and are being developed. They mostly aren't making money, but now they have limitless outlets, and not long ago there were a handful.

Recently a friend of mine sent an e-mail to several movie critics. He was Jeff Shannon of Seattle, a good critic who has been in a wheelchair since an accident in youth.

"Guys," he said, "I've been asked to provide career advice to a young disabled college student who wants to pursue a career as a film critic. I'm not one to sugar-coat reality, so my immediate advice for him would be to enjoy film criticism/appreciation through blogging and possibly attempting to write books about films, etc. In all sincerity I can't advise the kid to pursue this career under present circumstances. From my perspective as someone who had various highs and lows in the job since 1984, I'd feel like I was doing the kid a disservice if I told him he could make a decent living at it. I just don't see that happening for anyone apart from the upper-echelon critics who've been established for years or decades (and recent cutbacks at Variety prove that even the "A-list" critics are under siege).

"So, in all sincerity and honesty, do you think I should encourage the kid to follow his passion (which is what I would normally do), or give him a hard dose of reality? Maybe he could consider other work in the film-biz that holds more potential?"

The best response to this question came from my hero David Bordwell, who is the most knowledgeable film critic in America. I won't even get an argument about that. David and his wife Kristin Thompson, herself on the topmost shelf, have published many invaluable books, including textbooks few film students fail to use. These textbooks are extraordinary above all because they are books, written in classical English prose and a great pleasure to read. Now David and Kristin have transformed their own careers with the best single movie blog on the web. After distinguished careers as much-published writers, it's as if the internet allowed them to unleash their real energy.

Here's what David wrote back: "Last year I moderated an Ebertfest panel consisting of a dozen or so critics. A student from the audience said he wanted to be a critic too. Instead of advising him to get into a more financially rewarding form of endeavor, like selling consumer electronics off the back of a truck, the panelists encouraged him. This form of altruism, in which you help people to become your competitor, is alarmingly common in the arts.

"A moderator doesn't get to talk much, so I couldn't respond. What I wanted to say was: Forget about becoming a film critic. Become an intellectual, a person to whom ideas matter. Read in history, science, politics, and the arts generally. Develop your own ideas, and see what sparks they strike in relation to films."

Yes! This is the best possible advice. I tell young students: Take film courses, certainly. But cover the liberal arts. Take English literature, drama, art, music, and the areas Bordwell lists. Learn something about science and math. A physical anthropology course was my introduction to the theory of evolution, which is an opening to all of modern science. Don't train for a career--train for a life. The career will take care of itself, and give you more satisfaction than a surrender to corporate or professional bureaucracy. If you make careers in that world, you will be more successful because your education was not narrow.

What the internet is creating is a class of literate, gifted amateur writers, in an old tradition. Like Trollope, who was a British Post official all his working life, they write for love and because they must. Like Rohinton Mistry, a banking executive, or Wallace Stevens, an insurance executive, or Edmund Wilson, who spent his most productive years sitting in his big stone house in upstate New York and writing about what he damned well pleased. Samuel Pepys, who wrote the greatest diary in the language, was a high officials in the British Admiralty. Many people can write well and yearn to, but they are not content, like Pepys, for their work to go unread. A blog on the internet gives them a place to publish. Maybe they don't get a lot of visits, but it's out there. As a young women in San Francisco, Pauline Kael wrote the notes for screenings of great films, and did a little free-lancing. If she'd had a blog, no telling what she might have written during those years.

At this year's Ebertfest, Chaz and I hosted a "meet and greet" for the Correspondents and Ebert Club members. One man in his early 20s looked somehow familiar. I discovered this was Homer, who I met as a kid on an Ebert & Roper Film Festival at Sea a decade ago. He said he'd just graduated college. We asked him what he had studied.

"English literature," he said, "because that's what you told me to take, instead of locking into a career path."

What are you doing now?

"I'm in law school."

Then Homer said words of the greatest significance: "I'm trying to figure out what I can do with that."

That's what an education is for. That's what life is for. That's the discovery made by these extraordinary writers I've found on the World Wide Web. Find out all you can, and see what you can do with it.
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The photographs are of internet writers I admire. I mention no names because I would have felt bad forgetting someone. Many of the photos look strange because they're avatars. That's the spirit.
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I found the comic book cover used at the top at OmniBrain.
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Where it all began: My entry the Blogs of my Blog.
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Over at Newsweek, our favorite movie critic Roger Ebert rips into 3D technology and makes us want to boycott every Avatar sequel James Cameron can come up with:

3-D is a waste of a perfectly good dimension. Hollywood's current crazy stampede toward it is suicidal. It adds nothing essential to the moviegoing experience. For some, it is an annoying distraction. For others, it creates nausea and headaches. It is driven largely to sell expensive projection equipment and add a $5 to $7.50 surcharge on already expensive movie tickets. Its image is noticeably darker than standard 2-D. It is unsuitable for grown-up films of any seriousness. It limits the freedom of directors to make films as they choose. For moviegoers in the PG-13 and R ranges, it only rarely provides an experience worth paying a premium for.

Read more at Newsweek >

Join the conversation about this story

See Also:

• How To Watch The Masters In 3D
• I Just Saw The Masters In 3D And It Was Awesome
• 3D Movie Wars Get Ugly

Roger Ebert has mentioned his opinion on video games before, but, as he says I have declined all opportunities to enlarge upon it or defend it. That has changed, now that the movie critic has published his response to Kellee Santiago's Games Are Art TED talk here, on the Chicago Sun-Times website.

I found that Ebert spent most of his time refuting her arguments point by point, and did not build a compelling argument of his own. While I could go through his essay point by point refuting arguments, I was hoping to keep my blood pressure to a manageable level now that the Great Kick-Ass Hype Tsunami of 2010 has finally come to a close, and besides that, I've always found that refuting someone in great detail without presenting a better founded argument of your own to be a little bankrupt of purpose.

Definitions

Ebert concedes that playing with the definition of art allows a person to frame the X is art argument any way they like, but a few paragraphs later says that a game must have rules, points, objectives, and an outcome and must be something that you can win, effectively playing the You say X is art? I say X is not a game game.

Research

Santiago mentions three games-as-art examples in detail (experimental game Waco Resurrection, Braid, and Flower). Ebert dismisses each one based on brief videos of gameplay and her words describing them. Roger Ebert is a sophisticated consumer of media, an intellectual, and a critical thinker, and so I feel embarrassed to have to point this out: watching some gameplay footage and having someone explain the game's basic concept to you is not a substitute for the experience of playing the game.

I'm pretty sure Roger Ebert would never pass judgment on a song or a painting if he had only heard someone describe it; and he would never review a movie based on reading a few pages of the novelization. I wish he could have the same attitude towards games.

In Conclusion

As a general rule, I feel that people who maintain that games will never be art are taking a very shortsighted view of history, both in looking forwards and looking backwards. There was a time when people in this country rounded up comic books and burned them in huge bonfires because they thought that they lead to juvenile delinquency and would keep children from learning to read. As Santiago points out in her talk, there was also a time when movies where seen the same way. Going back even further, this is also the attitude that upstanding middle class parents in Europe of the 1800's had towards the advent of novelized fiction. That's right. They thought that reading books would keep their young daughters from becoming educated women.

Given the cycles that other firmly established art media have gone through, I feel that saying that a medium less than two generations old is not art is a defensibly precarious stance, especially if you do not clearly lay out your own first hand experience with the medium. Ebert does soften his stance slightly in the essay, though it is still one I would disagree with, by saying: no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.

In Conclusion, the TL;DR Version

Roger Ebert has already formed his opinion, and will allow no personal experience or new data to alter it. If he doesn't want want to try any green eggs and ham, fine, but it would be nice if he would stop telling everyone else that it tastes bad.

Ebert's essay can be found here. Santiago's TED talk is embedded below.

(via Joystiq.)

Hospital confuses living patient wwith a dead one, PWN3T.

Picture by: dunno source Submitted by: Englebert via Fail Uploader

The good news? Now that European vacation is back on! (Via Probably Bad News)

I just woke upto find a total disarray in the storage industry. Things have changed but what changed, why did it change. Nothing matches up to my last remembrance.

Did you know.

Chuck Hollis doesn't work for EMC and is now blogging for TechTarget, his blogs are still so futuristic about the mainframe world and how it will rule the market. Barry Burke on his blog is talking about the benefits of using an iUSPV versus using an iV-Max, and has been named as the top friendliest blogger. Dave Graham is now working for AnandTech.com as the chief editor and has taken over the world by his blogs about the next generation AMD processors.

Storagezilla has now become lonely social media voice at EMC, though these days he talks a lot about how to integrate storage platforms with mobile devices. Stu Miniman still blogs occasionally on his blog but has gone to Chair the FCoE Standards committee and now hates social media. Ed Saipetch decided to turn to industry speaking and is amongst one of the leading speaker for Environment Protection.

Chad Sakac decided it was enough with VCE, vArmy, Private Cloud and these days is working hard to built the next generation weapons systems for the Army, though not everyone within the Army is so excited, Chad with his partnerships is bringing some big momentum. Steve Todd finally decided to get into management and left his long legacy with DG, XAM and programming and now doing something..that he doesn't want to understand. Christopher Kusek (CXI) decided to move out of EMC and is now an activist against animal killing.

Wow for a change.

Vaughn Stewart like Kostadis decided to move out of the Storage Virtualization industry and these days they work together at a furniture startup. To my surprise, Val Bercovici now works with Chad in his advanced weapons systems design. After the great acquisition of NetApp, Dave Hitz has now moved over to 3Par and is helping build the next storage platform. After all, Alex McDonald decided to move to HP and now works along with Calvin Zito on competitive landscape.

Hu Yoshida decides to quit blogging and these days work along with Barry Burke and Barry Whyte and often talk about the iUSPV platform and how it may change the way we do mobile computing. All the 3 of them are working on designing the next genration platform called the iV-U-S. Claus Mikkelsen still occasionally writes about VM's and LPar's on mainframes and still considers HDS platform as the most monolithic architecture, just publically doesn't accept it. David Merrill now gave up on the whole idea of Storage Economics and is typically telling customers, always buy more storage for your future needs, TCO, ROI, ROA are not good examples and measures for Storage acquisition.

Marc Farley and Greg Knieriemen started Infosmack Productions and now run a very successful media business (talk shows, comedy, podcast all storage / virtualization related) competing with the biggest media houses. You can call Marc and Greg at 1-800-INFOSMAC to appear on their podcast. Stephen Foskett is now an end user managing 10 PB's of Storage and turned into the biggest critic of storage and virtualization vendors. Every chance he gets he manages to beat up the vendors. Pretty apparent from his blogs, he hates everyone now

As consolidation hits everywhere and doesn't spare Storage Monkeys, Wikibon, Backup Central, The Register and GestaltIT, which are today called as GestaltMonkeys.com and RegisterBackupWiki.com. The storage analyst are no more just storage analyst and typically use a i in front of their twitter handles, website addresses and company names, showing an integration between storage and i products from Apple.

Many Vmware focused bloggers like Duncan Epping, Eric Siebert, Rodney Haywood, Simon Seagrave, Rich Brambley and Daniel Eason now have a big section on their blogs about HyperV, Xen, Amazon S3 and Azure. Scott Lowe's focus has turned to Cisco and now he writes books on the next generation virtualization engine by Cisco. Marc Farley on the StorageRap blog decides to quit making those Steering Wheel Camera and Check it out videos, but continues to make 3par storage videos while hunting bears.

Storagebod now works for EMC, he has lately become The Seller of Dreams. Storage Architect Chris Evans decided he had enough with the Storage Industry and now works and blogs fulltime for the Wine Industry. Jon Toigo now works at his startup called Toigo Partners on his first project called FunnyToigo designing his first disk array called the OptimizedToigo. Nigel Poulton permanently quits blogging and now works at a Networking startup with Greg Ferro as his boss. GrumpyStorage had enough with the storage industry and now calls himself GrumpyCloud.

Just realized either I am still in my dreams or today is the 1^st of April remember this is a light hearted peak into the storage industry. Which one of these is your favorite.

Related posts:

1. GestaltIT TechFieldDay 2009: Post 3 (The Industry Independent Bloggers Attending)
2. New Updated Blogroll
3. HP TechDay 2009 Day 1: HP StorageWorks Technology
4. GestaltIT TechFieldday 2009: Post 7 (Day 0)
5. HP TechDay 2009 Day 2: HP Converged DataCenters
6. EMC's Unified Platform and Storage Tiering on GESTALTIT.COM

Yes, Chaz and I are still going ahead with our plans for a new movie review program on television. No, Wednesday's cancellation of "At the Movies" hasn't discouraged us. We believe a market still exists for a weekly show where a couple of critics review new movies.

I can't prove it, but I have the feeling that more different people are seeing more different movies than ever before. With the explosion of DVD, Netflix, Red Box, and many forms of Video on Demand,

virtually all movies are easily available to virtually all North American moviegoers. This has created a huge potential audience. When people tell me how many titles they have in their Netflix queues, I reflect that until recent years they'd be telling me how many movies never even played in their town.

I can't reveal details about the talks we're deeply involved in. I can say that the working title was "Roger Ebert presents Fill in Words Here," and that it has now become "Roger Ebert presents At the Movies." Gene Siskel and I started using that title way back in 1980, when we left PBS for Tribune Broadcasting. I can also say the Thumbs will return.

I can also say that we held video tests with several potential hosts two weeks ago in Los Angeles, and know who we will use. We also know we will have a strong web presence. We will go full-tilt New Media: Television, net streaming, cell phone apps, Facebook, Twitter, iPad, the whole enchilada. The disintegration of the old model creates an opening for us. I'm more excited than I would be if we were trying to do the same old same old. I've grown up with the internet. I came aboard back when MCI Mail was the e-mail of choice. I had a forum on CompuServe when it ruled the web. My web site and blog at the Sun-Times site have changed the way I work, and even the way I think. When I lost my speech, I speeded up instead of slowing down.

We'll also go New Cinema. Not just the One Weekend Wonders, although you gotta have 'em, but indie films, foreign films, documentaries, restored classics, the new Herzog, the new Bahrani, the new Almodovar. What's new on Instant Streaming. What great movies should everyone see? Hey, Paramount just announced $1 million for ten $100,000 movies. Those kinds of films. What kind of a real movie lover cares who has the "exclusive" first trailer in the newest extrusion of the "Transformer" franchise? It's time to smarten up.

It isn't only "At the Movies" that died Wednesday. It was whole genre of television. We thought of it as a movie review program. The television industry thought of it as a half-hour weekly syndicated show. Those are shows sold market-by-market and usually placed in a weekend time slot. The first time Siskel and I attended NAPTE, the annual trade show of syndication, there were so many shows they jammed the floor of the Convention Center in New Orleans. Wolfgang Puck flew in to cater private dinners. We were approach by "Fishin' Fever" and asked if we wanted to be Celebrity Guest Anglers.

"At the Movies" was one of the last survivors of half-hour syndication. It didn't fail so much as have its format shot out from beneath it. Don't blame Disney. Don't blame Tony Scott and Michael Phillips, the final co-hosts, critics I admire who still have five months left on the air. Don't blame Ben Mankiewicz. Don't blame my pal Richard Roeper, who didn't fancy following the show in a "new direction." Don't blame the cancer that forced me off the show. Don't even blame Ben Lyons. He was the victim of a mistaken hiring decision.

Blame the fact that five-day-a-week syndicated shows like "Wheel of Fortune" went to six days. Blame the fact that cable TV and the internet have fragmented the audience so much that stations are losing market share no matter what they do. Blame the economy, because many stations would rather sell a crappy half-hour infomercial than program a show they respect. Blame the fact that everything seems to be going to hell in a hand basket.

Chaz and I will produce the show. Yes, I'd like to make occasional appearances on the air. I'm not foolish enough to believe any form of back-and-forth debate is possible, but I could do Great Movies segments, or a wrap-up from Cannes or Toronto. With all the publicity about me "getting my voice back," some people have the idea that a computer program has magically allowed me to speak again. That will never happen. I type, and the words come out. No one can type fast enough for conversational repartee. With the new software from Edinburgh the words will come out sounding like me. That's huge. It will work well on the new show in voice-over narration of TV packages.

There has been a fragmentation of movie watching. Theatrical distribution is now dominated by the big-budget, heavily marketed 3-D of the Week. Such films have a success utterly independent of critics. Like junk food, they're consumed by habit and may be filling but are high in cinematic sugar and fat. The consumers of that product don't think of a movie as an investment of two hours of their lives.

When the New York Times put an interactive Netflix map online, allowing me to search by zip code and see what my neighbors were renting, the top title was "Milk," followed by such as "The Wrester," "Slumdog Millionaire," "Doubt" and "Rachel Getting Married." Think about that. Good movies. "Transformers 2" was nowhere to be seen. ("Milk," in case you're wondering, was first or second in most Chicago zip codes, not just mine.)

Those are the kinds of people who might want to watch a movie review program. Our show will try to reach people who think before they watch a movie, and value their time, and their minds. Does that sound like a pitch? Probably. I think it's also a business plan.

I've written before about my adventures as a movie critic on TV. I've said what I have to say. Was I sad today when "At the Movies" was cancelled? You bet I was. I received a nice phone call from two of the Disney executives in charge, who had been aboard since Day One, and that was a kindness. Week in and week out since 1980, Disney produced a weekly movie review program, and to my certain knowledge never once tried to influence the reviews of any its their movies. When Rich Frank was president of the Disney Studios, at speeches he'd even show video clips of Siskel and I trashing some of his films. I think he felt a certain pride in our independence.

Under all those years under Michael Eisner and Bob Iger, that never changed. We got support. We made friends. It was a long, strange trip for Gene and myself, Richard, Michael, Tony, Ben and Ben and all of our co-hosts. One of the show's guest co-hosts, Kim Morgan, tweeted Wednesday night that it was an "honor" to sit in the chair. I replied, "It was the chair that was honored." Doing that show is harder than it may seem. But I can tell you this: It's every bit as much fun as it looks like.

For years we closed with, "The balcony is closed." Before that it was, "See you at the movies." That's the right note to end on.

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Bill Mitchell / PoynterOnline:
Ebert & Friends Tweak New Online Business Model Roger Ebert and a few hundred of his closest friends and readers are hammering out a new business model for media online. The money involved is small, just $4.99 a year, an amount dwarfed by an appreciation for what the film critic's fans describe