Irina Slutsky covered Macworld as only she can with her humorous coverage of last January’s event.
Layoff Fallout
As more and more companies layoff employees, the flotsam of past marketing efforts like t-shirt schwag heads for the local thrift shop. When a previous Santa Cruz company I worked for imploded, they donated their marketing t-shirts a local shelter. For months I would see street characters wearing their Lutris shirts on Pacific Ave in downtown Santa Cruz.
Now as Microsoft lays off thousands, their shirts are appearing in the Seattle area thrifts.
Crazy Nights in Oakland
It has been noisy with helicopters constantly in the air. The downtown streets started filling up with protesters two nights ago. After a grocery trip, I followed one of the helicopters towards Lake Merritt. I turned down Madison and then at the intersection with 14th St., I saw a dozen police cars, and scores of OPD. Smoke was in the air. A dozen or so bystanders were on the sidewalk. I parked and started to check out the scene. I talked to a street journalist guy with pro Sony headphones and a microphone who was interviewing people to see what was going on. He told me it was that this is where the Fruitvale BART protest ended up and that there was rioting.
I went back to my car and sent out a couple Twitter messages. A bottle crashed to the pavement a few feet from my car. Time to get out!
Helicopters circled the city all night. I checked tv to see if there was any coverage. The local Oakland station? Nope. The only station doing some live coverage before 10PM was KRON. The most news I got was from doing searches for ‘riot’ and ‘Oakland’ on Twitter’s summize.com.
Though there are reasons for the community to be upset about the tragic New Year’s Eve BART shooting, trashing the struggling business of downtown Oakland doesn’t seem to be the answer. The businesses and citizens of Oakland had nothing to do with this incident. There seemed to be an anarchist element that came from out of town that helped create the violence, arson and property damage that happened that night.
It was only two months ago these streets were full of joy and hope after Obama was elected. Now there are boarded windows and burnt cars in the streets.
Blog Being Updated!
My blog is currently being updated. I migrated from Movable Type to WordPress and changed web hosts. Links and images are being updated today so there might be some broken links and missing images!
WWDC 08 Starts Next Week
I’m getting ready for a fun week when Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference starts on Monday. I’ll be following the meetup and drinkup scene via Twitter. BTW, I’m @davebryan.
The Humans!
Going to high school late seventies Santa Cruz, my favorite local band was The Humans. They were a mix of the then emerging New Wave scene with a mix of surf, punk and avant garde theatrics. The first time I saw them was after Devo played a show at the Santa Cruz Civic in 1979. I hung out after the show and got to meetup with Devo so I could show them some pics from their previous Santa Cruz show when they played earlier that year.. While talking to them, they got an invite note from a local band called The Humans that said they were inspired by Devo and that they should come check out their show later that night at JJ’s Pizza over in the East Cliff neighborhood. The guys from Devo and their brother/manager said come on let’s all go!
So me and my younger brother booked out to JJ’s in my Datsun 510 to go hang with Devo and finally get to see The Humans which were getting some considerable buzz at the time. Half an hour later, I’m sitting at a little table with a couple guys from Devo, their manager and a pitcher of beer! I guess those times were a little different.
The Humans came on stage and did a blistering set of punk/new wave music with great surfy guitar licks. I became a big fan of them that night and went to almost every performance they did around the Monterey Bay area. The band was always so cool and friendly to this dorky teenager with his ever present camera around his neck.
Recently I’ve been going through and digitizing some of my favorite old cassette tapes and I found this aircheck tape of Eric Gies and Sterling Storm of The Humans being interviewed on KLRB – the ‘alternative’ progressive FM rock station that broadcasted from the Barnyard in Carmel Valley. Because of this station I was exposed to the Punk revolution, New Wave as well as artists like Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa and anything else weird the DJs felt like playing.
Photo Finishing?
What do you know – just as I upgrade my Flickr photo account to ‘Pro‘, it’s come to my attention that they are censoring users photos.
Blogger, Violet Blue, had her pics ‘snowed over’ to the regular viewer of her account page. What’s strange is there seems to be no rhyme or reason to what gets snowed. The sexytime pictures of her on the floor that my friend Seventeenstars composed? Or maybe the pics of her with some SRL machinery Worldess Workshop Style?
This is all adding up to some bad publicity for Flickr. Maybe theres some room for an edgier, freer (more in the spirit of the Internet) photo sharing site?