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(COOLLIST) Busy Times, New Opportunitites
Hello, (CL)ers. This list has had some growth recently, with four or
five people being added in the last month. I like that. I even got
an offer to copy some video by someone who had done a web search and
found my description of the William Shatner/Rocket Man video that we
had shown on _The Show With No Name_.
Things are quite busy here.
I went to a presentation last Tuesday by Microsoft. It was very cool
in two ways. First, it was a live simulcast to 50 movie theatres
around the continent. I was in a room with 400 other central Texas
webheads, but the total group mind involved was closer to 20,000.
Second, Microsoft has really turned around from the monstrosity I read
about in Cringly's _Accidental Empires_. It's not a 180, more like a
132... but its something. I've seen them participating in the
standards committees I'm on. I've seen almost all of their net tools
having public beta periods with many of them being free. I use their
newsgroups (open technology) where real dev team members answer
questions about their products. They really seem to be an exciting
company right now. I hope this momentum doesn't go away. A lot of it
is due to the threat of Netscape. There is a lot of positive energy
coming from them, so lets take advantage of that.
Another thing from the conference was a cool 2-CD set filled with neat
stuff. I've got Windows NT 4.0 beta 2, I've got a newer Internet
Explorer, I've got lots of clip art, I've got FrontPage, and I've got
many other neat things. I've already made a few minor changes to my
web space due to the conference. My pages have the RSAC voluntary
PICS ratings on them now. I'm about to add a sitemap for Nashville --
there alpha version of a complete integration between Internet
Explorer and Windows Explorer. I'm probably going to do some subtle
things with animated GIFs soon, and I'll be using ActiveX on a demo
page in order to get more free stuff (see
http://www.microsoft.com/sitebuilder/).
So, what else is there?
After I finish writing this, I'm going to head out with my camera and
my note-pad and do some shooting for (CL)TV #3. I need to get some
footage of cable TV plant equipment for my hacker segment. This
episode will also feature Olympic-themed video games from the classic
era, an interview with TV star Echo the Bunny, "Broccoli-woccoli!",
and original and traditional MOD music. I'll use a little Pylon too.
I hope to do most of the editing with equipment I now have at
home... I'm developing quite a menagerie of video tools, and I'm about
to order a couple more items that will put me in top form.
Anyway, to leave you with a humorous note, I'll explain why my
precious dwarf rabbit. Echo, is a TV star. Last week, on _The Show
With No Name_, we had her introduce all the clips we were showing -- a
close up of her with Charlie off camera doing a saccharine-sweet voice
over line like "Here is the trailer for the Al Pacino film
_Scarface_." It went over quite well.
Peace and love to all!
--
Benjamin L. Combee (combee@techwood.org) <URL:http://www.yak.net/combee/>
that public-access-TV-making, video-game-collecting, cryptography-pushing,
World-Wide-Web-explaining, fem-music-loving, bad-pun-creating guy in Austin
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