More on Bill Walsh.  John Madden is on the Bay Area's KCBS every morning at 8:15; this morning he talked at length about the genius.  (Dear KCBS, I wish you had better permalinks for each of the shows.)

Worth watching:  James L. Brooks and Matt Groening on Charlie Rose. (The show's not online as of this posting, but will likely show up soon at that URL.)

The San Francisco Chronicle's Ray Ratto on Bill Walsh; worth quoting at length:

He was also a complex man, well-read, solicitous, and curious about things beyond the 6,400-square-yard box in which he made his living and his reputation. Yet, at his core, he was the prototypical man of combat. He loved boxing, he was an avid reader of books about generals, and believed in the inherent truths of competition. That flew in the face of his reputation, largely unfair, that he was an effete, ethereal poser, not made of true coach's cloth.

Well, truth is he did like to cast the image of the grander thinker, the great conceptual artist, the whistled humanitarian, even the wry comedian. But he was very much a coach, with a coach's eye for skills, both ascendant and waning; for personalities, dominant and compliant; for the separate pieces and the greater whole; for strategies and tactics, for grace and brutishness  --  all the things that separate football from a bar fight. He built, dissembled and rebuilt with cold, remorseless precision, and his ruthlessness did not always sit well with those pointed toward the door.

File under "the web creates unlimited column inches" and "where oh where have the editors gone" and "Q: How much do we love living in the first world? A: This much":  The Washington Post does 746 words on Hillary's cleavage, and Tidbits does 2,200 on something called SafeSleep.  ("Look, it's 2007 and I'm a Mac user; if I can't put my brand new computer to sleep and into its bag in less than 10 seconds, something is seriously wrong." Emphasis mine.)

Recommended: The Mix-Up from Beastie Boys.  From Jason Kirk's Amazon review:  "The Beastie Boys now bring what feels like their emeritus recording, a celebratory instrumental memoir of all of the influences (except punk) that brought them to their secure place among hip-hop's fickle elite."  And yes, they sell it at Starbucks.  In fact, I hope they sell a lot of them at Starbucks.

I'm loving Cringely lately.  From his latest, about the 700mhz spectrum auctions:  "There is, however, an alternative motivation here beyond simple megalomania and corporate self-delusion: Google may actually be playing a game of poker."

I love A.O. Scott's review of The Simspons Movie because he makes absolutely no bones about being an unabashed fan of the series. "Let’s keep things in perspective. 'The Simpsons' is an inexhaustible repository of humor, invention and insight, an achievement without precedent or peer in the history of broadcast television, perhaps the purest distillation of our glories and failings as a nation ever conceived. 'The Simpsons Movie' is, well, a movie."  Worth reading in its entirety.

John Funk riffs on pmarca's post re. working with whales: "When you're a minnow, shouting, threatening, arguing, and getting pride confused with objectives gets you exactly nothing. You'll end up with no deal, chewed up and spat out by the whale...."

Ken Norton, who PMs Google Docs on apps heading into the clouds.

When we launched a new version of Google Docs last month, the passionate response from users (both negative and positive) made it clear that our tool is an essential part of their lives, not just some toy they dabble with occasionally.

Crave (dot cnet dot com) reviews TypePad Mobile, the smartphone app we have for updating your TypePad blog (available for Windows Mobile, Symbian Series 60 and Palm devices).  "TypePad Mobile encourages photojournalism, which is what gives moblogging (I shudder at this every time) its edge."

« June 2007   August 2007 »

(un)filtered is a product of michael sippey. there are older things at sippey.typepad.com/filtered, with archives back to 2003, and even older things at stating the obvious.