Val's blog - thoughts, pictures, ideas

Now that I have blockbuster online, I'm finally catching up to the movies that I've wanted to see. One of the best ones so far has been Layer Cake. The idea of a gangster movie has been tried from many angles, but I found the approach in Layer Cake to be unique, fresh, and intriguing. The ideas of revenge, lust, and corruption add many layers, hahah, to the movie. Sienna Miller's lingerie scene is a big plus. And the alternate endings really expose a hard choice that directors had to make with the conclusion of their story, and I enjoyed getting a glimpse into that thought process. Overall, this movie has been one of the best surprises.

An awesome picture from a great birthday brunch for my mom in Baltimore. I call it - the Elberts.

 

well, it's official. I got used to drinking diet soda to avoid the carbs, but that may have been to no avail.

Check out the report from UT SA that concludes that people who have diet drinks may in fact be gaining more weight.

A response to a great post by sean

Determined by the size of the bust. (hehehe, size of the bust) however, given the points can be counteracted by a qualitative figure in comparing the .com bubble to the current 2.0 boom - the economy is not driven by 2.0 boom as it was by the .com bubble. When was the last time you saw a commercial for digg (a la monster.com)? Either 2.0 boom has not reached the bubble status, or the Entrepreneurs and vc's learned their lesson and are bound to avoid the mistakes from the history.

Over the last two days, I have been all about tracking the elections in US. The exciting news is that there seems to be a change of guard in Congress, so I look forward to new controversies to arrive from newley re-established checks and ballances system in DC.

I was shocked to see the ammount of money that advertisement platroms are raising from funds these days: 40M to spot runner??? http://gigaom.com/2006/10/30/spot-runner/

The figures are remeniscent of the late 90's and the model of advertising is very web 1.0. But maybe there is some substance behind this?

Anyway, there is a lot of money to be made.

Even smaller companies have to fight the the problems of excessive and disruptive nature of meetings. Plaxo, as reported on OM Malik, has adopted a plan to schedule all meetings on Tuesday, and leave the rest of the week meeting free... hooray. As added bonus, management brings in luch and dinner. While I think that Plaxo can get away with such plan, once a company reaches a certain size and geographic diversity, meetings and confrerence calls become harder to manage uniformally.

This evening I was hanging out with my and Carolyn's families and we reached a very interesting realization. Having grown up in Soviet Union before "westernization" my childhood was closely resembling to the childhood of the previous American generation. One visible comparison are photographs. Much like the pictures of kids growing up in America during the 50's and 60's, most of my photographs are in black and white. Color photography was only available for special ocasions, but very rarely. The other interesting parallel involves the electronic diversions. Growing up, my generation was not exposed to Attari/Jaguar/NES or any other console games. I remember playing table fooseball, and thinking that it was the greatest thing in the world. How about TV? Once the iron curtain was lifted, I finally got to see Disney cartoons for the first time. We had a flurry of old russian cartoons, but those hardly stood up to the production quality of what children in the western countries saw. Once again, we were behind.