Join Richard Giles, special guest Phillip Molly Malone and I while we rant about:
- The Pentagon 9/11 video doesn’t impress
- Newspaper sales on decline
- AOL UnCut coming coon, powered by Video Egg
- Listen to my 11/2005 interview with Video Egg’s CEO Kevin Sladek here
- John Lennon podcast
- Flickr is now in gamma
- The Internation Portable Film Festivel
- Skype is still growing
Don’t forget to build up Cam’s whuffie by clicking on this:
You can say nice things about Rich here.
Check out the new shows on TPN.
And participate in the conversation by leaving us a message!!!
Opening Theme Song: “Save Me” by The Napoleon Blown Aparts, America’s baddest rock n’ roll band!
Did you know G’Day World was the very first Australian podcast?
Hi Cameron
You may remember my message to you about two weeks ago.
I don’t know if this is of any help. but i noticed that your opml feed for all channels would not load in feeddemon or at least i could not get it to do so. So i got feedyes to make one up here is the link if of any use to you as a time saver
http://www.feedyes.com/feedshow.php?f=xqfJspMvK7h7fIR0
Funny that Friedman thinks that India’s offshoring was started during the dotcom burst. I was working for IT trade association in 2000 and remember a number of India IT service companies actively working in the States. Perhaps it was just they had the fortune of having the prepared mind when the bubble burst 😉
I haven’t had a chance to read Friedman’s book yet, but considering how much I enjoyed his ‘From Beirut to Jerusalem’ and the ‘Lexus and the Olive Tree’ I’ll give it a read. I think domesticly his US thoughts are off, but often his International opinions are quite astute. It’s just a shame the NY Times put him behind a pay wall, I never read him anymore.
Cam:
I cannot even wait until leaving my day job to respond to the discussion on show 124 about the conspiracy theories.
On September 11, 2001, I was in my office at the Washington Navy Yard. My organization provided IT support to a number of other Navy headquarters offices around the DC area including the Navy Annex and the Pentagon. The Navy Annex is located on a hill between the Arlington National Cemetery and I-395 directly overlooking the west side of the Pentagon. You can find it on Google Earth, I am pretty sure.
One of my colleagues came rushing by my office to tell me of the initial reports from New York. While we were scrounging around for some wire to use for an antenna (we had a television set for video demos but no cable or normal TV reception) he received a cell phone call from one of his technicians. (He was the operations manager.) The man was on a trouble call at the Annex and had just parked his car in the front parking lot, where there is an excellent view of the west side of the Pentagon.
He was calling to tell us that as he got out of his car, he saw a large plane fly very low over his head and hit the Pentagon. For several hours, there were assorted reports on the news media about a “small” plane impact, but we knew those reports would be found to be false.
Two of my friends crawled out of the rubble. The week before the event, I had met a young lieutenant in my Naval War College night class whose job was standing watch in the Navy Command Center – he did not come back to class because he did not make it out. A number of my immediate colleagues were assigned the task of helping to restore IT services to the people whose offices had been destroyed. I personally saw some of the debris and have seen hundreds of photos showing all kinds of parts of the plane.
In other words, despite my negative opinions about some of the responses to the event, there is NO doubt in my mind that the conspiracy theories are dead wrong.
All the best,
Rod
Thomas, perhaps I didn’t accurately state his position – I tend to riff loosely. 🙂
I don’t think TF is suggesting the dot com crash STARTED the Indian outsourcing movement, just that it ACCELERATED it, by providing lots of dark fibre up for fire sale, and pushing IT costs down, forcing CIOs to look offshore for cheaper resources.
Rod
That’s awesome. This is EXACTLY why blogs, podcasts, and the conversations that ensue are a fantastic medium for communication. This type of feedback and discussion has to occur so that EVERYONE knows the truth, not speculate.
Cheers for the info.
Rich
Just listened to this show (am running behind again) and just wondered if Cam has thought through the comments about Apple stuff being a ‘rip-off’ and that you can have 4 windows machines for the same price. It’s just not true. Sure you could sell a new BMW and buy a new KIA (or more than one) and pocket a lot of change but if you wanted a comparable car to the BMW’s quality and performance then you are going to have to pay something like the same money. See here for a laptop with specs close to the Core Duo 15″ MacBook Pro.
Are Apple packages dearer? Yes absolutely.
Are they much dearer for the same type of product? No it’s marginal and if you want stuff like built in iLife, XCode etc etc then you might even think it was worth the hundreds more. Plenty of people would not think that and all power to them.
If your wife wants a MacBook and instead you buy her an aneamic $!,000 laptop instead of a $3,500 comparable windows machine then you are making very different decisions. Maybe cheap and cheerful is the right option but quality costs whatever the company.
Jan, first of all, if you think that I think through ANYTHING I say on the show, you’ve obviously got the wrong guy.
Now, about Apple. OH COME ON. You ain’t selling that one, sunshine. The BMW v KIA comparison is dodgy as. Let’s leave laptops out, cuz I can’t go build a laptop from scratch yet. But if I want to build a PC from components to match the spec of a Mac G5, I can do it for about half the sticker price of the Mac, and WinXP comes with a bunch of free apps too these days. Movie Maker, ummm… notepad, etc…
Furthermore, if I buy a PC and then a year later I want to upgrade it, for a small amount of money I can upgrade the mobo, the chipset, graphics cards, etc, buying it all from a heavily populated aftermarket. Can I do that with Apple?
Now… I still want a couple of Macs. Because they are sexy. But I’m not kidding myself that I’m not getting skinned alive by Cupertino. Same as my iPod. I could get a cheaper mp3 player that does exactly the same thing. But would it be as sexy? no.
So… I’m paying a margin, not for quality, but for SEXY. And that’s ok. But lets not kid ourselves.
Rod, ever thought that the guy who told you he saw the plane was part of a carefully architected government conspiracy?????
Okay, so maybe it was a plane. Maybe there was wreckage. But no footage of wreckage has ever been shown publically. Neither has clear footage of the plane. SO I think it’s still fair to ask questions. Our job is not to believe everything we are told, ESPECIALLY by your current White House. Our job is to question, to probe. The price of freedom is vigilance.
Why do you think the pictures of the plane parts you saw havent been shown publically?
Hi Cameron,
Not sure whether Apple machines involve being ‘skinned alive’, I’d say more like tipping the waiter 12.5% for good service (like bluetooth that comes built in and works first time every time without a lost morning trying to set it up in PC world as you and I have both experienced).
On the other hand if you are considering an Apple purchase you MUST get extra RAM (the standard 256Mb’s a joke) and have a long look around at 3rd party stuff if you want to save some money to spend on better things.
Jan, after all the complaints I’ve been getting lately from friends with Macs, like “the latest version for Skype or so-and-so new application doesn’t run on a Mac”, you have to wonder if you are tipping the waiter for giving you the table near the toilet.
But yeah, I take the point that with a Mac you are supposedly getting something that works together more seamlessly than the Window environment often does. I’ve been thinking more about your BMW analogy. I’m a BMW driver and a couple of years ago I made the mistake of listening to a car salesmen who told me an Audi was just as good. To cut a long story short – I went back to the BMW with my next car. BMW’s just work. I like knowing my car isn’t going to be in the shop every other month because some small part stopped working. I don’t get that experience with my PC, BUT… there are those times, as you say, when I spend WAY TOO MUCH TIME trying to make simple things happen. If I was convinced that a Mac would save me that frustration, I might be convinced to pay the extra money for one.
On the other hand… I know a lot about how to make a PC work these days. I know nothing about cars.
Rod, I’ve been watching an interesting documentary today called “Confronting The Evidence” (https://secure.reopen911.org/freedvd.php) that my neighbour gave me and there’s a section that deals with the Pentagon that I’d be interested in your opinon on.
This photo is pretty interesting:
http://69.57.144.30/ats/pentagon757/Pentagon3.jpg
This is apparently a photo of the section of the Pentagon where the Boeing 757 supposedly entered. Where is the hole?
btw, in answer to my above question, i just read through this site (http://www.abovetopsecret.com/pages/911_pentagon_757_plane_evidence.html )
which attempst to confound the “conspiacy theorists” but, even after reading through that, I still don’t get how a plane that size slipped into a hole that size. Do you?
Cam:
I looked at the site you linked to. It provides photos similar to the ones that I saw and provides a pretty fair layman’s language explanation of the debris patterns, the hole size, and solid evidence showing that the debris came from a commercial aircraft the size of a Boeing 757.
I am not sure I understand your questions unless they stem from your distrust of anything coming from the American military.
Please remember one very important thing – our politicians and our service people are not always aligned.
BTW – I have to make a minor correction to my initial comment. I made a few phone calls to some of the colleagues that I had on September 11. (All of us are working in different offices now.)
The technician that saw the plane was in the Pentagon South parking area, not the Navy Annex. He would have had a very similar view except that the plane would have been in front of him instead of over his head.
The rest of the comment stands as is.
well I’m not convinced with that story. I want to see the Mythbusters drive a 757 through a reinforced concrete wall and see what kind of hole is made!
Cam, dead link on your picture of the whole at the Pentagon. As I understood it at the time and don’t have the time to read it all the plane hit the ground just before the building and then smashed the wall, hence the whole it’s size. Not sure of the source, need to back read on that.
On your Conspiracy vent, I don’t think them complete nutters, but rather I have been working on a idea that conspiracy theories as modern myths. That media allows such theories to flurish, without outright support, because it drives fear and media sales. Not that this is intentionally done, but a side effect of the modern system. Not so long ago it
was…
*Thunder* The Gods must be angry.
Now it is Clinton killed Vince Foster or Bush is a puppet. (I also think it’s not just a rightwing to dismiss such people the Vince Foster thing was very popular in DC a few years ago, I know someone who took a tour for it)
While Occam’s Razor is the easiest answer, but on a level they NEED the myth to understand their role in the world. Just as we need God to make sense of thunder when we lived in caves. Having their grand control theory that there is evil behind a story gives explaination to the world for some people.
I think it’s true of a lot of stories, Joseph Campbell’s writtings have kind of driven this thought in me, worth checking out if you haven’t read his stuff.
Thomas, yeah I’ve read most of Campbell’s books and I recently re-watched the awesome Bill Moyer’s interviews with him. Brilliant.
Re the link: yeah apparently the site doesn’t allow image linking! But you can read it all here:
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/pages/911_pentagon_757_plane_evidence.html
Rod, you say “our politicians and our service people are not always aligned” but your service people seem willing to march off and invade countries at any opportunity provided by your politicians, so I’m finding that hard to believe. When was the last time the US military as a whole said “I’m sorry Mr President but we’re not going to do that, it’s immoral.” ???
I’ve re-read through that site I just linked to and I still don’t get how a 757 goes through a wall and leaves a tiny hole. Okay – perhaps the wings and tail sheared off when they hit the wall and didn’t damage it – where were they though? They weren’t obvious in the wreckage and there weren’t any photos of them as far as I could see.
It’s not that I have a “distrust of anything coming from the American military”… okay, yes I do. I distrust anything that comes from the government or the military. And I believe it is the responsibility of all of us to distrust it and to ask lots of questions, especially when something they are telling us doesn’t make sense.