Laurie :) http://www.fuzz.com/fan/Laurie Sat, 22 Nov 2008 08:36:10 -0800 Fuzz.com en http://www.fuzz.com/ http://www.fuzz.com/_/images/logo/blimp.png http://www.fuzz.com/fan/Laurie/blog/entry/I-hardly-ever-write-anything-in-here http://www.fuzz.com/fan/Laurie/blog/entry/I-hardly-ever-write-anything-in-here#comments
I just started that new job a little over a month ago (month and a half, I think) and I really feel like I have just screwed up time after time. A lot of people really think I am doing well, which really shocks me cause if this is doing well, wtf is messing up? I made the same mistake not once but twice! I can't believe it, I am such an anal retentive person, it blows my mind to think I didn't learn it enough the first time. I mean, both times I missed, like completely missed an entire wave of a project, not a small oversight, and certainly not a quick easy fix. Both times I was able to still meet the deadlines, only due to having amazing coworkers that completely understand fucking up and trying to quietly fix the big mess. Either I am truly amazing at covering up my ackward fumblings of a job I know nothing about, or I really have some awesome guardian angels helping me out a lot. I am just looking forward to taking a little road trip to see a certain fuzz band in Milwaukee (woo-hoo!).

Laurie :)]]> Wed, 05 Sep 2007 17:11:15 -0700 http://www.fuzz.com/fan/Laurie/blog/entry/I-hardly-ever-write-anything-in-here http://www.fuzz.com/fan/Laurie/blog/entry/A-window-into-my-afternoon-this-is-funny http://www.fuzz.com/fan/Laurie/blog/entry/A-window-into-my-afternoon-this-is-funny#comments Sat, 21 Jul 2007 17:15:32 -0700 http://www.fuzz.com/fan/Laurie/blog/entry/A-window-into-my-afternoon-this-is-funny http://www.fuzz.com/fan/Laurie/blog/entry/Long-read-but-interesting http://www.fuzz.com/fan/Laurie/blog/entry/Long-read-but-interesting#comments
"Update on Joe Arpaio - TO THOSE OF YOU NOT FAMILIAR WITH JOE ARPAIO HE IS THE MARICOPA ARIZONA COUNTY SHERIFF AND HE KEEPS GETTING ELECTED OVER AND OVER THIS IS ONE OF THE REASONS WHY: Sheriff Joe Arpaio (in Arizona ) who created the "tent city jail": He has jail meals down to 40 cents a serving and charges the inmates for them. He stopped smoking and porno magazines in the jails. Took away their weights. Cut off all but "G" movies. He started chain gangs so the inmates could do free work on county and city projects. Then he started chain gangs for women so he wouldn't get sued for discrimination. He took away cable TV until he found out there was a federal court order that required cable TV for jails so he hooked up the cable TV again with only the Disney channel and the weather channel. When asked why the weather channel he replied, so they will know how hot it's gonna be while they are working on my chain gangs. He cut off coffee since it has zero nutritional value. When the inmates complained, he told them, "This isn't the Ritz/Carlton -- If you don't like it, don't come back." He bought Newt Gingrich's lecture series on tape that he pipes into the jails. When asked by a reporter if he had any lecture series by a Democrat, he replied that a democratic lecture series might explain why a lot of the inmates were in his jails in the first place. More on the Arizona Sheriff: With temperatures being even hotter than usual in Phoenix (116 degrees just set a new record), the Associated Press reports: About 2,000 inmates living in a barbed-wire-surrounded tent encampment at the Maricopa County Jail have been given permission to strip down to their government-issued pink boxer shorts. On Wednesday, hundreds of men wearing boxers were either curled up on their bunk beds or chatted in the tents, which reached 138 degrees inside the week before. Many were also swathed in wet, pink towels as sweat collected on their chests and dripped down to their pink socks. "It feels like we are in a furnace," said James Zanzot, an inmate who has lived in the tents for 1 year . "It's inhumane." Joe Arpaio, the tough-guy sheriff who created the tent city and long ago started making his prisoners wear pink, and eat bologna sandwiches, is not one bit sympathetic. He said Wednesday that he told all of the inmates: "It's 120 degrees in Iraq and our soldiers are living in tents too, and they have to wear full battle gear, but they didn't commit any crimes, so shut your damned mouths!" Way to go, Sheriff! Maybe if all prisons were like this one there would be a lot less crime and/or repeat offenders. Criminals should be punished for their crimes - not live in luxury until it's time for their parole, only to go out and commit another crime so they can get back in to live on taxpayers' money and enjoy things taxpayers can't afford to have for themselves."

Although I don't agree that prison is a walk in the park so to speak, I do think it needs to be a lot tougher. Maybe this guy is onto something...... or maybe I am showing a bit of my utter disgust with the justice system lately.]]> Tue, 17 Jul 2007 15:51:07 -0700 http://www.fuzz.com/fan/Laurie/blog/entry/Long-read-but-interesting http://www.fuzz.com/fan/Laurie/blog/entry/news-article-from-google-news-I-just-read http://www.fuzz.com/fan/Laurie/blog/entry/news-article-from-google-news-I-just-read#comments By ETHAN SMITH

The music industry is so desperate for new ways to make money that a Silicon Valley start-up is trying a counterintuitive approach: giving the music away as a way to jump-start sales.

Starting today, visitors to Palo Alto-based Lala Media Inc.'s Lala.com Web site will be able to listen for free on their computers to the digital catalog of Warner Music Group Corp. and hundreds of smaller independent music companies. Lala executives say they are working to secure licenses with the other three major music companies.

It's like a subscription music service, but without the monthly subscription fee. Lala is betting that in return for getting all that free access to music at home, listeners will pay to buy the songs they want to take with them on iPods and other music players. The prices will range from $6.50 to $13.50 for an album. (For now, Lala plans to sell music only by the album rather than song by song.)

Lala, whose owners include Bain Capital LLC and several veteran Silicon Valley investors, is underwriting the free offering by paying major labels $6 to $8 a user each month, about the same wholesale rate paid by online music-subscription services like RealNetworks Inc.'s Rhapsody. But where Rhapsody and its competitors charge users $12 a month for "all you can eat streaming," Lala.com will charge nothing. And where Rhapsody and its competitors require users to load special -- and occasionally glitchy -- programs to access their offerings, Lala will work through a normal Web browser. Users of Lala's Web-based service can create and save playlists, send them to friends and browse the virtual collections of other users -- all for free.

More important still, the new service will work with Apple Inc.'s iPods -- something no iTunes competitor featuring major-label content has been able to do.

The latter feature addresses one of the music industry's chief complaints in the digital era: Most music sold by rivals of Apple's iTunes Store can't be played on the iPod, the gadget that represents an estimated 75% to 80% of the U.S. market in digital-music players. That's because Apple uses copy-protection software but won't license it to others. Historically, record labels have been reluctant to sell music without such protection, though EMI Group PLC recently began selling unprotected downloads through various services. Lala gets around the copy-protection issue because once a user loads the songs on an iPod via Lala, they can't be moved any place else.

The beleaguered music industry has often been resistant to new ideas during its seven-year sales slide. Label executives say one of the features they find most compelling in Lala's new service is the fact that it allows users to download songs directly from a Web page into their iPods -- without using iTunes software. Music companies believe the workaround will make Lala more appealing than competing music stores that work with non-iPod players. On top of that, label executives say they are happy that a "discovery" site has found a way to charge users.

"If you give consumers a great and very flexible sampling experience, that generates a tremendous amount of commerce," says Alex Zubillaga, executive vice president for digital strategy at Warner Music.

When a user plugs an iPod or music-enabled mobile phone into a PC, he or she will be given the option of loading music directly into the device -- for a fee. The service keeps tabs on a user's music collection -- even songs they acquired from iTunes or elsewhere -- so if someone's home hard drive contains a particular song, Lala will enable that customer to download the song to an iPod for free from any computer connected to the Web. The company believes its business model will succeed because the ubiquity of mobile phones and other gadgets that can play music provides such a growth market.

Lala founder Bill Nguyen -- who has become wealthy by starting and selling a string of other technology companies -- calls the Lala gambit an "all-in" proposition, readily acknowledging that if it fails, his company will most likely go under. The company expects a loss of about $40 million over the next two years -- a sum it is in the process of raising in a new financing round. Mr. Nguyen keeps the sock-puppet mascot of the defunct Pets.com on his desk "as a reminder," he says, of what can happen to a dot-com company.

The risks include enabling Lala customers to circumvent the proprietary iTunes software. That may be viewed by Apple as a provocation. Spokespeople for Apple didn't respond to requests for comment.

In addition, Lala's plan to sell music only as albums, without giving users the option to buy individual songs, could also turn off potential buyers. In fact, Mr. Nguyen says he justifies the policy only on aesthetic grounds: As a fan, he prefers to consume music by the album. He says he has so far resisted tremendous pressure from employees and even label executives to sell individual songs.

Lala's pricing model, too, runs counter to the way the music industry has done things. Prices will be "dynamic," or based on demand for a particular title and other factors, including the existing content of a user's personal music library. Typically, labels use low prices to drive music discovery, often subsidizing big discounts for brand-new albums on the theory that generating word-of-mouth interest will provide momentum in the future. They also sometimes cut prices on blocks of older titles during special promotions. But for most older albums, they often charge a premium, figuring that people buying older music are less likely to be doing so on a whim after, for example, hearing the song on the radio.

Lala, by contrast, plans to use its variable pricing system as more of a customer-loyalty program. Low prices will be used as "a reward, not an enticement," Mr. Nguyen says. "It's like the Las Vegas comp system: The more you buy, the better deals you get."

Mr. Nguyen -- the company doesn't use titles but he is effectively chief executive -- says he aims to be as big as the iTunes store in 18 months to two years. He hopes to do so not by poaching Apple's customers but by recruiting new ones.

"Lala is about moving the 90% of the market that's [still buying CDs] over to digital," Mr. Nguyen says. "Getting iTunes customers onto Lala would be pointless."

Lala.com's roots are in another Web-based business that aims to match up buyers and sellers of used CDs. It has 300,000 active subscribers who list what CDs they are willing to swap and which ones they want to acquire. Executing such trades costs a dollar a transaction. Data on supply-and-demand dynamics in that market were critical in designing the digital-only offering, Lala executives say.

The Lala site already features an Internet radio service that, with their characteristic gung-ho spirit, Mr. Nguyen and his engineers built from scratch. Company employees spent weeks manning a jerry-rigged station they used to rip 100,000 CDs bought just for the occasion. That's the equivalent of the biggest Tower Records locations in the chain's heyday and several times more titles than the average Best Buy Co. location sells.

Write to Ethan Smith at ethan.smith@wsj.com]]> Tue, 05 Jun 2007 16:45:38 -0700 http://www.fuzz.com/fan/Laurie/blog/entry/news-article-from-google-news-I-just-read http://www.fuzz.com/fan/Laurie/blog/entry/SHHHHHHHH http://www.fuzz.com/fan/Laurie/blog/entry/SHHHHHHHH#comments Wed, 23 May 2007 14:20:30 -0700 http://www.fuzz.com/fan/Laurie/blog/entry/SHHHHHHHH http://www.fuzz.com/fan/Laurie/blog/entry/My-ideal-concert-wishing-I-know-but-a-girl-can-dream http://www.fuzz.com/fan/Laurie/blog/entry/My-ideal-concert-wishing-I-know-but-a-girl-can-dream#comments Fri, 18 May 2007 14:46:01 -0700 http://www.fuzz.com/fan/Laurie/blog/entry/My-ideal-concert-wishing-I-know-but-a-girl-can-dream http://www.fuzz.com/fan/Laurie/blog/entry/Im-new-at-this-so-forgive-me http://www.fuzz.com/fan/Laurie/blog/entry/Im-new-at-this-so-forgive-me#comments
Laurie :)]]> Fri, 04 May 2007 15:01:41 -0700 http://www.fuzz.com/fan/Laurie/blog/entry/Im-new-at-this-so-forgive-me