World's Highest Tennis Court Is High As Hell
Yes the picture's real. Burj Al Arab in Dubai is home to the world's highest tennis court (at times). At 210 meters (about 690 feet), it's pretty far up there. Way higher than I'd feel comfortable running around hitting a ball. The court doubles as a landing pad when there aren't any matches being played, and as a place to shit your pants the rest of the time.
Video of Andre Agassi and some other guy playing tennis up there after the jump. I like how at the end they just start wailing balls off of the side trying to hit things. Because that's what I would do.
September 20 screening at Miami Beach’s Colony Theatre Vivien Lesnik Weisman did not grow up in a typical American home, or even a typical Cuban-American home. Daughter of activist and journalist Max Lesnik, she was born in Havana, Cuba, but soon came to Miami, Florida when her father, a revolutionary and friend of Fidel Castro, fell out with the Cuban government due to ideological differences. In Miami, her father was both against the Cuban regime but also opposed to U.S. policy toward Cuba, espousing open debate and eventually dialogue and reconciliation through the publications and radio programs he produced. He earned the ire of much of the exile community, with bombings, death threats and drive by shootings becoming a daily occurrence at the Lesnik home. Not your typical childhood. Lesnik the daughter went on to become Lesnik the filmmaker, and in her controversial and poignant new documentary, The Man of Two Havanas, she tells not only her father’s fascinating story, but the journey she takes to understand her roots, her family, and the social and political currents that swirled around them. The film makes its Miami premiere at 7:30pm, Saturday, September 20, at the Colony Theatre, 1040 Lincoln Road on Miami Beach. Though the film premiered at the prestigious 2007 Tribeca Film Festival in New York City to packed houses, until now the filmmaker has not has not been able to secure a screening in what would arguably be its natural venue, South Florida, including, most notably, not screening at this year’s Miami International Film Festival. However, The Man of Two Havanas has won numerous awards over the past year, received critical acclaim and screened around the world, including winning the 2006 IFP Fledgling Fund Award for Best WIP Emerging Latino Filmmaker and the First Coral at the 2007 Festival Internacional de Nuevo Cine Latino Americano (Havana International Film Festival. The Man of Two Havanas is presented by Miami’s own Lynn & Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archives, the most important regional film and video archive, which supplied much of the footage used in the film. “We are always pleased to show films that make use of the invaluable historical resource that we have here at the Wolfson Archives, especially one like this that challenges us to revisit the past and deepen our understanding of the world around us,” says Donald Chauncey, Director of the Archives. The screening is presented in cooperation with the Greater Miami Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida.
HOMESTEAD KARTING CLUB SERIES – SUMMER SEASON OPENER
Easy Pick Up for Marco Ferrera “First in Race One”
Despite “less than ideal” conditions for racing, Summer Points Series - Race One was held on Sunday, August 31st at Homestead Karting track next to the International Speedway. Multiple rain delays throughout the morning qualifying sessions led to the cancellation of heat races.
During qualifying, Ferrera clocked a 42.488 mph top speed, snagging the pole position with a best time of 59.311 seconds. In the afternoon feature race, Ferrera with his number 15 Zanardi TAG (125 cc.) completed the 15 lap race in 13 minutes 19.678 seconds, leaving the second place to Dane Ierna with a considerable lead, more than a few car lengths. Ferrera maintained his pole positin throughout the race and is a favorite in the track for the Summer Points win.
A native of Rio de Janeiro - Brasil, Marco Ferrera (www.marcoferrera.com) with his crew Garry Williams and Christian Toro are members of Homestead Karting Team, which is owned by karting veteran Tony Schroeder. Race 2 of the heated series will take place on October 12 at Homestead track. The Summer Series consist of 6 races, where point leaders of the regional series will advance to compete at Florida Winter Tour and Stars of Karting.
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If you’d like more information about this topic, or to schedule an interview with Marco Ferrera, plase send an email to fmarco@marcoferrera.com
A new mobile phone powered by Google's Android software might be out as early as October, the New York Times reports.
The device, made by the Taiwan mobile maker HTC and supported by T-Mobile, is expected to match many of the features of Apple's iPhone, including a touch-screen, slide-out keyboard and 3 mega pixel camera. Google and T-Mobile didn't return calls seeking comment.
Rumor has it that the device will sell for $150 the first week, when it will be offered exclusively to T-Mobile customers, and then rise in price to $250 and $400, according to Wired. The magazine says the first version of the Google phone is expected to be released Sept. 17.
Last year, Google opened its Android platform to handset manufactures, hoping to create a unified platform that could span a number of devices. While other carriers have plans to roll out phones based on Google's software, so far the T-Mobile device is expected to be the only Android phone available in the United States, according to the New York Times.
The paper says this shaky video is an illicit preview of what is being called the HTC Dream Phone.
I use twitter quite a bit. I like to post to twitter in the most unobtrusive way possible. I don’t like to interupt my workflow to post a quick thought or update. When they used to have their Jabber bot running - it was easy for me to just type in my update and get on with my gmail session or work. I didn’t have to load a page that was often down, or use some other tool. I was bummed when the jabber bot went away. I needed it back to keep up with my use case.
I got tired of waiting, so i made Excla.im. It is a simple App Engine hosted application that allows a person to very simply update their twitter status from any jabber account. It is not very feature full, doesn’t update all the other sites and doesn’t do much else besides just interact with the twitter API. It is very simple.
The technology behind it is just as simple. The GAE app is written in python and uses the django helper. It is super simple and is basically a storage container for account info. It was a breeze to develop and fun to work with.
The Jabber bot was a bit more complicated. I ended up using the sleekxmpp library to do all the XMPP heavy lifting. It is an awesome library. Makes all the hard stuff easy. I then used Shane Hathaway’s daemon.py to help daemonize the bot (btw thanks to Anders for talking me through the dirtiness of daemonizing). To hook into twitter I used the python twitter library. It is featureful and super easy to use. It also supports in newer versions (post r112) setting the source.
I was then able to wrap this all up in a fancy little bot that on receiving a message, grabs encrypted credentials from the GAE app, sends the message to twitter’s api and then chills out. Pretty sweet. Currently all the heavy lifting is on the bot side, instead of on the webapp side - but i may change that.
At some point, I would like to be able to grab a users twitter friends updates and push them to their jabber ids. However - I have yet to figure out a nice and clean way to get the updates without having them seem batched. I have some ideas and a couple things fleshed out - but i don’t want to totally replicate twitter just to get my friends updates.
I am toying with putting the bot up on google code since it is pretty simple and could easily be hooked into almost any webapp. I think that the idea of a simple (simpler than sleekbot) webapp integrated jabber bot would have been helpful in writing this - and i imagine that people looking to do a similar thing may have use for my hacked together code.
A couple take aways from doing this project. First off - python is fun. Second - working with a designer makes things look a LOT better. Aaron Salmon took some time to make excla.im look MUCH better than it did. Check out his stuff and hire him.
Complete Google Conversion University presentation by Stephanie Hsu.
While I was searching for adwords videos in youtube I found this Google Analytics - Optimal AdWords Campaigns video which is full of great related information, see my channel for more free profitable unique information.
 | Brought to you by Eyesonmiami.com & ONS Management. Photos courtesy of HITOGRAM MEDIA INC. Date: Jun 22, 2008 Number of Photos in Album: 29 |
 | Funkshion Fashion Week, Miami Beach 2006 Date: May 23, 2008 Number of Photos in Album: 67 |
 | Funkshion Fashion Week, Miami Beach 2006 Date: Jun 28, 2008 Number of Photos in Album: 66 |
Early in 2007, my BFF and I did a weekend in New York City. My plan involved a carriage ride through Central Park, preferrably while it snowed, and perhaps while the Pogues serenaded us with their "Fairytale." His plan involved stopping at every hot dog cart we saw as we wove our way...
I kind of love scientific experiments in closely monitored, carefully guarded environments, because I'm seriously an armchair psychologist, but I also find that real life trials are just as important. After all, we're not living in a hermetically sealed bubble (unless you are, and if so,...
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June 13, 2008 4:18 PM PDT
From CNET.COM original article @ http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9968576-1.html
Yahoo's CEO Jerry Yang made the rounds on Capital Hill on Wednesday, in an effort to dispel antitrust concerns surrounding its search advertising deal with Google.
During his one-day visit, Yang met with Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wisc., who chairs the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee.
Kohl has previously expressed concerns that the deal between two technology search rivals could affect competition and have ramifications for advertisers and consumers. He noted the antitrust subcommittee plans to investigate the competitive and privacy implications of the deal.
Sen. Joe Barton of the U.S. House Energy & Commerce Committee also weighed in on the issue Wednesday, issuing a statement (PDF) that expressed concern about the deal's effect on competition in search advertising.
While Barton was not available to meet with Yang on this trip, the senator indicated he would be available next week. And also on the meet-and-greet trip was Rep. Edward Markey, chair of the Telecommunications and the Internet subcommittee for the House Committee on Energy & Commerce.
Google's slice of the U.S. search market reached 68.29 percent in May, according to Hitwise. Yahoo's share of the market declined to 19.95 percent from 20.28 percent in the at same time.
Yahoo, however, has previously said its arrangement is non-exclusive and does not require Yahoo to use any certain number of Google ads on Yahoo's search results page, nor does it require to give Google's ads preferential treatment on where they appear on the right-side column of Yahoo's search results page, where the sponsored links appear.
Yahoo is hoping to benefit from serving up advertisements on its search results pages where there are few advertising links that appear on the right-side column with relevant ads. For example, conduct a search for Fresno and spa and eight advertisements show up on Yahoo, but only two are actually for spas in Fresno. Yahoo gets its advertising dollars only if a user clicks on an actual ad, so the more relevant ads it can post on its search results page, the better its revenues.
Yahoo is hoping to use Google's ads to populate those search results where it tends to have fewer ads. Should Yahoo have a competing ad or ads on the same search page, may the most relevant ad that can entice a user to click on it win.
Whereas Yahoo is looking to bolster its advertising inventory by allowing Google to post its ads on its search page, Google is going in the opposite direction by scaling back on the number of irrelevant ads it has on its search results page--adopting the view that less is more. The search giant on Wednesday also said it is rewarding advertisers with fast-loading advertisements.
Yahoo is giving the U.S. Department of Justice three-and-half months to review its Google partnership, before it implements the search advertising partnership. Regulators, however, may find it more useful to evaluate the partnership after it's been implemented when they can assess the before and after effect.
Yahoo, meanwhile, also addressed privacy concerns raised by the legislators.
"Yahoo is deeply committed to building on our established trust with users by continuing to provide clear, comprehensive privacy policies. We structured the agreement with Google so that Yahoo will not transfer any personally identifiable information to Google without user consent," Yahoo said in a statement. "We have also designed this agreement so that both companies have stayed within each of their existing privacy and data policies, such as Yahoo's policy regarding logs anonymization after 13 months."
Social networking has moved from the computer screen to the big screen. The first cinema production made with the help of contributions from an online community is to receive its world premiere later this month.
For Faintheart, a comedy centring on a battle reenactment club, the director and much of the music were chosen by users of the networking site MySpace.
The same online group was asked to compete in auditions for some of the smaller parts and users were even asked how elements of the plot should develop.
“It’s the world’s first publicly generated movie,” said Jamie Kantrowitz, vice-president of marketing for MySpace. “It’s about involving a potential audience for a movie in the making of the film itself.”
The idea may catch on as producers look for new ways to gain the attention of audiences, with MySpace already working on a screen adaptation of Paulo Coelho’s latest novel. The bestselling Brazilian author, whose novel The Alchemist has sold more than 30m copies in nearly 70 languages, is teaming up with MySpace users around the world to create a television version of The Witch of Portobello. They are asked to send in video adaptations of the 15 storylines in the book and to submit music.
“When I decided to create my first movie together with my readers, MySpace came quickly to mind,” said Coelho, who was an early convert to allowing his books to be read online. “It also has that ability to connect artists, musicians and film-makers around the world.”
The Faintheart movie, which cost £1.3m to make, will be shown in public for the first time on the closing night of the Edinburgh International Film Festival on June 28. It stars Ewen Bremner, who played Spud in the 1996 film Trainspotting, and Jessica Hynes (formerly Stevenson), who appeared in The Royle Family and Shaun of the Dead.
The story revolves around Richard, played by Eddie Marsan, whose films have included Miami Vice and The Illusionist. He is a lowly sales assistant who spends his weekends dressing up as a Norse warrior with his friends. Meanwhile, his wife and son are becoming increasingly fed up with a father who seems to prefer living in the Viking age.
Faintheart may be conventional in subject and style, but the way it was put together – with elements from social networking and reality TV – marks a departure in film-making.
The idea came from Vertigo, a British production and distribution company whose films have included The Football Factory and It’s All Gone Pete Tong.
Vertigo had previously marketed some of its films on MySpace, which is owned by News Corporation, parent company of The Sunday Times. It then decided to take the idea a stage further by involving the users of the social network in making the film. The two companies approached FilmFour because of its record of making innovative films.
MySpace set up a website and asked would-be directors to send in a short film showcasing their skills. Almost 1,000 shorts arrived, which were whittled down to 12. A panel from the film industry, including the actress Sienna Miller, cut that down to three. The final shortlist was put back on MySpace and the website’s users chose the winning film-maker. A total of 500,000 votes were cast online at various stages of the process.
They chose Vito Rocco, who, despite his Italian name, is English. He is an award-winning maker of short films and promotions. “Vito already had an idea for a movie and a script that he was developing,” said Rupert Preston, head of distribution at Vertigo. “This was what has turned out to be Faintheart.”
After the MySpace community had chosen the director, users were invited to audition online by posting videos of themselves on the website for 10 of the smaller roles. About 20,000 auditioned. They were asked to send in jokes for the film as they followed its development online.
Next came the music, with MySpace users choosing the 10 songs and some of the bands in the film. Finally, as it was being shot – in the West Midlands – scenes were posted online, so users could even influence the plot with their comments.
“The nearest analogy is with a band or group who have some new songs which they play at gigs,” said Peter Carlton, senior commissioning executive at FilmFour. “They try them out and refine them according to how they go down with their audience before they record them.”
Arctic Monkeys were one of the first bands to come to prominence via the internet. Lily Allen has also made extensive use of online promotion.
“The British film industry has recently suffered from a lack of connection between movie-makers and their audience,” Carlton said. “With the internet, we should connect again.”
For Faintheart, a comedy centring on a battle reenactment club, the director and much of the music were chosen by users of the networking site MySpace.
The same online group was asked to compete in auditions for some of the smaller parts and users were even asked how elements of the plot should develop.“It’s the world’s first publicly generated movie,” said Jamie Kantrowitz, vice-president of marketing for MySpace. “It’s about involving a potential audience for a movie in the making of the film itself.”
Related Links“When I decided to create my first movie together with my readers, MySpace came quickly to mind,” said Coelho, who was an early convert to allowing his books to be read online. “It also has that ability to connect artists, musicians and film-makers around the world.”
The Faintheart movie, which cost £1.3m to make, will be shown in public for the first time on the closing night of the Edinburgh International Film Festival on June 28. It stars Ewen Bremner, who played Spud in the 1996 film Trainspotting, and Jessica Hynes (formerly Stevenson), who appeared in The Royle Family and Shaun of the Dead.Faintheart may be conventional in subject and style, but the way it was put together – with elements from social networking and reality TV – marks a departure in film-making.
The idea came from Vertigo, a British production and distribution company whose films have included The Football Factory and It’s All Gone Pete Tong.Vertigo had previously marketed some of its films on MySpace, which is owned by News Corporation, parent company of The Sunday Times. It then decided to take the idea a stage further by involving the users of the social network in making the film. The two companies approached FilmFour because of its record of making innovative films.
MySpace set up a website and asked would-be directors to send in a short film showcasing their skills. Almost 1,000 shorts arrived, which were whittled down to 12. A panel from the film industry, including the actress Sienna Miller, cut that down to three. The final shortlist was put back on MySpace and the website’s users chose the winning film-maker. A total of 500,000 votes were cast online at various stages of the process.They chose Vito Rocco, who, despite his Italian name, is English. He is an award-winning maker of short films and promotions. “Vito already had an idea for a movie and a script that he was developing,” said Rupert Preston, head of distribution at Vertigo. “This was what has turned out to be Faintheart.”
After the MySpace community had chosen the director, users were invited to audition online by posting videos of themselves on the website for 10 of the smaller roles. About 20,000 auditioned. They were asked to send in jokes for the film as they followed its development online.Next came the music, with MySpace users choosing the 10 songs and some of the bands in the film. Finally, as it was being shot – in the West Midlands – scenes were posted online, so users could even influence the plot with their comments.
“The nearest analogy is with a band or group who have some new songs which they play at gigs,” said Peter Carlton, senior commissioning executive at FilmFour. “They try them out and refine them according to how they go down with their audience before they record them.”Arctic Monkeys were one of the first bands to come to prominence via the internet. Lily Allen has also made extensive use of online promotion.
“The British film industry has recently suffered from a lack of connection between movie-makers and their audience,” Carlton said. “With the internet, we should connect again.”
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