Tech. Biz. Culture. Law.
A Maryland native named Michael Tully has written a movie about his experiences in Ocean City, MD, involving the late 1980’s and ping pong. The movie starts filming in September 2012.
There’s a great article with details at the Gazette website.
Interesting! There’s talent everywhere around here!
In a battle between the President of the United States and me, I win.
At issue is the measurement of a given Twitter account’s percentage of “real” Twitter followers, as determined by StatusPeople, a British site that analyzes a Twitter account’s followers, and uses a simple formula for determining how many of those followers are “fake” or “inactive”. The formula: followers with few to no followers of their own are flagged as “fake”, and followers with no recent tweets are deemed “inactive”.
According to StatusPeople, my list of authentic Twitter followers (@SteveOHearn), as of August 25, 2012, about 10 AM – is 97 percent, of which 88 percent are active, and nine percent are currently inactive. Only 3 percent were identified by StatusPeople as fake.
I ran the same analysis at the same time on the account of the President of the United States. He’s showing up as 70 percent “real”, of which StatusPeople says 39 percent are currently inactive, leaving 31 percent authentic and active. StatusPeoples says POTUS has 30 percent “fake” followers.
I win.
Just sayin’.
Here’s the screenshot for my own metric, see below.
And here’s the score for POTUS, aka President Barack Obama:
There you go.
One note: there are a lot of news reports going around claiming that the President’s percentage of “fake” followers is much higher. One national paper puts the “fake” number at 70 percent. Presumably they are lumping together the “fake” with the “inactive”, and calling them all “fake”. But that’s obviously inaccurate. “Inactive” might be fake, but also may have been bonafide users who got bored with Twitter. Maybe this is more of a statement about Twitter’s product life cycle than the authenticity of the President’s Twitter followers. We don’t really know, I don’t anyway, not yet. But one thing is for sure, the graphic above is authentic – StatusPeople declared 30 percent of the president’s Twitter followers to be “fake”, not 70 percent. The “inactive” 39 percent is subject to interpretation and further analysis. I don’t care what your politics are, but whatever you do, don’t misrepresent data. Although … we could probably launch an entire new media organization on the subject of statistics that are misused and abused, accidentally or otherwise.
Want to check your own percentage of fake Twitter followers? Click here to use the same Web app I used to create the reports shown above.
This is my new favorite YouTuber – her name is GloZell:
Best lines in this video:
And her comments about the Royal Wedding and John Stamos are HYSTERICAL. You definitely have to watch, she cracks me up. And in case this isn’t making any sense to you, here’s my two bits:
Maybe we should start a website called “Interpreting Glo-Zell For The Masses”.
But in the meantime – I love her work, she’s excellent.
I received an email this week from the good folks working on the Atlas Shrugged, Part 2 film:
Every day this week, we’ll be announcing a new way in which you can earn your way to the October 2nd Washington D.C. Atlas Shrugged Part II Movie World Premiere. All contests will be announced on the movie’s official website, blog, facebook, and twitter pages.
This first way: make a video! For details: http://blog.atlasshruggedmovie.com/2012/08/promote-atlas-shrugged-part-ii-on.html
But it’s a familiar story, it’s based on the same basic framework of a movie called The Omega Man with Charlton Heston, which I REALLY watched, when I was a kid, loved that film. And there’s a Vincent Price movie that’s similar, called The Last Man On Earth – same basic idea. In fact, all the films have very similar final scenes, all around some sort of ceremonial altar type of a display, sort of.
Little known trivia fact: the movie credited with having shown the first ever inter-racial kiss was The Omega Man. It was between Charlton Heston and Rosalind Cash. The Omega Man is one of my all-time favorites, a classic.
In the somewhat similar film
The Last Woman On Earth
, s
A minister decided that a visual demonstration would add emphasis to his Sunday sermon. Four worms were placed into four separate jars.
At the conclusion of the sermon, the Minister reported the following results:
So the Minister asked the congregation: What did you learn from this demonstration?
Freddie, sitting in the back, quickly raised his hand and said, ‘As long as you drink, smoke and eat chocolate, you won’t have worms!’
I gotta pay attention to Twitter a bit more … I just found that someone recently mentioned me on Twitter with this most gracious comment, followed by my (eventual) response:
Thank you A. Giannakidis! And welcome to the distinguished ranks of certified Oracle SQL Experts!
Michael Dell’s daughter is in the news this week.
I first got a chance to meet Michael Dell in June of 2000 when he spoke at the National Press Club. The event was coordinated by a friend, the ever so sweet and very hip Gayela Bynum, and moderated by Jack Cushman, who was the Club’s president that year, and who I was able to work with on some tech projects at the Club – Jack was one of the key club leaders at the Club who recognized the power of the World Wide Web early on.
The entire event is still online at C-Span’s online video archives:
I was in the audience, right up front:
I remember clearly that the introduction for Michael Dell was stunning, even to me, and I thought I’d known Dell Computers fairly well already. Michael Dell, at 35 years old, was announced by Jack as “the youngest CEO of any Fortune 500 company”. Dell Computers had already become the top seller of personal computers worldwide at the time, selling $40M per day online. Jack went on to say that Dell stock had risen 79,000 percent in the prior ten years, and in 1999 the Wall Street Journal named Dell Computers as the number 1 company in terms of total return to investors in the previous 3-year, 5-year, and 10-year periods. You can hear all of this in the video link above.
Michael Dell was already a rather wealthy man that day in 2000. He’s even more so now. And he reportedly spends about $3 million on private security.
But that didn’t stop his daughter from taking to Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr to do what pretty much most teenagers do nowadays: announce their every move and constant whereabouts to the world through social apps.
Unfornately for the very typical teenager, her parents aren’t so typical. And apparently somebody in the mix didn’t like that she published a detailed invitation to a graduation dinner, two weeks in advance, with the exact whereabouts of everyone involved out there for the world to see. (“Dell CEO’s Daughter Booted From Twitter For Security Reasons”, Mashable.com, August 14, 2012)
So her Twitter account has been shut down. Alas.
Security is an issue when you’re a gazillionnaire. But for that matter – it’s an issue for all of us. Just because you weren’t the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 in June of 2000 doesn’t mean you should ignore your own personal security today.
Something to consider.
Going back to that June 2000 speech I attended … if you watch that video, you’ll near Jack close the event with a great line. The Club always gives an official National Press Club coffee mug to each speaker at the end of their talk, as one of a few tokens of appreciation for the speaker’s efforts and time. Jack presented the mug to Michael as the “world renowned and highly coveted National Press Club coffee mug”, adding: “I recommend you install java in this before you use it”. HA! Such a geek thing to say, I love it. For those of you aren’t software developers, Java is a great software development language. Obviously it is also a reference to coffee. Excellent pun.
But you probably already knew all of that!
If anyone told me they wanted to come to where I work and hang out, I would tell them that I would much rather meet them at a restaurant somewhere. When I’m working, I’m working, and I don’t have the mental capacity to work and try to juggle the act of being social at the same time.
But that’s not the case for two of the most gracious people I’ve met, who also happen to be immensely talented at what they do. Andrew Lenchewski is the creator, executive producer, and head writer for a great one-hour television show called Royal Pains on the USA Network, and the show’s star, well known actor Mark Feuerstein. A few of us met Andrew and Mark back in April, and got a grand private tour of the world famous Oheka Castle in Long Island, site of some of the key scenes to the show. Mark led the tour, and Andrew was right there as well. That tour and the rest of the day there was an event unto itself, I’ll blog about that soon, there’s just so much to blog about! Oheka, in case you don’t know, was originally built by famous banker Otto Kahn, the real life person upon whom the Monopoly board game character is based.
That meeting, and a few subsequent discussions, led to another visit to the crew last weekend, at the Brooklyn studios where much of Royal Pains is filmed. I say “much”, but I wouldn’t say “most”, they do a lot of on-location shooting in the Hamptons.
We toured the sets, including the “guest house”, and the “hospital”. We saw the post-production operations, and had a great time chatting with the crew there, including David and Katie (Happy birthday Katie!), and one very helpful Matt Nickelson, post-production film editor, a very knowledgeable industry professional.
We even joined the cast for a buffet dinner, and everyone was there, in addition to Mark: Campbell Scott, Paulo Costanzo, Reshma Shetty, Brooke D’Orsay, and others, I won’t name them all so as not to inadvertently give away any plot lines. But those names won’t surprise any regular fans of the show.
Incidentally, here’s a little known fact: Campbell Scott (Boris) is the son of actors George C. Scott and Colleen Dewhurst.
And believe it or not, the three of us who visited ended up sitting in on the reading of the script for the upcoming season 4 grande finale. And we actually didn’t have to sign any documents to participate, so LEGALLY I could theoretically get away with publishing some breaking news here, but no way would any of us actually do that – we’re all self-avowed to secrecy. We like the people and show too much, and besides, we’re just not like that anyway. So the secrets are safe with all of us.
But …
… but ….
… it’s a GREAT season ending, WOW. You have to watch it. We only heard the script read aloud, of course, the actors were just doing their initial read-through, and they themselves were hearing it for the first time along with us. But it was obviously great, and the cast was clearly eating it up. There are great writers on that show, Andrew chief among them.
P.S. I did manage to get a few pictures, but not too many. Between “quiet on the set” and people wolfing down dinner or doing the reading, and chatting about other items, there just wasn’t a whole lot of time to snap pics. But we definitely got some great shots. However, I won’t publish them here until I get permission from the individuals involved to do so. Once that happens, I’ll post an update.