James Chutter

Working full-time and writing my Masters at the same time means that my summer is passing me by. It also means that I’ve got a killer computer tan.

Yup as expected Girl Talk threw the best party of the summer. Forget Pemberton, ya’ll should have been at the Commodore to see the cut and paste king (sorry Diplo) mash-up a record number of tracks keeping the ADD cocaine fueled crowd bouncing the whole time.
Check out new album here.
Some video I shot of the madness. My fresh white steps are wrecked now from being trampled on stage. I regret nothing.

Untitled from James on Vimeo.

Don’t know this girl, but I respect the fact that she rocks a Holga. I’m a little ashamed that I shot this with my tiny digital.

It was only a matter of time before the Web 2.0 community started to feel the burn of the US recession. This comes at a particularly bad time. as many newer Web 2.0 companies are still trying to figure out how to monetize their offering. Are we on the bubble of another burst?

The atmosphere was radically different during the day at Web 2.0 Expo, as talk of economic recession was unavoidable. TechWeb’s Jennifer Pahlka, one of the expo’s organizers, told attendees in a welcome address on Tuesday that she thanked them all for coming to the conference “in this time of budgets that are being scrutinized, and some bad headlines.” Veteran entrepreneur Marc Andreessen was grilled in a keynote interview on his use of the term “nuclear winter” as a justification for his start-up Ning’s new round of venture funding.

With investment banks going down and food prices going up, the gloomy economic forecasts have cast a dark cloud over cloud computing (and everything else getting talked about at Web 2.0). Yet tech companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon are posting healthy earnings, and despite talk of an advertising downturn, new digital-ad networks seem to be debuting by the day.

The economic attitude of the Web 2.0 Expo hangs in an awkward limbo: The tech industry relies on innovation, but no one can deny that these economic times demand caution. What’s a geek to do?

Source: news.com via James Chutter

NowPublic

Right on the heels of Castro stepping down as commander in chief, President Bush calls for democracy.  However, the U.S. embargo will not be lifted.

President Bush said Castro’s decision ought to spark “a democratic transition” for Cuba.

“The international community should work with the Cuban people to begin to build institutions that are necessary for democracy and eventually this transition ought to lead to free and fair elections,” Bush said Tuesday in Rwanda. “The United States will help the people of Cuba realize the blessings of liberty.”

Source: cnn.com via James Chutter

NowPublic

In a world gone mad one man is trying to bring the semicolon, a reminder to slow down and take stock, back into the public eye.  It’s nice to see some discussion around getting back to basics when it comes to punctuation.  Keeping up with the new wave of dodgy grammar wielded by text messaging and rapid fire Facebook messaging can be a Herculean task. Let us all pause and contemplate life and our friend the semicolon.

Semicolon sightings in the city are unusual, period, much less in exhortations drafted by committees of civil servants. In literature and journalism, not to mention in advertising, the semicolon has been largely jettisoned as a pretentious anachronism.

Americans, in particular, prefer shorter sentences without, as style books advise, that distinct division between statements that are closely related but require a separation more prolonged than a conjunction and more emphatic than a comma.

“When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life,” Kurt Vonnegut once said. “Old age is more like a semicolon.”

In terms of punctuation, semicolons signal something New Yorkers rarely do. Frank McCourt, the writer and former English teacher at Stuyvesant High School, describes the semicolon as the yellow traffic light of a “New York sentence.” In response, most New Yorkers accelerate; they don’t pause to contemplate.

Source: nytimes.com via James Chutter

NowPublic

Sheryl Crow is just one artist that has come to terms with the fact that it’s not all about writing a radio pop hit. There is an economy out there for so many new genres of music, freeing up artists like Crow to write the music she loves.

“There’s something really fantastic about knowing I’m not going to get played at radio,” she said. “I’m not interested in making the kind of music that would compete in that genre, so it’s great. It leaves me to my own devices without the framework of a pop commercial hit.”

Source: nytimes.com via James Chutter

NowPublic

As Britney goes, so goes the US economy. Britney Spears is touring less, thus injecting less into the ailing US economy. Coincidence? Portfolio magazine doesn’t think so.

The most useful magazine journalism of the (still) new year comes to us not from the usual sources — Newsweek, Time, etc. — but from Portfolio, a business publication. It has enumerated the vast amounts of money Britney Spears is worth not just to herself, but to others as well — about $110 million to $120 million annually to the struggling U.S. economy. This is what Portfolio calls the Britney Industrial Complex.

Source: miamiherald.com via James Chutter

NowPublic

This site is new and under heavy construction. It will be the online aggregator for the works and thoughts of James, should you care