Web Design Course at Frazier Preparatory Academy

Dear Internet friends,

I am hosting eight students in my classroom after school Monday through Thursday to teach them the basics of Web design. They will learn the basics of HTML and CSS to create their own Web site to post relevant information for the other students at Frazier Prep.

The students in the club, dubbed W^3, are starting by learning basic HTML tags. Today they are practicing using headings, paragraphs, and anchor tags. They'll do so first by recreating this blog post in a split-screen HTML editor/browser found at w3schools.com without peeking at the markup language that I used.

I will post their work on this blog when their Web site goes live.

Take care,

Mr. Carmona

Honoring Martin Luther King's Legacy

I'm not in the business of telling people how to honor heroes or celebrate holidays, but for what it's worth I'll let you know how I will honor Martin Luther King's legacy this Monday. I don't mean to be flippant when I say that I honor King by diverting attention to other people. Don't get me wrong--it would be hard to overrate King as an inspiring person who helped create transformational change in this country. He was the natural recipient of praise and adulation for many people in his generation, in generations that followed, and will be for many generations to come--and deservingly so. But I find it more useful to celebrate his most important ideas than to simply eulogize the man himself.

Perhaps the most salient, time-tested point King has ever made was that people should not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. (It is time-tested in that to this day we struggle to live up to this aspirational utterance.) In this spirit, we should take a look back at some of the transformational figures in King's age whose character may have been misjudged. An example that sticks out in my mind is that of Bayard Rustin, who was a driving force for the March on Washington but who took a back seat to King on the national stage. This was no mistake. Of course, someone had to be the face of the movement, and it was only natural that Rustin--instead of trying to push himself into the forefront--worked to strengthen King's position in the movement. But why did Rustin have to operate in the shadows of more prominent leaders? It didn't have to do with the color of his skin, but I assume that it had everything to do with the fact that he was gay and socialist, which were associations that in his time (and, sadly, ours too) did reflect on the content of your character. As a result, Rustin, a guru of nonviolent resistance who cut his teeth working in Ghandi's movement in India, although still prominent in his own respect, was met with suspicion from people inside and outside the movement for his sexual orientation and his rather moderate socialist views. (After all, he was openly critical of Communism and avoided the big-C label for himself.)

In short, I feel that we fall short of living up to the high-minded ideas that King professed when we succumb to the same stereotypes that made certain heroes seem less consequential during the Civil Rights Movement. I submit that a Bayard Rustin was every bit as important to the movement, whether people knew it back then or not. I believe we can, without conceit or delusion, attribute King-like credit retroactively to Rustin and perhaps others like him. I'd be willing to bet that Rustin never gets his own holiday, but I'd consider it a victory in my mind if I hear his name on Monday, whether uttered in the same breath as King's name or not.

Kindle Fire and Commoditization

I have read a couple of articles since the Amazon release of the Kindle Fire that seem to hint at a steady decline for Apple in an increasingly commoditized marketplace for its premium hardware. Amazon is seemingly selling its new tablet at a loss (or near loss) in order to push its ebooks and movie streaming, which leads us to the question of whether content or hardware is king...or is the answer more complex? A few pointed questions are worth posing:

• Do enough people want a tablet for ebooks and movies alone to supplant the iPad as the dominant player in the space? (This question rests on the fact that Amazon's Kindle Fire won't grant access to the full Android Market.)
• Do people buy the iPad for the top-notch hardware, or is it simply an acceptable medium for gaining access to good software and content?
• Is the iOS ecosystem better than the Android one? If so, how much better? If only marginally better, will Apple be able to win a battle in which prices are dropping and the Android OS is improving?
• Is the overall market for tablets and e-readers growing fast enough to accommodate multiple players in the space, and without making Apple skip a beat? (After all, moderate success is unacceptable for Apple, now the most valuable company in the world.)

Anyway, these are the questions that came to mind for me right away. It'll be interesting to see how this holiday season shakes out. I still say the iPhone 5 and the iPad 2 will be holiday favorites, but the Kindle Fire will certainly give the two-headed Apple monster a run for its money. 

A Letter from Netflix

Posted below is the email sent from Netflix (NFLX) CEO:  
Dear Thomas, 
I messed up. I owe you an explanation. It is clear from the feedback over the past two months that many members felt we lacked respect and humility in the way we announced the separation of DVD and streaming and the price changes. That was certainly not our intent, and I offer my sincere apology. Let me explain what we are doing. For the past five years, my greatest fear at Netflix has been that we wouldn't make the leap from success in DVDs to success in streaming. Most companies that are great at something – like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores – do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us). So we moved quickly into streaming, but I should have personally given you a full explanation of why we are splitting the services and thereby increasing prices. It wouldn’t have changed the price increase, but it would have been the right thing to do. So here is what we are doing and why. Many members love our DVD service, as I do, because nearly every movie ever made is published on DVD. DVD is a great option for those who want the huge and comprehensive selection of movies. I also love our streaming service because it is integrated into my TV, and I can watch anytime I want. The benefits of our streaming service are really quite different from the benefits of DVD by mail. We need to focus on rapid improvement as streaming technology and the market evolves, without maintaining compatibility with our DVD by mail service. So we realized that streaming and DVD by mail are really becoming two different businesses, with very different cost structures, that need to be marketed differently, and we need to let each grow and operate independently. It’s hard to write this after over 10 years of mailing DVDs with pride, but we think it is necessary: In a few weeks, we will rename our DVD by mail service to “Qwikster”. We chose the name Qwikster because it refers to quick delivery. We will keep the name “Netflix” for streaming. Qwikster will be the same website and DVD service that everyone is used to. It is just a new name, and DVD members will go to qwikster.com to access their DVD queues and choose movies. One improvement we will make at launch is to add a video games upgrade option, similar to our upgrade option for Blu-ray, for those who want to rent Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360 games. Members have been asking for video games for many years, but now that DVD by mail has its own team, we are finally getting it done. Other improvements will follow. A negative of the renaming and separation is that the Qwikster.com and Netflix.com websites will not be integrated. There are no pricing changes (we’re done with that!). If you subscribe to both services you will have two entries on your credit card statement, one for Qwikster and one for Netflix. The total will be the same as your current charges. We will let you know in a few weeks when the Qwikster.com website is up and ready. For me the Netflix red envelope has always been a source of joy. The new envelope is still that lovely red, but now it will have a Qwikster logo. I know that logo will grow on me over time, but still, it is hard. I imagine it will be similar for many of you. I want to acknowledge and thank you for sticking with us, and to apologize again to those members, both current and former, who felt we treated them thoughtlessly. Both the Qwikster and Netflix teams will work hard to regain your trust. We know it will not be overnight. Actions speak louder than words. But words help people to understand actions. Respectfully yours, -Reed Hastings, Co-Founder and CEO, Netflix p.s. I have a slightly longer explanation along with a video posted on our blog, where you can also post comments.

New rule for celebrity apologies

new rule: celebrities who go on bigoted rants must stop issuing weasley apologies like "i'm sorry if someone was offended," "my intention wasn't to insult anyone, or even better yet, "i'm sorry if my remarks were taken out of context." (quotations always are taken out of context; i'm not going to quote your whole shitty stand-up routine.) either apologize for real by saying that you were wrong and you have issues to deal with, or stick to your guns and say that what you said was true and wise, or don't say anything at all. #kattwilliams

"Apple is bigger than one man": a short rant

In fact, it's bigger than any other company on the planet that isn't name Exxon Mobil. I don't mean to say that Apple's long-term success has nothing to do with Steve Jobs. It does. But that doesn't mean they need him as their CEO right now. Jobs has already set an effective strategy in place. The iOS has been one of the most profound shifts in the short history of computing. The two-horse race between it and Android (which largely imitates the look and feel of the Apple app ecosystem) was only made possible by the 2007 launch of the first iPhone. And, clearly, the iOS doesn't stop with the iPhone. The iPad took aim at the PC industry, and--despite wishful thinking to the contrary--tablets are affecting PC sales. In fact, it may even make Apple itself change course on their own laptops. Many people believe that iOS will take over OS X, or perhaps the latter will come to resemble the former to such an extent that they're nearly indistinguishable.

Anyway, Apple is firing on all cylinders now, and Steve Jobs still won't even be entirely out of the picture. I'm sure he'll shape the company's vision as Chairman for years to come. And, for those of you who think Apple is now a value stock, you could only think this on valuation alone. Otherwise, you're underestimating Apple's China opportunity on a gigantic scale.

A short digression on aliens and the concept of "independence"

I think aliens may have visited Ancient human cultures. I just don't think Ancient Egyptians could have built those pyramids using the simple tools described by mainstream archaeologists. Some alien technology may have been involved.

How, you might ask, did these aliens show up and then scrub Ancient documents of detailed accounts of their presence? Well, first of all, we can't be sure of what form these aliens took to make their presence felt by Ancient people. Maybe they came in human form to make us more comfortable. Maybe some of the accounts are in ancient documents, but humans simply fell short of describing things that were beyond their imagination. Perhaps more likely, these aliens, who can presumably surpass or bypass the cosmic speed limit of light, can--as far as we're concerned--do whatever the fuck they want!

Why, you may ask, would aliens care to help us build massive pyramids without correcting, for example, the taking of slaves or any other ancient social ill? Well, if we found a primitive culture on another planet, would we care to do anything other than kick-start its technological progress and peace out? For an alien species, handing down a moral code to us, especially one that we'd find unnatural, might simply be a waste of time. After all, we don't waste our time intervening in the petty quarrels of rival lions fighting over a lioness. Heck, sometimes we don't even stop massive genocide within our own species (think Darfur and Rwanda).

The moral of the story: Aliens would certainly think strategically when interacting with other life forms. They may have simply helped us out in some simple way that was meaningful to us (and maybe to them) without incurring much cost to them. Also, maybe the aliens didn't find it practical to leave us with tangible AND unequivocal evidence of their visit, because--after all--we would have still been far from any advancements that would allow us to initiate communication with them on their home planets. In fact, we still are. Also, perhaps the aliens didn't want to prop themselves up as idols on our planet, which could actually impede the progress that they wanted to inspire in the first place. After all, if someone thinks that great works can only be the result of magical technology from a higher being, that person may well be resigned to lazy adoration rather than dedicated to industrious labor.

On this Fourth of July weekend I leave you with the thought that our independence, while utterly important within the proper context, is really only an illusion. We are connected to other matter and energy around us in ways that we can't fully understand. I don't mean this in a New Age hippie kind of way; I simply mean that our human notions of self-determination, self-reliance, individualism, etc. are trumped scientifically by our inextricable connections to the world around us. No one is "self-made"...and--forgive the cliché--WE ARE NOT ALONE!