An article in the People’s Daily Online (note: Chinese news) ran the headline: Iranian official lashes out at Hollywood movie “300″ for insulting Persian civilization. I get a mental image of the scene in 300 where the Iranian Persian emissary with the big whip gets his hand lopped off (and then talks about arrows blotting out the sun, about one minute into the trailer). The article goes on to talk about the new movie as being “part of a comprehensive U.S. psychological war aimed at Iranian culture.” That makes me smirk for many reasons, namely:

1) Said Iranian official gives Hollywood waaaay too much credit if he thinks there is some conspiracy with the U.S. government to defame the Iranian culture. One would not exactly describe Hollywood’s relationship with our government leaders as a love affair. Besides, Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is doing a way better job of defaming Iran than Hollywood ever possibly could.

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My friend David Felfoldi recently sent me a link to Ning, which, evidently, is the white board of social networking sites. This site serves to prove (as if there were any doubt) that the phenomenon of social networking sites (SNSs), as a genre, has reached the saturation point. No mas! As an investor, I would be steering my money away from SNSs in general. However, what does pique my entrepreneurial curiosity, and gets the old gears squeaking, is predicting what the next revolution of social networking on the Internet will look like. Thoughts?

I would love to hear what you think so far of a song I am writing and recording. Download the mp3 here and feel free to leave public comments or send me a private message – any constructive criticism is wanted and welcomed.

As you may or may not already know, I have been playing the guitar, writing & recording music for about twelve years now. Most of my work hitherto has been acoustic guitar stuff akin to Glen Phillips of Toad the Wet Sprocket fame. I am also handy with an electric guitar and bass, and have more recently begun writing songs in the modern rock genre. My interest in audio engineering has been a long, slow progression – as I have come to find that the fine art of recording and mixing music is actually incredibly difficult to master (pun intended). Recently I’ve been working on writing and recording a new song that I have entitled Pwnd, stemming from my geek roots as a casual player of the game World of Warcraft. No vocals tracks have been recorded yet, so it’s just music as of now. Also, it has not been mixed yet so the sound is still raw. But please check out the “in progress” demo track, and give me your feedback on it.