save your vinyl

Front-loading record player has optical scan.
http://laserturntable.com/

At $15k, it's not going to fly off the shelf. But as a novelty for audiophiles, could be cool.

Or just convert to mp3 with an Ion:
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Steal My Idea

LA is a car town, for sure. Angelinos live in their cars. They customize them for comfort and style, since they probably spend as much time driving as they do sleeping. Traffic is as prolific as the entertainment biz. I just flew through LAX and the traffic isn't pretty. Parking tends to be a problem. It's one of the most screwed up airport. The idea of a U-shaped system works in theory but somehow failed for auto and passenger flow.

This idea is not going to solve many problems in traffic, I know, but it will generate funds to get the airport to solve some of their problems.

Valet parking at the terminal - Drive up to the front of the terminal, drop of your car, and go. The attendant will take care of your car and you'll get charged $25-50 per day. Much better than waiting for shuttles to take you to the airport. When you are late for a flight, sometimes you just want to ditch your car in the red zone and rush to screening with your pre-printed boarding pass. Roll this out first at brief flight airlines like Southwest. Or better yet, get a sponsor to offer this for a month or two.

If they can generate enough cash, maybe the airport could finally do underground parking and use the centerspace for centralized check-in.

Designer of the Month

Pam West and Matt Edmonds do some fun stuff with industrial/interior design.

http://www.frankhome.co.uk/

Best of the Web - 2006

Yelp - Restaurant reviews made accessible
Pandora - Smart internet radio
Netflix - Movie recommendations based on past behavior
Myspace - Stalking made easy
SideStep - Aggregates all online flight and hotel search engines
My Google - Best RSS reader on the web
Soulsides - Most serious music blog online

Castro's Fresh Rice

This is old news, but I've been obsessed with the Castro rice cooker for a month. Castro got a great deal on rice cookers from China. In 2005, he offered every woman an electric rice cooker (at subsidized prices) to help the hungry and conserve energy resources. He did this on the day before Women's Liberation Day, which would be ironic in the USA but actually welcomed in Cuba. Many of the rice cookers turned out to be defective and the people in Cuba started rioting. The cookers were repaired. Shortly after, he did a news broadcast demonstrating how to use rice cookers. If anyone has video footage, please post! And I would pay good money for a Castro cooker.

 

Here's the NPR story, reported by Dan Grech for Marketplace on 12/1/06:

http://www.publicradio.org/tools/media/player/marketplace/morning_report/2006/12/01_mktmorn0450?start=00:00:04:53.0&end=00:00:08:17.0

Fidel's energy obsession

SCOTT JAGOW: Tomorrow, Cuba celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution. December 2, 1956, was the day Fidel Castro landed on Cuba's eastern shore in a yacht named the Granma. You may not be aware of this, but 2006 has been a year of revolution in Cuba. A very different kind of revolution. From the Americas Desk at WLRN, Dan Grech explains.

DAN GRECH: Jorge Piñón was watching Cuban TV earlier this year.
President Fidel Castro appeared on screen with a Chinese-made pressure cooker.

JORGE PIÑÓN: "And on national television, he was telling people how many cups of rice you had to put into how many cups of water and how you had to cook the rice so it won't be sticky, so it will be fluffy. It was extremely bizarre. Again I'm talking about a head of state telling us how to cook rice."

Piñón is a Cuba expert at the University of Miami. He says there's a method to this madness. Castro calls it . . .

PIÑÓN: "El Ano de la Revolución Energética. That means, The Year of the Energy Revolution."

Castro's on a kick to save energy.

Pressure cookers use less power than the stovetop, but the revolution doesn't stop there. Castro's importing energy-efficient fridges, TVs and air-conditioners from China. And he's recruited battalions of students to go house to house installing fluorescent bulbs.

Kirby Jones is president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade Association. He says this fits into a pattern.

KIRBY JONES: "He does get a bee in his bonnet. And he gets on certain kicks and he follows them personally and through his leadership the country follows suit."

In 1970, Castro mobilized the entire country to grow 10 million tons of sugar. He even took to the cane fields himself. That didn't work.

Then in 1982, a Cuban cow, La Ubre Blanca, produced 241 pounds of milk on a single day, a Guinness world record. But attempts to breed other supercows went sour.

Castro's latest kick is to solve Cuba's problem with rolling blackouts.

But Jorge Piñón says Cuba doesn't have the money to repair or replace its decaying power plants. So Castro came up with another solution.

PIÑÓN: "He has bought about $800 million worth, I repeat the number again, $800 million worth of small generators."

Piñon has a nickname for this do-it-yourself approach.

PIÑÓN: "The Home Depot strategy. And that is where he has bought thousands of small generators and distributed those generators across the country to bakeries, pharmacies, schools, hotels. So that in the event that the major power plants come down during the blackouts, all those businesses can function and turn on their generators."

While this band-aid approach draws ridicule, another front of Castro's energy revolution has the U.S. worried:

Cuba has up to 9 billion barrels of oil off its coast. Firms from Venezuela and China are drilling wells, but the U.S. is shut out.