| Sunday, January 11, 2009 |
19:20 - Auto Accessories Moment of Zen
|
(top) |
Of all the phrases to emerge into daily conversation from Internet Meme Land, my favorite has to be: "Wait. What?"
Yeah, nothing soothes the stress of driving like the relaxing scent of black ice.
Coming from a tree.
|
| Saturday, January 10, 2009 |
10:21 - I've got a little list, I've got a little list
|
(top) |
I've noted once or twice before how pleased I can't help but be at the Internet-age self-reinvention of Cracked. Once a waste of shelf space in the magazine aisle of stores with the lamentable taste to stock MAD but not to screen out humorless, shambling imitators, it's now a site full of the kinds of articles guaranteed to rob you of a valuable weekend.
Like these "Top Ten" type lists. I started out with 6 Baffling Old-School Video Game Commercials (really, how much abuse can our 80s childhoods take?) (via Mark), and spidered my way through the embedded links to 6 People Who Died In Order to Prove a (Retarded) Point (featuring Chris McCandless in the #1 spot) and 5 People You've Never Heard Of Who Saved the World (full of history of which I was not aware, though as a commenter rightly notes, unfortunately does not go so far as to include Stanislav Petrov). And who knows what else I'll find if I don't put a cap on my link travel depth.
...What? It's snowing out. What else am I gonna do?
|
| Thursday, January 8, 2009 |
20:32 - Ahsk not what the New Deal can do for you...
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/01/american_recovery_and_reinvest.htm
|
(top) |
Sounds like BHO wants to be FDR times JFK.
I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be inspired or infuriated, though, at the implications that we don't have enough broadband infrastructure to meet a global standard and our schoolkids are the disadvantaged also-rans to the ones in Beijing.
UPDATE: Fisking provided by CapLion.
|
| Tuesday, January 6, 2009 |
11:08 - Win some, lose some
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2009/01/06itunes.html
|
(top) |
We-hell. Looks like there's been much horse-trading going on in iTunes land.
All iTunes music is now DRM-free. But... and it's a big but:
“We are thrilled to be able to offer our iTunes customers DRM-free iTunes Plus songs in high quality audio and our iPhone 3G customers the ability to download music from iTunes anytime, anywhere over their 3G network at the same price as downloading to your computer or via Wi-Fi,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “And in April, based on what the music labels charge Apple, songs on iTunes will be available at one of three price points—69 cents, 99 cents and $1.29—with many more songs priced at 69 cents than $1.29.”
So variable pricing has arrived on the iTunes store. And you can bet that the fact that the bulk of the music is 69 cents does not mean any of the music you'll want is 69 cents.
Ah well—a small price to pay, quite literally, for the end of DRM. I wonder if that will put paid to the grousing from all quarters about Apple's "engineered lock-in" to the iPod/iTunes ecosystem...
UPDATE: As to the Big Giant iPod (aka the Sealed-Shut Desktop-Replacement 17" MacBook Pro that Only a Freak would Take on an 8+hour Flight and Need to Change the Battery, So Says Jobs), I do have a certain amount of affinity for this argument, wild rationalization though it might be. Does anyone doubt that Belkin will have its inevitable external MagSafe-compatible battery-brick device ready any later than 35 seconds from now?
|
| Monday, January 5, 2009 |
18:43 - "Everything is only a few hundred clicks away"
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/apple_introduces_revolutionary
|
(top) |
This earns a Heh™:
Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard
A little out-of-touch (as it were), perhaps—making fun of Macs for being expensive, feature-short, battery-hungry, flimsy, and unintuitive hardly seems like satire founded on legitimate complaint, these days especially. Makes one wonder what Apple could have done to avoid such charges, in fact. It reminds me of nothing so much as what happens when you go into a McDonald's these days and try to find unhealthy food in mass quantities—you can't do it. It's all chicken wraps and nonfat yogurt parfaits, and a friggin' Big Mac is only like 540 measly calories. Not that it helps; the more they do to dispel the popular stereotype, the more vicious it gets. And their competitors, like In-N-Out, whose products are vastly more objectionable on health grounds, are universally loved as a fixture of California/Southwestern culture. Such is life as an icon, I guess.
Still, I gotta give the Onion props for their production values these days. Man, is that ever a slick video. Though it looks a bit mean-spirited in light of recent developments.
|
|
11:35 - THIS IS THE SECOND NOTICE THAT YOUR AUTOMOBILE WARRANTY HAS EXPIRED
|
(top) |
I've been getting a lot of cellphone spam. So I go to donotcall.gov to register my phone in the federal Do Not Call list, right? And I put in my phone number and e-mail address, which it requires in order to send out a confirmation e-mail for authorization.
The authorization message gets stuck in my spam trap.
There's something cosmic at work here.
|
|
Brian Tiemann
