This new keyboard from Microsoft looks promising. It's wireless, recharchable, has a sensor that knows when to backlight the keys (like most Apple laptops) and another sensor that lets it know when you're away so it can save power.
The only thing missing -- and I hate to keep harping on this -- is a volume knob. What could be more intuitive for multimedia keyboards?
After reinstalling Windows XP on my home PC, I realized that I'd need to relicense music I bought a couple of years ago from MusicMatch. Problem is, Yahoo bought the company last year and no longer offers the music player I need to retrieve the license. Yahoo's new "Music Engine" won't relicense it either. So through no fault of my own, I need to re-purchase the album. You can bet that it won't be at another online store.
This is why so-called Digital Rights Management absolutely stinks. Where are MY rights to the music?
This is a little reassuring after installing the slow and extremely buggy Beta 2. I understand that it's a beta and all, but the first public release of Windows XP a few years ago (a half-decade, actually) was much more polished and stable than this monstrosity. I hope Microsoft makes build 5456 publicly available soon, because I'm ready to ditch Vista and reinstall XP.
Actual Reuters headline, as posted to MSNBC:
LOS ANGELES - Rock producer Phil Spector will go on trial in January on charges of killing a B-movie actress to death at his home, nearly four years after the fatal shooting took place, a judge said Friday.I imagine it'll be fixed before most of you read this.
Box.net, a slick, free online storage and sharing site, has unofficially added Webdav support. That means you can put online folders right on your desktop, as if they were local files. In other words, downloading and uploading become a simple matter of dragging and dropping.
Box.net gives you a gigabyte for free and 5 gigabytes for $5 a month.
Now the question: why am I still paying $3 per month to MyDocsOnline for 50 megs?
I just got word from my boss that reporters here may have to start blogging officially for the newspaper. Ugh.
The problem with newspaper blogs -- aside from being totally pointless in a media setting -- is that most aren't really blogs at all. Free of opinion, heavily edited and devoid of all spunk, most end up reading like half-baked news briefs. Let's hope IBD is willing to take some risks and do something really interesting with these.
Why I woke up at 7:30 on a Sunday
Apparently, there was an important soccer game going on.
Here's funny and insightful article by Dave Eggers on why soccer is such a popular youth sport in the United States, but not so popular as a professional sport:
The beauty of soccer for very young people is that, to create a simulacrum of the game, it requires very little skill. There is no other sport that can bear such incompetence. With soccer, 22 kids can be running around, most of them aimlessly, or picking weeds by the sidelines, or crying for no apparent reason, and yet the game can have the general appearance of an actual soccer match. If there are three or four coordinated kids among the 22 flailing bodies, there will actually be dribbling, a few legal throw-ins, and a couple of times when the ball stretches the back of the net. It will be soccer, more or less.
Here's a YouTube video of someone using a new Intel-based MacBook and two software applications, Parallels and Virtue, to easily switch between MacOS, Windows and Linux at native speeds.
Pretty slick -- and handy, to boot.
Oh how I would love to play Unreal Tournament 2004 on this thing.
McDonald's wants to look more like Starbucks, according to this article in BusinessWeek. I went to a McDonald's for the first time in years a few weeks ago, and have to admit that they've really managed to turn things around. Paying with a debit card was quick and painless -- easier than cash, actually -- and they've revamped the menu with somewhat healthier items. (Of course, I still ordered a Big Mac and fries.)
Still, the photos in the article make it clear that they're ripping off Panera Bread, not Starbucks.
How embarrasing. My RSS feed had been broken for a year. A longtime friend I hadn't seen in years pointed it out today -- which tells you how many people actually read this blog.
Thanks, Matt.
Gates doesn't want to be world's richest man - U.S. Business - MSNBC.com
I've got a solution! I'll be happy to take a few billion off his hands.
This media-PC software looked kind of interesting, but my ultimate reaction is the same as Jupiter analyst Michael Gartenberg:
What I don't understand is why Yahoo is spending the time and effort to do this. Microsoft's already much further ahead (from what I've seen of the download) and offers much better out of the box experience. There's no reason that Yahoo can't offer the unique services it brings to the table, like Yahoo Photos or Music via the MCE interface. This is one of those things where it just doesn't make sense to re-invent the wheel.I agree. And the same goes for Yahoo's Music Engine. Why couldn't this have been a plug-in to Windows Media Player. Like we need another media manager to install.
From Poynter, where a reporter talks about trying to find a story online:
So I went to Philly.com and searched for it.
You guessed it: It's not there. Or at least when I searched for it in their search box, it didn't come up. (You can only search Philly.com articles for the last seven days.)
Next step? Google.
I typed in exactly the same search command, and -- yup, you guessed it again -- up comes the article. From Philly.com.
Is something wrong with this picture? Indeed.
Microsoft has extended its one-year deal to offer stripped-down versions of its Visual Studio tools, along with some cool code snippets.
