A Newspaper WITHOUT an IPhone Cover Story

Friday, June 29th, 2007
Originally uploaded by rayxhead

[Spice Girls, iPhone]

As impossible as it seems – not a single mention on the iPhone.

Perhaps The Sun (UK) has other things (or 5) on it's mind?

Asimov Spam?

[Asimov, WTF]

A short snip of what came in today's post:

[...]

I am weary; way, of more my own.  Wienis sat in the satisfaction in its slot.  But me, you wish

were more in the may think you to be molded to all chivalrous this object his mustache and Smyrno

at.  And improvisations: their own knowledge; and waited with them up; and charted.  By SELDON,

himself, or must be very suddenly start a priest representative of the recitation of course have at

being sent out I to his throat than I realize said, his ship.  It would cut to love of the fame of

the.

[...]

Whence Begins the Reunion Fatigue?

[Spice Girls]

Will today bring about the oft-rumoured (all 5) Spice Girls reunion tour?

In the meantime, enjoy this bit of nostalgia....

The Dark is Rising

[film, Susan Cooper]

Well this is fun news, I just heard that the first second book of Susan Cooper's 5-book 'Dark is Rising' series is being made into a film and is scheduled to come out later this year, September or October depending on which source you read. Talk about (almost) instant gratification!

By the way, don't fret over perceived similarities (this book came out first) to another book from the UK that you my have read (a boy on his 11th birthday discovers he has magical power) and just enjoy how clever writing takes the legends and myths of Wales and weaves them into a story so the landscape becomes malevolent and magical in turn.

The cast reportedly includes Ian McShane ("Deadwood") as Merriman, Frances Conroy ("Six Feet Under") as Mrs. Greythorne and Christopher Eccleston ("Heroes," 28 Days Later, "Doctor Who") as 'The Rider'.

"When the Dark comes rising, six shall turn it back, Three from the circle, three from the track; Wood, bronze, iron; water, fire, stone; Five will return, and one go alone."

Now Where's My Labyrinth Sequel?

[movie, Jim Henson, Genndy Tartakovsky]

{ SFGate.com} The Jim Henson Co., now run by Henson's children, announced in 2005 an upcoming sequel to "The Dark Crystal," directed by "Samarai Jack" creator Genndy Tartakovsky. San Francisco's the Orphanage is reportedly producing "Power of the Dark Crystal" at its Los Angeles animation studios. Designer Froud and composer Jones are attached to the production, along with original writer, Dave Odell.

Brian Henson said the new "Crystal" will mix a lot of styles, including puppetry and a new 3-D animation technique that is being developed by the studio. The earliest release date, he said, is late 2008.

Good Ol' JK

[Doctor Who, Harry Potter]



Don't spoil the SciFi channel viewing by watching too much of this Season 3 Doctor Who clip but fast-forward to about 3:10 and enjoy.

Expelliarmus

And Now, Our Featured Presentation

[PowerPoint]

PowerPoint, the program you love to hate was originally released in April of 1987 (tip o'the pen to the WSJ.com for the heads-up).

For your bullet-point pleasure, some notes about the recent past :

•published by Forethought of Sunnyvale, CA
•originally named “Presenter” and designed for Windows 2.0
•2 developers, 16 months
•coding done using a Lisa with two 5 MB hard drives connected via the serial port
•ran on any Macintosh with 512K RAM and a floppy drive—no hard disk required

[Next slide, please]

Another* TV Show Moving to Comic Book?

[Veronica Mars, CW, DC comics]

"It's over for good as a television series," confirms creator Rob Thomas.

Of course, this doesn't mean Thomas is bidding farewell to Neptune, according to a report in the online edition of the Toronto Star.

"At the end of the day (CW president) Dawn Ostroff doesn't get to make the final call. Hers is an important voice in the room. But they're the little sister company of CBS. There was a pretty strong feeling that (CBS overlord) Les Moonves didn't want to do the show."

"I have some ambition to write a screenplay, see if I can shop that and get it made," he says. "And I had a meeting with DC Comics last Monday and they want to do (Season 4) as a comic series."

Thomas is a novelist and screenwriter who worked on Dawson's Creek before creating ABC's Cupid (1998). A year later, he joined David E. Kelley's dramedy Snoops.

(Wow – I've watched 2 out of those 3 shows and was cranky when they got axed, too.)
(*Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 8 currently lives on as a comic book.)

Early iPhone Wild-Sighting

[iPhone, Apple, Electra Woman, Fenslerfilm]

Break out the bell-bottoms and fix yourself a bowl of cereal then sit back and enjoy this trip down memory lane with Electra Woman and Dynagirl.

See if you can spot the iPhone prototype about half-way through.

Happy Birthday Garfield!

[Garfield]

June 19th, 1978:


is it just me or does this version of Garfield look somewhat similar to a B. Kliban Cat?

Troubled Waters

bridge+bridge
Originally uploaded by idogcow

So Yahoo! sacked their CEO – I think the shareholders have spoken, I mean, c'mon 75 MILLION?! wtf.

How Not to Run a Beta

[Apple, Safari]

Since Steve hasn't replied to my other suggestion, I figured it
was time to give him twice the reason to visit this humble blog.

Like a million^* other fine folks, I downloaded the Safari 3 Public Beta, anxious to see what the future held for web browsing.

I deleted my old copy of Safari to make room for the 'new hotness' (a critical error I later discovered) since my stock PowerBook G4 is not blessed with much available disk space. I surfed over to Apple.com and downloaded away. Double-clicked the installer and after a few clicks (thanks to the almighty Legal Department) was ready to join the Third Age of Browsing.

Well guess what? I get an error saying my system "Does not meet requirements." I check back to the splash page, perhaps this release Intel Macs only? Nope, "Safari for Mac OS X v10.4.9 or later" is the claim, OK let's download and try this again – nope, same problem. (What is it they say about repeated behaviour and expectation of different results?)

Several searches later over at support.apple.com for help I find out that many people are having problems installing. (Many people are having problems running it as well, but that is another matter – let's burn that bridge when we come to it.)

Finally after reading about people wishing they could run v2 along side of v3, it dawns on me that maybe what I downloaded was not an installer for a new program but an updater of the old version. I post that question and get a reply from another support seeker that yes indeed I have discovered my problem.

Sick of being an unpaid tester, I decide to return to status quo, only to remember I deleted v2, so I surfed some more to find a link to the older version. Wow – Apple sure is proud their new version, I can hardly find a mention to v2 or even v1. VersionTracker tells me that there is no v2, only updates to v1.x. I try a few downloads but these spank me and send me away telling me I am not running 10.3.x – silly me I thought 10.4.9 would be all that 10.3 was only more. Wrong again. At this point I am thinking, "how badly do I need a browser other than FireFox?" until I remembered that our time-reporting system works only with Safari on the Mac side (something to do with Java I have been told).

At this point, I remembered that the v3 download had an installer and and an uninstaller, maybe that will be my solution, let's go grab the Public Beta one more time (this is the 3rd download for those keeping track) and try that. More disk mounting and clicking of legal things until I get the same message, "Does not meet requirements."

At this point mid-month time-cards now need their approval, perhaps there is something new over at the support page. Hey look, a link to a v2 via RapidShare. Let's try that! Success!!

So, lessons learned:

• let other people test software, you have better things to do with your time
  
• don't throw things away that you don't know you might need
  

^*Does my 3 downloads and never using it count toward that million? If so, could there be a more meaningless statistic? Shame on you Apple, you were supposed to be the company that made computers easier.

"Only the Afternoons Were Ours"

[Chris and Cosey, 80s, music, mp3]

The amazing music blog, "Lost in the 80s" continues to, well, amaze with this 1986 Chris and Cosey gem, "October Love Song". There's a video to go with the song as well.

I have had this song in the back of my mind for quite some time – my mixtape version of it from my (first) KDVS era ends rather abruptly most of the way through it and bugs me every time I haul it out to listen to (each time of course thinking I should convert all of these to CDs or mp3s before the tape gets eaten).

Do yourself a favor and bookmark them, there is too much good stuff over there for me to tell you about each and every time.

I Solemnly Swear He Is Up to No Good

[politics, Cheney, VP, NY Times]

The Associated Press reported that Mr. Cheney's office ordered the Secret Service last September to destroy all records of visitors to the official vice presidential mansion — right after The Washington Post sued for access to the logs. That move was made in secret, naturally. It came out only because of another lawsuit, filed by a private group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, seeking the names of conservative religious figures who visited the vice president's residence.

This shouldn't surprise me since this is the same man who has still refused to name the energy executives who met with him to draft an energy policy but once again the unmitigated gall of this man and his utter lack of respect for the office he holds in the name of the American people.

 

Everything Counts (in Large Amounts)

[Climate Counts, environment, carbon neutral, global warming]

Climate Counts is a non-profit campaign that engages consumers and the business community in a constructive effort to fight climate change. By scoring companies annually on the basis of their voluntary action to reverse climate change, Climate Counts helps people make critical distinctions between well-known brands that are leading and those not yet keeping pace. Climate Counts also aims to inspire companies to continually improve their performance – and their annual Climate Counts score. Climate Counts believes everyday consumers can be the most important activists in the fight against global warming.

Rebirth of the PowerCD

Apple_PowerCD
Originally uploaded by davintosh

[Apple, PowerCD, DVD]

Dear Steve,

Yesterday I tried to buy a Sony device to convert my old videotapes to DVD. It had line-in jacks for RCA video, S-Video and FireWire i.Link & had I been willing to pay a bit more, card-readers for every type of removable flash-memory there is. Also, it could record to just about every type of DVD there is (+,-, RW), even double layer media.

One problem: it can't be used as an external drive with a Macintosh.

So here's my suggestion: the PowerDVD. Who doesn't have loads of tapes that they would love to do something with. I have iMovie and iDVD sitting there on the MacBook Pro and have used them once to convert an old Duran Duran special on Cinemax ("As The Lights Go Down"). My problem was devoting that much disk space to a hobbiest project.

Getting the footage onto DVD with the press of two buttons (Play, Record) would at least give me some digital files to work with, keep my computer from being jammed with video files, and clean up my basement. Probably make me (and many other people) get a faster Mac as well to handle the video work, maybe even an AppleTV, all of which wouldn't hurt the stock price.

Just a thought now that you are 'done' with the iPhone.

Regards!
C.A.B.

Like? No, Other.

[Sony]

Nice going Sony – I was all set to buy your DVD recorder (VRD-VC30 to be specific) and finally start getting rid of the boxes and boxes of old tapes, some going back to the Beta era, that have been following us around for years.

Easily turn your home movies into DVDs with the VRD-VC30 DVDirect® DVD recorder. Transfer video to DVD quickly and easily without a PC.

The only thing stopping me was the lack of any Mac support listed on the spec sheet. After I gave up on finding a confirmation of my suspicion of this in any of the (little) documentation I could find on the sony.style page I ended up 'chatting' with 'help desk' on their support site.

Turns out it is not Mac compatible and in fact none of their drives work with a Mac, despite the FireWire i.Link connector that allows you to hook this up to a Windows box.

So... 'quickly and easily without a PC,' but you better have a PC on hand just in case you want to use it as an external drive.

[Vosges, ice cream]

This week-end we had tried Vosges' Red Fire (Ancho & Chipotle Chillies, Ceylon Cinnamon and dark chocolate) ice cream.

Their candy is good, but this was better: sweet, cold and hot. Available at Whole Foods and probably many other locations as well give it a try if you are feeling adventurous.

Extreme or Obscene

[RV]

Capabilities include hauling 35,000 pounds up a 45-degree hill - and back down again - fording four feet of water and racking up 2,000 miles without refueling (at 60mph, expect 8 miles per gallon). The Unicat also comes with doubles of all its major parts and the tools needed for any spot fixes in the wild.

US$600,000

10 Years After

[Pirates, Cheap Ass Bastards]


"At World’s End", AKA "At Credits’ End”.

Thanks 10 Zen Monkeys for the alert!

Infinite Loop

[iPhone, icon]




Map icon had to be something, right? So why not the mother-ship?

[Crush] Danica McKellar

[Danica McKellar, crush]

Danica McKellar (AKA 'Winnie Cooper' to a generation) has an upcoming math book for middle school girls, "Math Doesn't Suck" hitting bookshelves in August 2007. Pre-Order it from her now!

"Danica loves math so much that she wants to share it with you, and help you get through some of your tough questions. Only a few questions each month will be forwarded to her for answering, and you can submit your questions to: MATH HELP "

Bowling Bride (and Groom)

[bowling, news]


Passionate bowler from Vallejo hooked Gayle Heckman for good in a ceremony of embroidered shirts and curious onlookers Sunday morning, when the pair exchanged vows at Diablo Lanes in Concord in front of about 60 friends and family members.

Though the vows delivered by Willie Shield – an avid bowler, of course – recognized the sanctity of the institution, the newlyweds wanted a venue to recognize Coleman's love of the sport.

"We considered getting married on a cruise or out of state near where some relatives live," Heckman said. "Mike suggested getting married at the alley, and I thought he was kidding. But the more I thought about it, the better the idea sounded."

Decorating ideas flourished: 3-foot inflatable pins, a bowling ball with pens in the finger holes at the sign-in table. The vows on lane three. Bowling for everyone during the reception.

(from today's Mercury News)

LOL Feeds

[LOL, LOLcats, news]

The news is now cute, as well as eerily appropriate at times (feeds taken from this blog
and from Detours off Britta Blvd:

The Last Battlestar

[TV, Galactica, SciFi]

Just read over at Yahoo! that "the upcoming fourth season of Sci Fi Channel's "Battlestar Galactica" will be its final one".

The fourth and final season of "Galactica" will kick off in November with "Razor," an extended two-hour episode, with the rest of the season slated to run beginning in early 2008.

Does this mean a remake of Galactica 1980 is next?