iPods Around the World

This made me laugh today: the iPods Around the World photo gallery. Some of these pictures are pretty darn cool.

Refinancing

We signed the papers for our home refinancing today. It'll save us a couple of hundred a month and about a point and a half of interest. Yay us. Attention scum: please stop sending all that refinance spam!

My tax dollars at work

Here's one for our ReplayTV:

An Extraordinary Movie: On October 2nd, NASA TV plans to broadcast the first live video from a space shuttle's fuel tank as it soars into Earth orbit on the belly of Atlantis and falls back again.

I'll be at the Mac OS X Conference, but I suspect that Tom and Sean will still be watching it over and over when I get home on Thursday. Thanks to Breaching the Web for the heads up.

When bad things happen to good bears

Tom recently linked to Hubzilla. Here's what results when you combine three bored MIT students, one 10/100 Ethernet switch, and a teddy bear: The Teddy Borg.

Ours Not To Reason Why

Michael Kinsley in Slate's Ours Not To Reason Why is worth reading. One highlight:

George W.'s war on Iraq will be the reductio ad absurdum of America's long, slow abandonment of any pretense that the people have any say in the question of whether their government will send some of them far away to kill and die.

Words, words, words

As a writer and reader, I love words. Which is why I was thrilled to come across WordSpy.

This Web site and its associated mailing list are devoted to recently coined words, existing words that have enjoyed a recent renaissance, and older words that are being used in new ways.

If you like Wired's Jargon Watch, you'll love WordSpy.

Take one down, pass it around

99 Bottles of Beer: One program in 435 languages.

Lego Harpsichord

A link for Meg (no, not that Meg, this Meg): A Lego Harpsichord. And yes, it's playable.

Ghost World. Ick.

I posted this review to Netflix today as a public service:

If you like movies where the lead character is a hateful, cruel, lazy, shallow loser who inexplicably thinks that she's superior to everyone else in the world, then Ghost World will be your cup of tea. If you actually have a life, you'll find that the movie is an admittedly unflinching look at the lives (if you can call it that) of deeply boring and annoying people. Would that the filmmakers had flinched. The only good performance here is Steve Buscemi as a pathetic loser with a heart of gold. Thora Birch, in a flat, one-note performance, shows that she's so far been unable to expand beyond the rut of the whiny disaffected teen that she played so ably in American Beauty. Her character's one accomplishment in the movie, her "art piece," is meaningless, as she creates it merely to mock her pretentious art teacher (who deserves it, but still). The movie's final shot -- a bus leaving town -- is a fitting metaphor, because Ghost World took with it two hours of my life that I'll never get back. Spare yourself the pain.

Bush sez, screw the economy. Let's bomb things.

Bush on the tanking-as-we-speak economy: "Message: I don't care." The markets continue their months-long plunge, poverty in America rose for the first time in 8 years (gee, I wonder what the difference was between the past year and the 8 years before it?), unemployment is way up, and yet the most important thing to President George W. Doofus is that he avenge Daddy's 1991 mistake. Perhaps Dubya's forgotten that Dad's other big mistake was his failure to understand ordinary people's economic woes, which led directly to his defeat.

Oh no, not again.

LawMeme covers how the Internet Archive is blocking all archived versions of one of Scientology's leading critics and the main target in the Google Affair, Xenu.net. Sheesh. Didn't anyone learn anything from the whole Google/Scientology mess?

Buffy! Buffy! Buffy!

Meryl Yourish is doing a Buffy Blogburst, a list of all the weblogs talking about Buffy. For those from another universe, the Buffy season premiere is tonight. Tom's going to make me wait to see it until he's done with a chapter or maybe just until it gets dark (depending on how badly he wants to see it/how badly the chapter's going). Oooh... Maybe I'll watch it without him and not tell him. And then I can watch it again with him.

Yeah, I got it bad.

Netflix as VoD

In The Packaging of Video on Demand, Peter Wayner of the NY Times argues that we really do have VoD—it's just that it's Netflix. If you keep in mind how long it would take to push a full version of a movie across the Internet, Netflix's 3 days or so is pretty darn comparable.

Two estimated statistics I found interesting:

• Over 2,300 terabytes of DVDs (rentals + sales) are delivered daily by USPS and FedEx
• Only 2,000 to 4,000 terabytes are carried daily by the Internet.

Geeklet comics

The latest Joy of Tech makes me wonder if someone's eavesdropping on our lives. This one struck just a little too close to home.

MacMania BoF

Note to self: arrange a sleep apnea BoF at Mac Mania. Known participants (so far): Tom, Al Hawkins, and now, Glenn Fleishman. Anyone else? Another note to self: remember to bring along an extension cord; it sounds like they'll be in high demand.