No Mountain Dew?

Okay, I've been asked about this multiple times now: Apple and Pepsi to Give Away 100 Million Free Songs. The press release includes the line, "100 million winning codes will be randomly seeded in 20 ounce and 1 liter bottles of Pepsi, Diet Pepsi and Sierra Mist".

This is just wrong, Wrong, WRONG. C'mon, folks. Where would Apple be without the soothing green glow of Mountain Dew? How could Pepsi have left that one off the list? Why isn't someone from Apple yelling about leaving off the Dew?

Or is this some grand conspiracy? After all, this press release describes Apple as "one of the world's major consumers of Mountain Dew." And even the dogcow gets excited by the Dew, as described in this technote. So, is the plan to keep iTunes away from Mac developers? Or is it assumed that if you drink Dew, you're already a Mac addict, and therefore, don't need to be sold on the iTunes music store?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Anita Rowland

Anita Rowland was just diagnosed with diabetes and ovarian cancer. She had surgery yesterday. Anita, we're thinking of you and hoping for the best!

Ow

My advice to you if you're contemplating the extraction of your wisdom teeth: avoid the dry socket. Or in my case, the "partial dry socket." It's all kinds of No Fun. I had to go back in today for a medicated dressing that they stuffed into the socket. It'll numb the pain, and they said that it should last all weekend long. Y'know, maybe I should have listened to that dentist that first told me to get the wisdom teeth yanked. That was, IIRC, back in 1982.

Update: That anasthetic dressing? It didn't last quite all weekend long. Ow. Glad I go in Monday morning for a followup.

Segway p Series

The Segway I tried out at Foo Camp over the weekend was announced: Introducing the p Series. It's less expensive than the original models, but at $4,000, it's still way too expensive for my wallet. When these things get down into the $1,500 range, I'd consider it for getting around my small town (it's only three miles from one end of town to the other).

Foo Camp aftermath

It's been kind of weird to read some of the complaining about Foo Camp from people who weren't invited. It's as though they think that the fact that they weren't there somehow diminishes them, or their work. I don't see that, and it's too bad that their egos are that fragile. A few days ago, Dori mentioned that one of the great things about Foo was that there were all these talented people there who all felt about equally amazed that they were in the same company with all these other talented people. The biggest stink about being excluded from Foo seems to me to have come from the "It's all about ME" crowd. But ego, and preening, and strutting, and testosterone poisoning was what Foo was NOT about. So I suspect that those people would not have had a good time anyway, because it wasn't an ego-stroking experience. Personally, I felt more humbled by Foo than anything else.

iSights on sale

I originally blogged this yesterday with a note to Tom to not read the comments, but somebody ignored what I said and did it anyway. So for the convenience of everyone else, I've promoted this to the front page:

Amazon is selling Apple's iSight at a pretty darn low price of $139.94 (normally, it's around $150). That's with no tax and no shipping.

An even better deal: buy two, and get $50 off a future Amazon purchase.

Dean's dollar power

Another aspect of the 3rd quarter numbers: Dean's $14.8 million raised in the quarter is more than each of the other Dem candidates have raised for the entire year, with Kerry being the only exception. Dean also has lots more money on hand. Given Dean's position for the year ($25.3 million total), and given how much more money Bush has raised ($85 million), I think that Dean will be nuts if he doesn't choose to forego federal matching funds. It would be the only way he can raise enough to be at all competitive with the Bush campaign.

Update: ABC News' The Note has a snippet today that says "...if Dean remains in the system, he can expect to get about $13 million to $14 million in matching funds. Because Dean has already raised $25 million, if he were to accept public financing, he might be allowed under the spending caps to raise as little as an extra $9 million or $10 million through next July's Democratic convention..." That would be like unilateral disarmament in the face of the Bush money juggernaut. Dean's competition will howl if he decides to bust the caps, but I think it's the only way Dean has a decent shot at winning.

Burn rates

This story, 3 Candidates' Spending Tops Funds Raised in Quarter, details an interesting aspect of the third quarter fundraising figures released yesterday. Kerry, Edwards, and Gephardt all spent more than they brought in. Lieberman barely stayed out of the red. Edwards and Kerry both spent about twice what they raised. Edwards is flat in the polls everywhere except SC, and Kerry has dropped everywhere during the last three months. This negative momentum is only going to lead to more drying up of funds, a slowdown of endorsements, and a lessening of volunteer support, and all that spells "Loser." High burn rates and failure to make sales (in this case, gain voter support) aren't any better for political candidates than it was for failed dot-coms.

Chat with us

Tonight, at 6 pm Pacific/9 pm Eastern, we'll be chatting over at World Without Borders. We're supposed to be talking about the 5^th edition of our JavaScript book, but we'll talk about anything that comes up.

One possible question: how well does Tom's speech recognition software work the day after he had three teeth pulled?

Thoughts on Rush Limbaugh

Mark Pilgrim wrote an excellent piece on Rush Limbaugh. My personal opinion is that I'd love to see Rush charged with purchasing unprescribed drugs, and given a choice by the judge of:

1. Jail time
2. Parole, treatment, and community service, where the community service consists of lobbying the gov't and the public on why the combination of parole, treatment, and community service is a better way to treat drug-related victimless crimes than jail time.

I would like to see Rush have to make that choice, and I find that I'm comfortable with either option.

Post Extraction

I'm doing OK, post-wisdom teeth extraction. Still hurting a bit today, and feel a bit of a drug hangover from yesterday's Percocet extravaganza.

But one thing amused me, and you'll get this if you're a fan of Food Network's Good Eats: The post-surgical instructions say to rinse periodically with warm salt water. I actually found myself wondering, "Does it matter if I use table salt or kosher salt?"

Quiet Tom

Don't expect to hear much from Tom for the next few days. It might be because he's getting three wisdom teeth pulled tomorrow, or it could be because he's in mourning after finding out that Alyson Hannigan and Alexis Denisof married this last weekend.

News RSS Generator

Here's an example of something useful I learned at Foo: check out Jeremy's Yahoo! News Search RSS URL Generator. For instance, paste this URL into your newsreader, and you'll get all the latest headlines about Howard Dean.

Foo Camp thoughts

We got back from Foo Camp a few hours ago. It was an amazing experience, and I'm happy and grateful to have been there. I got to meet and talk and hang out with a bunch of really smart people. I had a bit of darned good tequila. I think that I made some new friends. And I got to ride a Segway!