Aldoblog

On Tuesday, in an open letter Thoughts on Music, Steve Jobs responded (accidentally ;-) to my prior post calling on Apple to license FairPlay to other device makers. It’s a brilliant piece of writing, as all the best propaganda is, covering a lot of ground concisely and persuasively. Other people have analysed Thoughts on Music […]

Some visual analysis at The Daily Kos vividly illustrates just how little news is being presented on the CNN home page. It’s not clear to me whether this is worse than deliberately false and biased news. Indeed, as the writer points out Xinhua, one of China’s top news sites, does not suffer from the dumbing […]

Been meaning for a while to post that I saw the movie V for Vendetta, on the IMAX screen at the Sony Metreon. I enjoyed the movie immensely. It’s been a decade since I’ve read the original graphic novel by Allan Moore, so I can’t say how faithful it is to the original. Certainly there […]

I can’t say that I’m surprised that Bush lied to America about the disaster in New Orleans caused by Hurricane Katrina. I’m only surprised that there’s proof:

Video Shows Bush Warned before Katrina Hit
The Associated Press, March 1 2006

No wonder the administration doesn’t want to play the blame game.

Phillip Torrone’s Audible does Podcasts – the complete guide is a nice write-up of a new feature at Audible.com that supports the automatic download of periodic audible content. Although his article uses the very nice iPodder application to demonstrate the features, there’s no reason why you can’t use the built-in podcasting features of iTunes 4.9. Here are instructions and a couple of screenshots.

After a long and mostly fruitless search for a downloadable version of the Global Frequency ringtone, “hangfire snausage” was kind enough to share with me via email his MP3 of it, with the encouragement to spread it around. So for those phones that can play an MP3 ringtone, here it is.

You are being asked to do something and make a difference.

GraceAnn Walden is probably our favorite of the SF Chronicle‘s current food writers, and her weekly column keeps up on the comings and goings of San Francisco restaurants, restaurateurs, and chefs. This week’s column had news that literally brought tears to my eyes: Pascal Rigo is opening a place right around the corner from our house.

I don’t think you can fully appreciate the genius of the latest iPod shuffle ad until you’ve been watching the NCAA Tournament in a sports bar with a zillion TVs, and the spot is suddenly on 20+ screens all around you, especially if they have the sound turned up.

After the first round, it looks like I had some great picks. One of my ESPN Tournament Challenge entries (labelled “Whimsical” in the graphic) is in the 100th percentile, just outside the top 10,000, of nearly 3 million entries. It looks more impressive than it really is.