Freyburg

A friend of mine just sent me a heads up on what must be the greatest bargain of our modern age: sign up with the National Guard and receive three (that’s right, THREE) free iTunes downloads. Woo hoo! I’m going to Iraq! And I’ll play the same three tunes over and over again (my friend) on my iPod while I wait to get deployed in garden spots such as Fallujah and Sadr City.

On closer examination, it looks like you’re just signing up to get bombarded with National Guard propaganda, and probably have a recruiter come by and try to berate you into fighting an illegal, immoral war. But hey, free iTunes! 🙂

I haven’t got a PSP, mostly because it seems like a lot of money for some half-assed games,and it has other Sony silliness like Memory Sticks and UMD discs. But apparently the PSP is also Hax0r Central, with all sorts of clever folk making it run arcade games, browse the web and do all sorts of other neat stuff. Enter the Apple II emulator for the PSP. If anything could get me to plunk down $300, it’s the ability to run Visicalc AND Karateka on that bad boy. 🙂

Some ambitious fellow has chronicled every change in Apple.com’s web page, all the way back to the pre-Stevie J. days of Dr. Gil Amelio. Ars Technica has the details.

So I went to Joe Fortes (a fancy schmancy seafood restaurant just off Robson Street) with Karyn for a “2005 has been pretty kick-ass, let’s use Karyn’s gift certificate and eat some good fish” dinner. Not only do I run into an old high school acquaintance outside the restaurant, but who should be sitting behind me but Patrick “Captain Picard” Stewart. I was sorely tempted to go up to him and yell “there…..are…..four….lights!!!” but I restrained myself. 🙂

I don’t know much about wine, and by “much,” I mean “anything beyond the fact it comes in red and white.” But the fine folks over at the Daily Lush sure do, and the’ve composed an ode to Thunderbird, the cheap wine that built the Gallo fortune and allowed them to get all snobby with the grape juice. And as if that weren’t enough, they also have tales of inebriated celebrity midgets.

From the yawn-inducing Vista to, well, practically everything else, Microsoft’s dominance seems to be reaching an eclipse. A couple of interesting Cnet articles encapsulate why Google, amogst others, could soon take over The Beast from Redmond’s dominant position by shifting the operating system (or the platform, at least) onto the Web and away from the PC.

As usual, the Jobs doesn’t give up much in the way of details. Still pretty interesting, at least for the Apple fanboys amongst us. Anyone picked up a nano yet?

Despite the fact that Vancouver is chock full of restaurants of every ethnicity and inclination, I have yet to run into a bunch (though not all) of these new and disturbing restaurant trends. Guess that means I have to eat in a higher class of trendy feed stall.

Looks like venture capitalists are throwing their money around like a lottery-winning teenager, funding any old startup they can find. Looks like it’s time for me to dust off that business model (hint: sock puppets) for picturesofmycat.com. 🙂

I’m a little late to the party with this one, but Firefox (which is the only way to browse the Interweb on a Windows box, IMHO) is now functional while running off of a USB thumbdrive. It’s tiny, too; I have a little 32 meg drive that I keep all my stories on, and Firefox only takes up a fourth of the drive’s space. Now I can just pop my drive into a USB port on any Windows machine and all my favorite sites and settings are right there in front of me, and I can use tabbed browsing instead of IE’s terrible multiple windows. Ah, it’s bliss. 🙂