Freyburg

With the advent of Monday morning comes not only the slow trudge back to the cubicle but also a bunch o’ neat tehcno-doodads to start your week. Engadget features some new routers that, paired with a networked storage drive, allow you to run Bittorrent 24/7 without a PC, to….uhhh…….download exciting lectures from leading universities. And on the software front, Skype has finally release a new client for the Mac with video chat, regardless of platform.

The BBC and the Guardian teamed up to produce a short film about the daily lives of the 101st Airborne in Iraq, and their trails and tribulations trying to train an Iraqi army to eventually take over for them. Worth checking out.

The Guardian is chock full of goodness this morning, including a story about Bush finally admitting the war in Iraq isn’t going so well. The fact that Moqtada Al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army just took over a city would be a pretty big hint in that direction, but the military is also saying they’ve more or less lost Baghdad. Add to that former Secretary of State James Baker calling the war a “helluva mess” and you’ve got all the ingredients for Veitnam II on your hands.

What should have been a one-hit phenomenon riding the coat-tails of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” has somehow been a 25-year, polka infused joyride for “Weird” Al Yankovic. Let’s all tip our hat to one of the geek patron saints, shall we?

Keith Olbermann knocks another one out of the park with an editorial about the new Military Commissions Act, which will let the President of the United States arrest people without warrants, hold them indefinitely, and basically rape the Constitution. I can’t really do Olbermann’s invective justice..just check out the video, and applaud.

Ok, I’m no Bush apologist. Frankly, I think the guy is no better than Nixon, and may even be worse. The uber-liberals at the Huffington Post think otherwise, and claim he’s one of the worst leaders in world history. Uh…..Hitler, anybody? Stalin? Genghis Khan? Mao? Nero? Some two-bit Texan who admittedly has taken American foreign policy off the rails, hopefully only temporarily, doesn’t even make the cut, despite the obscene screw-up that is present-day Iraq.

Just letting everyone know I now have a Technorati Profile set up. I want to get some more readers for this here blog contraption, and I’m investigating various avenues for a wider presence on the Internet. Getting a bit of money would be nice too…what’s the consensus view on some ads (hopefully unobstrusive, and none of that damn “Get Zwinked!” junk) on the site?

Robert Cringely seems to think so. He’s made some wacky predictions and observations before, but this time i think he’s probably on the money. There’s presumably enough people clicking banners and Adsense ads for Youtube to be at least breaking even, despite their prodigious bandwidth bill. And now with Google welcoming them to the stable, the advertising will just get more integrated.

And the long-awaited (heh) part 2 of Radio Free Skaro #8, in which we chronicle “Doomsday,” the climactic final episode of the second season, is now up on the Internets. Next week we’ll wait a couple more days than usual in order to properly review “Torchwood,” the new (and apparently quite violent and racy) Dr. Who spinoff. Enjoy! As usual, get it via the web, the feed, or direct download.

Jeff Jarvis over at Buzz Machine has a post up about how journalists are breaking away from working in traditional setups at newspapers, and becoming more of a “journalist as brand.” His thoughts are a more well-formed version of some musing I’ve been doing on the subject for quite some time. Traditional media is consolidating, and I personally know a few people who’ve been either laid off from their media jobs or are struggling to establish a toehold in ever-shrinking waters. And the situation isn’t going to get any better, anytime soon.

It’s important, if you want to write or broadcast for a living, to not only look at every opportunity that you can get (yes, purists, that includes PR and the like) but also to not dismiss the Internet out of hand. It may not be 100 percent of the way there, but eventually a website and podcast or videocast will be the rule rather than the exception for new and established journaists.