I got an invitation to a birthday party today from someone who lives in the valley/bay area. I've known this person for a few years - we're not close, but certainly not adversaries either. This person is definitely a frienda, a colleague, an associate - that kind of a relationship. The kind of relationship where you make sure that you break bread together if you are ever in the same town at the same time because you know the conversation is going to fun, smart and definitely challenging. Exactly the kind of conversation I love with lunch.

I was pleased to get the invite, but I had to turn it down. The whole distance between here and there thing would have made it near impossible. Actually, I'm kind of bummed I won't be able to make it.

And impressed a too. A lot of times, valley events are valley events - i.e. if you aren't in the valley, you don't know about it until afterwards, never mind get an invitation ahead of time. It was nice to get an invite *beforehand*. I really wish I could be there. It'll be a great time - fun, smart and definitely challenging.

Exactly the kind of conversation I love with birthday cake.

Eric Rice is getting all hot and bothered about one of his Christmas presents...

Yup. Got a Sony Reader for Christmas, and it is *bad ass*. It looks like a book, feels like a book, reads like a book. And it takes PDFs, JPGs, MP3s, AACs, and RSS feeds.

Don’t try and compare this to phones, laptops, or any other computer device.

Compare it to paper.

- via Eric Rice, "The Official Site"

Being a red-blooded geek myself, this got me all hot and bothered too. Of course I had to check into what the heck a "Sony Reader" is. I'd never heard of it until I did my annual check on Eric's blog (I only need to check him once a year - he's timeless :)

These things do look pretty sick. Great looking display, nice form factor and a touch of elegance that you don't usually get in handheld devices of this ilk.

I got a bit of a shock when I clicked the "buy direct" button though - $349. I'm used to devices like this being subsidized by the book sellers (you know the old "buy a subscription, get a cheap/free/discounted reader" trick?)

$349 is a lot of cake to spend on paper.

Even though they do have a couple of rebates and discounts available (in a flash page I can't link to), I think I'll be sticking to the real thing until I can find someone as nice as Eric' benefactor to give me one ;)

In the age of sub-$1000 notebooks, the Ferrari 1000 is a luxury model.

– via Accordion Guy

Yeah maybe, but its not a Macbook.

(ObDisclosure: Microsoft gave me a bunch of free stuff last year, including a book on Outlook, a $100 gift certificate for the MS Store that I never used, an amazing USB laser travel mouse that I use all the time and a bunch of copies of Vista that I promptly lost interest after installing them and realizing that the gloss wasn’t really going to get me enthused about Windows any time soon…and oh yeah, a totally unexpected copy of OneNote which is a story worth reading…)

from the "shoulda-been-on-lifehacker" file. DIY Grow-Op via Google Video.

The intarweb is sooooooooo useful.

Sidenote: I’ve been spending a fair bit of time playing with Google Video and YouTube and their kith and kin over the last couple of days. For all of the fingerpointing at Youtube’s collection of copyright infringing clips, I’m finding that Google’s video collection is waaayyyy more infringing. Youtube only allows 10 minute clips to be uploaded. GV clips can be open ended. Guess which is showing more full length movies and TV shows? The quality is much better with GV, and they allow the download of raw, unencumbered QT files for play-anywhere action.

Complete episodes of “The Simpsons”, “Family Guy” and “South Park” are pretty easy to find… 

 …and full run movies of varying qualities are pretty available too (I managed to find copies of “Lady in the Water”, “Madagascar” and others pretty quickly)

In fact, a quick look at newly submitted content over 20 minutes in duration mostly looks to be pirated in some way – capped from TV, ripped from DVD, etc. There seems to be very little actual user generated media that runs this long.

So it looks like Time’s “Person of the Year” is not only a pothead, but they are a thief as well.

My friend Tim says this is a cliche, but I haven’t heard it before, and I quite like it…

…you don't know what you think until you have to write.

Crap.

Crap. Crap. Crap.

Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap.

(crap).

I’m out of town for a week.

And I forgot the power adapter for my Macbook.

And the closest Mac-savvy store is 90 minutes away.

And they are out of stock on Magsafe adapters.

Crap.

To make things even worse, I brought my old Thinkpad along with me so that I could finish up the data transfer off the unit before I turned it back into company inventory.

Now I actually have to use it.

Crap.

And I *hate it*.

If anyone knows of any stores in the Ottawa/Pembroke region that actually carries (instock) the Apple 85w Magsafe adapter for the Macbook Pro, please (please!) drop me a line.

If that's not enough for you, I've uploaded a bunch of stills to a Flickr photoset as well...

Heh...according to the Google Video Terms of Service, I can pack up my home movies in a box, stick a stamp on them, ship them down to Google HQ, and somehow, they'll end up in online...

You may designate content for hosting and display to end users... by sending copies of Your content to Google at the address located at www.google.com/corporate/address.html, Attention: Google Video Upload Program, in a format designated by Google, or to such other address as designated by Google, and/or by otherwise making such content available to Us...

Having nothing better to do while I fight the Brazilian Face Swelling virus, I might just do that over the next couple of days... :)

I attended two conferences in Seattle this past spring and had a little bit of downtime to do some sightseeing. I've taken advantage of the downtime associated with the allergies/poisoning/reaction/whateveh to put together a quick photo album using iPhoto and WebExport. Pretty good tools IMHO. Enjoy.