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CA has its own foreign policy now?

Governor, Blair sign warming accord
UNUSUAL STATE-NATION PACT PUTS DISTANCE BETWEEN LEADERS, BUSH
Front page coverage of a new media art show coming to SJ next week ...
``This will transform San Jose into the North American epicenter for the intersection of art and digital culture,'' said Dietz, former curator of new media at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
Epicenter, baby! Okay, we get a little excited out here in the provinces.

ZeroOne website
Guy who works on Boston's Big Dig project is appalled at the wasted materials. So he collects stuff that looks good, hauls it away himself, and uses it all to build this house.
Via boing-boing:
In 1968, Otto Preminger made 23 Skidoo, a psychedelic film starring Jackie Gleason as a mobster, Groucho Marx as the kingpin, and Mickey Rooney as a snitch. Throw in some LSD and you've got the makings of a very strange cinematic trip. The trailer for 23 Skidoo is now on YouTube and it's a gas.
apple i talk
High-definition video add-on coming to iPod

"The initial players will be able to handle MPEG 4, Divx, HD.264 and other video formats."

Interesting piggy-back strategy. Rather than doing the whole thing from scratch, they hitch a ride off Apple's base technology and extend it.
Online Videos & Playing Into Apple’s Hands

This is reminiscent of the digital music market, which is chockfull of players with marginal market share. Apple’s iPod/iTunes dominates the market because it provides a stress free (some call it integrated) experience for the end user.

CNN snatching page out of YouTube's book
AOL to Test-Launch Video Search Service
NEW YORK (Reuters)—AOL plans to announce on Monday it will test launch a new Internet video service in an attempt to demonstrate how much it has learned from mistakes that cost the once reigning king of the online world its leading position.

The new service, AOL Video, aims to be the one-stop shop for online videos and will let users search for videos across the Web, upload their own, or buy or watch for free thousands of TV shows from any one of 45 video-on-demand channels on nearly any device.
The Hard Disk That Changed the World -- happy 50th to the hard disk. The winchester disk (a sealed unit rather than a unit with interchangible disk packs) came along in '73, also developed by IBM in San Jose.
Just found this yesterday (am I late to the party?): War In Context - "Iraq + war on terrorism + Middle East conflict + critical perspectives". Seems like a fairly comprehensive listing of current pieces (mostly major media) on the war, with lots of pull quotes. Not much analysis, but a good way to keep up with all the reporting.
DirecTV: August Launch For New DVRs -- long awaited box with H.264/AVC support. non-TiVo (yuk)
Painted Willie?
two swiss chef's are cooking great in manhattan

one is rumored to be the youngest chef to get a michelin star in europe, and after a stint at Compton Place (sp?) in SF has taken the helm at 11 Madison Park, two meals there have been sensational, like dining in great spot in europe, with a very nice wine list!!

the other is a spot that used to be Chelsea Commons, now called Trestle on Tenth, hearty homey with a splash of innards, here too the wine is super, loaded with values / organic small growers

skinny
any major dupe
any major dupe.
43. Alias
Now that the pioneering 71 Clinton Fresh Food and aKa Café have closed their doors, Alias is the sole survivor of the restaurant family that made Clinton Street’s culinary name. Maybe that’s because the prices are low enough and the menu flexible enough to keep the locals coming back. But the kitchen’s genuine reliance on seasonal ingredients, and the offbeat way it combines them, as in a recent salad of Greenmarket strawberries, fried capers, and Di Palo’s ricotta, gives it a distinct identity on a block where it’s gotten much tougher to stand out.

plus top 5 brunch and prix fixe spot.
ny times endorses lieberman lamont.
Motorola Buying Broadbus Technologies -- Broadbus is a SW based video-on-demand (VOD) system vendor. This article cites Mot as a cell phone maker, but this probably has more to do with their cable TV business. They provide both headend and settop equipment for cable and IPTV.
sunday bloody sunday
YouTube strategy sticks to clips
2.5Gb/s Internet For French Homes Sacre bleu!
Amazon Looks to Movie Downloads
Although it has refused to confirm, Amazon has been rumored to be readying its video download service for launch in mid-August. First reported by trade magazine Advertising Age on Sunday, the service is said to offer both movies and episodes of television shows.
Judge Refuses to OK Telco Mergers
U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan told lawyers representing the interests of both SBC and AT&T and of Verizon and MCI that he could not give final approval to either merger unless he received more information. While both have been given the go-ahead by the FCC, the courts have not yet decided if the mergers are in the public interest.