maybe dkos and mydd can ban digby from the blogosphere for this conspiracy mongering.

Yahoo Mail to introduce limitless account size

politico is so busted for hackery. greenwald has been slamming them all day.

whole foods on the bowery

when people say theres a cancer growing on this white house, this is probably not what they had in mind. although he might be the first person in history to view a leave of absence for chemotherapy as a relief.

IMHO and the rest of the table we now have great Cantonese in Brooklyn......Pacificana opened after 3 years of construction from a fire.....1/2 the same owners and some new ones, dim sum is rumored to be awesome (1 1/2 hour wait at the peak last sunday), we tasted some dumplings that were grand cru and the mains we ordered were super......good news for us in Brooklyn

http://events.nytimes.com/2007/03/21/dining/reviews/21unde.html?ref=dining

I think we saw a gyrfalcon on saturday. Alex, is it possible? It was HUGE, bigger than any eagle I've ever seen. But it had pointy bent wings like a falcon, and very dark, almost black, on the underside. We saw it quite close up, near the north shore of Lake Erie, which I know is a hot spot for migration.

Ten most magnificent trees in the world.

nature porn tonight on discovery.

z-big

gilliard would shit a pickle over this one if he werent hanging on by a thread. so ill say it for him. fuck you, bloomberg, you little fucking twerp. what a bunch of creepy assholes we have running this country.

profiles in craven:

specter
kinsley

leahy sprouts notochord. meanwhile, the transvestite slips on a pair of kneepads and inhales at the altar of the sweaty codpiece.

Apple TV Has Landed -- Wow, requires a 16:9 television, which in the US means an HDTV. Not sure I would have gone that way. And I have trouble with the "iPod for your TV" analogy. My iPod has a disk twice the capacity of the Apple TV. Where do you even get a 40 Gig drive these days, from "Ye Old Computer Shoppe"? But I may have to get one anyway.

100 year old photoblog

gore about to testify on capitol hill about climate change on cspan 3.

The fabulous David E says that Obama is a 'Magic Negro' -- a non-threatening black man upon whom white Americans can rely.

Rush felt that this reference entitlee him to sing (to the tune of Puff the Magic Dragon) "Barack, the Magic Negro, doo doo do doo."

I really don't know anything about the fabulous David E, but I took note of this paragraph:

Poitier really poured on the "magic" in "Lilies of the Field" (for which he won a best actor Oscar) and "To Sir, With Love" (which, along with "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," made him a No. 1 box-office attraction). In these films, Poitier triumphs through yeoman service to his white benefactors. "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" is particularly striking in this regard, as it posits miscegenation without evoking sex. (Talk about magic!)

I just saw "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner". While there was much less on-screen fucking than in "Boogie Nights" -- very much less -- the topic of sex was broached, in an oblique 1960's PG sort of way. Specifically, the two fathers were chided for being dried up old farts who had forgotten the power of hot monkey love. But I guess the oblique reference wasn't fabulous enough.

By the way, this whitie supports Obama because he was against the Iraq war when 90% of the country was stupid on Bush.

un otro gobernador que habla español

Cable TV embraces an old foe: antenna
Planned device may give industry leverage when it negotiates fees for local broadcasts

Apple TV projected to surpass TiVo, Netflix

Flash drives being used in bigger devices

I've seen some articles popping up on this topic. This is from USA Today, so the PR is catching. Here's a blurb from a CEA newsletter that sounds like a flash manufacturer's press release ...

Flash drives transition into larger electronics
Durable and consumer-friendly flash drives are making the transition from smaller devices, such as cameras and cell phones, into larger electronics. Sony's new Vaio UX Premium and two Samsung laptops replace fragile hard drives with the more stable and energy-efficient flash offerings.

Flash is fragile, so they oughta watch with the throwing of the stones. Flash is fragile in a different way. It wears out due to write cycles. Given the way OS's like to fuck with files all the time, using flash with a general purpose OS is something to watch out for. Having a RAM disk absorb the thrashing and then writing to the flash on a much, much, much less frequent basis may result in a reliable disc-less system. Just popping in flash to replace the hard drive and hoping for the best is not so good.

By the way, when did you last do a backup?

I've been meaning to get up to speed on VoIP, but haven't really ever found the time. I know Skype must be pretty easy, but again, I haven't ever used it. There has just been some barrier there for me, and I'm generally a pretty early adopter of on line technology. But MagicJack sounds like it might be lowering the bar enough for me to take the plunge.

Techs, telcos team up to set Internet TV standard

A word of explanation: "Open IPTV Forum" isn't about having open, non-proprietary IPTV for the end-consumer. It's about having open, non-proprietary systems components for the service providers to choose from to build their closed, proprietary service delivery platforms.

Analogous organization: DVB, which sets standards used by a variety of satellite, terrestrial, and mobile TV systems ... some of which are "open" from the end consumer's perspective.

I saw 300. I totally missed the build-up until Jim mentioned it a couple of weeks ago and then I saw a History Channel treatment of the “facts”. It’s quite a piece of work. Easily the best approximation of comic book values into film that I’ve seen. That means an adolescent male ethos which is no more defensible than the cartoonish vision of history, but criticizing these things is beside the point. What struck me was the way it achieved a mythic scale (even though it’s Greek history, not myth.) The storytelling is highly condensed, with lots of voice-over and semi-static tableau, like comic book panels. I found it a great relief from the psychological “realism” that pervades even the worst of Hollywood films, in which actors strive for that subtle brow wrinkle which no more than suggests the deep mental turmoil within. It’s kind of like the difference between Poussin and Rembrandt, where Poussin uses an established roster of rhetorical facial expressions to convey a narrative, while Rembrandt’s faces have no expression, allowing us to read whatever we want into them, thereby appearing more “realistic.” The film’s success apparently came as a surprise to the establishment, but you’d think they’d have figured it out by now. Every Marvel comic movie has debuted at number 1, even though they’ve all suffered from the realistic treatment. The real tragedy is that crappy Brad Pitt Troy movie a couple of years back: if they’d put these guys in charge we might have had something worth watching.

Oh, and when Jim described the story I recognized it as Thermopylae, but couldn’t come up with the T. S. Eliot reference: it’s Gerontion.