The Board

This is seriously odd.  A $20 ticket can get you a $150 headset.

Headsets.com giving away gear to those nailed by CA’s new handsfree legislation – Engadget

Saw this on Slickdeals about a free pretzel coupon from Coupons.com. Seems like a lot of trouble to go through to protect people from getting too many free pretzels! Anyway, Slickdeals shouldn’t be linking to that site and endorsing their heavy-handed method for preventing us from getting fair use out of coupons.

Auntie Anne’s (store locator) has a printable coupon for a free pretzel available. Thanks brisar

Note, you will need to have coupons.com printing software installed prior to being able to print the coupon. You may print up to 2 coupons total

Alternatively, you may request one coupon to be mailed via this link

Driving around in an X3 today while Serena’s car is getting an oil change. It’s pretty nice– stiff ride, which is rare for a high car.

This is a story with a couple of beginnings, so it’s hard to know which beginning to begin with. Over a year ago, I started a project on Flickr to encourage people to collect photos of 6 Million People , one person at a time. This group has been a success, with almost 50,000 photos added from over 6000 members. I knew that we’d eventually have spin-off groups, and the first was Spotlight Seven, which through 17 weeks has attracted a loyal following and has featured some of the best portrait artists on Flickr. Smoothdude has been the driving force behind the group, carefully selecting the portraits each week and conducting insightful interviews with the photographers.

smoothdude
Click on for more.

(more…)

Only $2 for the album, today only! Tracks include the classics Synchronicity 2, Every Breath You Take, King Of Pain, etc. Amazon MP3 Store has a daily special on it’s main page… someone oughta submit the better ones to Slickdeals. At $2, it seems to be pretty close to the cost of delivery (by the MB), if I’m recalling correctly the basis for allofmp3’s pricing.

Amazon.com: Synchronicity: MP3 Downloads: Police

Speaking of classics, the Pixies’ Doolittle was released on RockBand as an entire album.  Pretty cool, but that’s starting to feel like real money ($19 for the faux-album vs. $9 for the mp3).  I’ll probably pick and choose a few faves. What are your recommendations?

Today, Mozilla is releasing Firefox version 3.0, which by all accounts is a big step forward in the venerable browser. And they’re going for a world record for number of downloads in one day, from their Spread Firefox community site. Unfortunately, right now, the site seems to be down from the millions of people trying to download the software.
A couple weeks ago, I decided to try the version 3.0 release candidate as my full-time browser (from Camino), and there are pros and cons:

All this being said, it’s still a perfectly capable browser, and the add-ons make it, in some ways, more useful/fun than Camino. On the Mac, where it can be a pain to change the default browser (by changing the preferences in Safari), I use IC-Switch in the menu bar to change my default browser when I need to (also for changing the default mail app). It’s still under evaluation as far as I’m concerned — I can already feel the pull back to Camino, which is just so much more seamless on the Mac.

Heard about this on yesterday’s BuzzOutLoud podcast—a couple who met in a line for a Star Wars movie got married last week, and the ring (pictured above) was a miniature Millenium Falcon. The best part was the engagement story:

Designed by the groom it has Sapphires for the engine and a diamond in the gun turret. It also split in two. When he proposed he gave her the back half and said You can have half now and the other half when we reach Alderaan.

Also, their wedding cake…
http://img392.imageshack.us/img392/5504/255266225048c007e233bjj5.jpg
Also designed by the groom.

To drink, to dance, to shoot

Over the top. Totally cheesy. And completely fun. I went all out to get this iconic sequence of Thomas Hawk as he drank a tall margarita and snapped photos of the light show on the ceiling.

I guess nobody else is going to start the inevitable thread, so here goes.
Today Steve Jobs took the stage at WWDC ’08 and announced, to no one’s surprise, the iPhone 3G. As the name implies, 3G is the big new feature, as well as built-in GPS. The other big announcements were the iPhone App Store, and the rebranding/revamping of .Mac as “MobileMe.” (Not sure if I got the capitalization right there). Oh, and the fact that the iPhone 3G now costs $199, half of what the slower version costs today.
So, what’s the verdict?
While I’m sure it’ll be great, this announcement frankly isn’t blowing my mind. If this phone were a Mac, we’d be talking about the “speed bump” that they announced today.
3G is great, and from Apple’s testing (which tends toward the positive), it’s 2-3x as fast as the original iPhone. The examples given during the keynote seem to be focused on how fast it can download static web pages, but it seems like many people will be craving other high-bandwidth apps, like mobile video. One cool feature of 3G, though, is that you can have both a data and voice connection at the same time, which EDGE can’t do.
GPS: A great feature, and one that hopefully will be leveraged by developers down the road. As for now, it looks like it’s just a better way to find yourself on Google Maps, which is a problem I don’t have (the cell phone triangulation works great in heavily-populated areas). And while GPS will work in areas without cell phone coverage, it’s doubtful that Google Maps will, since you need a data connection to download the map tiles. Turn-by-turn GPS apps (for driving) can’t be far away, and I’m guessing that for these to really replace dash-mounted GPS devices, you’d need the maps onboard rather than over-the-air. Like I said, I’m sure it’ll be great when developers really get into Core Location coding.
MobileMe is the new .Mac. And it looks pretty slick — over-the-air syncing of calendars, address book, and email. The AJAX apps look just like the desktop versions. The kicker: $99 per year. I was really excited about this, then the price made me pause and think about it. And I realized that this is a problem I really don’t have. I sync my iPhone to my computer just fine, using a cable. And it doesn’t cost me a red cent. Plus, I don’t like the tagline that MobileMe is “Exchange for the rest of us.” I guess Apple has given up on beating Microsoft in the enterprise. Not that they could have won, but it was nice that they were trying to use open source solutions. Oh well.
That being said, I’m hopeful (not optimistic) that I’ll be able to check my work email on my iPhone now. I think that my IT department has to activate some settings on their end to make that work, and that isn’t going to happen.
So, what else? Well, I mentioned a few days ago that I wish that the Calendar app on the iPhone supported different colors for different calendars — well, now it does! This is probably the single thing I’m most excited about in the iPhone 2.0 software. Since they apparently aren’t going to support Notes syncing. Still. Not to mention basic cut-and-paste.
And finally, the price. I’ve read in several places that in addition to dropping the iPhone to $199, they’ve increased the data plan per month by $10. And they still require a 2-year contract. The math isn’t hard — the new iPhone costs $40 more than the old one to own for 2 years (assuming you have a data plan). Glad they’re not raising the price on the older iPhones.
So all in all, I’m sure it’ll be a great device, and I’m sure that allowing developers to get their hands on them will result in all sorts of great new applications. But for now, I’ll stick with what I have.

Already reading!

Brandon looks on in amazement as Lucas browses the menu to decide which drink he’ll be ordering. “This kid is really advanced,” muses Brandon, “as I’m still just trying to learn my lower case letters.”