Trotz.com

Atlanta was hit by a major ice storm which began Friday night and continued into Saturday, and the lingering affects continue into Sunday. I’ve posted a gallery of images taken around our house - I didn’t venture too far out as (a) I am still recovering from a nasty cold and (b) the roads were close to impassable with over one inch of solid ice. Amy’s baby shower was postponed 24 hours due to the weather, and the Atlanta Symphony concert and dinner we’d planned to attend with my Mom, visiting from Savannah, were also cancelled. But the party will go on today, and mom’s flight to West Palm Beach to visit her sister Hilda will be on Monday, instead of today.

Tags: Gallery, Photography

Great news by email on Friday, courtesy of the Ben Folds mailing list. Ben’s first album since 2001 is coming out on April 26th - Songs for Silverman. “Landed,” the first single, is already on some radio stations. It officially goes on-air and online (ITMS) on February 1. The email also announced a remastered version of Whatever and Ever Amen adding seven lost classic bonus tracks, out March 22. As Martha would say, ‘that’s a very good thing.’

Tags: Music

While Kotaku.com dubs this perhaps the best ever stunt, I’m not so sure. But it is pretty amazing, and a testament to the fact that exploring this gamespace is just as enjoyable as following the ‘missions’ within. Beware low flying aircraft! Check out the video here.

Tags: Gaming

An intrepid reader of the British website theregister.co.uk tipped the site off to an interesting bit of code on Apple’s Powerbook product page. Apparently, a 1×1 pixel tracking gif from marketing firm Avenue A is labelled as ‘apple_g5_powerbook.’ A typo, perhaps? Probably, but all other such tracking tags across the apple.com site have the appropriate (and correct) processor and product names. It’s probably just wishful thinking, but we can hope, can’t we?

Tags: Mac, macintosh

MSNBC.com reports today that Asteroid Douglasadams was among the 71 newly named celestial objects announced Tuesday by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass. Mr. Adams is one of my favorite writers as I blogged about his long-awaited movie recently. Just before Adam’s death in 2001, one of the HHGTTG characters - Arthur Dent - became the name of another asteroid. Following the Columbia tradgedy, seven asteroids were named after the fallen astronauts. MSNBC.com solicited readers for future asteroid names. One reader suggested Adams, and upon further research, an asteroid known as 2001 DA42 was identified. How fitting - Douglas died in 2001, it already bore his initials, and the number 42 is, as all Guide fans are aware, the answer to live, the universe and everything.

In more Google news today, Reuters reports that Google has hired the lead engineer for Firefox. This comes on the heels of their registration of the Gbrowser.com domain and hiring of several Internet Explorer engineers last year.

Tags: Web

Google and Yahoo are expanding their search products to television. Google Labs released their beta of ‘Google Video’ today. This system allows a user to search closed captioning and see still frame grabs of the relevant video. Some PVRs and TV tuner cards for PCs have done this in the past - tuning to or alerting when certain keywords were matched. But these projects are on a much broader scale.

In a New York Times story this morning (free registration required), Google’s vp for product management says “The long-term business model is complicated and will evolve over time.” I’ll say - the rights to aggregating video from hundreds of local television broadcasts, not to mention networks like CNN, ABC, etc., are going to be complex. But given Google’s audience, it wil be interesting to see if broadcasters see value in placement here. The Times story digs briefly into the touchy issues of rights and network deals related to these types of technologies. A worthwhile read.

Tags: Web

At my 6-month teeth cleaning earlier this week, the dentist found a hairline crack in both of my lower back molars. Ouch. One was worse than the other, so I went under the drill Thursday to get a crown. I *hate* the dentist, especially when the drill, novocaine, or impressions are involved. Wearing my iPod and listening to Chris O’Reilly helped, but only marginally. I’m still sore, close to 24 hours later. Time heals all, right? Can’t wait for the visit in two weeks for the final porcelain. That’s also going to hurt, I’m sure. Then we get to do another one in a few months. Yay.

Tags: Health

This is a site update. I’ve added a pretty slick feature to Trotz.com, a set of (for now) four headline aggregation pages, implemented with the spiffy PHP program ‘zFeeder‘. Listed on the left rail of most pages of the site under ‘B L O G R O L L’, these pages assemble RSS feeds from some of my favorite sites. It’s a whole lot easier to check out these sites here, and visit headlines I’m interested in. Check them out, and let me know what you think.

The categories include:

DailyGeekOut: Sites like BoingBoing, Engadget, Gizmodo, TheFeature, Screenhead, etc.
News Feeds: Includes feeds from CNN.com and SI.com (where I work), The New York Times, The Boston Globe, etc. Easy way to glance at the top news of the moment.
Mac News: As a big Mac-geek, I need my daily dose of Mac news, tips and rumors. So here it is. Macslash, TUAW, etc. Good stuff.
MCE Feeds: I’ve been fooling around with Windows XP Media Center Edition for a while now, so this page lets me keep up with The Green Button, various Microsoft employee blogs, and hardware/software news from the gadget sites.
Continue reading »

Tags: blog, wordpress

Guest columnist Ross Rubin blogs on Engadget today that despite Apple not calling the Mac mini a media center device, it has all that in spades. DVD-player? Check. Rip, Mix, Burn? Check. Ken Burns hi-res slideshow effects? Check. Add on a USB TV tuner, and this thing is your TiVo on steroids. Rubin suggests the mini is a stealth MCE. The apps in iLife are all that a user is looking for when they want to access their media (movies, music, photos), and of course, there is the elegance factor. He also talks about the possibility that Apple is waiting to enter this market for a true media center once the CableCard standard is settled. That’s a great point - you should see how my IR blasters are scattered around with my MCEs, TiVo, etc. Anyway, others have blogged about ‘mini as media center’, but I think he hits the nail on the head here.

Tags: windows media center