Have you recently been inundated by advertisement after advertisement featuring Star Wars Episode III – The Revenge of the Sith? Or have you been on a trip to Outer Mongolia? Who ever heard of Yoda wanting a Diet Pepsi? Who ever heard of Star Wars M&M’s? You do not want Stars Wars Dark Chocolate M&M’s. [...]
The Broadcast Flag – A Fable in One Part
May 8, 2005 By Leave a Comment
There once was a national agency to regulate the transmission of any type of signal through the air. Like all agencies, it seemed a good thing when it was created… First, they had control of the broadcast waves themselves. With a little stretch, they grabbed the ability to control the content. The windfall came with [...]
Innovative news presentation at Newsmap
May 7, 2005 By Leave a Comment
One of the most interesting news sites I have found is an innovative presentation called Newsmap. Newsmap concentrates and presents news excerpts in a treemap visualization. Each block in the treemap is sized according to the popularity of the item at Google’s news site. Of course, clicking on any entry in the treemap actually takes [...]
Apple’s OS X — and the Windows pundits
May 7, 2005 By Leave a Comment
Background: This week, Apple Computer released it’s latest operating system for its Mac computers. Officially known as OS X, version 10.4, this version has the code name “Tiger.” At virtually the same time, Apple released a large package of updates for the previous version 10.3.9 (“Panther”). What are the Windows-centric journalists and e-journalists saying? Since [...]
Radio Show appearance May 7, 2005
May 6, 2005 By Leave a Comment
I’m scheduled to co-host the Cajun Clickers Radio Show on Saturday, May 7th at 9:00am on station WJBO. This is a computer question call-in show. Even better, WJBO provides access via the Internet to its radio show, so you can listen via streaming audio to your computer. Just click on the "Listen Live" button on [...]
Bug’s Bleat!
May 6, 2005 By Leave a Comment
James McClellan has converted his weekly Bug’s Bleat newsletter into a blog. James is a friend of mine from a former employer. The goal of Bug’s Bleat is to be the “Internet version of the Ed Sullivan Show.” It’s entertaining, informative, funny, personal, patriotic and respects faith and family values. Check out Bug’s Bleat when [...]
Firefox tops 50 Million Downloads
May 5, 2005 By Leave a Comment
Congratulations to the Mozilla Foundation and all the people contributing their efforts to make the Firefox web browser a success! Version 1.0 was released in early November. Last Friday morning, Firefox topped 50,000,000 downloads. I’ve been using Firefox since the 0.7 beta version, after reading comments about it in Maximum PC. I.E. is still around, [...]
Linux — now for the home computer user
May 5, 2005 By Leave a Comment
I’ve been playing recently with a copy of the Open Circulation Edition (a.k.a. free) version of Xandros Desktop version 3. Pretty cool system. I’d used Xandros v1 and v1.1 a couple years ago, so I knew to expect a smooth-running, graphical desktop that was an easy transition from Windows. Now, with version 3, Xandros has [...]
Blogging in public
May 4, 2005 By Leave a Comment
Independent Lens, a photographic essay on PBS
May 2, 2005 By Leave a Comment
If you are interested in photography, of the digital or film varieties, check out the new series being syndicated on PBS called Independent Lens. This show sometimes focuses on one photographer and his or her works. Other shows have one to three shorter photo essays. Although all the work is done by video cameras, the [...]