Having their sworn commitment to each other and all related rights therein recognized by the highest court of a sovereign U.S. state is ultimately not worth the hassle of moving to Iowa, longtime partners Danny Mindlin and Alex Small determined Monday. Good point.
I saw this in a facebook sidebar ad, check it out:
I’m pretty sure that (a) I’m not going to jump through the dubious hoops at chooseyourcolor.com and (b) that it’s a spray-on recolorized Mac, not one with Orange anodization, but still pretty fun given that K still has an Orange clamshell iBook running around.
So, the Apple keynote, while introducing slick new versions of iWork and iLife, and announcing the tiered pricing and DRM-free iTunes songs, featured no Steve, and was a disappointment to many – including AAPL stockholders.
Long-time Apple fans, however, should not have been surprised when the “one more thing” was announced the next day: the MacBook Wheel! Combining the best features of their award-winning iPod line with the ease of use and stability of Mac OSX, this is an impressive of innovation and engineering. Just watch the movie: Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop. Pretty slick!
1. No Steve Jobs – not a surprise, really, but a surprising number of fanboys were disappointed.
2. Also disappointed was anybody with AAPL stock – except again they shouldn’t have been, since Apple’s stock price ALWAYS drops anytime Jobs doesn’t announce the iUniverse, and even then it probably sheds a couple points.
3. The new iPhoto sounds pretty darn sweet. Sorting photos by face (using fancy and trainable face-recog algorithms) or place (using GPS tags found in many new cameras) is neat. Apple has done a nice job with iLife’09.
4. I really, really want a new MBP. Not sure if I’m buying the seven hour battery life claim, but wow that’s a slick piece of machinery goodness.
5. Numbers (Apple’s version of Excel) looks like it’s going from “sucky” to “wow, I could probably manage using it instead of Excel, or soon anyway.” Linked charts – when you make a chart in Numbers and embed it into a Keynote presenatation, the chart updates when the data changes – is a rather nice feature.
6. Finally, iTunes will now have three pricing tiers: $0.99, $0.69, and $1.29. Starting today 8 million songs (of the 10+ million catalog) will be offered DRM-free, with the entire catalog to be DRM-free by the end of the quarter.
There seems to be a weird discrepancy on the post and comment timestamps. For example, it is now 8:23pm Pacific, and I see a little note next to the “Save” and “Publish” buttons saying that it was autosaved at 11:23:15pm, but the date stamp is Dec 3, 00:21 am.
No big deal, but just making note. Any ideas Nathaniel?
Inspired by the release of the mythical G’n'R album, Chinese Democracy, PoptartsSuckToasted has put together a list of top-10 of “long-awaited” albums, ones for which
we had to wait a long time for, but were also wholly worth the wait once we finally got to hear them. When you really think about it there aren’t too many of these. Sure there are a lot of bands that had huge gaps between good albums, but very few went on long hiatuses and managed to crawl their way back into the music listening consciousness.
I might quibble with a couple and suggest a couple others, but in general it’s a well-reasoned list – and you get free music downloads so why not check it out while waiting for tomorrow’s iTunes Free Music Tuesday?
Following up on a previous discussion/post on people’s perceptions of right, wrong, and shades of gray, I point you to this Balloon Juice commentary on an absurd editorial in the National Review. The NRO’s argument, in essence, is that the oppression of an undesirable minority (gays in this case) is a perfectly legitimate expression of free speech, while any dissenting opinion or effort to combat this oppression is a trampling of the First Amendment.
Or, put more artistically:
The logic, according to our repressed wingnuts, is that the first amendment struggle goes something like this:
Wingnut- “Homosexuals are filthy sodomites who should not have access to marriage.”
Evil gay person- “Nonsense. I demand the same rights as you and will fight for them.”
Wingnut- “Why won’t you respect my right to free speech?”
And there you have the wingnut understanding of the Constitution.
Look, I don’t like name-calling and divisive language. I think that the electoral college system results in the illusion of a deeply-divided nation, of a irreparably damaged union of two warring factions – and this perception leads to further escalation of the name-calling and intolerance. I don’t like this. But sometimes it’s okay to call a spade a spade, and or in this case calling a crazy a crazy. I truly don’t understand how these people can think this way, I don’t think there’s any way to change their mind, and so I can only hope that they become further marginalized and disenfranchised… which is exactly how they feel about me, a straight white guy who has sold his soul to that great demon, rational thought liberalism.
