Speaking of Podcasts...

I recently stumbled across a new podcast from the Quick and Dirty Now group. Along with shows about grammar (Grammar Girl), personal manners (Modern Manners Guy), and even Second Life (Traveling Avatar), the newest podcast offers great tips and thoughts about one aspect of life (personal and professional) that cause may people a lot of anxiety: Public Speaking.

Take a listen to The Public Speaker... hope you get something out of it (I know I have).

Steve Jobs - Still Alive After All These Years

Contrary to the report, Steve Jobs is not dead!

You can now return to listening to music on your iPod...

Throttled For Throttling...

Seems Comcast got into a little bit of trouble recently with the FCC. Turns out they were arbitrarily disconnecting high-band with BitTorrent uses for no legitimate reason.

They claim they were only trying to "keep the pipes open" for the majority of users. First, this seems to be a violation of terms of service, since they never informed customers that such a practice was in place. Unfortunately, the FCC did not hand down a fine with there order, but it does set a precedent against future such actions.

Now I'll put my conspiracy cap on and wonder... why target just BitTorrent? Because it's the belief that the majority of torrent traffic is illegal music and movies? But at no point did Comcast try to determine if the torrents where transmitting legal or illegal content. Either way, I'm sure the RIAA and MPAA would be giddy to see BitTorrent rendered a useless Internet tool with these heavy handed approaches.

For more details: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/29/AR2008072902077.html?wpisrc=newsletter

For All the Scrabulous Fans Out There

From the Washington Post:

A Few Cross Words

Updated: Seems you can't keep a good game down... Wordscraper is a retooled version of Scrabulous, that is hopefully different enough to keep the wolves at bay.

A Bit of Tech Humor

Here's one you may have seen before, but it's certainly funny enough for a second viewing.

The Web Site Is Down

Note: This is NSFW (you've been warned)

New Music, New Outlet

Years ago (more than I like to admit), I remember when Guns N' Roses released their landmark albums Use Your Illusion 1 & 2. There was a huge fanfare over the whole thing, with record stores opening around midnight so die-hard fans could get the first copies on CD and tape.

Now here we are, 17 years later and news of a new Guns song being released made me think about how much has changed. Music cassettes are virtually gone, with CDs close behind. Many brick and mortar music stores are gone, or diversified to include DVDs and games. Real hardcore fans have heard a bunch of leaked tracks from Guns thanks to YouTube and file sharing.

And now news that their next official release is actually part of a video game... Rock Band 2, to be exact. I'm not sure all of this is what Axel meant when he sang "welcome to the jungle" or "take me down to paradise city", but it's definitely a whole new world.

Not as Many People Going Wii

Recent figures show the Wii's Japan lead on PS3 falling from a 6-to-1 lead, to a 1.7 -to-1 lead in recent months, seems like PS3 is finally putting out enough titles to attract the hardcore gamers that are the base of their market. The Wii on the other hand is more for the "casual gamer" or a second system (to PS3 or Xbox).

While things may be looking up for Playstation, the bigger question is how did you get in to this situation in the first place? And how embarrassing is it to be routinely beat by Wii Sports...