Google Sets  [not quite random]

What a cool idea!  They must serve great coffee in the Google thinktank… [jenett.radio]

Wow… That is cool! I put in ‘Cowboy Bebop’, ‘Escaflowne’, ‘Noir’, and ‘Cardcaptor Sakura’. I got back a nice list of anime shows.

Jenny is thinking about possibly switching to a Mac.

… Call me stupid if you want to, but I had a bad experience with Macs at my first job, and I’ve just gone along with Windows ever since (even though I have bad experiences with Windows, too).

However, I’m at a point where I don’t want to upgrade to Windows XP, and I don’t really want to re-format my hard drive to upgrade to Windows 2000, which will only take me so far anyway. So for the first time, I will actually consider a Mac the next time I buy a computer. Especially after this week’s announcements. …

I think this is Apple’s advantage right now. M$ is doing a lot of things that people aren’t happy with. People are nervous about the whole DRM thing and Apple is mostly staying away from that (we’ll just ignore Roxio Toast for now). At the same time, I think Macs are finally worth looking at again. There was a looong time there between college and last year where I didn’t think they were. Apple always seemed just a little behind the ball. Now they seem to be working on building a better one.

(I’ve gotta settle down on this whole pushing people to Apple thing :))

John Cage. “I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.” [Quotes of the Day]

These are great! True Porn Clerk Stories  [The smelly feet] [jenett.radio]

Sometimes new customers don’t see the security cameras right away, and they sure as hell don’t expect the Voice of God mike. When you’re scrutinizing the charming cover art of White Trash Whore the last thing you want is to be chastized by a booming voice from above.

Update: I think they were reading from this on This American Life over the weekend. (And I was right! I just checked and there it was. Trippy.)

The Internet Archive is this neat site that archives web pages online. But I was poking around today and found they have a really neat online archive of old movies from the Prelinger Archives. Pretty neat. From the site:

This collection contains movies that the Prelinger Archives has digitized and donated to the Internet Archive. The films focus mainly on everyday life, culture, industry, and institutions in North America in the 20th century.

This is the first time that most of the films have been available to the public. They are “open source movies” — available for viewing at no cost and with few restrictions. About 1254 films are now online.

MacPlay released two of my worst online game addictions in the past year or two. You can now get Bejeweled & Alchemy for OS X. Thank god they don’t have a demo for download!

Ambrosia software has released a wonderfully addictive game for the mac called Pop-Pop. Ambrosia has released some of the best games for the mac and this one is just as fun as many of their earlier ones. This one also sports a very cool bouncy soundtrack. Now all they need to do is release an OS X version of Barrack!

Ken Venturi. “1. Never tell everything at once.” [Quotes of the Day]

It’s just about 6PM now and I was wondering where my UPS package was. Upon bringing up the shipment tracking page the last entry is:

 Jul 17, 2002   04:00:00 AM   SOMERVILLE MA US   OUT FOR DELIVERY  

Okay, does anyone else think FOURTEEN HOURS is a bit long for a package to be delivered?

The Keynote is starting up right now. Here’s some notes (updating as it goes on) (last update: 10:06AM):

• The Will Ferrel (sp?) commercial rocked.

• The next Apple store is in NYC.

• New Photoshop Elements that integrates with iPhoto

• New RealPlayer for OS X

• Jaguar, OS X 10.2 is officially announced today.

• iTools has become .mac. Now costs $49/year for existing, $100/year for new. I have mixed feelings on this. I understand them needing to charge, but.

• iCal: Calendar app with online publishing and sharing (I think it should publish a version in opml). Question: Palm sync?

• iTunes: 14 million copies. iTunes 3. New Features: Ability to rate music. Playcounts. Audible.com support. Scriptable playlists (like you can say play the 25 songs I listen to the most that I’ve given a rating of at least 3). Downloadable Today.

• iPod: 5GB: $299, 10GB: $399 (it’s THINNER, remote, case, firewire cover), 20GB: $499. Neat new features. Browse by composer (for classical music). Integrates with iCal (along with contacts), a clock, and the game.

• iSync: For syncronizing all your toys. Support for Palm and Phones, syncing between all of them. Very slick. Syncing over .mac between computers.

• iMac: 50% of iMac purchases are for the highest model. Price on the highest model dropped by $100. new 17inch *landscape* display, $1999

Jaguar Notes

• OS X is the #1 version of unix out there

• SMB Browsing, Active Directory Support, and PPTP for supporting windows

• Finder now Multi-Threaded, spring-loaded folders (neat!), integrated search

• More Universal Access stuff

• Quicktime 6: MPEG-4, AAC audio. Streaming is MUCH nicer. They played a video stream and were jumping around within the file, very cool.

• Sherlock 3: Internet Services. Sherlock looks much more useful to me now.

• Handwriting recognition (Inkwell)

• Rendezvous: Automaticly discover other network devices over IP networks w/out any other configuration. Demoed iTunes using it. They opened up a PowerBook and the demo computer detected it and made the playlists available on it. Open standard! Printers are going to support it (Epson, HP, and Lexmark planning to support). (Question, what about security?)

• Mail: Improvements. Learning Junk Mail filter.

• New Address Book. LDAP support. Showed bluetooth support with address book to call someone with his bluetooth enabled cell phone.

• iChat: some neat features! Find other ichat users around you w/rendezvous. Fully integrated with typical mac features.

• Cost: Full $129. Upgrades just pay media costs. Out August 24.

Final Thoughts: Apple is really working on the whole integration thing, and is working on making it easier for the casual user to use all the tools. It’s going to be a fun couple of months with stuff coming out.