brainwagon

I just completed ordering a product from a website which claimed “free next day delivery!”. “Golly”, I think to myself. “It will be nice to have this gadget sooner rather than later.” I eagerly click, and imagine the box being here on Friday. Just got the confirmation email. The item (mind you, not built to […]

Stories like this one have been making the rounds, probably in response to the unfortunate remarks which Harvard University President Lawrence Summers made last month that suggested that innate differences between men and women might be responsible for the differences that the two sexes demonstrate in math and sciences. Unfortunately, in all of the these […]

How in the world does this book get to be ranked #15 on amazon.com? Truly, the end times must be upon us. Or, they would be if I believed in such nonsense.

I watch a fair number of crime drama shows. Early on, I really liked CSI. It had some fairly interesting characters, and tried to present some interesting bits of forensics in a stylized dramatic way. But now that it has branched off into three different shows, it simply makes me wince. The problem is a […]

If you thought $0.10 was expensive for an SMS message (and it is), for pity’s sake, how bad is $3.95 per message? Holy crap, how pathetic do you have to be to use a service like this?

With the combination of my iPod suffering a meltdown and the Christmas holiday, I must admit that I am way behind on my podcast listening. While trying to catch up, I ran across yet another bit of “controversy” involving the PodFathers, Dave Winer and Adam Curry. Apparently in a recent episode, Adam excerpted some bits […]

Russell Beattie Notebook – Home What I really want to do though is to be able to mark a URL as referrer spam, then the next time someone hits my machine with that URL as a referrer, a lethal electric shock is sent back through the internet into their computer, killing them and all of […]

One last, long campout for ‘the Star Wars guy’ Jeff Tweiten lives on a periwinkle blue, fold-out futon on the sidewalk in front of the Cinerama Theatre. He is not homeless, but camping out for 139 days. Waiting. For Godot, you wonder? An organ transplant? The end of the world? Jeff Tweiten is already waiting […]

It’s obviously not by having anything insightful to say. Robert Scoble has quite possibly the most “I just don’t get it” response to Jobs’ MacWorld keynote so far. Let’s work this slowly so that even he can understand: The Mac mini is the cheapest Macintosh ever released. It costs about the same as an iPod […]

Over at evilgeniuschronicles, Dave Slusher has dug out yet another Internet pundit who proclaims that the idea of allowing every individual to have their own radio show is somehow a bad thing. I promised that I wouldn’t rant, and it may seem like I’m piling on, but here’s my take. If you don’t want to […]

Sometimes, you just have to shake your head at the stupidity of people. Today’s installment comes from the editorial pages of the New York Times, where we find the following (registration required): To the Editor: Re “Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database” (front page, Dec. 14): While having online access to some great […]

My rant begins with Dave Winer’s post on Scripting News, from which I quote: Here’s the Trade Secrets podcast I promised yesterday where we explain where Adam and I see podcasting going. Since it’s a travel day (flying to Boston for the I&S conference) there won’t be much to read here, so I’m asking for […]

I was trying to figure out why my Cinnamon Bear Podcast was not showing up on audio.weblogs.com after pinging. I checked it with the feed validator and it came back clean. I remember that Dave Winer had mentioned that he made a Feed Debugger, so I thought I’d give it a try. It returned the […]

It could be possible that someone might disagree with what many others view as the promise of podcasting, or might not possess the foresight to see its possibilities. That in itself is no great crime. Honest disagreements occur even between the informed, and far too few people make the work to even be informed. It […]

I just finished listening to the latest of Dave Slusher’s Evil Genius Chronicles (love the show Dave!) and thought I’d merely give my comments about a topic that he brought up: the common criticism that the only thing podcasting is talking about is podcasting itself, existing only for the self-gratification and aggrandization of people who […]