Leaving aside the fact that the idea of “one-day potty training” is, well, so much ca-ca, this clip from Good Morning America illustrates just how sexist people are being about Katie Couric taking over the CBS Evening News.
If Charles Gibson, who himself just ascended to the anchor chair at ABC, gets off scot-free for this piece, no one can reasonbly complain about Couric’s gravitas.
Cute kid, though. And you’ve gotta love the crew’s reaction at the end.
The Big Apple Cube
Sometimes it seems like Apple never forgets. Remember the Cube — a beautiful but flawed Mac, grey encased in clear plastic the stood about 10 inches on a side? Writ large, that’s kind of what Apple’s built in one of New York City’s most public spaces: Fifth Avenue and 58th Street.
The Fifth Avenue store, which opens tomorrow at 6pm and will never close, sits under GM Plaza, across the street from Bergdorf Goodman, the Plaza Hotel and Central Park and steps away from FAO Schwartz. The entrance is marked by a dramtic 32-foot-cube of glass that encases the Apple logo. A 32-step glass spiral staircase winds its way down a round glass elevator one level down.
The number 32 appears weirdly throughout. The cube is 32 feet on each side. There are 32 steps down. Of course, 32 is 2 to the 5th power — and Opening Day is the fifth anniversary of the first Apple store’s debut, and the store itself is on Fifth Avenue. Good thing it’s not on 7th; a 128-foot glass cube might be a tough engineering problem.
The natural light that pours down warms the 10,000 square foot selling area. Ron Johnson, Apple’s SVP of Retail, says there are 100 Macs and 300 staffers available for customer use. The Genius Bar is 45 feet long, and they’ve hird 96 full-time "Geni-i." There’s a new iPod bar to provide support for iPod users and a "Studio" to help "creatives" with questions about their hardware and software. The plaza above is now WiFi-ed; I didn’t check to see how far into Central Park the signal carried.
Oh — and this is the first Apple store to be open 24/7/365. "Open today, forever," Johnson said. And yes, there will be Geniuses at the Bar all night long.
The Mile-High Club, or “Snakes on a Plane” has got nothing on this
From the AP, via the NYTimes:
A guy got on a JetBlue red-eye from San Juan to Newark with a couple of undeclared lovebirds in his carry-on. (I mean, he didn’t fill out the right form; I don’t know what declarations the lovebirds made.) Sure enough, one of them got out and made a break for it.
It all ended happily, though. The bird was caught and both were impounded until the unnamed passenger — who was not held — finishes the paperwork.
“Exhibits Grace Under Pressure”
Some poor production assistant at the BBC put the wrong guy on the air. Rather than Guy Kewney, tech pundit, they grabbed an IT interviewee who was waiting at the Reception desk and put him on a live program instead.
After something of a rocky start, he apparently did quite well — which kind of underlines how low the bar is for punditry.
Kewney himself, waiting in the green room, had no idea this was going on until he looked at a monitor and saw someone who was not himself.
From the AP, via the NYTimes:
In fact the man was Guy Goma, a Congolese man applying for a technology-related job with the British Broadcasting Corp. Goma followed an employee to the studio after a mistake at a reception desk, the corporation said late Monday.
*snip*
Producers apparently realized by the end of the interview that something had gone wrong — and, after they had gone off the air, asked their ”expert” if there was a problem.
”He said: ‘Well, it was OK, but I was a bit rushed,’ Kewney wrote on his blog.
Goma told the BBC his interview was stressful, but added he was prepared to return to the airwaves. He said he was ”happy to speak about any situation,” the BBC reported. Officials at BBC declined to comment on whether he would get the job he was applying for.
A Lot of Beer Has Much the Same Effect
The New Scientist has this story:
Sound Neutralzing Technology ‘Confuses’ Abusive/Racist Chants at Stadiums
During tests of the prototype system, volunteers were surrounded by loudspeakers simulating the sound of a chanting crowd and were asked join in. But one speaker replayed the crowds chant with a short delay. When the delay was greater than 200 milliseconds the volunteers found it too difficult to chant coherently.
My 4-year-olds can do kind of the same thing. It’s really annoying.
The downside of the technology, of course, is that its use won’t be restricted to sports crowds. Expect repressive political regimes to be first in line; this thing would be great at breaking up political demonstrations.
…and Now for the Daring Escape
So the magician David Copperfield and his two lovely assistants were robbed at gunpoint in West Palm Beach. The local newspaper reports that while he has a gun on him, Copperfield
pulled out all of his pockets for Riley to see he had nothing, even though he had a cellphone, passport and wallet stuffed in them.
“Call it reverse pickpocketing,” Copperfield said.
He probably was going to make the two of clubs jump out of the guy’s ear while he was at it.
The perps were caught about 10 minutes later.
The New Old Hands-On Generation
One of my oldest friends grew up a gearhead/theater tech, then became a computer magazine editor, then evolved into a stay-at-home mom. I remember visiting her and being astounded at her heretofor unsuspected talent for making things like adorable frogs out of edible fondant.
Where do you learn things like that? I wondered. I knew her mom and her dad; she sure didn’t get it from them. I was pretty envious, because I’ve never been good at arts and crafts and this looked like it was just a ton of fun you could have with (and for) your kids.
I read today about a coming-soon magazine called CRAFT: Make Cool Stuff, from the people who publish the excellent Make. But where Make is about doing hands-on hardware techie project things, Craft looks like it’ll be about fondant frogs and finger puppets and maybe toilet-paper-roll cars.
O’Reilly, which also publishes tons of *very* detailed books for techies and more less-detailed books for people who wish they were techies, has made the world safe for geeks. Now they’re making the world safe for stacking frog sock puppets. Yeah, I’ll subscribe to that.
Needle and the O-Gauge Done
He somehow doesn’t seem to be the type, but Neil Young is apparently a big model train fan. In fact, according to Reuters by way of the New York Post, he owns about 20 percent of Lionel, which is currently going through a bankruptcy reorg.
The story says Young and Lionel have a joint venture to sell some of Young’s technology as part of Lionel’s Trainmaster control system. I guess when you hit 60, the rock-and-roll thing gets pretty old and you’d rather just stay home and work on your layout.
First Look: Samsung Helix
I’m pretty sure that mine is the first hands-on review of the Samsung Helix, a combination MP3 player and portable XM Radio receiver. The thing’s not on sale until the end of May, but Samsung made an early production unit available for testing.
Look at the full review, but the short version is that it doesn’t suck at all. The ability to record and time-shift XM content is pretty cool. But There are two major flaws:
- First, the thing is tied to Napster and is DRMed up the wazoo. Except for the stuff you rip yourself, you’re renting the music for as long as you subscribe to Napster or XM.
- Second, XM reception remains kind of dicey. Granted that Brooklyn doesn’t give the non-stop view of the south sky that XM really wants, but I don’t think a lot of places (like office buildings) do. XM, when all is said and done, is radio — and radio reception does tend to drop out.
- Oh. There’s a third thing. The Helix is Mac-unfriendly. You can’t even authorize an XM radio on a Mac, and Napster is tied to WMAs. Macs need not apply.
Clearly, Technology Would Be To Blame
From the Beeb:
There are some new GPS-based products — in the $50 range — that are designed to let parents know where their kids are at all times. Or, at least, at all times when they have a clear view of the sky. Which they wouldn’t have if they were, say, in a club or a crack house or a friends’ basement playing video games.
Simon Davis, director of Privacy International, voices concern that parents might go a little nuts with this stuff:
‘What this can result in – and we’ve seen this through visual surveillance technology and bugs that can be put into children’s bedrooms – is parents becoming obsessed, to the point of having an unhealthy and destructive relationship with their children,’ he said.
True enough. Of course, parents who use this stuff in an unhealthy and destructive way would very like find other means to behave in an unhealthy and destructive way regarding their kids. Or their spouses. Or their business rivals.
Once again, the problem isn’t with the technology, it’s with the user.
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