A Blogger's Big-Fish Fantasy Interesting piece about getting readers for your blog.
Reporting on Maine's introduction of Apple laptops to 17,000 seventh graders, an Associated Press article posted on CNN.com says, "Maine's first-in-the-nation laptop program, which covers all 241 public middle schools, has received high marks as the first full year ends this month." [Jun 16] [Apple Hot News]
A Pizza Schmizza chain has parlayed a neighborhood problem with panhandlers into a world of attention. In exchange for pizza, soda and a few bucks, panhandlers are asked to hold a sign that reads: "Pizza Schmizza paid me to hold this sign instead of asking for money." The campaign was started this month because aggressive panhandlers were keeping patrons from the chain's new outlet downtown. Read the article here.
Radiohead has some North American tour dates. Closest to Portland is Vancouver. Damn! [via kottke]
Update: They will be in Auburn, WA on August 31.
Friday night, B and I attended the We Are Nighttime Travelers Tour here in PDX. The Travelers are Found Magazine's Davy Rothbart, his brother Peter, a musician with a band called Poem Adept, and Devon Sproule, a folk singer. The tour is a celebration of the release of Davy's book of short stories, the lone surfer of montana, kansas.
Davy shared some of his latest finds and also read one of his stories. I really enjoyed the combination of readings along with music. It was a very fun and interesting night. Local author Kevin Sampsell shared one of his stories and there was also a performance from Harmon Leon, a writer/comedian from San Francisco. After the performance we had an energized discussion about the ethics and legality concerning all this "found" stuff and whether or not it's considered art. Made me think. The best $5 I'll probably spend all summer!
An enhancement to iTunes, the iTunes Doodad lets you view and switch to any of your iTunes playlists without bringing iTunes into the foreground. [Mac OS X Downloads]
Nothing particularly surprising about this, but TiVo is going to start selling information about what its users are watching and (more importantly) how they're watching to advertisers and networks:
[T]he company can monitor viewers' second-by-second behavior. It can tell how many viewers in a certain ZIP code clicked away at what moment in a commercial, for instance, or when a particular character appeared on a show... The first report shows that TiVo viewers are much more likely to record popular dramas and sitcoms, while they prefer to watch reality shows like "American Idol" live.They insist that the info will only be used in the aggregate, so you won't have to worry about anyone else knowing that you've set your TiVo to record every episode of Extreme Makeover. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Ok this is a quick repurposing of the eBay auction script I submitted the other day, but perhaps someone can use it. Just enter the name of your town in the dialog box and it'll look up open WiFi hotspots.
set my_town to "A... [Mac OS X Hints]
As you (may) know, Image Capture is a great iApp. At least I consider it one. One of its quick and great features is its "no frills" quick and easy webpage generation output option. However, Image Capture does not ... [Mac OS X Hints]