Apple's iTunes "My Alerts" feature continues to bring me some great music from artists the service already knows I like, thanks to past purchases. My biggest limitations these days? Determining what to buy, and what to let go. But with $50 in new iTunes gift cards obtained from yesterday's belated birthday bash, I'm being a little more liberal in my tune acquisitions.

Last night, I uncovered three new additions to the iTunes store: something new, something old and something blue, as the saying goes.

Something New

DJ Tiesto's "Elements of Life". Released April 10th, this is DJ Tiesto's latest solo album that doesn't consist of his remixing other artists' tunes, following on to "In My Memory" and "Just Be". I've seen DJ Tiesto in concert, and was even briefly featured in a DVD called "Another Day at the Office", which included a Bay Area stop at Shoreline. Tiesto is easily the world's #1 DJ today, and I'm already enjoying the new tracks. iTunes listeners are calling it the "Best Trance Album of 2007", but... it's only April.

Something Old

Information Society: Peace and Love, Inc. This one debuted on iTunes on March 27, even though the CD itself debuted in 1992. Peace and Love Incorporated was one of my favorite albums in high school, and it died an antiquated death when I left cassette tapes behind, moving to CDs, MP3 and the iPod. Now, I'm all too tempted to pay iTunes for the privilege of going digital, to enjoy "Peace and Love, Inc.", "Crybaby", and "Where Would I Be Without IBM" again. An excellent album that brings back a ton of memories from high school.

Something Blue

Eiffel 65: Contact Though Eiffel 65 is featured as a 1990s one-hit wonder, with their Blue (Ba Da Bee) song hitting the airwaves in 1999 and 2000, I actually didn't even find that track to be the best on the album. Instead, the album's leading song, Europop is the 15th most listened to song in my iTunes library, with 34 plays since iTunes started counting. Now, we've found an obscure follow-on album in 2001 and are enjoying the group's unique sound.

It's not just weddings that can benefit from something new, something old, something blue. See if you can pull off the trifecta with your iTunes.

Though Google's home page remains spartan, the company often makes edits to their logo around holidays, notable birthdays, or to commemorate anniversaries of significant events.

Today being Earth Day, Google debuted a logo that shows the Google name partially submerged below water, as an iceberg. The top half of the Google is melting, and much of the mass remains below the presumed ocean.


Today's Google Logo (Earth Day Theme)

Clicking on the Google logo from the home page takes you to a predefined search for the term "Earth Day". So why choose the logo they did? In my best guess mode, I have to assume this is Google's quiet, subtle reminder and buy-in on the theory of global warming, made a topic du jour by the Oscar-winning Inconvenient Truth, fronted by Al Gore.

Google doesn't typically make a stand on political issues. The company has been vocal on the topic of net neutrality and privacy, but steers clear of more partisan conversation. But at the same time, the company houses some of the brightest minds in technology, and with buildings full of Ph.D.'s, it's no surprise they would find the very real issue of global warming as one they would highlight on Earth Day. Good for Google. I hope others besides myself take note.

Update: Welcome visitors from Scoble's Link Blog and TechMeme. Looks like others did take note after all...

With most families seeing April 8 as Easter Sunday this year, and my work-related travels taking me to San Diego this most recent week, today is the day my wife and I set aside to invite friends to our home for an Oakland A's themed birthday extravaganza. Now, with a few dozen expected to arrive in just over an hour, our house is decked out with all things baseball, the colors green and gold most heavily featured, of course.

We have the A's vs. the Rangers playing on both TVs, in the living room and bedroom, a baseball themed birthday cake, green and gold napkins and plates, ballpark food, including polish dogs, peanuts, jelly beans and Skittles (green and yellow hand selected). We have all matter of A's paraphernalia out, from team blankets to pot holders and bobbleheads. Should be a fun time.

I don't typically make a lot of noise around holidays and birthdays, especially my own, but the friends are arriving from all over. From the East Bay and the Peninsula, to lifelong pals driving up from the Los Angeles area, just for the event. As I told nearby neighbors, you will know the party is a success by what time the cops are called. But I was kidding. Or was I? You'll have to wait and see.

This week's horrific shootings at Virginia Tech defy any in-depth analysis. Although the incident may eventually be more fully documented than any other in our nation's history, in part due to the killer's own use of the media, and vigilante student journalists' attempts to record it with their cell phone cameras or handheld video cameras, no amount of knowledge can let us understand why it happened, or what really could have been done to prevent it. While some look at the two hour gap between shootings and the police's inability to stop it a massive intelligence failure, I can't possibly hold the law enforcement liable.

As I've mentioned a few times on this blog, for just over a year I was the full-time crime reporter for the UC Berkeley student newspaper, the Daily Californian. While most stories consisted of tracking the occasional assault and battery or in more fun times, a rash of vending machine thefts, I did have the occasional proximity to bloodshed. And in one incident off-campus, I was at the scene of a double homicide, whose perpetrator, as far as I know, was never found.

That's where I look for some small parallel to the Virginia Tech massacre. To campus police, the shooter had taken two lives in an apparent domestic incident, and fled. While they were of course looking for him, there was no call to cancel classes or lock down the campus, in fear he had more violence in him. In the incident in Berkeley, there was no call to cancel classes or warn neighbors that the unfound gunman would strike them next. It was seen as a domestic incident, and nothing more.

What separated the Virginia Tech incident from the one in Berkeley in the fall of 1997 was, of course, that the killer wasn't done killing. Not by a long shot. For a domestic dispute to balloon into one of mass murder and chaos is so incredibly rare, it's without shock that the shooter caught the entire university community unready for what had come next. And going forward, as there are more calls for police scrutiny, ramped up security and furor to avoid copycats or more bloodshed, it may all be for naught. We cannot predict the next move in the mind of a deranged killer, and we shouldn't expect our law enforcement to be super-human. Given everything they knew at Viriginia Tech, and their expectation they were dealing with a domestic dispute gone bad, we cannot blame the police or the university for what happened next, as horrible as it was.

As easy as it is to find somebody to blame, there can only be one person - the one who pulled the trigger. It's not the police force or the university, or video games, or even the laws which let him purchase the guns. As they say, when there is a will, there is a way, and in this time of terror, his will was unstoppable.