More in an irregularly occurring series...

We're on the verge of kicking off a sports-filled weekend, with the Oakland A's back in town to take on the World Champion White Sox, and the Cal Bears also home to take on Division I-AA quasi-power Portland State. Being good season ticket holders, I'm going to aim to be at all three games this evening and tomorrow, but there is certainly some overlap on Saturday that could make things dicey, especially if the A's haven't blown out the Sox by the early innings...

On the technology side of things, It still seems to be all about Apple all the time. Apple's iTV announcement and enhancements to the iTunes Store to include videos continues to make waves. Interestingly, one of the quieter announcements was that Apple's moved to reduce the 30 gigabyte iPod to a pricepoint of $249. This apparently has hurt Microsoft's big rollout of Zune this week. While unveiling the music players, Microsoft did not announce a price at all - which some are saying is a direct result of Apple's price cut. Fun to have the Redmond giant on the wrong side of volume discounts. In addition, TechCrunch reports Amazon is the next giant expected to deliver feature film downloads, which explains their frustration with studios that have sided with iTunes.

And even though Apple just held a big media event, everybody seems to be yearning for the next big thing from Cupertino. ThinkSecret now says the long-awaited Apple iPhone will hit in the first quarter of 2007, and a contributor to GigaOM claims that Apple will enable consumers to run Windows Vista in a virtual desktop as part of the company's Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard rollout. Also in the same vein, Storage Mojo is very intrigued on Apple's future plans to help consumers store and backup their downloaded feature films, which could take gigabytes apiece.

Stepping away from Apple for a second, it's said that the pretexting scandal at HP is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. The company's chairman, Patricia Dunn, has been summoned before Congress, where she will no doubt be harangued by politicos who love to see themselves on C-Span making non-enforceable threats, shaking heads and wagging fingers. Or maybe I'm just cynical?

Listening to ''Until You Love Me'', by 4 Strings (Play Count: 11)

Cross-posted at Sactown Royalty...

In his forty games as a Sacramento King during the 2005-2006 campaign, Ron Artest led the team in time on the court, averaging 40.1 MPG. Now, a pair of lawsuits have surfaced that ensure Artest will see even more court time this year, regardless of how well he shoots the rock.

The first lawsuit stems from the infamous 2004 brawl between the Pacers and Pistons, where Artest played a starring role and soon became a household name, for all the wrong reasons. A fan in the stands that day, Michael Ryan, claims that Artest and Stephen Jackson assaulted him when they rushed into the stands. His lawsuit also says the Pacers were negligent in signing Artest and allowing him to play given his history of violence, repetitive bad conduct, and unfitness as a professional basketball player. (Source: Click On Detroit)

With that logic, he may as well sue society at large for our enablement, right? And what took him two years to realize he'd been slapped around a little?

In a second, unrelated, case, Artest has himself filed a lawsuit to gain custody of his son, saying that his ex-girlfriend is denying him access to his child. In fact, he's discontinued paying monthly child support due to the dispute. Of course, the lady's lawyer has a completely different opinion on the situation, saying that due to Artest's "history of psychological and anger-management issues, his request borders on frivolous." (Source: New York Daily News)

We know Ron-Ron is a fighter. We've seen that. We know he can juggle a few things at a time. Heck, TZ noted his new album is coming on Halloween night. But it could be scary, not just for the little trick-or-treaters, but for all Kings fans, if one of the team's key cogs on both sides of the ball is spending more time in court wearing a suit than on the court in a Sactown jersey.

On Tuesday, September 12th, while the rest of the Mac world was sitting with jaws agape, anticipating Steve Jobs' every breath, hand gesture, slideshow and demo, I was working. Though I was vaguely aware that Apple was very likely in the process of introducing new iPods and iTunes, with Disney-branded movie downloads, I was forced to resort to the highly unsatisfactory method of getting the news through the Blackberry browser, where in text, I tried to absorb the real-time feed from MacRumors, and visualize in my head every shiny gadget and GUI.

Not until this evening, when I finally had the time to sit down and watch the Showtime event's keynote stream from the Apple Web site, did I get to see Jobs do what he does best - unveil incremental updates as if they were must-haves, and try to find new ways for me to distribute my money to Cupertino. But, as with nearly every one of Jobs' keynotes, I again came away impressed, not entirely so with the products, but with Jobs' capabilities.

While most marketeers, CEOs and PR lackeys tend to want to crowd every product feature and bullet into a never-ending slide deck, Jobs managed to introduce new products every five minutes (no exaggeration) for the first half hour of the event - moving crisply and quickly, but not skimping on substance. 5 minutes into the presentation we had a new iPod. 10 minutes in, a new iPod Nano, and 15 minutes in, a new iPod Shuffle, featuring a built-in belt clip. Next up was iTunes 7, and here we were seeing a new GUI, including CoverFlow, and the addition of "one more thing" - movie downloads.

For Jobs, though he peppers his speeches with words like "beautiful", "amazing", "great" and "outstanding", he isn't the one doing the selling. Instead, he lets the products sell themselves in such away that you find yourself thinking of what you need to do to make room for this new product in your stable or your workflow. And, in a step unusual for Apple, they took a big risk by announcing a new box (code named iTV) to interface between your computer and your television, which aimed to bring the media (movies, TV shows and music mostly) to your home theater. By showing a slim white box with all the necessary ports, and a slick GUI, he has the Web buzzing about adding yet another device to the already crowded living room, most of which feature televisions, stereos, a DVD player, a DVR, and a cable box at the very least.

iTV is supposed to marry your digital computer media to your TV. But with TiVo grabbing the shows I already want to watch (for free) and my gaining access to DVDs cheaply with NetFlix, and the Airport Express already shuttling my music to my stereo, I can think of a lot of reasons where I don't need iTV - yet. Over the next few months, as its release date draws nearer, I may go out of my way to try and find good reasons to pick one up. But I would need to have a significant change in how I manage my entertainment and my budget. With full-length feature films nearing 1 GB in data to download, even at the fastest of connections, it will be an enormous network hog and capacity hog. On my 80 GB laptop, I've got about 16 GB available, and I'm not about to spend $100+ to download the Disney library and fill it up. But, as Steve knows, some people will, and in months, we may very well be looking at another hit on Apple's hands - whether I'm along for the ride or not.

Related Links:

BBC: Apple video move divides industry
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5342408.stm

Wired: New UI Showdown: Apple vs. TiVo
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71774-0.html

AppleInsider: Apple's living room strategy a multi-year venture
http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=2045

Listening to ''Take Me Away (Into the Night)'', by 4 Strings (Play Count: 29)

Each of the last two days, I had the "pleasure" of driving between Sunnyvale and Burlingame and spending way too much time on Highway 101 on the San Francisco Peninsula - a trip that according to Google Maps and Yahoo! should take only 30-plus minutes but in actuality ranges between an hour or an hour and a half. Spending so much time in a car over the last two days - there and back, there and back, made me think a lot about the quality of life, and whether I'd be best off just sitting on my rear and telecommuting everywhere.

But another thing struck me - to my left, in the carpool/commuter lane, I wasn't passed by a series of partnered businesspeople looking to save gas and time, or a family's minivan, but instead by Toyota Prius after Toyota Prius, with the occasional Honda Civic Hybrid thrown in for variety. As these high gas mileage hybrid cars have the option to drive in the carpool lane, I was continually mocked for continuing to drive my boring old 118,000+ mile 1998 Mercury Tracer, which gets a cool 25 or so miles a gallon itself. As I sat, admiring the dirt on my windshield and debated whether my back speakers were blown out or just falling apart, on my left, I would see Prius, Prius, Civic, Van, Prius, Van, Prius, Civic, Prius. And I'm jealous.

The only question is, if I were to plunk down $25,000 that I don't have on a car I don't yet need, how long would it take to make up the money on saved gas and saved time? It's time to break out the calculators - or I'll never know.

Listening to ''That's Right'', by Blank & Jones (Play Count: 5)