Apple gets another pound of flesh

All right. I did it. I ordered the 10.5 OS. I was pissed when they released 10.4 soon after we got our Mac....It was one more reason for L to be convinced that Apple was an expert in sucking users dry rather than crafting elegant hardware. (This leads to at least one "fun conversation" w/ my brother, who gets his paycheck from Apple, during any given visit to AZ....but I digress...)

I remember being floored as a colleague of mine in school was so INTO getting his 10.4 in the mail....Like it was opening night for a film he'd been waiting YEARS to see....I can recognize the need for upgrades, and even the need for paying for it...But it still made us miserable that this $1000+ machine we'd bought seemed already....out of date. This must have been what the folks who didn't wait for the Video iPod felt like. Or the folks who saw the iPhone price plummet. Still, Apple stock continues to go through the roof, and my bro (who gets stock options as part of his gig, to the best of my knowledge) continues to wax rhapsodic about Steve & Co.

I guess there's something to it, because I just ponied up over $100 for the new OS (maybe we can work out some of our surfing bugs this way? maybe???).....But I do it with a sense of inevitability and even resentment, rather than excitement.

Here's a link to Apple's "guided tour" of the new OS: http://www.apple.com/macosx/

Me, I hope I don't crash the hard drive upon installing....Computer Love, indeed....

Lucky Dube, RIP

I just found out this morning that Lucky Dube, a giant in world reggae, was killed in front of his children in an apparent carjacking this past Thursday. He came out of South Africa, but his impact was truly global. What a waste--what a loss.

When I was doing work for WFHB in Bloomington, I got a chance to review his last album, called THE OTHER SIDE. The title track to that is brilliant--seek it out if you have a chance. Not finding that on the global jukebox that is YouTube, I offer another clip to get a sense of who he was and what he was on about.

The Good Ol' CBC

So I had to get up REALLY early one morning this week (the reasons are already hazy to me). Like usual, I turned on the radio, but instead of going to one of my usual suspects (NPR, ESPN radio) I kept going, I guess trying to pull in the Cleveland AM station (WTAM--1100)....

I guess I never got there, as instead I found a local outlet of the Canadian Broadcasting Channel (the CBC)....I used to listen to the CBC when I had a bad bad BAD job at a mall in the Twin Cities, and Quebec was THIS CLOSE from secession.

Anyhow, the local CBC on AM is on 1070, from Moncton, New Brunswick. If you'd rather check them out on the web, you can click and stream from this link: http://www.cbc.ca/informationmorningmoncton/

Of course this begs the question of what Moncton looks like. Which, apparently, is something like what you see above....

Has anyone travelled much in New Brunswick and/or Nova Scotia? I sense a summer roadtrip in the making.....

How's Your News (revisited)?

I was listening to a podcast of THIS AMERICAN LIFE while running this weekend, and the show did a repeat of a feature they did on a film called HOW'S YOUR NEWS? (The website for the movie, which includes a link to this radio feature, is: http://www.howsyournews.com ) I got a chance to see it a few years back, and thought it was great--especially the music! There's some real wisdom swirling around, here.

As a taste, here's one of the reporters talking about Texas....



Now I lived in Texas for two years, and I'd say this is pretty spot on.

These developmentally disabled reporters are folks that, in the pre-nonlinear computer editing, pre-camcorder era, had little to no access to be the SUBJECT of media output, much less the PRODUCERS of such output.....This is a nice example of what Jenkins might call the grassroots-enabled production. Check it out!