Rodent Regatta

I’m told that any product or service launched today requires buzz. With buzz comes the risk of someone co-opting—no, stealing—your idea. Some forms of buzz simply amount to renaming something that already existed, which brings us to podcasting.

Read on...

I like what Walter Mossberg writes for the Wall Street Journal. He’s good at translating geekspeak into executivespeak. There is a difference and it has nothing to do with executives being indifferent or uneducated in technical matters. Some people don’t like his dismissiveness of weblogs as a journalistic medium.

Today’s Wall Street Journal carries an interview of Steve Jobs by Mossberg. You’ll probably need a subscription to get to this, but if you can pick up a copy of the paper today, you’ll enjoy this view of the industry by Jobs.

Wired’s article about better earbuds reminds me of the fantasy I ponder. It’s the one where the perfect digital camera, an iPod with perfect earbuds, a Treo 600 and an Apple Powerbook make up my totally portable technology bag.

Questions abound:

• What’s the perfect digital camera?
• Is the iPod still the state-of-the-art player?
• What about recording MP3’s? What do I need?
• Do all the purists replace the iPod’s standard earbuds?
• Should I go with the Powerbook or the ThinkPad X40?

What else is needed to have the ideal portable office, entertainment center and personal workcenter?

Ben Hammersley linked to Telltale Weekly last week and I missed up until a few minutes ago. As I understand it, you can download or listen to audio downloads of public domain texts.

Given that a minute of MP3 equals approximately 1MB, the bandwidth requirements are going to jump pretty quickly. What am I missing?

Over time I’ve spent way (I mean waaaaay) too much money on great audio systems. Speaker wire the size of garden hose and connectors that cost more than some components have been part of past systems.

Never have I spent anything approaching $3000 for a set of headphones. Nine hundred and ninety nine people in the world have that opportunity!