America's Made For TV Snack

Orville Redenbacher's new, corny, but perfectly awesome tagline.
"America's Made For TV Snack."

That's Right,
HMK

Tang: There's a new space drink in town!

The Big Gulp 

NASA pisses away millions hauling H2O into orbit. But there's a better way - recycle astronaut urine. Just one question: How does it taste?

By Tom McNichol

People head to Reno for all sorts of reasons. Some want to gamble. Others are looking for a hasty wedding or quickie divorce. I've come to the Biggest Little City in the World to drink my own pee. Not straight up, of course. First, I'll run it through a new NASA water purification system that collects astronaut sweat, moisture from respiration, drain water, and urine - and turns it all into drinking water.

NASA desperately needs this technology. Water makes for a heavy - and expensive - payload. Over the past five years, the agency has spent $60 million delivering potable water to the International Space Station on the space shuttle (6 tons at a cost of about $40,000 per gallon). Deploying the Water Recovery System on the ISS will cut the volume of water hauled into space by two-thirds and free up enough room on the shuttle for four more astronauts.

I'm in Reno because this is the home of Water Security, a new company that is finding ways to use the NASA technology in extreme environments here on Earth. Company president Ray Doane can't wait to show me his magic box. "This is whiz-bang technology," he boasts, with an emphasis on the whiz.

Water Security has added a special filter to the NASA unit, creating a system that can scrub away 99.9 percent of all waterborne viruses, which could prove particularly useful in the developing world. The United Nations estimates that more than 1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water and that 10 million die each year as a result of contaminated water supplies and inadequate sanitation.

The six-stage system starts with a prefilter that removes large particles of sediment and debris, such as hair or lint, from contaminated liquid. Next, a carbon filter strips out the organic waste products contained in urine, like urea, uric acid, and creatinine, as well as pesticides and herbicides, which frequently leech into water supplies from farmland. The liquid then flushes through a cartridge developed by Water Security that contains tiny black beads of iodinated resins. Any microorganisms collide with the beads, which release iodine to kill the bugs.

"The iodine is released gradually into the water and is very stable over a wide range of temperatures and pHs," company vice president Ken Kearney says. "It's very predictable, and that's what you want in space. It can also take some of the dirtiest, nastiest water on the planet and produce clean, safe drinking water."

The water lingers briefly in a holding tank to give the iodine enough contact time for a complete kill. Next, a resin filter strips out the iodine, along with nitrates and heavy metals. Finally, the water moves through a filter that eliminates cryptosporidium (a waterborne parasite that's resistant to iodine) and provides a final "polish" for good taste.

At least that's what they tell me. A Water Security system is set up here at company headquarters, ready to be put to my own uric acid test. A big yellow bucket next to the unit is filled with water and then tainted with "Arizona dust," a common contaminant used by laboratories. I discreetly retire to a side office and emerge clutching a warm plastic cup. I pour the urine into the yellow bucket, taking care not to splash. The chemist stirs the brew with a long stick.

Human waste has bedeviled NASA engineers from the get-go. Alan Shepherd's first 15-minute suborbital flight was so short that no one thought to install a urine receptacle in his space suit. At T-minus 15 minutes, an electrical problem caused an 86-minute delay on the launchpad. Shepherd's bladder soon reached the bursting point, and he radioed the first-ever "Houston, we have a problem" message. After some deliberation, mission control had an answer: "Do it in the suit."

Gemini and Apollo astronauts wore plastic bags taped to their buttocks. After defecation, the crew member was required to seal the bag and knead it, mixing in a liquid-bactericide to provide the desired degree of "feces stabilization." The first men to walk on the moon stepped onto the lunar surface wearing astrodiapers - undershorts layered with absorbent material. Which may explain all the jumping up and down.

As a 1975 NASA study put it, "In general, the Apollo waste management system worked satisfactorily from an engineering standpoint. From the point of view of crew acceptance, however, the system must be given poor marks." For the space shuttle, the agency designed a $23 million toilet that freeze-dries solid waste so it can be transported back to Earth. Until recently, the gray water was dumped overboard, becoming an orbiting monument to mankind.

The water filtration system allows NASA to solve two problems at once. It eliminates the gray water disposal issue and recycles urine into drinking water for the astronauts. The agency is testing the system at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama - where employees run on treadmills as their sweat, respiratory moisture, and urine are collected, cleansed and consumed.

Water Security has already begun putting the technology to work in areas where freshwater is in short supply. This summer, global relief agency Concern for Kids deployed a foot-powered purification unit in northern Iraq. Robert and Roni Anderson, Concern's founders, loaded it onto the back of a Toyota pickup and drove to dozens of villages to purify their groundwater. The unit pumps out 5 gallons per minute, and a single day of purification can sustain a village of 5,000 people for a month. The cost is about 3 cents a gallon. Iraqi water companies, by comparison, charge $4 a gallon.

It's not just war-torn regions that are short on potable water. After the tsunami hit Indonesia last December, much of the freshwater supply became contaminated with salt water and toxic street runoff. Kearney says the Water Security system is perfectly capable of working in such natural-disaster scenarios. After all, the technology was originally tested on an open sewage ditch in Jakarta and produced water that met Environmental Protection Agency standards.

Back at Water Security HQ, the contents of the bucket get a final stir, and the experiment begins. The water is sucked through an intake hose and into the purification system - prefilter, carbon filter, iodinated resin, disinfectant holding tank, iodine scrub, and a polish. (Don't be shy with the polish, guys.)

After 30 seconds, water dribbles out of a nozzle and into a plastic cup. I raise it with a trembling hand. A toast to Alan Shepherd and all the brave astronauts who endured the wrong stuff in their space suits for the advancement of science: This number one's for you. I take a big astronaut gulp, lower the cup, and wait for the noxious aftertaste. Nothing.

The water tastes pretty good - it's definitely not Evian, but it is better than most city tap. Certainly more palatable than many light beers I've had, and not at all, uh, urinous. Move over,

Tang: There's a new space drink in town!

Thanks to Tom McNichol (mcnichol@pacbell.net)

Podcasting: Now Hear This

In One Stroke, Podcasting Hits Mainstream

EVER since Steven P. Jobs returned to Apple Computer in 1997 after a 12-year absence, his company has thrived by executing the same essential formula over and over: Find an exciting new technology whose complexity and cost keep it out of the average person's life. Streamline it, mainstream it, strip away the geeky options. Take the credit.

So far, Apple has worked this kind of magic on digital video editing, wireless networking, online music selling, R.S.S. feeds (a kind of Web site subscription) and other technologies. Its latest attempt, however, will be music to an awful lot of ears. With its release of the free iTunes 4.9 software for Mac and Windows, Apple has just mainstreamed podcasting.

A podcast, as anyone under 25 can tell you, is an audio recording posted online, much like a short radio show. ("Podcasting" is a pun on "broadcasting," implying, of course, that you listen to it on your iPod or another music player.) The beauty of a podcast is that it's free and you listen to it whenever you like. And there are more than 7,000 podcasts "on the air" right now, on every conceivable topic. Their quantity and variety already dwarf what you can find on regular radio.

What makes podcasting a national dinnertime conversation these days, though, is that anyone can make one. You just need a microphone, a sound-recording program, and the tutorials that have already appeared at many points on the Web, including apple.com/podcasting.

Yes, some are corporate broadcasts, repurposed shows from traditional radio shows. But the real fun is finding the homemade ones, the amateur attempts made in somebody's basement with a laptop and a microphone. These can be unpolished and quirky, with plenty of dead air and "ums," but that's their charm. Podcasts, in other words, are the audio version of blogs - the Web logs, or daily text postings, that made up last year's hot dinnertime conversation.

Until Apple got its mitts on podcasting, the finding, sampling and managing of podcast audio files was time-consuming and scattered. First you had to find a podcast worth listening to, using directories like www.podcast.net or www.podcastalley.com. Then you had to find, download and (in some cases) pay for a podcast-management program like iPodder (for Mac, Windows or Linux).

Three things give iTunes 4.9 enough heft to bring podcasts to the people. First, it manages the complete chain of podcasting command - finding podcasts, subscribing to them and transferring them to your iPod - beautifully and simply. Second, it's free. Third, it already has a vast following; millions of people already use iTunes to manage their music collections and iPods. Adding podcasts to that work flow feels like a natural evolution.

To get to the podcast selection screen, you open iTunes and click the Music Store icon. (Oddly, you don't click the new Podcasts icon. Doing that shows you the list of podcasts you've subscribed to so far, so it's empty the first time you try this experiment.)

Here you can see featured icons for new spoken podcasts, music podcasts, indie podcasts, and so on. There's also a list of podcast categories, a Search box (which works either by show name or by podcaster's name), and a Top 20 Podcasts list.

This is a coveted list to be on. Once you're on the Top 20 list or even the Top 100 list, your popularity benefits from a delicious cycle, because thousands more people will find your show and give it a listen. The Top 20 list usually includes the professional programming from National Public Radio and CNN, technology shows like Leo Laporte's TWIT (This Week in Tech), and, inevitably, the occasional sex-talk show. (Oh, yes - podcasts can be off-color. Hundreds of them bear the label "Explicit" on iTunes, and those are just the episodes that Apple noticed or was made aware of by users.)

Spot No. 1, though, is often occupied by something called iTunes New Music Tuesday, an Apple-produced show whose D.J. introduces and plays the latest pop music. It's a so-called enhanced podcast, a format that displays slideshow-like graphics at relevant points in the audio. These images appear right in iTunes (in the cover-art area) and even on the iPod itself, if it has a color screen. Cheerful geeks have already hijacked this feature to create, for example, podcasts that walk you through various acts of PC surgery, with photos popping up to accompany the spoken instructions.

To sample a podcast on iTunes, you click its name. A new screen appears, listing the last few episodes. A double-click starts playback. If you like what you hear, you can click Get Episode to copy the audio file to your computer, where you can either listen to it or have it transferred automatically to your iPod or iPod Mini. (If you have an iPod Shuffle or another brand of music player, the transfer isn't automatic; you must drag the podcasts onto the player's icon each time.)

And if you really like what you hear, you can click Subscribe. Now your iPod will always be loaded up with the very latest episodes, without any further work on your part. Pleasant touches abound: for example, the iPod remembers where you stopped listening to each podcast so you can pick up again later. And if you keep transferring a certain podcast series to the iPod without ever listening to it, iTunes politely notices and invites you to unsubscribe.

Apple clearly considers podcasting an important new audio format - so important, in fact, that you can't even hide the Podcasts icon in the iTunes music-source list (as you can the Music Store, Radio and Party Shuffle icons). Company executives must be ecstatic that the masses have adopted the term "podcasting" itself, evoking Apple's most popular product name with every utterance. (Makers of rival players, on the other hand, must be gnashing their teeth and every other body part. According to an article in The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, in fact, Microsoft employees are pointedly using the unappetizing term "blogcast," just so they won't have to say or type the word Pod.)

The big question is, why is Apple working so hard to claim the podcast phenomenon as its own? After all, the company doesn't make any money when you listen to or subscribe to a podcast. The Price column in iTunes says Free for every single podcast, and Apple says it has no intention of changing that.

Clearly, the motivation behind Apple's podcasting program is selling more iPods. You can certainly get podcasts onto other music players, but not with the effortless, automated flow of the iTunes-iPod system.

In other words, these free podcasts are just another feather in the iPod's cap. As an editorial at daringfireball.net astutely observed, Apple is flipping the traditional business plan on its head. It's giving away the razor blades, but selling a staggering number of razors.

Not everybody is happy with Apple's podcasting ecosystem, by the way. Geeks have griped that, unlike other podcast programs, iTunes doesn't speed up downloads using high-tech tricks with names like ETags, compression and "last modified" headers. Early podcasters complain about the growing presence of the slick corporate 'casts, claiming that they're ruining the grass-roots, power-to-the-people feeling of the original podcasts.

And, of course, there's the perpetual wheel-squeaking of long-time iPod haters, who feel suffocated by the whole astonishing iPod juggernaut. They can only resent Apple's success in bringing podcasting to the masses with its own stamp all over it.

But all of that is whimpering in the wind. Overnight, iTunes 4.9 has already become the most popular podcast-management software on earth; Apple says that within 48 hours of its release, Pod people had subscribed to more than a million podcasts. Pockets of the populace may not enjoy the transformation of podcasting into a commercial, pop-culture phenomenon, but it's too late now. The people have spoken - or, rather, listened.

Thanks to David Pouge
pogue@nytimes.com

The Low Down On Downloads

People who illegally share music files online are also big spenders on legal music downloads, research suggests.

Digital music research firm The Leading Question found that they spent four and a half times more on paid-for music downloads than average fans. Rather than taking legal action against downloaders, the music industry needs to entice them to use legal alternatives, the report said.

According to the music industry, legal downloads have tripled during 2005. In the first half of 2005, some 10 million songs have been legally downloaded.

Music 'myth'

More needs to be done to capitalise on the power of the peer-to-peer networks that many music downloaders still use, said the report's authors. There's a myth that all illegal downloaders are mercenaries hell-bent on breaking the law in pursuit of free music


Paul Brindley, The Leading Question
The study found that regular downloaders of unlicensed music spent an average of £5.52 a month on legal digital music. This compares to just £1.27 spent by other music fans. "The research clearly shows that music fans who break piracy laws are highly valuable customers," said Paul Brindley, director of The Leading Question. "It also points out that they are eager to adopt legitimate music services in the future."

"There's a myth that all illegal downloaders are mercenaries hell-bent on breaking the law in pursuit of free music." In reality hardcore fans "are extremely enthusiastic" about paid-for services, as long as they are suitably compelling, he said.


Carrot and stick

The BPI (British Phonographic Industry) welcomed the findings but added a note of caution. "It's encouraging that many illegal file-sharers are starting to use legal services," said BPI spokesman Matt Philips. "But our concern is that file-sharers' expenditure on music overall is down, a fact borne out by study after study. "The consensus among independent research is that a third of illegal file-sharers may buy more music and around two thirds buy less. "That two-thirds tends to include people who were the heaviest buyers which is why we need to continue our carrot and stick approach to the problem of illegal file-sharing," he said.


Music To Go

The Leading Question survey also asked 600 music fans what devices they would be buying in the next year. One of the challenges will be to develop the perception of the phone as a credible entertainment device. A third planned to buy a dedicated MP3 player, while just 8% said they would be buying an MP3-enabled phone.

Reasons cited for not purchasing a music playing phone included worries about battery life and concerns about losing the handset, and potentially their music collection. The fact that phones tend to be frequently replaced also meant people had a low emotional attachment to them.

"The phone is not ready to replace the iPod as a serious digital music player just yet," said Tim Walker, director of The Leading Question. "One of the challenges will be to develop the perception of the phone as a credible entertainment device," he said. Providers need to look at features such as dual download to mobile and PC, back-up facilities and improved interfaces between PC and mobile, he said.

There is a huge potential market for MP3 phones. The survey found that 38% were interested in downloading full tracks to their mobile phones. And people are happy with the storage possibilities of phones with only 4% wanting to store more than 1,000 songs to take on holiday.


Story from BBC NEWS
Published: 2005/07/27 08:10:56 GMT
That's Right 2005 © BBC MMV

Spectacular Sunrises & Sunsets!

A satellite photo shows the dust cloud off the Atlantic coast of Africa on July 19.


Large Dust Cloud Heads to U.S.

MIAMI, Florida (AP) -- An enormous, hazy cloud of dust from the Sahara Desert is blowing toward the southern United States, but meteorologists do not expect much effect beyond colorful sunsets.

The leading edge of the cloud -- nearly the size of the continental United States -- should move across Florida sometime from Monday through Wednesday.

"This is not going to be a tremendous event, but it will be kind of interesting," said Jim Lushine, a severe weather expert with the National Weather Service in Miami.

He said the dust could make sunrises and sunsets spectacular.

It might not have much effect on the rest of the country, said Scott Kelly, a meteorologist with the weather service in Melbourne.

"Maybe south Texas or Mexico if that dust cloud keeps moving westward, but nothing north of Florida, unless a weather system can dive southward and pull that air northward," he said.

Such dust clouds are not uncommon, especially at this time of year. They start when weather patterns called tropical waves pick up dust from the desert in North Africa, carry it a couple of miles into the atmosphere and drift westward.

If the dust is concentrated enough, it could create some problems for people with respiratory problems, said Ken Larson, a natural resource specialist with the Broward County Environmental Protection Department.

"If somebody is subject to a respiratory condition, if they see hazy skies, they might want to take a little more precaution, not participate in strenuous activity and stay indoors," Larson said.

Thanks to CNN, NASA & AP.

Is there supposed to be something special here?

In Search of the Characters of New York
By RANDY KENNEDY

If you are not the sort of person who cares deeply about the Old World subtleties of Fournier, the retro-hipster swirl of Ministry Script or the plain-vanilla, rock-ribbed dependability of Helvetica - nor the sort immediately able to identify the typeface you are reading right now as 8.7-point Imperial - then you were probably not aware that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg declared this week Type Week in New York City.

You also might have assumed that a group of a dozen people wandering around the Upper East Side on Thursday morning, snapping pictures of the unremarkable words "Public School 6" inscribed into stone above an unremarkable red door on East 81st Street were tourists in possession of a badly translated guidebook.

But they were actually admiring the inscription on purpose, remarking on its clean Bauhaus roots. And a few blocks away, they gave the third degree to the neo-Roman letters carved along the top of Regis High School.

"The 'R' is too small in the bowl, and too long in the leg," complained Paul Shaw, a New York type designer and calligrapher who was leading the group on what he called a letter-form tour of Manhattan, with stops to take in the Art Deco Bloomingdale's sign, the sputnik-esque Frank Lloyd Wright letters on the Guggenheim Museum and the work of Bruce Rogers, a demigod of American book design, in the form of a huge Emerson quotation adorning a wall of Hunter College.

These pilgrims were among about 500 people, some from as far away as Brazil and Finland, who have converged on the city for TypeCon, a yearly gathering of typographers, printers, designers, calligraphers and assorted, self-described font freaks and type nerds who can argue about kerning into the wee hours.

If nothing else, TypeCon, now in its eighth year, sets out to prove that the typographical crowd, despite its two-dimensional obsessions, can partake in all the three-dimensional joys of any conventioneers. The activities include a film festival (sample past title: "Helvetica It Hurts"), a citywide typographic scavenger hunt with cash prizes and even a temporary radio station, set up inside the Parsons School of Design on West 12th Street. ("Type is speech on paper," the station's slogan goes. "Typeradio is speech on type." The D.J.'s say, however, that it has not proved particularly exciting to talk about type, so conversation on the station, accessible on the Web at www.typeradio.org, has tended toward music, food and sex.)

"We do compare this to a Trekkie convention sometimes," said Tamye Riggs, the executive director of the Society of Typographic Aficionados, which organized the event. "People can get really obsessed about it."

But type types don't wear costumes like Trekkies or Civil War re-enactors. Instead, they often wear really cool T-shirts and designer eyeglasses and hand out exquisitely designed business cards on heavy card stock. Their conversation can quickly descend into the slightly self-satisfied jargon of any specialty, with talk of uncial script, ligatures and serif slants, along with frequent references to Trajan's Column in Rome, an ancient source of Western letter forms.

But unlike many kinds of buffs, they are quick to try to share their enthusiasm and knowledge with even the most ill-informed typographical philistine (who has never changed the typeface on his word-processing program and had no idea until he looked it up yesterday that his newspaper's body type was 8.7-point Imperial.)

"Bloomies!" Mr. Shaw exclaimed, raising both his hands like a religious supplicant as he emerged from a subway staircase on Thursday morning and caught sight of the Bloomingdale's sign, with its boxy letters, ended by a cartoonlike "s" that seems to have wandered over from a Disney movie.

"The 's' is so funky," said Craig Brown, a New Jersey graphic designer, who took the tour with others from San Francisco, São Paulo, Calgary, Pensacola, Fla., and Redding, England. "It's so out of place."

Mr. Shaw, bearded, with long graying hair and the zeal of the Ancient Mariner, led his followers at a furious pace from the Guggenheim all the way down to Madison Square Park, dipping in and out of the subway, where he showed examples of weird serifs in the tile work (the serifs on the middle bars of the "e's" on signs along the Lexington line lean from left to right, an odd variation that seems to connote speed), and revealed little-known subterranean typographical mistakes.

"Some of the 'h's' in the Borough Hall station in Brooklyn are upside down," he said. "The crossbar is in the wrong position. I think the workers had a drawing from the engineer, but - hey - they're working with tile and sometimes they were one line off."

At times on Thursday, passers-by would stop and stare, too, trying to figure out what all these serious-looking people were looking at. In front of Public School 6, a man paused, squinted at the red door and its seemingly prosaic inscription and then shook his head.

"Is there supposed to be something special here?" he asked.



Thanks to The New York Times Company Copyright 2005

Choosing The Right iPod

In the beginning (OK, in 2001), there was the original 5GB iPod—and we were lucky to have it. But in the past four years, Apple has made things a bit more complicated, adding several new members to the iPod family. Not too long ago, making an iPod-buying decision boiled down to exactly one factor: whether you had the money to pay for it.

Now that Apple offers three versions of its diminutive music player—the iPod shuffle, the iPod mini, and the color iPod (including the iPod U2 Special Edition and most HP-branded models)—at prices ranging from $99 to $400, there’s far more to consider. Will a small iPod or a large iPod serve you better? And is there any advantage to owning Apple’s iPod instead of one branded with the HP logo? I’ve had my hands on every iPod model Apple has released, so I’m in a unique position to give advice on finding the iPod that’ll be the best fit for you.

iPod with color display
Not long ago Apple offered the fourth-generation iPod—a model with monochrome display—and a separate iPod photo, an iPod that could not only play music, but display color pictures on the iPod’s screen as well as project those pictures to an attached television or projector. In June 2005, Apple brought color to all its full-sized iPods (the iPod U2 Special Edition included) and dropped the “photo” appendage from the iPod’s name.

The name change doesn’t mean that the iPod has lost any of its photo capabilities. As with the earlier iPod photo, you can use Apple’s $30 iPod Camera Connector accessory to load pictures from a digital camera onto the iPod without having to first process them in iTunes. (Normally, you need to load your pictures onto your Mac or PC, where iTunes processes them for iPod compatibility, and then run a sync to download them to your iPod.) The iPod with color display can also take advantage of the Apple iPod AV Cable (now a $19 accessory) to connect the iPod to a television or projector.

People who don’t need this iPod’s photo features shouldn’t dismiss it too quickly. Even though its photo capabilities are its most glamorous feature, the addition of color improves everything about the iPod’s interface. Calendar events are far easier to differentiate, Solitaire is finally playable (because with color you can tell one suit from another more easily), and color album art is just cool no matter how you look at it.

While the iPod with color display offers more storage than the iPod mini (offering capacities of 20- and 60GB versus the mini’s 4- and 6GB hard drive capacity), it takes an hour longer to fully charge than the mini (five hours versus four for the mini) and offers less skip-protection—providing up to 17 minutes of protection versus up to 25 minutes for the mini. It also offers less playtime-per-charge (Apple rates the iPod’s playtime at up to 15 hours of music playback and up to 5 hours of slideshow playtime though we’ve managed over 17 hours of playtime on a color iPod when pressing play and walking away). But this iPod boasts a larger display, which allows you to view three lines of text on the Now Playing screen as compared to the two lines displayed by the mini (and zero lines of text shown on the display-less iPod shuffle).

These iPods have all the music and storage features switched on—unlike the mini and the shuffle, this iPod allows you to record voice memos with a third-party voice recorder such as Griffin Technology’s $40 iTalk or Belkin’s $50 Voice Recorder for iPod with Dock Connector. You can also store and view digital pictures on the iPod with Belkin’s $50 Media Reader for iPod with Dock Connector (Belkin’s $40 Digital Camera Link for iPod with Dock Connector will download pictures to the iPod but you can’t view them without first processing them through iTunes).

The HP iPod models—called Apple iPod + HP—differ slightly from Apple’s offerings. As I write this, HP still offers a 20GB monochrome iPod priced at $300. It will also sell you a 30GB color model for $350 plus its own 60GB color iPod that’s identical to Apple’s offering except for the two companies’ warranty support.

Specifically, Apple provides a one-year warranty but only 90 days of free phone support; it further restricts those terms in that all repairs after the first six months require a $30 shipping and handling fee, and the free phone support applies to only one incident within the first 90 days after purchase. HP, on the other hand, provides a full year of both hardware warranty and phone support, with toll-free technical support available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. HP also provides out-of-warranty support via e-mail. HP provides support only for Windows-formatted iPods, however.

If history tells us anything, HP’s models will soon match Apple’s lineup.

Capacity and Price 20GB (approximately 5,000 songs), $299; 60GB (approximately 15,000 songs), $399; iPod U2 Special Edition 20GB (approximately 5,000 songs), $329.

Ideal Usage and User If you’re looking for the ultimate in an iPod—a color display, the ability to view and project pictures, a decent amount of playing time, and enough storage for a very large music library—you and the iPod with color display were meant for each other.


iPod mini (second generation)
When Apple first released the iPod mini, the company positioned it as a competitor to other manufacturers’ high-end flash memory-based music players. But it wasn’t long before people forgot all about how the iPod mini compared to the competition and simply thought of it as a great way to shove a thousand tunes into the coolest looking music player on the market. The iPod mini has nearly the same functionality as the original fourth-generation iPod. Its screen is smaller, so it doesn’t display as much information as the larger iPods (the mini’s Now Playing screen, for example, doesn’t display the title of the currently playing album). The screen remains monochrome. And these iPods don’t support voice recording and media storage via third-party peripherals.

When you consider the price-to-storage ratio, the mini isn’t as good a deal as the iPod with color display. Cost per megabyte for the $199 4GB iPod mini is around 5 cents. And a megabyte on a $249 6GB mini costs about 4 cents. Compare this with about 2 cents per megabyte on a $299 20GB iPod, and you see that people who want the most for their money may pass on the mini’s cool exterior and handy size in favor of the higher-capacity iPod.

If you intend to put a lot of hours on your iPod, you’ll find the mini’s playing-time capabilities very attractive. Though Apple suggests that the 2G mini can play for up to 18 hours, I’ve been able to play nonstop music on a 6GB mini for more than 26 hours on a single charge. As I mentioned earlier, the best I’ve done with a color iPod is just over 17 hours.

Capacity and Price 4GB (approximately 1,000 songs), $199; 6GB (approximately 1,500 songs), $249.

Ideal Usage and User The mini, with its vibrant green, blue, pink, or silver case, is Apple’s most fashionable iPod. If you have a sense of style and want to store a goodly number of songs on a small, portable music player, you may just find it hard to resist.


iPod shuffle
Apple’s least-expensive iPod offers a host of advantages: it’s affordable enough to be an impulse buy, it sounds as good as any other iPod, it never skips (because it stores music on solid-state flash memory rather than a moving hard drive), it’s highly portable, and it holds more than enough music to get you through a long drive or a marathon run (though rated at up to 12 hours of play time, it can get much more). It doesn’t, however, include a screen for navigating to specific songs. And its capacity is limited enough that only people with very small music collections will be able to store an entire library on it.

Capacity and Price 512MB (approximately 120 songs), $99; 1GB (approximately 240 songs), $129.

Ideal Usage and User The shuffle’s non-skip nature and small size make it the perfect companion for exercising. And it’s easily cheap enough to become your second, “just kickin’ around” iPod. It’s also a good choice for kids (or adults) who tend to misplace their valuables. (Losing a $99 shuffle is a lot easier to swallow than misplacing a $400 iPod.)

With Thanks to Apple & Christopher Breen

Tre Bon!

Congratulations to Kaye and Ed on finally closing the deal on their groovy new place south of Paris in the west of France!

Braceology

A who's who and what's what of sports bracelets. What started as a yellow 'LIVE STRONG' bracelet message through Lance Armstrong's foundation has grown into a rainbow of support through various colors, messages and materials. From baseball to diabetes research, the below guide decodes what your subway seat-partner may be supporting on his or her wrist.

MLB

Houston Astros— At the April 9 game, the first 20,000 fans were given a Believe bracelet, geared toward stroke awareness and sponsored by The Methodist Hospital. Astros outfielder Lance Berkman is a hospital spokesperson and not only helped endorse the bands but also wears one frequently. The bracelets, which are red or black, can also be purchased, with the proceeds earmarked for stroke research at the Methodist Neurological Institute.

Minnesota Twins— The club and the Twins Community Fund are selling red/blue rubber bracelets stamped with the words Go Twins! on one side and For The Twins Community Fund on the other. The Twins have sold 20,000 bands, raising almost $30,000 for the Twins Community Fund, the team's charity. The Twins' cost on each bracelet is $2, with approximately $1.50 going to the Fund to support youth baseball/softball programs initiatives.

NBA

Boston Celtics— I Am A Celtic green bracelet, along with donations at regular-season home games in April, raised more than $50,000 to donate to the family of Hector Paniagua, a Lawrence, Mass., high school basketball star who was shot outside a nightclub March 27th and left paralyzed. The rest of the proceeds go to the Boston Celtics Shamrock Foundation, which assists children in need in New England. About 36,000 have been sold.

San Antonio Spurs— Have sold 100,000 Spurs black bracelets, raising more than $139,000 for the Spurs Foundation, which supports physically, emotionally and economically underserved youth.

Washington Wizards— Their Pure Energy black bracelet raised more than $64,000, going to UNICEF for Tsunami relief.

WNBA

Houston Comets — The Comets will give away a pink bracelet to the first 5,000 fans at their Breast Health Awareness game on July 30. To raise money for the Pink Ribbon Fund, the Comets will do an auction on the concourse.

New York Liberty— Have sold 5,000 Liberty Cheering For Children sea-foam green bracelets at home games. The money goes to the Madison Square Garden Cheering for Children Foundation, which has committed to build 10 playgrounds throughout the New York metropolitan area.

NHL

Atlanta Thrashers— About 80,000 True Blue blue bracelets have been distributed over the last year, largely tied to community development programs. They were given out free at school assemblies, reading events and fan development functions.

Detroit Red Wings— The Believe red bracelet was produced by the Red Wings and Ilitch Charities for Children, with proceeds earmarked for children with cancer and AIDS. More than 50,000 have been sold. "Believe" was the Red Wings slogan following the 1997 Stanley Cup and the subsequent limousine accident that left player Vladimir Konstantinov and masseuse Sergei Mnatsakanov seriously and permanently injured.

College sports

Bowling Green— Two bracelets are the rage on campus: orange BGSU Falcons bracelets, $1.99 at the campus bookstore, and red Multiple Sclerosis Society bracelets, at $5, which were passed out by former BGSU hockey goalie Jordan Sigalet, who announced this past year he had MS.

Colorado— Head football coach Gary Barnett designed 250 black woven bracelets with DTRT (Do The Right Thing) stitched in white. He presented them to coaches, players and staff — after they had read a mission statement Barnett had written and agreed to honor the principles set forth.

Duke— About 33,000 Duke For Life blue bracelets have been sold, with the proceeds ($48,000) going to the Emily Krzyzewski Family Life Center. The mission of the Center is to create an environment that fosters the development of life skills that are fundamental to reaching one's highest potential. Coach K, who started the center in his mother's name, the Blue Devils coaching staff and the players all wear the bracelets.

Florida — Head football coach Urban Meyer worked closely with several student leaders on campus on a community service initiative and fundraiser surrounding the Spring Game (the Orange and Blue Debut). Student leaders sold orange and blue spirit bracelets, with proceeds benefiting the Children's Miracle Network. Fans could pick a color, then cheer for that respective team in the April 9 game. Fans who purchased the bands of the losing team (blue) were then asked to assist members of the UF coaching staff and football team in planting more than 400 crepe myrtle trees on Radio Road on campus.

Fresno State— The Student-Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC) produced Fresno State Bulldogs red bracelets to raise money (as they had no budget) so they could provide more opportunities in terms of teambuilding and social activities for student-athletes. They have sold 3,500 at $2 each.

Michigan— The athletic department and C.S. Mott Children's Hospital have teamed up to sell blue M Go Blue for Mott bracelets to raise money for a new children's and women's hospital at the university. Football coach Lloyd Carr is co-chair of the Champions for Children campaign, with University Regent David Brandon, a former Wolverine football player.

Minnesota— Head basketball coach Dan Monson, a big admirer of the Live Strong bracelet, designed a special band for his team. The maroon bracelet, which was not available to the general public, was stamped with Mindset, and every letter stood for something. It became the credo for the basketball team.

M-Minnesota

I-Indivisible

N-Not about me

D-Discipline

S-Serve the Program and each other

E-Excellence

T-Thankfulness

Meanwhile, Minnesota's women's ice hockey team created their own blue Unbreakable bracelets, in honor of long-time equipment manager Bonnie Olein, who was diagnosed with colon cancer at the end of February. With the bracelets on their wrists, the Gophers won their second in a row NCAA championship. On July 12, the team will be honored at the White House, and Olein will be there with them.

Ohio State— The Buckeyes have jumped on the wristband wagon with numerous designs. The first bracelet, introduced last football season, is stamped with Tradition, People, Excellence, with more than 150,000 sold. Proceeds go to the Student Athlete Scholarship Fund. The latest bracelet projects include a "fan pack" band (You Win With People) and a three-pack (Go Bucks, Buckeyes, Hangonsloopy). Projected sales: 150,000 units, $250,000 in proceeds.

St. John's— When the St. John's baseball team played Notre Dame in a three-game series shown on ESPN and CSTV, the players wore purple Got Guts bracelets to honor a teammate, Matt Tosoni, who is redshirting this year. Tosoni was a starter in 2004 and had to sit out because of ulcerative colitis. The bracelets were purchased through a foundation that does work for people who have colitis.

Virginia— The athletic department's marketing and promotions office created two bracelets in the school colors — an orange Orange Fever bracelet and a blue Uncompromised Excellence bracelet. More than 15,000 have been sold at $2 each. The purpose was to continue to develop the Orange Fever brand and to participate in a national fundraising phenomenon on behalf of the United Way.

Washington State— The Cougars generated increased attendance at a men's and a women's basketball game by giving away 5,000 crimson bracelets stamped with Go Cougs. Says Leslie Cox, director of athletic marketing, via email: "We were very strict about the fact that going to the game was the only way to get a bracelet. Our attendance for both of those games increased significantly. Our fans still wear them, and we get requests all the time to do the bracelets again next year."

Western Michigan— Two years ago, as a sign of unity, the men's hockey team started wearing bracelets made from ice skate laces, an idea of Andrew Dwyer, now a senior defenseman. They fused together the ends of the laces by burning them with a match. When the team got knocked out of the playoffs, coach Jim Culhane proclaimed he would not take off his bracelet until Western Michigan advanced to the Super Sox Championships. Culhane and several players are still wearing their skate lace bracelets.

Individuals

Andy Baskin, one of the Fox Sports Net Ohio broadcasters, who works Cleveland Indians games, wears a blue bracelet for Cystic Fibrosis. His brother Bruce recently died from the disease.

"My brother bought 500 of them about two weeks before he went in the hospital," Baskin writes in an e-mail. "It was cool over the last four months to see all of the nurses at the clinic wear them. My family still wears it. For me, it's a constant reminder of what is important in life, and that every breath counts."

Angela Glazer, the wife of Tampa Bay Buccaneers executive vice president Joel Glazer, designed a blue bracelet to create awareness and educate people about endometriosis, a painful disease that affects 5 1/2 million women and girls in the USA and Canada and millions more worldwide. It occurs when tissue, like that which lines the uterus, is found outside the uterus, usually in the abdomen. The wording on the bracelets is Endrometriosis-Live Life-Think Positive.

Former NCAA champion breaststroker Dave Denniston wears his white Send It Forward bracelet to empower himself to walk again. He was paralyzed from the waist down in a sledding accident last February. The motto comes from a drill in a breaststroke training DVD he produced a few years ago. "The idea is to take all your energy and send it forward," explains says Denniston, who has sold 2,800 bracelets at $5 each and raised $15,000. That, with other fundraisers, will help pay for his rehabilitation at Project Walk in Carlsbad, Calif.

Jerome Bettis, Pro Bowl running back for the Pittsburgh Steelers, created a yellow and black tie-dyed bracelet, stamped with Bus & 'Burg Caring For Kids on the front and Bus36 on the back. A portion of the proceeds go to Bettis' "The Bus Stops Here Foundation," which funds programs that foster self-esteem and educational success in children.

Jason Taylor, Pro Bowl defensive end for the Miami Dolphins, created a red bracelet stamped with Jason Taylor Foundation. More than 7,000 bracelets have been given out, in exchange for a $1 donation per bracelet to the Foundation, which supports and creates programs for South Florida's children in need. The Foundation used the bracelets in conjunction with its "Big Screens-Big Dreams" program, inviting nine high school basketball teams to an advance screening of the movie Coach Carter. Each athlete was given a bracelet as their "ticket" into the theater.

Arizona Diamondbacks manager Bob Melvin wears a blue bracelet to create awareness for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. His 16-year-old daughter Alexi has juvenile diabetes. He and Alexi are spokespeople for the disease, and he's never seen without the bracelet.

Thanks to Jill Lieber, USA TODAY

Bitchin' Projector

optoma
Originally uploaded by H. Michael karshis.

This is really sweet. A totally self-contained home theater solution. The DV10, from Optoma, integrates a DVD player, a set of speakers (two 5-watt stereo) and a projector. Next time you're ready to kick back and watch a movie, surf or game, place this puppy 5ft away from a white wall, and dig "Jaws" on your 50inch screen, right then and there. Dude, it’s even HDTV compatible! That's right, "Go Spurs Go!

Of course, you can use it like a standard projector as well. It comes with a bunch of I/O connections (Composite (RCA), D-sub 15 VGA (analog RGB/component/HDTV), S-Video, RS-232 communication, Stereo audio in, Stereo audio out, Optical audio out), so you can game, connect your satellite, hook up your real sound system, etc.

It features brightness of 1,000 lumens, a contrast ratio of 4,000:1 and a bulb life of 2,000 hours.

Damage? $1500.

That's Right. Bitchin' Projector

Beijing Clinic Ministers To Online Addicts

BEIJING, China (AP) -- The 12 teenagers and young adults, some in ripped jeans and baggy T-shirts, sit in a circle, chewing gum and fidgeting as they shyly introduce themselves.

"I'm 12 years old," one boy announces with a smile. "I love playing computer games. That's it."

"It's been good to sleep" says another, a 17-year-old with spiky hair, now that he's no longer on the computer all day.

The youths are patients at China's first officially licensed clinic for Internet addiction, a downside of the online frenzy that has accompanied the nation's breathtaking economic boom.

"All the children here have left school because they are playing games or in chat rooms everyday," says the clinic's director, Dr. Tao Ran. "They are suffering from depression, nervousness, fear and unwillingness to interact with others, panic and agitation. They also have sleep disorders, the shakes and numbness in their hands."

According to government figures, China has the world's second-largest online population -- 94 million -- after the United States.

While China promotes Internet use for business and education, government officials also say Internet cafes are eroding public morality. Authorities regularly shut down Internet cafes -- many illegally operated -- in crackdowns that also include huge fines for their operators.

State media has also highlighted cases of obsessed Internet gamers, some of whom have flunked out of school, committed suicide or murder. Nonetheless, Internet cafes continue to thrive, with outlets found in even the smallest and poorest of villages. Most are usually packed late into the night.

Dr. Kimberly Young, a Bradford, Pennsylvania, clinical psychologist whose 1998 book on Internet addiction has been translated into Chinese, says she's not surprised the Chinese would face problems with Internet overuse.

"They are catching up with a lot of our technology, and certainly at that juncture, are now able to run into some of the same difficulties," Young said.

While treatment programs were virtually nonexistent in the United States a decade ago, she said, dozens of clinics and countless individual therapists such as herself offer counseling and treatment in her country.

Various fixations

Programs are growing elsewhere, too.

Just a few years ago, Young says, she attended a conference in Switzerland where she was the only American out of some 200 academics and clinicians who gathered to address Internet addiction.

Tao's government-owned clinic, which began taking patients in March, occupies the top floor of a two-story building on a quiet, tree-lined street on the sprawling campus of the Beijing Military Region Central Hospital in the heart of the Chinese capital.

A dozen nurses and 11 doctors care for the patients, mostly youths aged 14 to 24 who have lost sleep, weight and friends after countless hours in front of the computer, often playing video games with others online.

Some come voluntarily, while others are checked in by their parents. Many say their online obsessions helped them escape day-to-day stress, especially pressure from parents to excel in school.

Some can't stop playing games, while the older ones tend to be addicted to online chats with the opposite sex, Tao says. Others are fixated on designing violent games.

Tao, a psychiatrist for 20 years who specializes in treating addiction, estimates that up to 2.5 million Chinese suffer from Internet addiction, though others are skeptical.

"As the number of the Netizens grows, the number of the addicted people will grow as well, but we should not worry about the issue too much," says Kuang Wenbo, a professor of mass media at Beijing's Renmin University. "The young men at the age of growing up have their own problems. Even if there was no Internet they will get addicted to other things."

A reporter was allowed to talk to patients at the clinic on condition they not be identified by name.

"I wasn't normal," said a 20-year-old man from Beijing who used to spend at least 10 hours a day in front of the screen playing hack-and-slash games like Diablo.

"In school I didn't pay attention when teachers were talking," he said. "All I could do was think about playing the next game. Playing made me happy, I forgot my problems."

The 12-year-old, a new arrival, spent four days in an Internet cafe, barely eating or sleeping.

A soft-spoken 21-year-old man from northeastern Heilongjiang province who had been in the clinic for 10 days said his addiction had helped him escape from family pressures about his studies.

"I would stay up for 24 hours. I would eat only in front of the computer," he said.

Step-by-step

Tao's team has put together a standard diagnostic test to determine whether someone is addicted, then uses a combination of therapy sessions, medication, acupuncture and sports like swimming and basketball to ease patients back into normal lives.

They usually stay 10 to 15 days, at $48 a day -- a high price in China, where the average city dweller's weekly income is just $20.

The routine begins around 6 a.m. and includes sessions on a machine that stimulates nerve impulses with 30-volt charges to pressure points.

Some patients receive a clear fluid through intravenous drips said to "adjust the unbalanced status of brain secretions," according to one nurse. Officials would not give any other details about the medication.

Patients also nap, write diary entries or play cards. Their rooms are sunny, each decorated with artificial flowers, Winnie the Pooh comforters and a 17-inch television.

Tao says the long-term effects of treatment are generally successful, but it's not easy to keep patients from again giving themselves over to Internet temptation.

"It would be hard to give it up completely," said the 20-year-old from Beijing. "I'll take it step-by-step."

CNN Tecnology Report from The Associated Press

Front Page

Front Page
Originally uploaded by H. Michael karshis.

Ramiro "Ram" Ayala
1933-2005

Rest In Peace Ram

Click to see the Front Page

Rest In Peace Ram 1933-2005

Miguel & Ram
Originally uploaded by H. Michael karshis.

My friend of 20+ years, owner of world famous Tacoland and favorite bartender was shot and killed early this morning, June 24, 2005.

Here's the latest:

 
Taco Land Owner Fatally Shot
Web Posted: 06/24/2005 05:38 AM CDT

Vianna Davila
Express-News Staff Writer

The owner of Taco Land, a landmark San Antonio night club once immortalized in song, was fatally shot at the bar around 1:21 this morning in an incident that sent two other people to the hospital in critical condition, police said.

Ramiro Albert Ayala, 72, was pronounced dead at 2:25 a.m., according to the Bexar County Medical Examiner's Office. Ayala is listed as the bar's owner, the medical examiner said.

Details of the shooting were sketchy, but San Antonio Police Department Sgt. Matt Podwika said two men were inside the bar when words were exchanged and at least one of the men opened fire.

"We don't know exactly what was said between (the victims) and the suspects," he said.

Ayala was taken to Brooke Army Medical Center with a wound to the left side of the chest. A 40-year-old woman who was shot in her abdomen, and a 54-year-old man shot in the side, were taken to University Hospital, according to Podwika.

It appears the two suspects fled in an unknown vehicle with the money in the bar's cash register, the sergeant said.

A Dec. 12, 2000, article in the San Antonio Express-News said Ayala opened his business, at 103 W. Grayson, in 1965, selling food to workers from the soda bottling plants that once operated in the area. He turned the business into a bar in 1969.





Lyrics to The Dead Milkmen song they wrote after playing Taco Land on February 19, 1986


TACOLAND

There's a place
In San Antone
Where I can go
And not feel alone!

Tacoland
It's a panacea
Tacoland
They're always glad to see ya

You'll understand
When you go
On Down to Tacoland

When I feel
My world is lost
I go to Tacoland
And I get really tossed!

I wish my band would always pla-a-ay
Tacoland, I want to sta-a-ay

You'll understand
When you go
On Down to Tacoland

There's a girl with dirty hair
She's got her dress up in the air
She tells a lot of jokes
Hell, she's got a lot to share

Tacoland
We ate a lot of figs
They passed around a bottle
And we took a lot of swigs

It's nature's plan
To go On
Down to Tacoland

That's Right.

We miss you already Ram!

Birthday Party Spot

Tarzan's Patio
Originally uploaded by H. Michael karshis.

This groovy hotel is the official site for my birthday bash October 2, 2006 - so start planning now! Built by Johnny Weissmuller, the original Tarzan, back in the thirties while filming in and around Acapulco, this place is the perfect self contained place to hang in Acapulco. The hotel, now called Los Flamingos, is located on top of the highest cliffs of Acapulco, 450 feet high, with awesome views of the Pacific Ocean and "La Roqueta" island. It's a killer unique location, providing not only perfect sunset views, but there's also a continuous ocean breeze to keep you nice and comfortable. There's a bitchin' pool smack dab between a cool outdoor bar and the restaurant. Couple that with wicked cheap tequila and rum brought in from town and we've got ourselves a Tiki Room on the cliffs!
The hotel is situated very close to "La Quebrada" where the famous high cliff divers perform daily. It is also five minutes away from "Caleta" and "Caletilla" beaches, La Roqueta island, the bullring and the main square. And dig this, off season rates are only 500 pesos per night! That's $50 bux for all you gringos...

Av. López Mateos No. Fracc. las Playas Acapulco, Guerrero, México
Apdo. Postal No. 70
Tels. (744) 482 0690 al 92
E-mail: flamingo@acabtu.com.mx

Be Cool to the Pizza Dude

If I have one operating philosophy about life it is this: "Be cool to the pizza delivery dude; it's good luck." Four principles guide the pizza dude philosophy.

Principle 1: Coolness to the pizza delivery dude is a practice in humility and forgiveness. I let him cut me off in traffic, let him safely hit the exit ramp from the left lane, let him forget to use his blinker without extending any of my digits out the window or towards my horn because there should be one moment in my harried life when a car may encroach or cut off or pass and I let it go. Sometimes when I have become so certain of my ownership of my lane, daring anyone to challenge me, the pizza dude speeds by me in his rusted Chevette. His pizza light atop his car glowing like a beacon reminds me to check myself as I flow through the world. After all, the dude is delivering pizza to young and old, families and singletons, gays and straights, blacks, whites and browns, rich and poor, vegetarians and meat lovers alike. As he journeys, I give safe passage, practice restraint, show courtesy, and contain my anger.

Principle 2: Coolness to the pizza delivery dude is a practice in empathy. Let's face it: We've all taken jobs just to have a job because some money is better than none. I've held an assortment of these jobs and was grateful for the paycheck that meant I didn't have to share my Cheerios with my cats. In the big pizza wheel of life, sometimes you're the hot bubbly cheese and sometimes you're the burnt crust. It's good to remember the fickle spinning of that wheel.

Principle 3: Coolness to the pizza delivery dude is a practice in honor and it reminds me to honor honest work. Let me tell you something about these dudes: They never took over a company and, as CEO, artificially inflated the value of the stock and cashed out their own shares, bringing the company to the brink of bankruptcy, resulting in 20,000 people losing their jobs while the CEO builds a home the size of a luxury hotel. Rather, the dudes sleep the sleep of the just.

Principle 4: Coolness to the pizza delivery dude is a practice in equality. My measurement as a human being, my worth, is the pride I take in performing my job -- any job -- and the respect with which I treat others. I am the equal of the world not because of the car I drive, the size of the TV I own, the weight I can bench press, or the calculus equations I can solve. I am the equal to all I meet because of the kindness in my heart. And it all starts here -- with the pizza delivery dude.

Tip him well, friends and brethren, for that which you bestow freely and willingly will bring you all the happy luck that a grateful universe knows how to return.

Courtesy of Sarah Adams
Sarah Adams has held many jobs in her life, including telemarketer, factory worker, hotel clerk and flower shop cashier, but has never delivered pizzas. Raised in Wisconsin, Adams is now an English professor at Olympic Community College in Washington.

Thanks to Sarah, NPR and All Things Considered

That's Right,

HMK

Genius.

Genius.
Originally uploaded by H. Michael karshis.

iPodlounger Ata Oz provided us with a screenshot from the 350th episode of The Simpsons titled "Future-Drama." In the episode, which aired last month, an iPod was used as the only DJ at Bart and Lisa's Prom, 8 years into their future.

Thanks to Larry Angell at ipodlounge.com for the hook up!

This Is The Life

The world's greatest experiences begin with you and can now be shared at This Is The Life

That's Right,

HMK

God Only Knows...

PopeBrackets
Originally uploaded by H. Michael karshis.

...who's going to be next Pope.

I Love L.A.!

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- "Star Wars" fans will have to find the right theater before they can leave for the dark side.

Seven weeks before its release, "Star Wars" fanatics started lining up outside Grauman's Chinese Theater for the sixth installment of the popular George Lucas movie series. The vigil began Saturday.

But there's a problem: "Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith" won't be showing at the Hollywood landmark when the movie is released May 19. The studio, 20th Century Fox, opted instead to open the film a mile away at the ArcLight theater.

Still, the resolute "Star Wars" die-hards aren't moving on. Beneath a makeshift awning, 11 people refused to relinquish their spots in line.

"We've heard all this before," fan Sarah Sprague said, noting there were plenty of rumors in 1999 and 2002 that previous "Star Wars" movies weren't opening at the Chinese Theater. The rumors were false and the films were shown there.

Fox and the ArcLight haven't completed their "Star Wars" deal, but executives on both sides told Daily Variety "Revenge of the Sith" will play at the ArcLight, not the Chinese.

Yet Sprague was adamant the line wouldn't be moving to the ArcLight.

"This is still the epicenter for 'Star Wars' fans. For the big iconic pictures of the 1970s, people lining up were here. They weren't at the Cinerama Dome (at the ArcLight)," Sprague said.

Lucas' final "Star Wars" chapter spells out the last dark steps the once goodhearted young Anakin Skywalker takes to become the villain Darth Vader.

May The Farce Be With You,

Tha's Right,

HMK

Show Me The Funny!

The Found Footage Festival is a live comedy event and screening featuring odd and hilarious clips from videotapes found at thrift stores and garage sales and in warehouses and Dumpsters throughout the country. Curators Geoff Haas, Joe Pickett and/or Nick Prueher host each screening and provide their unique observations and commentary on these found video obscurities. From the curiously-produced industrial training video to the forsaken home movie donated to Goodwill, the Found Footage Festival resurrects these forgotten treasures and serves them up in an entertaining 90-minute celebration of all things found.

The preview simply says it all!

Show Me The Funny!

That's Right,

HMK


The FFF is a non-profit arts group which holds no rights or permissions to the material screened. The presentation of the FFF is for the purposes of entertainment only!

Apple Adopts Windows Media for iTunes, iPod

In a surprise move, Apple Computer announced Friday, April 1st, that it was licensing Microsoft's Windows Media platform for use with both the iTunes Music Store and the company's market-leading iPod music player. Apple will be replacing its proprietary FairPlay DRM scheme and AAC codec with Microsoft's Janus platform, allowing the company to leverage the more open nature of Microsoft's Windows Media platform across its burgeoning consumer electronics product line.

In addition to managing a la carte downloads from online music stores, Janus has the added bonus of allowing music lovers to take rented music with them in Windows Media-supported devices, something that has helped Napster become the #2 online music service. By licensing Windows Media and Janus, Apple will be able to follow in Napster's footsteps, and the company plans to open a rental section in the iTunes Music Store.

iTunes users will have the option of converting all of their songs to Windows Media in an upcoming update to iTunes, and iPods will be converted to Windows Media players in a firmware update due later today.

More Choice, and changing momentum
One factor in bringing Apple to Microsoft's trough has been the changing landscape in the online music industry. Apple's iTunes Music Store has, by some estimates, some 90% of the market in legal music downloads, but replacing AAC and FairPlay with Windows Media and Janus gives Apple access to 100% of the market.

Microsoft has worked hard to show customers that having access to more choices in digital media devices and online music stores is better than having access to many consider to be the best music player, the iPod, and the top online music store, the iTunes Music Store.
Microsoft's 'More Choice' campaign has had an impact on Apple's sales, and Apple wanted to jump on the Microsoft bandwagon in order to keep pace with these changing tides.

"Microsoft has scored a success with consumers with its 'More Choice' campaign," Apple vice president Phil Schiller said in a statement. "Our customers have been letting us know that they expect that choice from Apple, and partnering with Microsoft seemed the best way to achieve that."

Six ways to punch you below the belt
Sources close to the company admitted to TMO that Microsoft had also hit Apple where it hurt with its "Six Tips for Buying an MP3 Player with Flash Memory" tip sheet for consumers. The Six Tips offered consumers a guide to selecting a music player that meets their needs, and emphasized some of the many features and benefits found only in non-iPod, Windows Media devices.

"That was just genius," said one source, who requested anonymity. "You'll notice that they didn't even mention the iPod once. Once a potential customer sees that, they're sold on an iRiver, a Dell DJ, or whatever. We couldn't compete with that, but thankfully Microsoft was willing to help us out."

In an interview with The Mac Observer, Apple CEO Steve Jobs pointed out that Apple was doomed as long as it tried to go-it-alone, and that the time had come for Apple "to do the right thing" for its customers and shareholders.

"We've had a pretty good run so far, you'll have to admit," said Mr. Jobs, "but let's face it: This is Microsoft we're talking about. Everyone knows they get it right by the time version 3.0 rolls around, and it was only a matter of when before our time in the limelight of success was merely dust in the wind."

He continued, "Why take chances? This way we can keep our customers while letting Microsoft have all the headaches of managing customer expectations and problems. That stuff was killing our margins."

When asked if Apple had always intended to adopt Windows Media as the platform controlling iTunes and iPod, Mr. Jobs declined to comment.

Thanks to Bryan Chaffin

Read. Digest. And Pass On.

 
iPod Therefore iAm

Ordinary people narrowcast; always have, always will. It's human nature to want to surround ourselves with like-minded people, familiar music, comfortable art, and unchallenging surroundings. Who can be surprised that our technology reflects this basic impulse?       
Andrew Sullivan, that's who. In his recent essay, "iPod World: The End of Society?" Sullivan broods over the popularity of America's new favorite gizmo, the iPod:
 
"Americans are beginning to narrowcast their own lives. Technology has given us finally a universe entirely for ourselves -- where the serendipity of meeting a new stranger, or hearing a piece of music we would never choose for ourselves, or an opinion that might actually force us to change our mind about something are all effectively banished. Atomization by little white boxes and cell-phones. Society without the social. Others who are chosen -- not met at random.
"Human beings have never lived like this before."
 
On the contrary: human beings have always lived this way. Until very recently, most people lived their lives -- culturally and otherwise -- within the confines of small homes, small towns, and small places. Geography dictated your language, religion, political beliefs, cultural preferences, and artistic tastes. You didn't need a cell phone or an iPod or an Internet connection to link up with your tiny little subculture -- you just needed to get out of bed in the morning. To be sure, there was room for variety within geographical areas -- but for most of human history, location was destiny. Cultural jostling was largely restricted to merchants, soldiers, peripatetic clergymen, and perhaps the very rich. And while the constriction of cultural experience was hardly ennobling or intellectually fulfilling, it doesn't appear to have made most people miserable.
 
The history of the modern world is the history of culture transforming from a geographical phenomenon into an ideological phenomenon. As information technology has blossomed, ideas no longer rely upon locations for transmission. But while the unit of atomization in the bad old days was the small community, the unit of atomization in the present is the individual. Either way, the constant is atomization.
 
Human beings are parochial animals; in the modern age, we dwell in parishes of the mind. Sooner or later, one form of homogeneity replaces another. The old differences -- North vs. South, city vs. country, black vs. white -- give way to the new: Red America vs. Blue America, investor vs. consumer, new wave vs. old school. We select our style of narrowness, but the narrowness never changes.
 
And what's wrong with a little narrowcasting, anyway? Social life is a difficult thing -- fraught with awkwardness, quirky taboos, the fear of rejection, and the discomfort of confrontation. The unfamiliar and the unexpected can stimulate but they can also exasperate -- and exacerbate ill will. We surround ourselves with the familiar and unthreatening precisely because ordinary life is threatening enough, even within the confines of the familiar. To be sure, a select few will always strive to broaden their cultural horizons -- but then, a belief in the value of broadened cultural horizons is itself a cultural position, and a surprisingly comfortable one at that.
 
The question is not whether we will narrowcast our lives. The question is how to create a broadcast society out of narrowcast people.
 
Our true concern is not cocooning, but rather the intellectual indolence that it permits. It's fine to surround ourselves with the familiar and unobtrusive, provided that we use that comfort to create a mental space for reasoned, virtuous reflection. If every New York iPod zombie engaged his or her chosen style of music in a focused, intelligent way, we wouldn't mind the rise of the iPod a bit. But it seems likely that the familiarity of our favorite iPod tunes isn't making civilized thought easier -- it's allowing civilized thought to be avoided altogether. How many iPod-heads poison their brains with soulless pop drivel because it's the same crap to which they've always listened? As Christine Rosen warns in her New Atlantis article, "The Age of Egocasting:"
 
"TiVo is God's machine, the iPod plays our own personal symphonies, and each device brings with it its own series of individualized rituals. What we don't seem to realize is that ritual thoroughly personalized is no longer religion or art. It is fetish. And unlike religion and art, which encourage us to transcend our own experience, fetish urges us to return obsessively to the sounds and images of an arrested stage of development."
 
But fetish is an old enemy. Since time out of mind, most people stayed in the village because it was easier than venturing out into the city. Most people thoughtlessly accepted whatever music the cultural elites presented at the orchestral performances, or whatever art the smart-set displayed at the museums. Even today, most people accept the religion, culture, and mores of their upbringing without question. Do iPods encourage fetishes, or simply transform them?
 
Perhaps the new and the unfamiliar are just as likely to close the indifferent mind as to open it. Perhaps iPods are merely symbols of the insularity that characterizes the average intellect.
 
Sullivan identifies the real problem later in his essay:
 
"But what are we missing? That hilarious shard of an over-heard conversation that stays with you all day; the child whose chatter on the sidewalk takes you back to your own early memories; birdsong; weather; accents; the laughter of others; and those thoughts that come not by filling your head with selected diversion, but by allowing your mind to wander aimlessly through the regular background noise of human and mechanical life."
 
The iPod is a tool of choice. With it, we can download exactly the music that we choose, and play it when we choose, and where we choose. And ours is a nation swooning over the joys of choice. We learn the lesson over and over, in movies and TV shows and commercials: be yourself. Do what you want. Don't live by the rules and expectations of others. Pursue your own destiny. What we forget -- but what Sullivan remembers -- are the joys of not choosing. To accept what life offers, not numbly but deliberately, placing our beloved autonomy into abeyance, is to open the door to unforeseen surprises, happy coincidences, and profound affirmations. Good as it is to choose who we love, it is even more intoxicating to be chosen. Good as it is to seek out what we like, it is just as pleasant for what we like to seek us. And given our society's endless fascination with questions of identity, it seems that we are desperate to find those qualities of ourselves that are unchosen, unchanging, and fundamental. As our tools for choosing grow ever more powerful, our hunger for the unchosen can only increase.
 
I am not afraid of iPod nation. I am not so naïve as to think that good music will triumph over awful music. I am not so optimistic as to forget that we lose something vital when choice barricades the walls of our minds against the adventure of the unknown and unselected. And I accept that every iPod-like innovation tips the scales a little further in the direction of the chosen over the unchosen -- a dangerous trend in an era when choice always seems to win. But like everything else in modernity, iPods have increased our capacity to take pleasure in our unique pursuits, even as they have increased our responsibility to choose our pursuits wisely. Will we live up to that responsibility? Maybe so, maybe not; either way, the fault, dear Andrew, dear Christine, lies not within our iPods, but within ourselves.

As far as music goes, there are entire galaxies of music beyond planet Clear Channel. Do yourself a favor and sample some home grown antigravity by simply going left of your radio dial and tuning into your local college or NPR station. I like to refer to it as What's Left of The Dial.

Listen. Digest. And Pass On.

That's Right.

Thanks to Douglas Kern

Your Music Collection: Rent or Own?

The latest NAPSTER commercial offers the following comparison. On top, there is a single iPod. The cost to fill it, Napster says, is $10,000. Beneath it are three MP3 players: the Dell Pocket DJ, the Creative Zen Micro and iRiver's new H10. With Napster to Go, the commercial says, you can fill all three with almost any song you can think of and you're out only $15.

Next to that, in tiny print, are the words "per month."

Ordinarily such a lopsided comparison would make me cringe and conclude that it was aimed at the gullible. But this one made me re-examine my life.

Napster to Go is the latest edition of Napster's legal download service. (Although it was previewed to the public last fall, the software allowing small portable music players to work with it has become available only in the last few weeks.) A vast majority of the available tracks - Napster says 1.3 million - can be downloaded by subscribers without paying additional fees.

What makes Napster to Go different from other subscription services, like Rhapsody ($10 a month) from Real Networks, is that you can load these tracks onto a compatible player and hit the road. As long as the player reconnects to the PC every month to verify your subscription, it feels just like the more common alternative, the one-time à la carte cost of $1 per track or $10 per album.

Of course, the commercial doesn't say you will lose access to music if you stop paying. And Napster's $10,000 reckoning also assumes that everything on an iPod is purchased at the iTunes Music Store. In reality, you could have plenty of MP3's already, from ripping CD's and dredging the Internet.

But the commercial raises a good question: Will you rent albums the way you rent TV programming? If it makes financial sense - and if, armed with that knowledge, you can avoid the competing allure of iPod style and the Apple brand - you just might.

Since Apple opened its iTunes store at the end of 2003, I've purchased 504 songs - that's 21 albums and 224 loose tracks. That means my music diet, excluding a dwindling number of old-timey CD purchases, comes to roughly $30 a month.

Most of my spending has been satisfying: new releases from U2 and Jack Johnson are simply essential, and impulse buys like the Postal Service's "Give Up" and Better Than Ezra's "How Does Your Garden Grow?" have become staples of my week. But many hunches and recommendations got old fast.

More frustrating still, there are hundreds of tracks I've just been too cheap to check out. Even though I have a permanent collection of about 7,000 MP3's - compatible with any service and player - $15 a month is still less than what I spend discovering new music.

Parents with children ages 10 to 20 know how costly the digital music revolution can be. If you look the other way as they download music using ... let's call them gray-market techniques, your PC becomes irreversibly crippled by spyware. But when you try to encourage them to pay for music instead of stealing it, you quickly discover that even a two-album-a-month allowance adds up.

When used to its fullest extent, Napster to Go lays iTunes flat, financially speaking. For the $15 monthly fee, you're allowed unlimited downloads. You can put them on up to three compatible portable players, and log in and listen on up to three PC's. (Napster to Go does charge by the song, however, to burn music to a CD.) Sure, there's an initial investment, and in homes with more than three listeners they'll have to share, but for a low fixed price they can all download as many songs as they want, most of which they will soon forget about anyway.

The value proposition is in place. I know I can get tons of music, but can I get tons of good music? There are bands not yet online at all, like the Beatles, Led Zeppelin and AC/DC. But with Napster to Go there is a new discrepancy: songs you must purchase outright, ones that aren't part of the all-you-can-have subscription deal.

I hit Napster thinking that maybe half of the tracks I'd want would be "buy only." To my amazement, it was less than a tenth. Heavies like Paul Simon, Pink Floyd, Prince, Bruce Springsteen and even, yes, Metallica have made their entire catalogs available for subscription download. The subscription service makes sense for Pearl Jam, which has posted over 80 separate live recordings. Sure, some people bought them before, but now even those without Eddie Vedder tattoos will have a chance to check them out.

I'm not saying that you won't stub your toe against tracks that don't budge until paid for individually. But between your own music collection and what is available, it's easy to see how to build up your core library.

The magic of the subscription plan is that music you don't know is also covered. I got to see if I liked new cuts from the Killers (yep) and Gwen Stefani (nope). Sitting in judgment didn't mean sitting in front of a computer screen, either; I could do it in the driver's seat of my car.

The trouble is, that thing next to me wasn't my trusty iPod. A switch to Napster means kissing your iPod, or any prospect of getting one, goodbye. The Napster-compatible players, at the moment, are the ones from Creative, iRiver and Dell that I tested, as well as others from Samsung, Gateway and Audiovox, ranging in price from $180 to $500. What they have in common is a piece of hardware allowing this sort of subscription content to be used under a Microsoft-powered secure-content system.

I could easily dismiss the players friendly with Napster to Go, but most of my gripes merely translate into this boilerplate: They're not iPods.

More substantial are my complaints with Napster's PC software, which tends to jerk the user around in a very unstable fashion. It takes its sweet time reacting to mouse clicks, and mundane maneuvers make it freeze for minutes. Players often ominously "stop responding" in the middle of something important. It's possible to load the same tracks onto a player twice (an act iTunes most sensibly prohibits). Once you get the hang of the Napster service, a smart move is to use the more stable Windows Media Player 10 as your music manager instead.

For the most part, however, the software and the players do their jobs. So let me ask a question that some may consider heresy: How necessary is the iPod?

I recently discovered (with some horror) that I could live without TiVo. Time Warner Cable offered a box with better picture quality at a better price - about $9 a month with nothing up front. Compared with TiVo, the new box's interface is medieval dentist painful to use, but I use it and I don't look back.

If I could jump from TiVo to Time Warner, a switch from the iPod to the Creative Zen Micro ought to be easy by comparison. Yes, the iPod is a beautiful symbol of how cool I am, but an iPodectomy is scientifically possible.

Thankfully, an iPodectomy may not be necessary. Buzz on the Internet and in the industry suggests that Apple may be planning a retaliatory move, an iTunes to go. There are also good odds that Yahoo and Real Networks will soon join the melee.

Though it seems like a lopsided deal - paying less than what Target charges for a CD and getting almost any musical wish granted instantly - the record industry is lobbying hard to make subscription services the next phase in the digital revolution. The labels are using them to get the attention of 15- to 25-year-olds, the group most responsible for the sharp decline in CD sales over the last few years (not to mention the rise of illegal file sharing).

"We are very pleased to welcome this group into paying for music again," says Adam Klein, executive vice president for strategy and business development at EMI. Mr. Klein also tipped me off to another source of industry optimism: early research has shown that people who pay monthly to sample all music are still likely to pay extra to own some of it outright.

At the moment, that makes sense. Pay a nominal fee to taste everything, then spring for the stuff you can't live without. But in a future in which renting music is standard practice, this concept of ownership may become silly.

And though you may not be able to switch cable operators, you will be able to switch subscription music plans when a better price or a cooler program comes along. Switching may require a new player, and an afternoon to redownload the content you still want. The remaining question is, who will get your $15 a month? Let the real contest begin.


Thanks to Wilson Rothman and David Pogue.

The SegueVox Shuffle Project

Hey y'all I've got a brand new little site, the SegueVox: (Click here to go straight to SegueVox!) It's dedicated to my collection of transitions and segues for all you Shuffle freaks to add some meaning to your so called random lives. Add these groovy little audio gems to your iPod Shuffle and experience the true meaning of random yet inspirational wisdom. Get ready to fire your shrink and 86 your Fortune Teller. With the addition of these SegueVox transitions to either your Shuffle or your iPod your life is guaranteed to be more interesting and you're certain to surprise everyone (including yourself) with these dead-on perfect little transitions. You'll truly be amazed at the 8-Ball like accuracy of these seemingly random transitions - because, as we all know - everything happens for a reason, and the SegueVox collection is no exception.

To date, The SegueVox Vault contains 1500+ audio segues complied over the past 25 years from various audio fanatics, speakers of Truth and yes, Guardian Angles! (More on these folks later). These audio gems range from chants, forgotten and rescued vintage thrift store vinyl, subliminal messages and prayers, shortwave grabs, old answering machine junk to radio grabs from foreign lands, alien transmissions, vintage radio commercials, tags and jingles, drunk people reading quotes of inspiration, hidden microphone gaga to a bunch of other impossible to categorize little treasures.

SegueVox!

We'll be uploading files almost daily so feel free check back whenever you need a fresh random hit of subliminal inspiration.

If you simply can't wait, you can PayPal 6 Bux U.S. to kahuna@grandecom.net and we'll hook you up lickety-split. Volume One release date is May 09, 2005.

SegueVox is a subsidiary of Totally Bitchin' Recording and The Tiki Room Experiment

Revenge of the Right Brain

Logical and precise, left-brain thinking gave us the Information Age. Now comes the Conceptual Age - ruled by artistry, empathy, and emotion.

When I was a kid - growing up in a middle-class family, in the middle of America, in the middle of the 1970s - parents dished out a familiar plate of advice to their children: Get good grades, go to college, and pursue a profession that offers a decent standard of living and perhaps a dollop of prestige. If you were good at math and science, become a doctor. If you were better at English and history, become a lawyer. If blood grossed you out and your verbal skills needed work, become an accountant. Later, as computers appeared on desktops and CEOs on magazine covers, the youngsters who were really good at math and science chose high tech, while others flocked to business school, thinking that success was spelled MBA.

Tax attorneys. Radiologists. Financial analysts. Software engineers. Management guru Peter Drucker gave this cadre of professionals an enduring, if somewhat wonky, name: knowledge workers. These are, he wrote, "people who get paid for putting to work what one learns in school rather than for their physical strength or manual skill." What distinguished members of this group and enabled them to reap society's greatest rewards, was their "ability to acquire and to apply theoretical and analytic knowledge." And any of us could join their ranks. All we had to do was study hard and play by the rules of the meritocratic regime. That was the path to professional success and personal fulfillment.

But a funny thing happened while we were pressing our noses to the grindstone: The world changed. The future no longer belongs to people who can reason with computer-like logic, speed, and precision. It belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind. Today - amid the uncertainties of an economy that has gone from boom to bust to blah - there's a metaphor that explains what's going on. And it's right inside our heads.

Scientists have long known that a neurological Mason-Dixon line cleaves our brains into two regions - the left and right hemispheres. But in the last 10 years, thanks in part to advances in functional magnetic resonance imaging, researchers have begun to identify more precisely how the two sides divide responsibilities. The left hemisphere handles sequence, literalness, and analysis. The right hemisphere, meanwhile, takes care of context, emotional expression, and synthesis. Of course, the human brain, with its 100 billion cells forging 1 quadrillion connections, is breathtakingly complex. The two hemispheres work in concert, and we enlist both sides for nearly everything we do. But the structure of our brains can help explain the contours of our times.

Until recently, the abilities that led to success in school, work, and business were characteristic of the left hemisphere. They were the sorts of linear, logical, analytical talents measured by SATs and deployed by CPAs. Today, those capabilities are still necessary. But they're no longer sufficient. In a world upended by outsourcing, deluged with data, and choked with choices, the abilities that matter most are now closer in spirit to the specialties of the right hemisphere - artistry, empathy, seeing the big picture, and pursuing the transcendent.

Beneath the nervous clatter of our half-completed decade stirs a slow but seismic shift. The Information Age we all prepared for is ending. Rising in its place is what I call the Conceptual Age, an era in which mastery of abilities that we've often overlooked and undervalued marks the fault line between who gets ahead and who falls behind.

To some of you, this shift - from an economy built on the logical, sequential abilities of the Information Age to an economy built on the inventive, empathic abilities of the Conceptual Age - sounds delightful. "You had me at hello!" I can hear the painters and nurses exulting. But to others, this sounds like a crock. "Prove it!" I hear the programmers and lawyers demanding.

OK. To convince you, I'll explain the reasons for this shift, using the mechanistic language of cause and effect.

The effect: the scales tilting in favor of right brain-style thinking. The causes: Asia, automation, and abundance.

Asia

Few issues today spark more controversy than outsourcing. Those squadrons of white-collar workers in India, the Philippines, and China are scaring the bejesus out of software jockeys across North America and Europe. According to Forrester Research, 1 in 9 jobs in the US information technology industry will move overseas by 2010. And it's not just tech work. Visit India's office parks and you'll see chartered accountants preparing American tax returns, lawyers researching American lawsuits, and radiologists reading CAT scans for US hospitals.

The reality behind the alarm is this: Outsourcing to Asia is overhyped in the short term, but underhyped in the long term. We're not all going to lose our jobs tomorrow. (The total number of jobs lost to offshoring so far represents less than 1 percent of the US labor force.) But as the cost of communicating with the other side of the globe falls essentially to zero, as India becomes (by 2010) the country with the most English speakers in the world, and as developing nations continue to mint millions of extremely capable knowledge workers, the professional lives of people in the West will change dramatically. If number crunching, chart reading, and code writing can be done for a lot less overseas and delivered to clients instantly via fiber-optic cable, that's where the work will go.

But these gusts of comparative advantage are blowing away only certain kinds of white-collar jobs - those that can be reduced to a set of rules, routines, and instructions. That's why narrow left-brain work such as basic computer coding, accounting, legal research, and financial analysis is migrating across the oceans. But that's also why plenty of opportunities remain for people and companies doing less routine work - programmers who can design entire systems, accountants who serve as life planners, and bankers expert less in the intricacies of Excel than in the art of the deal. Now that foreigners can do left-brain work cheaper, we in the US must do right-brain work better.

Automation

Last century, machines proved they could replace human muscle. This century, technologies are proving they can outperform human left brains - they can execute sequential, reductive, computational work better, faster, and more accurately than even those with the highest IQs. (Just ask chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov.)

Consider jobs in financial services. Stockbrokers who merely execute transactions are history. Online trading services and market makers do such work far more efficiently. The brokers who survived have morphed from routine order-takers to less easily replicated advisers, who can understand a client's broader financial objectives and even the client's emotions and dreams.

Or take lawyers. Dozens of inexpensive information and advice services are reshaping law practice. At CompleteCase.com, you can get an uncontested divorce for $249, less than a 10th of the cost of a divorce lawyer. Meanwhile, the Web is cracking the information monopoly that has long been the source of many lawyers' high incomes and professional mystique. Go to USlegalforms.com and you can download - for the price of two movie tickets - fill-in-the-blank wills, contracts, and articles of incorporation that used to reside exclusively on lawyers' hard drives. Instead of hiring a lawyer for 10 hours to craft a contract, consumers can fill out the form themselves and hire a lawyer for one hour to look it over. Consequently, legal abilities that can't be digitized - convincing a jury or understanding the subtleties of a negotiation - become more valuable.

Even computer programmers may feel the pinch. "In the old days," legendary computer scientist Vernor Vinge has said, "anybody with even routine skills could get a job as a programmer. That isn't true anymore. The routine functions are increasingly being turned over to machines." The result: As the scut work gets offloaded, engineers will have to master different aptitudes, relying more on creativity than competence.

Any job that can be reduced to a set of rules is at risk. If a $500-a-month accountant in India doesn't swipe your accounting job, TurboTax will. Now that computers can emulate left-hemisphere skills, we'll have to rely ever more on our right hemispheres.

Abundance

Our left brains have made us rich. Powered by armies of Drucker's knowledge workers, the information economy has produced a standard of living that would have been unfathomable in our grandparents' youth. Their lives were defined by scarcity. Ours are shaped by abundance. Want evidence? Spend five minutes at Best Buy. Or look in your garage. Owning a car used to be a grand American aspiration. Today, there are more automobiles in the US than there are licensed drivers - which means that, on average, everybody who can drive has a car of their own. And if your garage is also piled with excess consumer goods, you're not alone. Self-storage - a business devoted to housing our extra crap - is now a $17 billion annual industry in the US, nearly double Hollywood's yearly box office take.

But abundance has produced an ironic result. The Information Age has unleashed a prosperity that in turn places a premium on less rational sensibilities - beauty, spirituality, emotion. For companies and entrepreneurs, it's no longer enough to create a product, a service, or an experience that's reasonably priced and adequately functional. In an age of abundance, consumers demand something more. Check out your bathroom. If you're like a few million Americans, you've got a Michael Graves toilet brush or a Karim Rashid trash can that you bought at Target. Try explaining a designer garbage pail to the left side of your brain! Or consider illumination. Electric lighting was rare a century ago, but now it's commonplace. Yet in the US, candles are a $2 billion a year business - for reasons that stretch beyond the logical need for luminosity to a prosperous country's more inchoate desire for pleasure and transcendence.

Liberated by this prosperity but not fulfilled by it, more people are searching for meaning. From the mainstream embrace of such once-exotic practices as yoga and meditation to the rise of spirituality in the workplace to the influence of evangelism in pop culture and politics, the quest for meaning and purpose has become an integral part of everyday life. And that will only intensify as the first children of abundance, the baby boomers, realize that they have more of their lives behind them than ahead. In both business and personal life, now that our left-brain needs have largely been sated, our right-brain yearnings will demand to be fed.

As the forces of Asia, automation, and abundance strengthen and accelerate, the curtain is rising on a new era, the Conceptual Age. If the Industrial Age was built on people's backs, and the Information Age on people's left hemispheres, the Conceptual Age is being built on people's right hemispheres. We've progressed from a society of farmers to a society of factory workers to a society of knowledge workers. And now we're progressing yet again - to a society of creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers.

But let me be clear: The future is not some Manichaean landscape in which individuals are either left-brained and extinct or right-brained and ecstatic - a land in which millionaire yoga instructors drive BMWs and programmers scrub counters at Chick-fil-A. Logical, linear, analytic thinking remains indispensable. But it's no longer enough.

To flourish in this age, we'll need to supplement our well-developed high tech abilities with aptitudes that are "high concept" and "high touch." High concept involves the ability to create artistic and emotional beauty, to detect patterns and opportunities, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to come up with inventions the world didn't know it was missing. High touch involves the capacity to empathize, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in one's self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian in pursuit of purpose and meaning.

Developing these high concept, high touch abilities won't be easy for everyone. For some, the prospect seems unattainable. Fear not (or at least fear less). The sorts of abilities that now matter most are fundamentally human attributes. After all, back on the savannah, our caveperson ancestors weren't plugging numbers into spreadsheets or debugging code. But they were telling stories, demonstrating empathy, and designing innovations. These abilities have always been part of what it means to be human. It's just that after a few generations in the Information Age, many of our high concept, high touch muscles have atrophied. The challenge is to work them back into shape.

Want to get ahead today? Forget what your parents told you. Instead, do something foreigners can't do cheaper. Something computers can't do faster. And something that fills one of the nonmaterial, transcendent desires of an abundant age. In other words, go right, young man and woman, go right.

Adapted from A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age, copyright © by Daniel H. Pink, to be published in March by Riverhead Books. Thanks to wired.com