Month: October 2004

House approves spyware legislation | CNET News.com Careful with that ax Eugene.

Boing Boing: EFF suing the FCC over the Broadcast Flag! It’s about friggin’ time!

Sony’s home server stores 1 terabyte | CNET News.com The future of home media according to Sony. A terabyte of storage and 7 tuners. NOW we’re getting somewhere! Unfortunately it looks like this media center is being developed for Japan only.

After using My Yahoo! for many years it is beginning to lose it’s grasp on my digital life and I may have abandoned it entirely today.

With RSS and Bloglines there is no longer any reason to go to My Yahoo! for customized content as I have done in years past. I get better customized feeds in a much better format from Bloglines.

So let’s see what else I use My Yahoo! for in my own personal case.

1. Calendar. I’ve always accessed my calendar through my My Yahoo! home page. The problem? I have to click through to actually get my calendar. So instead I’ve just put a direct link to my calendar in my Firefox quick launch bookmark bar and can go direct skipping the side trip through My Yahoo!.

2. Driving directions. Ditto. I always hated the additional few steps I had to go through from the My Yahoo! home page to actually get my driving directions. Instead I just put a link in my Firefox quick launch bar directly to Yahoo!’s driving directions.

3. What else. Yahoo/SBC mail preview. It does me no good because the majority of the time I want to access this email via My Yahoo! I’m at work and work has blocked Yahoo! mail from coming in to the office. Since I’ve moved my blog to another hosting company I just use their remote email anyways.

So that’s it for me. Unless I’m missing something significant here I’m done with My Yahoo! RIP. With Bloglines/RSS, direct buttons to yahoo calendar and driving directions and a non Yahoo! email/hosting provider I simply don’t need it anymore.

It still bothers me that as an SBC My Yahoo! client I can’t upgrade to the beta but frankly I’m not sure that there would be anything there anyways which would convince me to stay.

Wired 12.10: The Long Tail Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.

A very interesting article on the power of technology and the internet to change the way we are exposed to popular media and thus the ensuing popularity and diversity of media in our culture. From Wired Magazine.

A good companion post on the subject over at Venture Blog.

Also over at techdirt.

Techdirt:Washington State Opens Digital Records Archive Very nice work Washington State. All public records should be digitally archieved and searchable in an easy to manage database via the internet for the general public. Included in this archive should be everything presently in the Library of Congress. They should allow Google and other search engines to crawl these databases.

Vincenzo is a wine and food tasting held each year in San Rafael that benefits the St. Vincent’s School for Boys — a boys home for troubled youth. Every year it is beautiful and a wonderful day of wine tasting and great food. I’ve been going for the past few years and had the opportunity once again last Sunday. If you can make it in 2005 it’s definately worth checking out.

They had a number of top wineries there again this year including Staglin, Dominus, Silver Oak and ZD to name a few. Dick Grace was the Honorary Chair and brought some special bottles for the auction.

BARROOM BARD’S NEXT ROUND Jeez with so much Tom Waits stuff floating around the internet these days you’d never guess he just released a new album.