I was a big fan of Tril­lian because dur­ing my 15 year his­tory of using the internet—it’s even longer if you count my bulletin-board days—I’ve acquired mul­ti­ple IM accounts from dif­fer­ent providers. I’m in the process of tran­si­tion­ing my mul­ti­ple com­put­ers away from pro­pri­etary OSes that aren’t nec­es­sar­ily worth the money spent. (That’s not to say there aren’t OSes worth pay­ing for.) How­ever, since Tril­lian is plat­form depen­dent, it was out. I needed a multi-network IM client that would work on mul­ti­ple plat­forms. Enter Pid­gin. It fit all my needs, except…

Read the rest of this entry »

“May Day” is exactly what Digg is exclaim­ing right now. Any­one who’s a reg­u­lar reader of Digg, Slash­dot and the like knows, users are doing noth­ing short of revolt­ing against DRM and respond­ing to—what peo­ple say is uncalled for—censorship (even if its in a site’s power to mod­er­ate the user-posted con­tent). They’re flood­ing Digg with links to ever more cre­ative expres­sions of the access key for unlock­ing HD-DVDs. The MPAA might as well just throw in the towel and either gen­er­ate a new key, develop a new copy-protection scheme (that will get defeated sooner or later), or just fol­low the music industry’s lead and phase out DRM all together. By try­ing to squash this infor­ma­tion, all they’ve done is pub­li­cize it even more. When they say that if it gets on the inter­net it stays on the inter­net, they mean it.

As much as I knock Taco Bell and its ilk these days because my palate has aged and broad­ened, I still have a fond­ness for a par­tic­u­lar menu item that I thought was extinct. I was mis­taken. How grate­ful I was to have stum­bled upon I Need Chili Cheese because it showed me that the Chili Cheese Bur­rito still exists, at least in select mar­kets. Taco Bell cor­po­rate does not offi­cially man­date the item be put on menus, but leaves the choice up to indi­vid­ual fran­chises, and my local restau­rant pur­port­edly does! Next time I drop by, I know what I’m order­ing. So for those a’hankerin’ for some melty, meaty good­ness, go find the near­est Taco Bell that car­ries it.

Now, I just need to con­vince Wendy’s to bring back the Smokey Bacon Cheese­burger. I’m not the only one who thinks so.

The iPhone, after years of spec­u­la­tion, rumor, hope, and antic­i­pa­tion, finally debuted yes­ter­day. The flurry of acco­lades and crit­i­cisms (for a demo prod­uct mind you) exploded over the next 24 hours, as Asia and Europe woke up to the news, and the com­men­tary hasn’t slowed down since. I’m going to hold off on my final judg­ment until June, but as far as first impres­sions go, this one was amazing.

Read the rest of this entry »