Dan Lyons, (aka the Fake Steve Jobs) talks at Google about being the fake Steve Jobs. Long video, but entirely worth it.

Via ProBlogger

Every Veteran’s day, since 2004, I give thanks that I no longer play in a marching band. Those parades always sucked even more than the Christmas parades.

The moka pot makes surprisingly good espresso, and I highly recommend for anyone looking for an economical way to get espresso. However, it is also good to get a milk frother with it.

I am currently unsure of the correct frother to get, given the variety of available products. Personally, I want one that is very similar to my espresso maker being that it must not require an outlet and it must be relatively portable. I’d like to take it camping. That’s right.

The cheapest item I found is available from Ikea, and can be found used for as little as $3. It takes 2 AA batteries. There are a bunch of these types of frothers around, and they’re pretty much all alike. Some come with metal stands. Woohoo!

 Next up are the glass and metal press-pitcher models, available for $9+ These work similar to french press coffee makers.

The last type of frother I’ll be covering is the stovetop steamer you see here on the left, available for $60+. The premise of this is really simple. You put water in it, put it on the stove, it makes steam, you put the tip of the wand into a cup of milk, you get hot foamy milk.

Tip: When choosing a milk, skim milk froths the quickest, but whole milk is the traditional choice among coffee aficionados.

All of these milk frothers can be had within your budget. With a combination of a $5 moka pot and a $3 frothers, you can rival the quality of a $300 espresso maker and far surpass the quality of any cheap-o steam-driven espresso machine. You’ll have rich and delicious espresso and moist, foamy milk, and a couple extra bucks to buy a coffee grinder with.

Today never ended. I met with clients, then went up to a house in Hermitage that DBF is helping a friend’s mother sell. The realtor hadn’t been to the house in 2 months, and neither had the people DBF hired to finish the painting or cut the grass. The windows to the house were still hanging open. In the words of Myron Cope, “What a debacle!”

After dealing with the absentee realtor, we went out with another of DBF’s friends, and DBFF’s daughter. I found a nice moka pot for $5. I’ll have details tomorrow on how they are at making stovetop espresso. I found a 1. liter carafe over at the Goodwill store for $1.50, a nifty iHome pillow for $3 off, and a tin of Bentley’s Jasmine white tea for $4 . Good fun is tasteless. Good tea is tasty.

DBF napped and I drove on the way home. For the record, I don’t like how VW golfs handle, and his is a diesel with a temperamental 5-speed manual transmission to boot. I only stalled it twice!

I’ve gotten into the habit of, while driving down crosstown boulevard, to take a careful look at the parkway ahead of me and, if I see three lanes of solid congestion, I take the boulevard of the allies home through Schenley Park. It’s 11 and I’m tired. The melatonin must be kicking in.

So I was just about to say that Vista isn’t all that bad, but something interesting happened. My PC froze up for about five minutes, the hard drive went crazy, and the half-finished blog entry I had started disappeared. So I figure that whatever is bad for me may as well be bad for a conglomerate’s PR: Windows Vista is no more reliable than Windows ME. I will retract that statement after Microsoft sends me a refund. Not a refund for the software license, a refund for the hours I spent using it, at a rate of $10/hr. Anybody want to get in on this and go class-action style?

Actually, both my laptop and my PC crashed. The desktop crashed twice… in the past half hour. The problem is that I have to choose between Linux - software that was put together by a bunch of unpaid professionals, Windows - software that was apparently put together by paid amateurs, and Mac OS 10 - software that does exactly what Steve Jobs says it will. There really isn’t a win anywhere in there.

NaBloPoMo - So, being more behind than usual on my cyberculture news, I forgot that NaNoWriMo and NaBloPoMo started. Also, I think we need a new word for acronyms that occur in camel case like the aforementioned events, NaDruWriMi, EvDO, etc. I think we should call these camel-case acronyms Acrocamels!

Lastly, Blogfest 12 was a hit. I met a lot of fabulous people, and will have to dedicate some time tomorrow to stalking them.

Sprint has made some headway since the Sprint/Nextel merger. This streaming service with Pandora is a good example:

How it works

To start you off, Pandora is a great free audio service that learns about your audio tastes as you listen to music then rate and bookmark said music. Simply go to the website, type your favorite artist in the text box they give you, and Pandora collects a list of similar songs and plays them back at you. If you don’t like a song, give it a thumbs down and you’ll never hear it again. If you love a song, give it a thumbs up; you’ll get more.

For $3/month, you can now get your Pandora goodness through your phone–and use it as an mp3 player with the world’s largest library.

How Much It Costs

Like I said–the service is $3/month. This is…

• $3/month less than Yahoo! Unlimited
• $10/month less than Sirius
• at least $7/month cheaper than XM (that’s if you buy 3 years at a time)
• $7/month cheaper than Napster (basic, not unlimited).

…and basically a good buy provided Sprint and Pandora stay in business.

Conclusion

I hope the GPhone gets something like this! 

I posted earlier this month about the problems of having too much data going at me at once, and literally thought “I feel like I’m drinking kool-aid” from a fire hose.

There are a lot of information sources on the web. I’m sure you’ve figured that part out by now. Blogs like Lifehacker and BoingBoing are extremely prolific, to the tune of about 20 articles daily. However, there are less prolific blogs, like Self-Made Minds, that put out rather useful content that I’d really regret missing.

Unfortunately, value in content is extremely subjective. Literally, one person’s trash is another person’s treasure. Some blogs are going to put out posts that you’d hate yourself, in hindsight, for missing; yet there are blogs out there that you could really care less if you missed a week of articles.

Efficient & Lazy Strategy:

The best way I found to do this is to use two major categories for every single blog I read: Junk and Value. I ended up re-categorizing all 86 (and growing) of my RSS feeds into the two categories. Interestingly enough, the Value category only has 24 feeds in it, and they are definitely not the prolific ones. Since I use Google Reader, I set it up to load the Value category by default when I open my RSS reader.

Result:

When I open my RSS reader for my fix of feeds now, I usually look at the text of the 10 or so truly valuable posts. If I have another fifteen minutes to kill, I might occasionally open the Junk folder and scroll through the titles of the 100+ articles, open one or two, and star the ones I want to read later when I’ve got the time to dive into a pile of articles.

In a nutshell, I get the maximum return on my time after the 30 minute investment in categorizing my feeds in a way that is extremely functional.

So after watching the latest TiVo-ing of The Daily Show, I’m both surprised and annoyed to find that Jon Stewart, while still being current, doesn’t have anything new at all, and really hasn’t had anything particularly groundbreaking since, oh… seven years ago when we didn’t elect Bush. Remember the Bush vs Gore debates, the “fuzzy arithmetic” retort to practically every statement Gore issued involving numbers, the fact that we didn’t elect Bush in the first place? I do, and I was 14 at the time. New year, different bullshit.

Yes, it is really sad that it would have been better off taking a public speaking class than 99% of what he actually did, but it is worth that people have this annoying tendency to forget Bush’s greater offense–being a slimy bastard.

Our Viacom-owned news organizations are stuck with mocking Bush’s inability to use his native language while we have a president who is guilty of at least:

• Authorization of a war of aggression without any real premise
• Authorization of the use of torture and abuse in violation of the international humanitarian and human rights law and domestic constitutional and statuary laws.
• Authorization of the transfer of persons held in U.S. custody to foreign countries where torture is known to be practiced.
• Knowing failure to adequately maintain and upgrade the levees directly contributed to the foreseeable loss of life and suffering of many people when Hurricane Katrina struck.
• Distortion of sound science and attempts to suppress medical research studies in HIV prevention when it conflicts with the ideology of the Christian Right.
• Re-instation of the “gag-rule” policy which restricts foreign organizations that receive US funds from using their own, non-U.S., funds to provide legal abortion services or even provide accurate medical counseling or referrals regarding abortion.
• Imposition of Abstinence-Only HIV Prevention Programs: The Bush administration is using its political influence, aid, and funding in the sphere of HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment to advance policies and programs that worsen the AIDS pandemic.
• Use of military forces to seize and detain indefinitely without charges U.S. citizens, denying them the right to challenge their detention in U.S. courts.
• Insertion of secret clause in Terrorist Tribunal Act to pardon himself from war crimes

…and many more!

This, perhaps, is why my boyfriend is catching the next plane to Germany right after he wins the lottery.

No, I will probably never buy a Sony Bravia, but their commercials still rock the house.

This is the new one:

Wait… didn’t Apple use that song when they were introducing the tie-dyed CRT iMac?

So after uploading a bunch of files as an automated offsite backup in SyncBack from my pc, I exceeded the storage quota of the account this blog sits on by about 483%, causing the WP-Cache to crash whenever anybody tried to load a page.

Anyway, it’s fixed now. Sorry!