One Canuck's Radio Weblog

  Monday, 23 August 2004

.< 1:35:54 PM >
Students turn to Macs thanks to the iPod

Are iPods driving sales of Macs? USA Today documents the iPod's "halo" effect on college campuses. According to the report, many students are choosing Macs after having a good experience with the iPod. Sales associates at the campus computer stores for the University of Oregon and University of Arizona both tell the paper that Mac sales are up this season; one factor that may help the sales of new Macs is a US$200 iPod rebate for students who buy a new Mac. Awareness of the lack of viruses on Mac OS X and competitively priced iBooks are also helping to drive sales, according to the report. [MacCentral]

< 1:31:17 PM >

Cory Doctorow: A MetaFilter post links to several information resources on Toronto's new innovative downtown cooling system, which pumps near-freezing water from Lake Ontario's deeps through the city's office-towers, eliminating 40,000 tons of CO2 pollution per annum (no word on whether there's an environmental impact to pumping the atmosphere-warmed water back into the lake). [Boing Boing]

Part of this project takes place across the street from where I work. They've had a lane of traffic blocked for some time as they do the installation.

< 1:27:48 PM >

Cory Doctorow: As a requirement of its price-fixing settlement with the Feds, the RIAA is obliged to give thousands of CDs to public libraries. However, as has been noted, the CDs they're sending around are worse than shit: hundreds of copies of the years-old Whitney Houston single of the Star Spangled Banner, that species of kidney.

Jenny Levine (AKA the Shifted Librarian) works at a library where the RIAA care packages have started to come in. She reports on the contents thereof:

Several of the boxes are literally cut on the side, and the cut goes into the jewel cases themselves. Hence my declaration that we received a ton of "cut-outs." Some of the boxes even have dates of 2001 and 2002 posted on the labels, which I hope doesn't mean the date they were boxed up and put into storage. There is no way these boxes were packed by mistake as the result of a computer glitch. Some of the labels very clearly say 30 copies of this or that title, and I highly doubt the labels were supposed to cut the boxes after boxing and labeling them.

Link [Boing Boing]

< 1:24:23 PM >

AP - Mexican officials said Monday they have captured a man allegedly involved in shipping nearly half of the illegal drugs moved across the U.S.-Mexico border, the latest in a series of high-profile arrests. [Yahoo! News - World]

< 1:17:09 PM >

The UN is leading a day of global events to mark the abolition of slavery and to highlight continuing abuses. [BBC News | World | UK Edition]

< 12:00:52 AM >

The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is a gang of liars who ran a thoroughly debunked TV ad in which they lied about serving with John Kerry in Vietnam and lied about his service record. Then the Bush campaign disavowed any connection to the Lying Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

It was lying.

This New York Times infografic traces the financial connections between the organization and the Bush administration's staff, financiers, and cronies. Link
[Boing Boing]