Cyrus Farivar

AFP: November 15, 2005 JOHANNESBURG — A giant underwater cable network connecting Africa to Europe and Asia provides Internet access to the planet’s poorest continent but only a handful of countries seem to be enjoying its benefits. The 28,000-kilometer (17,500-mile) optical fiber cable, named SAT-3/WASC/SAFE, brings the Internet to Africa but seems to be giving an unfair advantage to coastal countries. Its first segment, in the Atlantic Ocean, leaves Portugal and goes down to the Cape in South Africa. In…

Thanks for subscribing to Burritoeater.com’s Intestinal Apocalypse Monthly newsletter. We hope you find it enjoyable, useful, and above all, not worthy of knee-jerk deletion. If you ever decide to unsubscribe, simply send an e-mail to ch@burritoeater.com requesting just that. You’ll never hear a peep from us again. If you’d like to switch the e-mail address at which you receive the Apocalypse, follow the above unsubscription guidelines, and be sure to include the new recipient e-mail address. We’d send you a…

I just discovered this site via NYT (TimesSelect), in an article about the Mission. “The Mission is the burrito vortex,” said Charles Hodgkins, who has visited every one of the city’s more than 150 taquerias – nearly a third of them are in the Mission – rating each burrito for his Web site, burritoeater.com. (Taqueria San Francisco, an unassuming neighborhood hole-in-the-wall on 24th Street, boasts the highest-rated burrito in the city.)

For those of you who know me, you know that I’m obsessed with geographic oddities around the world. One of my favorites is Nauru, a tiny island in the South Pacific (Population: 13,000) that entered into a Faustian tale of strip mining itself into oblivion during the bulk of the 20th century. It was “rescued” through a huge influx of cash by the Australian government when they built a detention center on the island, one of the largest icons of…

Macworld: Got a lot of repetitive tasks in your work life? Automate them! We’ll show you how. All month long, Macworld has been taking a look at Automator, the built-in Automation tool found in Mac OS X 10.4. As part of that look into how to use Automator workflows to handle the repetitive jobs on your Mac, we’ve lined up an interview with Sal Soghoian, product manager of Automator at Apple. I talk to Sal about how Automator is different…

Slate: Since high school, I’ve been a student in three very different environments—Afghanistan, where I’ve been spending my summers; Diablo Valley College, a community college in Pleasant Hill, Calif., about 20 minutes from my home in Concord, Calif. (where I spent most of my life); and Yale, where I transferred this semester as a junior majoring in economics. So, when the professor asked who you shouldn’t mess with, I immediately thought of something I saw in the summer of 2002.…

1) They’re not covered under Apple’s one year hardware warranty. 2) If you ask for open-box AC adapters at any Apple Store, they can be had for $29, instead of $79.

At a fundraiser for none other than Sen. Hilary Clinton @ Crobar on Tuesday December 6.

Personal Note: My Iranian father is a secular Muslim, my paternal grandmother a religious Shi’ite Muslim who has been on hajj to Mecca. For what it’s worth my Iranian father has said that our family is seyyed, or descendant of Mohammad. In addition, I was raised as a Presbyterian, under the guidance of my maternal grandfather, who is a Presbyterian minister. I was baptized at the age of three and under family pressure was told that I had to become…

Craigslist: 1997 Ford Expedition XLT, in excellent condition. Champagne color (beige), power steering, cruise control, antilock brakes, dual airbags, power windows, power mirrors, multi-disc CD player, tan color leather seats, illuminated running boards, alloy wheels, rear stereo and A/C control, roof rack, rubber lip container for the trunk, chrome bumpers. Single owner in Southern California, mostly freeway miles, regularly serviced and maintained, service records available 121,949 miles; $4,995 or best offer.