Cyrus Farivar

This is from my Columbia buddy Tom Randall who I saw last weekend in DC. He’s an intern at Bloomberg in DC for the summer and occasionally is on presidential press pool duty. i went to the state dinner with indian pm, george, laura, condi, don, dick, the whole gang. libby snuck in the back door. they kicked us out after toasts, but hey, i got to stand face to face with the pres for 5 minutes in matching tuxes.…

I was up at 5 am this morning to do an interview on WRVA about robots. It went well overall, except that it had three minor issues. The first was that I was mistakenly credited as being the “editor of Macworld magazine” (Jason, I’m really not trying to take your job, I swear!). The second was that my interview was cut short due to breaking news of the 2nd round of minor London bombings. The third was that I forgot…

In the interests of punditry, I will be waking up at 5 am tomorrow to make my third appearance on “Richmond’s Morning News with Jimmy Barrett” (WRVA 1140 AM Richmond). I will be talking about household robots, including the Nuvo robot and the Roomba. I was on WRVA on April 28 2005 and April 5 2005.

I know this is really geeky, but it needs to be said. In NPR’s tribute to James Doohan, the intro music is to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which James Doohan never had anything to do with and never appeared on. C’mon guys, not all Star Treks are created equal. Learn your theme music.

AP: LOS ANGELES (AP) — James Doohan, the burly chief engineer of the Starship Enterprise in the original ”Star Trek” TV series and movies who responded to the command ”Beam me up, Scotty,” died Wednesday. He was 85. Doohan died at 5:30 a.m. at his Redmond, Wash., home with his wife of 28 years, Wende, at his side, Los Angeles agent and longtime friend Steve Stevens said. The cause of death was pneumonia and Alzheimer’s disease, he said. He had…

For his first piece (the lead story, no less) in Wired News, on Cambodian blogs. Matt emailed me awhile back asking how to break into the freelance world, and will be attending Columbia this fall. Great job, Matt!

Last night, after going through a debriefing of my first day, Becky pointed out an inconsistency with two of the fringe benefits that I get as an employee of Macworld (parent company IDG). On the one hand, they subsidize gym membership (sweet!), to encourage their employees to stay healthy and work out, etc. Now in addition to that, there’s a shuttle bus that takes employees from the Montgomery BART station (2nd and Market St.) to the office (2nd and Bryant…

Yesterday, I was driving Boyk and I home from Fruitvale. We had just eaten 10 tacos between four taquerias and polished it all off with a few churros. We got stuck in some brief traffic on the 80. Cyrus: “You know what sucks? Traffic.” Boyk: “Yeah, it’s definately not as good as churros.”

One of my best friends, Dallas Bluth is enjoying his summer in Lyon, France, where he lived from Fall 1996 until 1999. Through family friends, he recently met a woman named Fanny, who is to be married to a Crown Prince of Kuwait. The new couple will be moving to Dubai in a few months, where Fanny is to open a small chain of lingerie stores. Dallas fell into this, and is becoming Fanny’s new English tutor and will likely…

I spent most of last night camped out in Dulles airport. Managed to get a standby to Chicago and then to Oakland this morning. Not fun. However you should go buy your tickets to the Senegalese rap group Daara J (along with Lateef the Truthspeaker) show at 12 Galaxies at 9 pm on Saturday August 6. $13/advance. $15/door. Get them now. Daara J is awesome.