Cyrus Farivar

Via Boing Boing: CNN: (CNN) — In 1994, people had to call the bank to check their balances. Or inquire in person, or wait for a paper statement to arrive in the mail. Baseball box scores were found in the newspaper. Weather forecasts came over the phone from the weather bureau, or on TV. Back then, most Americans still had to lick a stamp to send mail. Then along came the Internet, and an experimental browser called Mosaic, followed by…

So I’m sitting here in my house with the front door open, working on the couch, and a raccoon walks in. When I stood up, it got scared off. Whoa.

Congrats to Jennifer Weiss, for her first piece in the NYT! ALEX SPENCER did not say hello. Instead, he silently took the hand of Masha Khokhlova, his partner, and stepped into the song that was filtering through Ballroom on Fifth, one of the city’s premier dance studios. It was the kind of instrumental ballad from the 1940’s to which either dancer’s grandparents – his in Germany, hers in the former Soviet Union – might have fallen in love. Mr. Spencer…

AP: WASHINGTON (AP) Ñ With barely a word about it, workers at the Justice Department Friday removed the blue drapes that have famously covered two scantily clad statues for the past 3 1/2 years. Spirit of Justice, with her one breast exposed and her arms raised, and the bare-chested male Majesty of Law basked in the late afternoon light of Justice’s ceremonial Great Hall. The drapes, installed in 2002 at a cost of $8,000, allowed then-Attorney General John Ashcroft to…

LA Times Ahmadinejad, 48, who has never held an elective office and was the appointed mayor of Tehran for two years, was the young challenger. A former Revolutionary Guard and instructor to the “basiji” militia, who wears a fighter’s symbolic kaffiyeh, Ahmadinejad talks tough toward Iran’s enemies. He promises to reverse what he and his followers based in the military, the bazaars and the clergy view as the watering down of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s militancy. His foes fear he will…

Macworld.com: We here at Macworld have decided to experiment with the Podcast format. So weÕve taken a page from the magazine and inaugurated the Geek Factor podcast, covering tech topics on an irregular basis. Cyrus Farivar, who has written for Macworld, the New York Times, and Wired News, among others, is the host of this Podcast. In this third 26-minute installment, the topic of choice is ÒCase ModdingÓ Ñ modifying a MacÕs case to create unique and interesting computer designs.…

From my stroll down the Fillmore to the Presidio on Sunday:

California’s been good to me. Hope it don’t fall into the sea. Sometimes you got to trust yourself. It ain’t like anywhere else. It ain’t like anywhere else. – Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, “California”

LA Times: Michael Davidson, Republican of Berkeley, is standing in the circular, two-story foyer of a Mediterranean dream home in a gated neighborhood in Laguna Niguel, sounding every bit like a headliner at a political fundraiser Ñ which he is. Davidson, 25, is running for chairman of the College Republican National Committee, a powerful grass-roots organization with thousands of members and a multimillion-dollar budget. He’s in the race partly because of a fundraising controversy that has threatened to tarnish the…