Cyrus Farivar

I’ll be on Richmond’s Morning News with Jimmy Barrett (1140 AM WRVA Richmond) tomorrow at 7:20 am Eastern talking about podcasting. (Thanks to Daniel Terdiman for suggesting me.) Will post an mp3 tomorrow morning. My first media appearance was on “Bud Hedinger Live” (WFLA 540 AM Orlando) on February 7 2005. You can listen to that clip here.

Is there anything better than sitting at home on a lazy Sunday with Vin Scully’s voice live from Dodger Stadium filling up my empty room? (Ok, it’s an exhibition game, but still.) When I was a kid, it was over a clock radio from my bedroom in Santa Monica. Now, I pay $15 a season and can hear it anywhere I have an Internet connection. Amazing. Will be off watching the Boston Red Sox against the Yanks tonight, for baseball’s…

These could either be great names for coffee, or great band names, I haven’t decided which. From the BBC explainer on oil markets. Saudi Arabia’s Arab Light The United Arab Emirates’s Dubai Nigeria’s Bonny Light Algeria’s Saharan Blend Indonesia’s Minas Venezuela’s Tia Juana Light and Mexico’s Isthmus.

You read these two sentences on Slashdot and laugh out loud: “A study commisioned by Congress in 1998 to report on internet traffic has finally been published — 7 years, two presidents, and one internet boom/bust later. Some of their findings include “DNS is good” and “We should probably have some more TLDs”

Damn. Glad that I got to see him in Berkeley and in Providence. Mitch Hedberg, R.I.P. Comedian Mitch Hedberg dead at 37, The Pioneer Press

My good friend David Boyk has started a new music/MP3 blog : Universal Pop This is a much better version of a column that I used to write on my rarely-read website circa 2000 called “International Musician of the Week.” Rock on, dude.

AP: SAN FRANCISCO, March 28 (AP) – A thief has stolen a laptop computer containing personal information about nearly 100,000 alumni, graduate students and past applicants at the University of California, Berkeley, university officials said Monday. The incident is the latest in a string of security breakdowns that have illustrated society’s growing vulnerability to identity theft. University officials announced the theft under a state law requiring that consumers be notified whenever the confidentiality of their Social Security numbers or other…

My Slate piece was killed and I killed my own radio doc piece (not enough good sound and/or characters), but Tom Randall and I are currently on the steps of the Supreme Court waiting to get into the MGM v. Grokster oral arguments. Photos here. We’re Nos. 29 and 30 in line. We’re supposed to be let in around 9 am Eastern.

So one of my stories that I thought was running for Macworld, is already available today on the Playlist website, here. Imagine recording studio-quality audio using your iPod and a regular-old microphone. Or sitting on the commuter train, playing Othello, Pong, Tetris or Asteroids. All this and more is possible when you install Linux on your 3rd generation or earlier iPod. Best of all, one soft-reset and youÕre back in AppleÕs iPod operating system, listening to your tunes.

I’ve currently got two long-ish pieces in upcoming issues of Macworld, some online stuff for the Macworld spinoff iPod-centric magazine Playlist, an approval for a small piece for Wired . . . but the better news is that I’m working on a piece for Slate! Thanks to Paul Boutin‘s encouragement and kind recommendation, I’m doing a piece on some stuff happening in Estonia. No word on when it will run yet — I filed it late last week. In more…