Aside

iPod 10 GB 3G; $150

NYT: One evening earlier this summer, I asked Masood Farivar, a former Khalis officer who had fought in Tora Bora during the jihad, to tell me why the caves were so important. “They’re rugged, formidable and isolated,” he said. “If you know them, you can come and go with ease. But if you don’t, they’re a labyrinth that you can’t penetrate. They rise in some places to 14,000 feet, and for 10 years the Soviets pummeled them with everything they…

WashPost: Mayor Ray Nagin called [Lt. Gen. Russell] Honoré (pronounced ah-NOR-ay) “one John Wayne dude” when the general arrived here after the storm and started taking charge. It seemed the city had spiraled out of anyone’s control when the 6-foot-2 general with the pencil mustache and caramel skin appeared from obscurity and threw his weight against the mayhem. “He’s got the power to make things happen,” Firestone says. Nearby, Honoré is pledging to a volunteer that the Army will find…

AP: Hardest hit will be the approximately 18,000 Northeast Corridor commuters who have monthly passes, whose fares will increase an average of 50 percent. The cost of monthly passes vary. A monthly pass to ride Amtrak between Trenton, N.J., and New York City currently costs $522. Same pass on NJ Transit? $320.00 Why is Amtrak so expensive? Even with a $1.2 billion subsidy!

I was catching up on some The Party Line reading this morning when I caught the links to two articles from the East Bay Express written in February 2005 about the possibility and aftermath of a massive quake in the Bay Area. Remember the FEMA 2001 report that said that the three most likely disasters are a terrorist attack on NYC (check), and a hurricane on New Orleans (check) — and a massive quake on SF? Uh oh. What trenching…

From Channing Joseph, a New Orleans native, and classmate of mine from the Class of 2005: I’m in New York, and most of my immediate family was able to evacuate before the storm hit. They are now scattered across the country but physically unharmed. Not all of our homes fared as well, though. The house I grew up in is beyond repair, and my uncle lost one of his dogs (whom he had left behind, thinking it would just be…

Oh yes, it is mine! And in case you were wondering how I’m going to fund this operation, I have two items for sale: Ericsson T610 cell phone ($50) iPod 10 GB 3G ($150) A few things that I noticed: iTunes recognizes that it’s black, but yet the registration page doesn’t know that they exist yet. Also, even though I bought the black one, they gave me white cables. Huh. As Paul Boutin reminded me, they’re supposed to come with…

Wired News: By Cyrus Farivar 02:00 AM Sep. 08, 2005 PT On the morning of Sept. 3, Rich Kyanka set up a PayPal account to raise money for Hurricane Katrina victims, with the intention of donating the money to the American Red Cross. Kyanka runs the popular Something Awful web community, which is based in New Orleans, and donations came in quickly. Within nine hours, Something Awful readers had donated $27,695.41. Kyanka donated an additional $3,000 from his own pocket.…

Macworld Podcast #8: ROKR phone, iPod nano By Cyrus Farivar The Macworld editors were out in force today at Apple’s press event, just a few blocks from our offices in San Francisco. True to form, Apple CEO Steve Jobs didn’t disappoint. Apple announced two new major products — the new iTunes phone, the ROKR, from Motorola; and the new iPod nano, packing up to 4GB of music into a tiny portable player. We’ve got nearly 25 minutes of audio, including…

Macworld Podcast #7: Tiger Secrets By Cyrus Farivar Tiger has been out for a few months now, and the Mac OS X update packs quite a punch. And while many of Tiger’s major new features have been extensively profiled, there’s still plenty to OS X 10.4 that remains hidden from all but the geekiest of Mac users. Our October 2005 cover story—arriving on a newsstand near you within the next week—exposes some of Tiger’s secrets, from new Widgets to slick…