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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…

Well, a Happy Easter to all, and to all a good night. Or something like that. Sarmad and I hit up the H-town (read: Hartford) scene for a tasty weekend full of roast duck on Saturday and roast leg of lamb in stereo (read: two of them) today. Made some progress on the book front, but I had to wake up today at 6:45 am to do a phone interview. Missed the train connection in New Haven by mere minutes…

Courtesy Boing Boing, courtesy of the dude’s LJ : The way this all got started was that my friend and i were sitting around at dinner chatting about what to do for the upcoming room-to-room party. We went through a whole bunch of ideas for room themes. And then Ñ you know how, sometimes when you’re bored, you look up and imagine what it would be like if gravity turned upside down and you got to walk around on the…

Goddamn — the fourth movement of Tchaikovksy’s fifth symphony is totally punk rock. Also, good news to announce on the freelancing front pretty soon.

NYT : Beginning next Thursday, as part of a reorganization of technology news coverage, the weekly Circuits pages will appear in Business Day, with David Pogue’s column on the front page of that section. The Game Theory column will move to the Weekend section, beginning on April 8. The Online Shopper column will return on April 14 in a section to be introduced that day. Circuits will also appear several times a year as a special section, beginning with a…

Boston Globe, March 19 2005 : A New York-to-Boston bus burst into flames on the Massachusetts Turnpike early yesterday, sending spectacular flames into the sky and capping what two passengers said was a harrowing trip after the driver ignored problems with the vehicle and continued to Boston. Shitong Ou — the driver of the Travel Pack bus, based in Chinatown — pulled over before the toll booths in Allston-Brighton and ordered all passengers off. Seconds later, the vehicle burst into…

It’s supposed to be spring and it’s snowing outside. Boo.