Aside

The Los Angeles Times has a great article about the $10 sweet spot for a good bottle of wine: That’s because for most people who buy and drink wine, $10 somehow feels like the right amount to spend on a bottle most of the time. Sure, there are the serious wine aficionados who think nothing of spending $40 or $50, or even $100, on a bottle for Saturday night. But for most of us, $10 is what Kyle Meyer, wine…

Dave Winer has created something pretty damn sweet. A readable, portable version of The New York Times that I can read on my Treo. Normally I just stick to mobile.bbc.co.uk and mobile.latimes.com, because they’re the only news sites that I read regularly that have good mobile support. Point your mobile browser here: nytimesriver.com. Thanks, Dave!

Dear Friends: It’s official. My last day at Macworld will be August 25, 2006. On August 28, I will begin a new phase in my career as Senior Associate Editor of Engadget. For those of you who might not be familiar with it, it’s the most popular blog out there. Period. It draws tons of readers each day and does its best to attract in the hardest of the hardcore gadget-heads. I will be working out of my neighbor’s home…

I dreamt that I had to go rescue a female journalist who was across the Cuban border. (Somehow my brain didn’t remember that Cuba is an island.) And in the dream, the border was on a rolling hill type environment (not unlike, say, Napa Valley) with a pair of black metal fences marking each border. There were large posts with horizontal bars connecting them, but with enough space to squeeze through, between the lower bar and the ground. I slid…

My home media/backup server officially has an obscene amount of storage. I have three internal drives and one external: Utnapishtim – 400 GB (I scored this last week for $120 shipped, via DealMac.com) Shamhat – 200 GB Enkidu – 25 GB Humbaba – 250 GB Now that I think about it, perhaps I should rename the 400 GB drive Humbaba.

So last week I blogged about cyber security, and Stephen Colbert joked last week about entering random search queries to throw off an online profile. Today, life imitates art: Enter the TrackMeNot Firefox extension.

Shah of Shahs, by Ryszard Kapuscinski (1992). A quick read but an intimate literary impressionist tale of the Iranian Revolution and the effects before and after.

Maximum City, by Suketu Mehta (2004). An astonishing portrait of a city that I knew nothing about: Mumbai (Bombay). It’s a biographical love letter to a megapolis that sports everything from strippers to Mafia dons and Bollywood stars, with dashes of street poets and masala Cokes. Incredible book.

Forget Snakes on a Plane — it’s all about Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan! Only 76 more days ! There’s a new trailer (in the Borat link above) that was released two days ago. Fucking briliant.

So I don’t know which is more ridiculous, the cover of this new book Chine-Afrique: Le Dragon et l’Autruche (China-Africa: The Dragon and the Ostrich), or the fact that it would cost me 40 € to buy the book and have it shipped to the U.S., or the fact that I can buy it direct from the publisher in PDF form for 17.85 €.