Aside

My favorite Senegalese rap group, Daara J, is on tour right now, and will be playing in Boston this Friday night. They’ll also be doing a bunch of outdoor free summer shows, including in Detroit, Santa Monica, Los Angeles, and San Francisco (July 29). Hear NPR’s piece on them from 2005. Becky and I saw them last fall, and they were amazing. I’ll be at the SF show, in my Fadiga jersey.

Dear JetBlue, Recently I had the pleasure of flying on your airline. As a stockholder, I was pleased to enjoy the comfortable seats, excellent staff, and on-time flights. One of the features that you tout on your airplanes is the presence of DirectTV and over 30 channels of television available from each seat at no additional charge. While this may be useful to people who can’t seem to exist without a television nearby, I usually find television at best perplexing…

After getting to play with Melissa’s Nikon D50, I’m now really interested in buying a Digital SLR. I’ll admit that I don’t know much about photography, and while I do enjoy taking photos, my camera is limited in what it can do. I’d like to start taking some better quality photos, and given how much SLR cameras have dropped in price ($530, no tax, including shipping and a 28-80 lens) over the last few years, I just might start thinking…

Maps More Real Than Virtual July 9, 2006 The New York Times By CYRUS FARIVAR The bird’s eye view offered by a flat paper road map works well enough when spread out on the kitchen table, but Volkswagen thinks it can do better for drivers trying to find their way in unfamiliar settings. The company is working with Nvidia, a maker of computer video cards, to bring the satellite images of Google Earth — complete with buildings, terrain and other…

This is the most comprehensive train travel site I’ve ever seen. Truly amazing.

Starting July 12, 2006, you can fly direct to the Azores. Wow.

Slate; “Abu, Ibn, and Bin, Oh My!” ; July 3, 2006 : The term can also be used in a more colloquial sense. A guy with a moustache might be called “Abu Shanab,” or “father of moustache.” You could even refer to a place or object as “the father of” a certain quality. “Shibshib abu khamsa gnieh” literally means “flip-flops, father of $5,” but it would be taken to mean “a $5 pair of flip-flips.” Similarly, the place name Abu…

I’ve posted the instructions on MacUser.

I’m not sure that the Swiss analogy fits 100 percent, but this is an intriguing idea nonetheless: You might call it a “dual state.” Instead of the familiar formula in which two states exist side by side, Israel and Palestine would be two states superimposed on top of one another. Citizens could freely choose which system to belong to. Their citizenship would be bound not to territory, but to choice. The Israeli state would remain a homeland for Jews, and…

Mark Pilgrim‘s blog has taught me two things today: 1) HOWTO make the perfect fruit salad and get laid 2) On storage, from the comments: My uncle works for NASA. Years ago, he was called in to consult for the government on how to store some important data. Tape drives? CDs? (This was before DVDs.) His response was this: “If you write it on papyrus and lock it in a pyramid, we know it will last a few thousand years.…