If I offered you a gift — and you must accept the gift and you must use the gift only on yourself — which one of these two things would you choose: Getting plastic surgery; or receiving a killer new computer setup?
Here are the details:
A year ago a High-Definition (HD) video camera would have cost you $5,000.00 USD; six months ago the same HD camera would have cost you $3,000.00 USD; today, the Sony Handycam HDR-HC3 HD camera costs just over $1,000.00 USD.
Last week in my article, MacBook Questions from a Windows Heathen, I asked some questions about the new MacBook line of laptops from Apple computing. I have been using Windows computers since the rise of Windows 3.11.
My previous experience with Apple has been limited to the first generation Newton which I loved so much that Apple used a quote of mine in a press conference but without attributing it to me or asking my permission. I had posted on a CompuServe forum explaining why the Newton was “touching the future today.”
I believed in that technology then and the Apple Newton set the stage and started the trend for personalized, portable computing now. I have also used a first generation iPod and I have used iTunes and QuickTime.
I don’t know much about Apple computers so if there are some things in this review you do not understand or that are wrong, please let me know. After using the MacBook for a couple of days, my plan was to make a permanent move away from Windows and become a MacBoy today and forever. I will let you know my decision about moving from Windows to Mac at the conclusion of this article.
One of the great things about the new Intel-powered MacBooks is you can dual boot into Windows and Mac OS X on the same machine so you, in theory anyway, do not have to make a choice of Operating System preference.
Continue reading → An Apple Through the Windows: My MacBooks Review
In December the Michigan State board of Education approved a plan to require all high school students to take at least one online course before they graduate in order to prepare them for online courses they might take on the college level.
Continue reading → Isolated But Equal: Michigan Requires Online Courses
At 14-years-old I started in radio in Lincoln, Nebraska as the host of a weekly 10 minute interview show called Unique Youth. I would celebrate kids in the community who were making a positive difference in the lives of others.
Rick Alloway was my mentor and defender. Unique Youth aired on KFOR 1240 — the number one station in the city — and on their FM sister station X103 (now known as KFRX 102.7 after the advent of digital stereo tuners) at 5:30am Fridays.
I was quickly able to move up to weekend air shifts and I steadily worked in radio at KFOR and X103 as well as KLMS 1480 (the call letters at the time were pronounced “Kay-Elle-Aim-Esh-ah!” on air in an old-time classic boss jock performance) and KBHL FM. Later I added television to my resume when I became the teen movie critic on Kidding Around — with hostess Leta Powell Drake — for broadcast powerhouse KOLN/KGIN-TV and those stations had a coverage map the shape and size of the entire state of Nebraska.
David Irving, a British historian, will be in prison for the next three years after claiming for decades the Holocaust did not happen. The Austrian sentencing judge called Irving a “falsifier of history” who had academically challenged the Holocaust research of other scholars. One researcher, Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University, fought back against Irving and won but she feels Irving’s imprisonment will only make him a Free Speech martyr.
When the Western mindset of freedom and Free Speech meets anti-Muslim cartoonists and Holocaust deniers like Irving, there is a strange and dangerous conflation of the radical worst of us becoming memes for a movement. The best evidence for fighting the David Irvings and others who press lies over ugly truths is in the specificity of the body and the revelation of embedded truth that erupts to the surface when crushed into the flesh. When I was a teenager, I worked at a television station as an on-camera movie reviewer.
There was a man who worked in the film department named Eli. Eli was the only person who could take a piece of ruined raw film, fix it, and have it on the air for the evening news in five minutes. Eli was old school. He could fix anything mechanical. The new videotape revolution happening around him held no interest. He was pure celluloid and chemicals and darkrooms. Eli was a “Jew in Nebraska” and that was extremely rare in the 1980’s. He moved to Nebraska after World War II after surviving Auschwitz and surviving Auschwitz was even rarer than a Jew in Nebraska.
Over the past year, I’ve written about the ridiculous effort to “save” Terri Schiavo‘s body from her dead brain, the ruse of Intelligent Design, and the tragedy of Homeschooling and then recently in The New York Times genius Frank Rich nails every 2005 coffin closed on the open and un-brawly intents of the religious right and other pretenders in two paragraph gems from a jewel of an essay:
An ersatz war on Christmas fits all too snugly into a year that began with the religious right’s (unsuccessful) efforts to destroy the box office and Oscar prospects of Clint Eastwood’s “Million Dollar Baby” and “save” Terri Schiavo and that ended with a federal judge banishing intelligent design from high school biology classes.
In his sweeping 139-page opinion, that judge, John Jones III, put his finger on the hypocrisy of many of those most ostentatiously defending faith from its alleged assailants in America. Referring to the fundamentalists on the Dover, Pa., school board, he wrote that it was “ironic” that those who “so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the intelligent design policy.” That passage fits much of the dishonesty and cynicism perpetrated in the name of religion in America over the past 12 months.
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