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Cuppabits December 13th

by Walt Posted on Dec 13, 2006 under Cuppabits |

Get out your lead umbrella

One of the single nastiest sunspots in over a year unleashed its fury, and the earth is in the middle of a solar storm. “…satellites may experience some glitches and reboots, but astronauts are in no danger.”

Those of you that were having to redial your cellphones more than once yesterday or had several text messages glitch now know what probably caused the issue.

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The Royal that doesn’t look like a horse will dance

The Duchess of York will be on the next DANCING WITH THE STARS

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Lots of reality TV albums have dropped recently — Fantasia’s sophomore effort comes today, and the list goes on to people you’ve actually heard about.

Dave Navarro heard crying loudly over the fact that ROCKSTAR: SUPERNOVA’s album got released and nobody bought it. It’s somewhere on the Billboard chart in something like 111th place with a (what’s the opposite of a bullet?)

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Just when you thought you’d seen everything converted so it would plug in to your laptop’s USB port…

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Of course, there’s still the USB dog, after you plug him in to your laptop, he gets busy humping it.[College Humor]

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Do You Believe In Miracles?

Guy enlists in Navy the day after December 7th, 1941. Explosion onboard ship, leaves him blind in right eye. Doctors wanted to remove the bad eye. He kept it, lived ever since with one good eye.

He’s spent the last 16 years as a security guard at a horse racing track.

Guess what happened?

Yes, the miracle bump to the head. The horse that gave him the sight restoring knock to the head is called My Buddy Chimo.

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Forbes magazine can’t help you if you went to the office party, drank too much and shamelessly hit on the beautiful woman who turned out to be the wife of the CEO, but they do have suggestions for your hangover

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Apple execs got ahold of our scathing remarks yesterday about the death of sales at iTunes and have countered with claims that sales there are doing just fine [link]

There’s a side issue here that is small at the moment, but promises to get very large very quickly. While many folks don’t plan on buying a Zune music player by Microsoft, Microsoft has its own music store now, and that store isn’t named iTunes. The music companies look at this, and are scratching their heads, because now there are two competing Digital Rights Management setups — people will either buy from one, or the other, but not interchangibly. What happens if the Microsoft music store starts selling music for cheaper than iTunes? The music you buy at one store won’t go on the player with the different DRM setup. All way too confusing.

The record companies are actually questioning if DRM is actually really needed and have toyed with selling songs without any digital protection on them at all. (uh, this would be the MP3 format. Alison’s older MP3 player is loaded with perhaps 500 songs, and none of them have Digital Rights Protection on them. We buy the CDs, I rip them, and then she loads them. I have a CD spindle full of run once CDs. ) The only way we’d buy songs digitally would be for the songs to be in unprotected MP3 format.

We’ll see how this all shakes out, but I suspect that it’s actually going to be an issue of cell phones that can carry MP3s that will really change things. People want to take their music with them, and we already know that radio is dead. The iPod will fade when phones can carry 1000 songs on them, and the Apple Phone isn’t out yet - and the last version was so crippled nobody wanted it.

In the end, the phones will be the tail that wags the dog.

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Wii Are Coming!

Best Buy stores have got new shipments of the Wii, but will only start selling them on Dec. 17th.

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Facebook, the not-just-for-fratboys-anymore MySpace clone, rejected a 5% investment offer from Yahoo! The valuation would have put a $750 million tag on 100% of Facebook, and I guess they thought that was too low. Trust me, for the long run, Facebook isn’t worth it. But for the time being, it may seem like these social sites are the place to throw money around.

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The FTC says “Work At Home” sales pitches are scams with a website

However, the best summary of what scams the FTC has already cracked down on is presented here

I like the one where you would pay $5,985.00 to acquire a medical billing practice, only to be told you had to find your first client through the Yellow Pages.

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And finally,

Corruption at the UN:

The NYTimes front page today has a video that discusses the parking ticket situation around the UN building. The country that has the most unpaid parking tickets is…. Kuwait.

250 parking tickets per Kuwaiti diplomat per year. Egypt is #2 at about half as much.

I get notes from lawyers when I have ONE unpaid ticket (unjustly applied, I’ll have you know!)