rounding up the interesting news of the day --

the nba's washington wizards have planned singles nights for this season. sounds like a ridiculous idea to me, although prolly mostly cuz it's the wizards. i have a hard time believing that any decent NBA team would bother with something like this, only a city with a perennial godawful team.

XM finally decided it made some goddamn sense to produce a portable player. a somewhat crafty idea, it's basically a portable delphi satellite radio with some flash memory that can hold about 5 hours of digital radio. only problem is it only holds XM content, you can't load mp3's or AAC's on it. that'll prolly be what kills it. if XM or sirius partnered up with apple and put out some kind of ipod that could connect to satellites, they'd empty the shelves i bet. my guess is with the hefty ~$350 + $10/mo subscription, they won't sell all that hot.

apple decided to put out a photo-capable ipod, although i guess i don't really see the appeal. now instead of just using your ipod for portable music, you can... carry pictures around on it too. and you can... look at them. you can't take pictures, but you can look at them. sounds like yet another way to fuck up the ipod's already abysmal battery life. i just don't really see what the use is here. unless a 1 gig flash card isn't enough for you to store your pictures on or something, but if you're that serious into high quality digital photography, wouldn't you just use a laptop or something. who needs to whip out a collection of photos from your pocket, or at least enough to take advantage of a hard drive instead of a flash card on a PDA? as much as i still love the idea of a having an ipod, i'm still interested in a joggable mp3 player and still waiting to see if Hi-MD goes anywhere to go out and buy one. i'd actually be more likely to buy an iBook with a reasonable raytheon discount. still pretty impressed with those customized color ipods though.

good to see firefox making some headway into the market. i may be writing this from XP, but i support open source software such as this. you may hate to admit it, but you'd love life just a bit more if we were all using firefox and OpenOffice on an open source Linux-based OS. keep in mind though that while i support OSS, i do kinda like getting paid to write and maintain proprietary embedded real-time software, okay?

--j