Today Apple unveiled their new lineup of iPods, and there's some pretty crazy improvements that have been long anticipated. In a nutshell:
The new iPod touch was unveiled, which is essentially an iPhone without the phone - instead of using a 3G phone network, it has WiFi. So you can still watch YouTube videos and browse the web on it (though in a lot fewer places).
Gorgeous 3.5-inch widescreen display. Touch your music in Cover Flow and watch video on a stunning, widescreen display.
Wi-Fi web browsing. Browse the web with Safari and watch YouTube videos on the first-ever Wi-Fi iPod.
Music downloads from iTunes. Search, preview, and buy songs from the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store on iPod touch.
22hrs audio/5hrs video
The iPod "Classic" is now all metal, has a longer battery life, and starts at 80GB (Remember when they started at 20GB? Now the bigger one is 160GB!) Also has cover flow and a nicer interface for browsing music too.
Up to 160GB. iPod classic puts your entire music and video collection in your pocket.
Cover Flow. Use the patented Click Wheel to flip through your music by album cover.
Enhanced Interface. Experience a whole new way to browse and view your music and video.
40hrs audio/7hrs video (160GB) | 30hrs audio/5hrs video (80GB)
The iPod Nano has gotten fatter to accomodate a bigger, wider screen. It now has cover flow.
iPod nano sports a larger, 320-by-240-resolution display that’s 65 percent brighter than before.
Watch up to 5 hours of TV shows, music videos, movies, and podcasts.
Browse your music by album artwork with Cover Flow. View everything on your iPod nano in a whole new way.
24hrs audio/5hrs video (same for 4GB and 8GB)
The iPod shuffle now comes in different colors
The iPhone price dropped by $200 to $399 (I bet a bunch of those people that rushed out to get one just 2 months ago are going to regret that decision after seeing this big price drop!).
As usual, the costs for the iPod Classic and the nano haven't gone up because of the new features/capacity. They now all sport Cover Flow (except the shuffle, of course).
I'm a bit disappointed that you have to choose between either the touchscreen and WiFi (the iPod Touch), or a massive amount of storage (new iPod Classic). Basically I wish the iPod Touch would have a higher capacity than 16GB. Especially since it starts at $299.
Also, as one might expect, Cover Flow does not run very smoothly on the iPod nano, according to some at the event today. This is hardly surprising given how tiny and cheap it is.
This movie cannot be missed...Will Arnett looks hilarious, and as I've mentioned before, the rest of the cast is quite good too. It's coming out this Friday, and there's a trailer up on Apple trailers (YouTube version below). Also, I'm pretty sure the trailer has an acoustic version of "Hey Ya!" in it :)
Those are some happy mug shots
Comment on the YouTube page: "did anyone else catch the Arrested Development references? the way will arnett says "marry me!" and the shot of the two brothers sleeping on the floor in sleeping bags... hope there are more in the movie!"
With the amount of blatant network bashing and the level of detail this contains, it's amazing that it ever got on the air (from what I've seen NBC pulled it after it was on the air once). It's SNL's TV Funhouse talking about the mainstream media.
In case it disappears, there's several more results here.
The Season 4 finale was pretty ridiculous (in a good way), though it was already apparent that things were leading up to this. It turned out E was right and Medellin really sucked. So much so that only Vince and Billy were into the screening. The entire rest of the audience looked bored and annoyed. And yet Vince somehow doesn't care? It seems like he's gone off the deep end with Billy. I mean, he never had any real concern with money before but he was never truly stupid about it. Now it seems like E is the only one that's worried about it and even he didn't seem all that concerned at the end after Harvey bought the movie for $1. I still can't believe how easily Yadoyir backed out of the deal, especially considering how ruthless Ari is. And of course things worked out great for Dana.
The gang arrives at Cannes
Turtle and Drama were up to their usual shenanigans, with Drama's ridiculous quest to get the hotel room he supposedly booked and to find the girl he fell in love with in one day. That beach scene was pretty hilarious.
So the obvious questions now are: What is going to happen with Medellin, and what is going to happen with Silo? And do they have any money left? Looks like no because Vince is an idiot. And because E somehow blew the Anna thing. It's going to be interesting to see where next season goes. At least this season resolved some story and had a pretty solid finale. You can't disappoint with some good humor and plenty of hot chicks.
It looks like it will finally be a long break before season 5 (unlike the start of season 4), so it'll be a nice change of pace to write about The Office, 30 Rock, 24, etc. until Entourage returns. Hope you enjoyed the reviews/recaps for this season!
On a related note, here's an Entourage-related minor spoiler for the upcoming season of 24: The actor that plays Billy Walsh, Rhys Coiro, will be on the upcoming season 7.
Anyone that's gone to U of I probably knows that plenty of people outside the state have heard of The University of Illinois and associate it with the Champaign campus (as opposed to Chicago and Springfield). But far fewer know that UIUC stands for University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign. So they've decided to gradually replace uiuc.edu with illinois.edu, saying:
"We are Illinois' flagship institution, and our name should reflect that," Chancellor Richard Herman said. "As we work to build our reputation as second to none among public research universities, it is critical that we identify with one name that resonates with key audiences. 'Illinois' is recognized as a leader in technology, social sciences, business, agriculture and much more. Having our Web presence reflect that name is increasingly important."
Provost Linda Katehi concurred: "As more and more of our stakeholders connect with us through e-mail and the Web, it is critical that we speak to them in one voice. 'Illinois' will become that voice of excellence across disciplines. This transition will require the help and input of each member of our campus community, and it will benefit each of us."
The uiuc.edu domain name dates back to the early days of the Internet, when the primary criterion for selecting domain names was brevity, not branding power.
"It's hard to remember that when the uiuc.edu domain name was established, most people had never heard of e-mail, and Web sites didn't exist at all," said Sally Jackson, chief information officer and associate provost. "Today an Internet address makes much more difference in how we present ourselves to the world."
I think there's still something to be said for brevity in site URLs (just look at your address bar :), especially for sites you're typing in all the time. But the new URL is not much longer, and there's certainly no arguing that it will be clear in what it represents. This change could even have some implications for alumni - for instance, engineering alumni have lifetime email addresses on the engineering subdomain. I would guess that will change to the new domain like everything else.
And no need to panic, the change is supposed to take place over several years so it's not like it'll be switched overnight. As of right now, I can see the same page on both uiuc.edu and illinois.edu
I forgot to post this yesterday. If you're avoiding spoilers about the upcoming Batman movie, The Dark Knight, you should stop reading. For everyone else, Fox Chicago caught some sweet footage of filming for Batman. Specifically, an old Brach's Candy factory was blown up as part of the shoot. I'm omitting some further spoilers about what the building was made to look like, but if you click through to the article you can read the details. Below are before and after pictures of the building. Mouseover the block to show the images.
Mouseover below to reveal image, click it to enlarge
Mouseover below to reveal image, click it to enlarge
Mouseover below to reveal image, click it to enlarge
I was a huge fan of Opera Mini from the moment I discovered it. It's a mobile web browser, and it blew my phone's standard browser out of the water. It had some limitations versus the built-in browser (i.e. unable to play streaming video) and some limitations that affect the majority of mobile browsers (can't display/run Javascript), but it got the job done and was much easier and nicer to use.
But today the team released the second beta of Opera Mini 4 and the new features are amazing. Most notably, you can now change the browser orientation to landscape mode (by hitting *#), which is extremely useful since OM4 does iPhone-style website resizing/zooming. But OM4 also is very smart about getting content to fit in the screen and adjusting where you are on the page so you don't have to do much horizontal scrolling, if any, as you move down the page.
The other big feature is one I love in Firefox...being able add any search field on any site to your overall search box. So when OM started using Yahoo search a few months back after using Google before that, a lot of people were left groaning. Now you can add Google, IMDb, eBay, whatever. And especially when it comes to mobile browsing, saving time and page loads is key so this is very useful. It used to be a bit of a hassle to find something on IMDb and now it takes seconds.
There's a lot of other new features...I've just talked about the most notable (to me). There's also encryption support (while this is big, I still don't think I would ever do anything truly secure (i.e. financial transactions, banking) on a mobile browser), better image quality, BlackBerry integration, intelligent font resizing, etc.
After using OM4, you'll find your phone's built-in browser is nearly useless (I only use mine for application downloads or to watch YouTube videos on TinyTube). And for those that aren't on an unlimited data plan, OM lets you set it to not load images.
If you don't have your phone handy or just want to test it out, you can use their simulator.
This week's episode was pretty funny. And it again actually included some plot. Though that didn't really go anywhere, and the ending with Anna and E didn't make much sense since they didn't really explain it much. But this episode had some great lines in it:
Billy: "Somebody grab my fucking luggage?" Drama: "Got a lot of bags, Billy? I like a lot of wardrobe choices too when I'm travelling abroad." Billy: "I got one bag, Drama, you fruitcup. But I took 3 Ambiens and I can't lift my arms." Turtle: "Haha, fruitcup."
Ari's got Lloyd jumping for joy
The mess on Ari's hands between his wife and Lloyd was quite good too. It gave all three of them some funny moments. It's always hilarious when Lloyd gets excited and/or Ari's being nice to him. Probably at least partly because you know with Ari involved that it's not going to last long. "Lloyd, Lloyd...come on, it was a numbers thing...you heard. I couldn't have done anything. Where are you going?" "To unpack." "Unpack?, you couldn't have even packed yet!" "In my mind I did, Ari."
Ari's not pleased
E was being ridiculous as he has been in the past about his opinion of Walsh's script. I don't know how Vince convinced him to lie and say it was good when he just said to convince him that he had tried to get Anna to like it. At any rate it makes no sense that he both got fired and isn't dating Anna. How'd he screw up both of those things? Maybe they felt it was necessary since the season is about to end, but that seemed very poorly resolved.
Billy manages to be unannoying, and even funny at times
And finally, Turtle and Drama were pretty funny on their pointless "sweep" of the airport. It was really pretty hilarious to see Kanye show up at the end and end up getting them all to Cannes.
What the hell is Steve Carell doing? After a career consisting of Bruce Almighty, Anchorman, the voice of Gary in the Ambiguously Gay Duo, The Daily Show, The Office, 40 Year Old Virgin, Little Miss Sunshine and more (I still haven't seen Evan Almighty), I was convinced he could never be unfunny. But unfortunately it looks like he may be out to prove me wrong.
This movie, Dan in Real Life, looks awful. The "funny moments" aren't funny (except for some of Carell's physical comedy), and the movie looks like an uninteresting and completely predictable romantic comedy. Though maybe it's completely predicatable because the 2 and a half minute trailer narrates the entire plot, including the twist.
And are he and Dane Cook going to be in more movies together? There's this movie, and he's also working on High T (previous post on that here) which also has Dane Cook. After the initial interest wore off, I've become pretty uninterested in Dane Cook. He doesn't have much versatility and it starts to get annoying after a while.
I was on my way to lunch today, traveling westbound on I90. A little while after going through the tollbooth by O'Hare, I see a black BMW coming up quick in my rear view mirror. There wasn't much room to make a lane change or anything, so I kept going at the same rate of speed in my lane. Sure enough, the car comes up behind me and starts tailgating to get me to speed up, and then eventually does a lane change into a small gap.
While continuing in my lane, I see the car do a few more close lane changes, and think about how ridiculous it is to be going 90 down the highway when there's lunch hour traffic and there's not much room to move around. Plus it's not like he was getting all that far with all the swerving around. And the car looked new too.
So finally, we came to the situation in the picture below. "A" is the black BMW. "C" is me, now about three cars behind the BMW. "B" is a long truck in the far right lane. I saw that the BMW was actually still accelerating, and at this point the gap between the truck and the blue car was getting quite small. Here's what followed, with the numbers represented on the picture:
The BMW speeds up even further in order to shoot the gap between B and the blue car. I would guess he was now traveling at over 100MPH.
The BMW makes the gap, and I expect to see it pulling ahead of the truck quickly because of how fast it was going. But it doesn't. And suddenly there's smoke coming from in front of the truck and beyond the right lane (from the right shoulder).
Suddenly things become clear as the BMW comes swerving back through the right lane. But at this point the driver is over correcting for the lane change and pulls too far left against the skid. This resulted in a spin-out which propelled the car sideways across the lanes of traffic (from the right shoulder towards the center barrier).
After flying across all 3 lanes for traffic and thankfully avoiding hitting any cars, the BMW hits the center concrete barricade and bounces off. Then it spins a bit and ends up hitting it once more. Each time it hit, it send pieces flying off the car.
The car finally comes to rest in the far left lane, facing opposite to the direction of traffic. All of the cars had started hitting the brakes as soon as we saw the car travelling sideways (#3), so by this point we had all come to a stop. A couple of the cars in front of me had gotten out in the right lanes and left the scene, but there were 7 or 8 total cars that stopped to see what had happened to the driver.
At this point I notice several things. The BMW is facing my car, and the first thing I realize is the driver is not in the driver's seat. In fact, less than 2 seconds after the car comes to a stop, he pops out of the passenger side of the vehicle. Then I notice the passenger side is totally damaged. The front passenger tire has completely bent so it is now sideways and on the front of the vehicle because the front bumper on the passenger side is destroyed. As I make my way to the car I see that the rear passenger tire has also bent inwards into the car.
The guy that was driving was now standing there looking at the car with his hands on his hips. We trying to ask him if he was alright and he was brushing everyone off saying "I'm fine." He looked like he was about 20, dressed in all black dress clothes with a gold chain around his neck, and you could tell he thought he was king of the road. And it looked like his new BMW just got totalled.
A bunch of people started leaving after we found that the driver amazingly just had a couple of cuts from what happened. Soon, one other guy and myself were left, so he came up to me and said, "Did you see what happened a the end?" I said I only kind of saw it since I was a little further back. He said, "he was right in front of me. And when the car stopped, he was in the back seat!" So the driver was likely not wearing a seatbelt, and actually got thrown into the back seat from the driver's seat! Holy crap! And he somehow walked away with nothing more than a few scratches?!?
Then the guy asked if I needed to be somewhere. I really did, and he said he could stay for when the cops came to describe the incident, so I got ready to leave, but the cops pulled up so I figured it'd be good to have a second account of what happened (to verify the other guy's description). The cops took our names, numbers, and date of birth, and then got a very brief account of what happened. While the other guy was explaining, the driver of the BMW tried to go back to his car to get something, and the cop abruptly stopped writing and yelled at him, "Hey! I told you to stay at the barrier! Do not move from there!" The driver kind of nodded, but went towards the car again and shut the passenger door. The cop screamed at him again, "I said stay at the barrier! Leave the door! Get over there and LEAN on it. You know how to LEAN, right?!!"
Finally, they let us drive off. To let me leave, the cop let me use the shoulder, after first kicking the fallen and shattered passenger rear window into the corner.
