Don’t know if you’ve been watching this, but it’s crazy.

Here is Microsoft’s latest letter from the Top Bully and CEO himself Steven Ballmer.

Apparently, when Microsoft offers $44.6 billion, it expects the world to stop.

And here is Yahoo’s polite, but firm response: “Bring your best shot.”

The end result and my prediction: more employees going to Google.

This could get good.

Just thinking…

Blogs were the big story for 2005.

YouTube for 2006.

Facebook for 2007.

What’s the big story for 2008?

Twitter?

I don’t know.

What do you think?

So I’m hooked… on Twitter.

I was skeptical at first, but with so many friends using it, I thought I would jump on and give it a try.

But I get questions al the time as to what it is.

So check out this short video. It’s the best explanation by far.

And then sign up for an account and Friend Me Up!.

It’s official. Toshiba released a statement yesterday saying they will no longer develop, manufacture or market HD DVD.
That’s it. The war is over. Blu-ray has won.

I’m surprised.

I thought that the history Sony has in failed media would be enough to bring down the Blu-ray Disc Association. Their smarter bet of collaboration paid off this time… at least for now.

I still don’t think Blu-ray is a good long-term standard. It won’t make it. I think it will be here and gone and one day we’ll be talking about it with our kids, “They used to put movies on these big things called LaserDiscs.”

Oh… my father-in-law just bought one…. a HD DVD player.

I told him to try to return it as fast as he could.

I watched a great video this morning on my way into work on ending oil dependance. Amory Lovins does a great job of putting a plan together to decrease our dependancy and create jobs, with complete independence by 2040. Tons of stuff I have never thought about or heard of before.

At 18 mins, it’s worth watching. Check it out here at TED.com.

And he’s made his book available for free here.

And by the way, you should be watching TED videos… lots of them.

I feel in love last week with a new Mac App called Things.

One of the things that has always frustrated me is digital project/task management. There has never seemed to be a good way to me to organize all the projects and things I have rolling around. Most to-do list software is just too simple.

I tried Backpack for awhile, but I don’t like being internet dependent and I don’t like having to log-in every time.

So I have always resorted to paper and typically I fill up about two pages a week in task/project lists that I maintain.

So I found this… installed it… gave it a shot…. and haven’t been on paper for two weeks.

I love it when Things make my life nice and easy.

Here’s a great new resource for runners or bikers. Map My Run allows you to create routes on Google Maps. It will also clock the distance and elevation. If you enter your time, it will shoot you back the pace and average time per mile.

Here’s a shot of my 10K route. That’s a little over six miles. I used it earlier today to plan out a 10 mile and 13 mile route that I can begin working in soon.

I’ve been running with Nike’s iPod module that I got for Christmas. It’s so much better than running with nothing to track your time and distance. I can’t believe I’ve never used anything like this before. Thanks to Seth and Rebecca for hooking me up!

The coolest thing is that there’s this British chic that comes on every now and then and tells you how far you’ve run and how long you have left. You can change it to an American male if you want, but I think it’s cool that someone is clocking my time from the UK.

When I’m done, I get a report of distance, time, pace and calories on my ipod nano. When I sync it to my computer, it uploads the stats to Nike’s site. Very cool.

Apple announced their new iphone yesterday at the MacWorld conference. I have to tell ya, I didn’t think they were going to release it yet. But in Apple style, they surprised a lot of people. What’s funny is that it doesn’t look anything like the concept images going around of what people thought an apple phone would look like.

I can’t wait to get my hands on one… oh, wait… it’s only on Cingular. Ahhhhh!

My main hard drive on my home computer (Apple G4 MDD) crashed last week. The bad kind of crash too - lots of ticking (which indicates a mechanical failure and can only be recovered by taking the drive apart and putting it back together which costs thousands of dollars). I wasn’t sweating it because I had been running a back up program once a week.

Turns out, I didn’t have everything backed up (it’s a long story that would bore you), but I have managed to recover about 80% of that drive including all my music, videos and most importantly… pictures.

Instead of replacing my 120G drive with something similar, I decided to install 2 - 300G drives and set them up in a Level 5 Raid Array. For all you non-computer geeks, that means that even though I have 600G in hard drives, I only have 300G available because it writes the same thing on both drives. Level 5 is set to the most redundancy and mirrors the original drive.

So if I have a hard drive crash in the future, I just pop out the drive, pop in a new one and I’m ready to go without missing a beat. No drive restores or lost preferences or reinstalling software. It should make life very easy if I ever have a crash again.

Ohh… I also bought a Samsung 16x, double-layer, DVD-+RW for $35! I have 2 optical bays so I installed that as the second drive. I feel like a computer engineer or something.

Well… our plane is delayed… for 45 minutes they say. Something about mechanical problems.

So, I found this and had some fun. Give it a shot.

My brother is a huge fan of Jackson Pollock. I think he would be proud of my talent.

I can still hear Mario speaking Spanish very loudly into his laptop at the other end of the gate.

I’ve been fascinated with this project ever since I heard about it on a podcast from IT Conversations over a year ago.  The goal of OLPC is to produce a laptop for $100 and then get them into the hands of children in developing nations.  They say, “Laptops are both a window and a tool: a window into the world and a tool with which to think.” I think the long term global results from a project like this will be unbelievable.  I wonder what would be more significant in the lives of children in developing nations:  formal education or a laptop?

Here is a picture of the first working model and an earlier proposed model with a hand crank to generate electricity.

I’ve been considering a new video ipod for my birthday (which is February 24th by the way… because that’s something important that you want to keep track of….), but something was telling me to wait.  That the second generation of video ipods would be a huge step.

I came upon these leaked images……

This stuff is bad.

Here’s what these guys are using to make that video set up work.

Okay, I got the scoop.

First all their camera are HD and run outside to a semi truck where all the switching is done. They send one signal back into the building where it is fed into the screens.

They use Final Cut on a G5 tower to show all their videos. Apple Keynote on a G4 Powerbook for announcment slides. ProPresenter on a G4 Powerbook strictly for lyrics. And a new software developed by the same guys that did ProPresenter called ProVideoPlayer for all their video loops. It has a very cool interface and is supposed to be coming out this fall. They ran that on a G5 tower.

All the videos loops were HD and ProPresenter will never loose resolution. That’s why everything was so clear.

Here’s the tricky part. They are using a Fulsom Encore Controller to manage all their inputs and run the screens. This is the bad boy that creates a 60′ by 20′ screen using 6 projectors. It can take 64 video inputs and output to 32 different screens.

The price?…. $25,000.00.

I don’t feel well.

Other than that piece of equipment… I could probably put all that together too.

If you want, check it out here.

I went ahead and ditched mozilla. I was having trouble with rss feeds and I also found that 1/3 of any attachments that get emailed to me won’t open. Since I switched my rss feeds to safari, I decided to import my mail accounts to Apple’s Mail. It’s been almost a year since I’ve been using Mozilla products, but now I’m back to Apple.

I discovered some trouble today with Thunderbird. It wasn’t retrieving rss feeds on most of my blogs. I was wondering where all my friends were at. I was getting ready to call a few people and let them know that they needed to post some stuff.

I switched over to Safari this morning and bookmarked all the sites I was reading. Safari 2.0 automatically pulls the feed. Is anybody else using this?

In case you didn’t see, Apple unveiled the new iPod nano yesterday and Moto ROKR iTunes phone. I think the black nano is bad. Finally a black ipod that doesn’t have U2 stuff all over it.

I don’t know about the iTunes phone. I don’t use my phone for music right now and until they start putting 20 gig drives in them, I don’t know if I will.

This is a better shot of the giant video wall they had behind them. It was one of the LED walls like they have in their “Speed of Sound” video. It did any lighting or video combination you could think of. It helped me because I was looking for something like this for our stage at church. I’m going to go pick one up next week.

Yeah… I picked up a new phone yesterday.

My old phone actually started dying after a freak thunderstorm that I got caught in on my motorcycle.

A lot of people and places are talking about LEDs and their promising place in the future. I think stuff like this is wild… I would definitely put it in my house.

Check out Peter Davidson.