East of the Sun, West of the Moon

Dee Snider of Twisted Sister:

If we go, ‘This one’s from our new album!’ you see hundreds of people standing up and walking out of the room.

From RollingStone.com.

You can’t make this stuff up…

How to split up: Vienna hosts world’s first divorce fair:

“If people untie the knot in good faith, it can turn out that the day you divorce is the best day of your life,” said the organiser, Anton Barz, who also arranges wedding fairs.

Vinyl May Be Final Nail in CD’s Coffin:

Pressing plants are ramping up production, but where is the demand coming from? Why do so many people still love vinyl, even though its bulky, analog nature is anathema to everything music is supposed to be these days? Records, the vinyl evangelists will tell you, provide more of a connection between fans and artists. And many of today’s music fans buy 180-gram vinyl LPs for home listening and MP3s for their portable devices. <…> Because these music fans also listen using portable players and computers, Matador and other labels include coupons in record packaging that can be used to download MP3 versions of the songs. Amory called the coupon program “hugely popular.”

And lastly, this Ars Technica review is well worth the read if you’re interested in knowing what changed under the hood of OS X Leopard (10.5):

While the casual Mac user will gauge Leopard’s worth by reading about the marquee features or watching a guided tour movie at Apple’s web site, those of us with an unhealthy obsession with operating systems will be trolling through the internals to see what’s really changed.

These two views of Leopard, the interface and the internals, lead to two very different assessments. Somewhere in between lie the features themselves, judged not by the technology they’re based on or the interface provided for them, but by what they can actually do for the user.

Verizon Wireless: If you don’t opt-out, we get to share your CPNI call data:

Verizon Wireless has been contacting its customers via mail to inform them of their intent to share CPNI [Customer Proprietary Network Information] data with “our affiliates, agents and parent companies (including Vodafone) and their subsidiaries.” The company says that customers who do not want their CPNI data shared need to call 1-800-333-9956 to “opt-out.” Upon dialing the opt-out number, Verizon customers will be prompted for their phone number, billing ZIP code, and last four digits of their Social Security Numbers (in the case of businesses, their Employer ID numbers).

Whatever happened to opt-in? Anyway, if you’re with Verizon Wireless I recommend you do this.

Cold weather really does spread flu:

At room temperature, they found flu transmission peaks at low relative humidity (20-35%) and again at 65%. It spread less well at around 50% humidity, and not at all over 80%. This parallels the stability of flu virus in aerosol droplets at different humidities, and also the droplets’ ability to remain airborne. At over 80% humidity, droplets containing flu virus themselves fall out of the air.

The effect also happened too quickly to be due to dry air damaging nasal tissue so that it is not as effective a barrier to viruses, which has been suggested as a factor in humans.

But temperature trumped humidity: at 5 °C animals caught flu at humidities that stopped the virus when it was warmer, possibly because sick animals’ noses shed virus two days longer at cooler temperatures.

Record labels to ditch CD singles for USB flash drives:

Universal told The Times this week that by the end of this month it will release USB singles holding several songs, videos and multimedia content. However, it’ll charge around £5 (€7/$10) per stick – around £2 more than CD singles currently cost.

Read the comments for added fun.

US lawmakers’ apology to Canadian:

Members of Congress have apologised to a Canadian who was seized in New York in 2002 by US officials and sent to Syria, where he says he was tortured.

But then… that’s apparently all they did, while Canada (which also apologized, although I’m not sure what they did wrong, given that the guy was grabbed at New York’s JFK) has offered him $10M (Canadian dollars, which is $10.2M US dollars at the moment, ahem).

Happy birthday Pär! I promise to catch up with you in about 2 months, as usual.

Case of vodka used to treat poisoned tourist:

Australian doctors used a case of vodka to treat an Italian tourist who poisoned himself with a highly toxic substance found in anti-freeze.

The man was unconscious on arrival at Mackay Base Hospital in Queensland and doctors immediately started treating him with pharmaceutical-grade alcohol, which works as an antidote to the poison.

But the hospital’s alcohol supplies were soon exhausted and staff were forced to buy a case of vodka, which they administered through a drip in his nose.

I Love Mars, and I Vote:

Carberry is the political director of the Mars Society, a nonprofit group that pushes relentlessly for human exploration and settlement of the red planet. He’s the point man for Operation President 2008, in which Mars Society members lie in wait for presidential candidates at campaign stops in the early primary states, then leap out to pop the question: As president, would you send a man to Mars?

Kwik-Fit sued over staff radios:

A car repair firm has been taken to court accused of infringing musical copyright because its employees listen to radios at work.

This is the joy of listening to music in our house:

• Foo Fighters - What if I do
• Las Ketchup - Asereje
• Beethoven - Mondschein Sonata
• Vangelis - Lindsay’s Heat
• Johnny Cash - Ballad of a Teenage Queen
• Bløf - Harder dan ik hebben kan
• Beyonce - Crazy in Love

How does that compare to your collection?

Haven’t done one of these manually in a while.

• Cool (relatively long) article in the Washington Post that can be interpreted in many ways. My take on it is that people are too busy, living to work instead of working to live. Sad, but true.
• On CNN, a story about a woman selling nearly everything she owns on eBay.
• Interesting software project sponsored by Google.
• The 21 Biggest Technology Flops according to ComputerWorld.

Bought 3 CDs (Violent Femmes, Talking Heads, and Supertramp) and watched a DVD (Little Miss Sunshine).

The movie was completely unplanned and a pleasant surprise, showing Steve Carell in (I think) an atypical role. Importing the CDs into iTunes caused some frustration because the CD drive in the MacBook Pro consistently spit out the Talking Heads CD, but thankfully the drive in the Mac Minis are more tolerant (if that’s what is going on here). I noticed that of the 3 CDs only the Violent Femmes one has the “Compact Disc Digital Audio” logo on it, but don’t know if I can draw any conclusions from that.

How was your day?