Obama

Whatever Happened to The Zune? (2008 Obama’s Zune is Safe Edition)

December 31, 2008 by Kirk Biglione

Zune owners are a notoriously thin-skinned lot. It might have something to do with the Zune’s perpetual status as a third place also ran in the portable media player market. Or maybe it’s the fact that the Zune apparently borrows so much of it’s “innovation” from the world’s worst portable media player.

Whatever the reason for their prickly nature, Zune owners have a whole new reason to grumble. Early this morning every 30 GB Zune on the planet stopped working. You have to give Microsoft credit, this was an act of synchronized ritual suicide that has not been seen before in the consumer electronics business.

How does something like this happen with a mainstream product? Some have speculated that this could be a date problem related to the new year. In fact, many are already referring to this as the Z2K9 bug. But, if that’s the case then there’s a bug in Microsoft’s bug. You would expect a problem of this sort would manifest itself at midnight on New Years Eve, not the night before.

In Praise of Asynchronous Voting

October 28, 2008 by Jim Connelly

My name is Jim Connelly, and I am an Asynchronous Voter. And by that I mean that instead of voting on Election Day itself, I’ve always requested an absentee ballot and voted by mail. I’ve been an Asynchronous Voter for several years now, ever since I realized that the State of California would let me mail in my ballot instead of waiting in line either prior to or after work.

I’ve always figured that it didn’t matter how or when I cast my vote, as long as I cast it. For the longest time, this made me an anomaly — voting absentee every election was weird for a young(er), healthy, non-traveling person.

However, this year, I’ve become a trend! Loads of people are voting asynchronously. I should have known something was up when the State of California asked Rox and I if we wanted to become “Permanent Vote by Mail Voters”. Hell yes!

Who Will Get Joe Strummer’s Vote?

October 16, 2008 by Jim Connelly

Is it just me, or is this election making us all a bit crazy? I know that, for my part, I’m obsessively checking RealClearPolitics several times every day (thanks a hell of a lot for that, Tom!!), memorizing their Electoral College counts, not to mention that on my commute home last night, I actually listened to the third debate instead of the Dodgers game.

Of course, that commute was made much longer by the residual traffic created by the Dodgers game, which is never fun.

It has been like this forever. In fact, I’m not actually sure that I can remember a time before this campaign started. Way back in March 2007, (over a year and a half before Entertainment Weekly said the same thing on their cover) I asked if this campaign was going to be the best reality TV show ever, and I think that it has ended up that way.

One small problem: I hate reality TV.