“groovy mother...”

Marc Hedlund’s start-up launches. Looks like an awesome light-weight social web-based finance manager, for folks for whom Quicken is too much hassle. Whether users will entrust their financial info to Web 2.0 remains to be seen.

Version 1.0 of Firebug is on the horizon, and it looks about 75% more kick-assier than the current release, which is saving my life at the moment as I do some JavaScript ftuff at work.

FFS. Detailed explanation of the how’s and why’s of reading/cloning a UK RFID-chipped passport — which don’t even have the tinfoil protective cover that US passports will. “‘This doesn’t matter,’ says a Home Office spokesman.”

$20 for five experimentally-flavoured bags of Kettle Chips. Vote for your faves, and they might appear on shop shelves some day. “Royal Indian Curry” is calling my name.

Audiophiles claim that an original model Playstation, if left on for about three days to “warm up”, is an amazing sounding CD player.

The Sox today paid $51.1m for the rights to negotiate exclusively with a (reportedly outstanding) Japanese pitcher. $51.1m to *negotiate*. It will cost them many millions more to actually sign him. Wow. Just… wow.

Ouch. I’m not sure Microsoft will be happy that their launch-day feature on CNN features incredulent hosts (“Who do they think is going to buy this?”), one of whom ends the segment raving about her new teeny iPod Shuffle.

Programmers/Designers! Got an idea of something you want to build, but no time to do it? Got a hankering to build something, but no ideas? In New England? Come along to Dev House Boston on Dec 9th.

Wow. What a great move by Apple. Further domination of the iPod-only connector, plus it solves the “iPod batteries only last 4 hours when watching video, that’s too short for a long-haul flight” problem in one foul swoop.

Wow. Microsoft make it clear that, however rushed, buggy and miserably unready the Zune software may be, the user experience design was always half-assed.

I’m playing with Vista on my laptop, and this “improvement” from Microsoft was pissing me off. Thankfully there is a “solution”. One that is a usability nightmare waiting to happen (drag a folder too close to the edge of the screen, and it becomes a toolbar that is hard to work out how to close).

Man, I consider it a chore to have to watch SNL on TiVo each week, when I can fast-forward through it. I can’t imagine queuing up each week to go see the show live.

GUI for managing SQLite databases. Best one I’ve found, although it’s not free. Deals gracefully with the 4Gb database files we use at work.

Microsoft’s “you must buy points in $5 increments” makes sense if you consider credit-card transaction costs (I’m sure Apple loses money if you only buy one 99 cent song at a time — that’s why they batch up your transactions), but the user experience of “1.25 cents per point” is ridiculous, and probably going to bite MS.

Best SNL sketch in AGES. Sadly, I can’t find the video on YouTube, so here’s the transcript. “Bobby McFerrin raped my grandmother” has become a wholly-inappropriate running joke between Joy & myself.

A considerably funnier version of the 3D animation gag in the Simpsons trailer: the South Park movie teaser from *1998*.

Oh. Dear.