After only a few minutes I’m already loving iTunes for Windows. Slick, functional interface. Surprisingly low CPU usage during playback (unless you enable visual effects). Gets the job done without fuss. It’s free. What more could a guy ask for?
Will Windows users now storm the iTunes music store and swell Apple’s pockets? Perhaps. Hard to believe we’ve had to wait this long though — not for iTunes, but for someone to get with the program and really start selling music in digital format to one monster of a consumer group.
Just typical. Last week I derided David Coulthard as a “dawdling old geezer”, then he goes and puts in a decent performance at the season finale in Japan. The scotsman led and out-paced Finnish teammate Kimi Raikkonen (one of the sport’s rising stars) for most of the race, but let the Finn take second position so as to increase his chances of lifting the driver’s title. Nonetheless, I’m sticking by my original statement.
Seemingly anywhere I go in and around Calgary I notice vehicles with at least one non-working brake light. The incidence is unusually high. It also appears to be spread fairly evenly across older and newer vehicles, American and foreign models, and even 18-wheelers and trailers.
This can be quite distracting. When coming up behind cars in adjacent lanes with the working tail light on my side, where the driver begins breaking when their car is at about a 45 degree angle to me, I register it as an indicator light and slow up slightly, anticipating a lane change. Then you realise what’s happened, and off you go again until the next run-in. Slightly more worrisome is when you’re directly behind such a vehicle and they begin to brake, your brain just doesn’t seem to recognize one red light as a brake and it takes a split second longer before you react as you normally would.
Take a minute to check your own vehicle’s lights at your next chance, just in case.
It was a great feeling taking possession of our new house yesterday. A sensation made no less sweet despite having been delayed a week, due to the fumblings of the seller’s mortgage company. Don’t think for a minute that buying a home where the seller herself is a realtor makes the process any smoother.
Still, we won’t be moving immediately. The contents of my apartment in USA won’t arrive until late next week, our goods from Romania will take up to a month, and we still have to make plans for everything that’s back in South Africa. Rest assured that I’ll be spending a good deal of time at the house before then though — I’m just dying to get a few steaks on the barbeque and down a couple of beers in the backyard before the weather gets too cool.
British American Racing dropped racing driver Jacques Villeneuve from their team this weekend. Perhaps the 1997 World Champion has not produced great results at BAR, or anything that could justify his $4 million paycheck, but then he hasn’t had the car to do it with — the BAR Honda has been less than unreliable. BAR is under great pressure from engine sponsor Honda to field a Japanese driver (Takuma Sato). I’m no Villeneuve fan, but I am keen to see him escape BAR, I only hope that he will find a drive for next season.
I think this is a golden opportunity for the McLaren Mercedes team. Team boss Ron Dennis should sign Villeneuve tomorrow, and send #2 driver, David Coulthard, packing. Coulthard is a relic in the world of Formula 1. The dawdling old geezer’s driving is passive and unspirited, his performances relying almost solely on a process of attrition; his career has been spent at F1’s best teams, but he has never shone — Coulthard just doesn’t have the makings of a Champion. Villeneuve on the other hand still fights the fight, he has that tiger’s eye and attacking spirit that are needed to bring wins. Sign him up McLaren, sign him now.
Has it been a year already? Who knows. Not these people: the 2003 IgNobel Prizes for ‘research achievements that should not be repeated’ have been announced. Topping last year’s leading entry, ‘a more accurate method for approximating the surface area of elephants’, should have been a hard sell, but “an analysis of the forces required to drag sheep over various surfaces” comes pretty darn close. “Chemical investigation of a bronze statue that fails to attract pigeons” is another good one. These people still need to find something better to do.
Another friendly cosmic reminder that our number will be up before we even know it. Last Saturday, 27 September, an asteroid the size of a house made the closest ever approach to earth, passing within 88,000km. Thing is, no one realised it until Sunday. Where were you then Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck, where were you then huh huh? So when the big one finally comes, governments need not worry about inciting widespread panic amongst the public: NASA won’t even know until it’s all over.
