It was inevitable, given the sheer ubiquitousness, that .sex is under consideration for use by ICANN for domains.

“You can almost guarantee the most highly sought-after one will, unfortunately, probably be dot-sex,” said Bryan Glick of Computing Magazine.

“All the meaningful words and meaningful names in the English language have been bought up already,” Glick said.

True. While some companies have been clever in branding their organizations with a quirky name so they can have a unique domain, it’s become a little difficult to identify a company with it’s product or service because of its deliberately misspelled or derivative name (Google being the glaring exception, obviously).

As the article states, it will create a new gold rush for prime Internet real estate for anyone with the time and money to scoop up as many words as possible… quickly.

I suspect that most of the best words will be gone in the blink of an eye and be worth a fortune. Still, with even a little imagination, there’s a lot o’ words in the dictionary.

Some comedians have made a living with one-liners, some make fun of their lame sex lives and some just milked their one-note routine for a while and went away (see ya, Diceman).

The best comedians have always been astute observers of absurdity in an ordinary day; their material was about the stuff we saw all around but we didn’t see how funny — or stupid — it could be. Taking something overt and repackaging it so you have a completely different perspective on it is an art. And today, we lost an artist.

George Carlin died of heart failure at age 71. Read the rest of this entry »

For the past 20 years (give or take), the word “Zen” has been used liberally in association with some personal, commercial or business concept to suggest that the concept in question can be “mastered”, usually through a “formula” that someone “discovered”. Typically, though, this mental elixir is alluded to in a self-help book (or eBook), DVD or seminar — which, of course, will cost you some money to acquire.

Typing in “the zen of” (with quotes) in Google alone results in over 742,000 sites out there talking about the Zen of something. So if the true ideas about Zen as a distinct school of Buddhism are distilled to loosely — if at all — apply to anything from MP3 players to how to close a business deal “better”, it would only make sense that “meditation” would become the next logical buzzword that would be touted as a let’s-get-happy meme. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m typing this entry on my new MacBook Pro, which I purchased recently having decided that a laptop would be a more efficient way of working since it was time (yet again) to upgrade. This is now the sixth Mac I’ve owned, but more interestingly — and coincidentally — is that each time I’ve purchased a new Mac it’s been at a time of (often major) change in my life:

• a IIci (8 MB RAM, 80 MB HD. That’s 80 megabytes, folks) when I was just starting out;
• a PowerMac 9600 when I was freelancing but found full-time work;
• a PowerComputing Pro (raise your hand if you still have one) when I left my job to work on my own;
• a G4 when I bought my house and business was buzzing;
• a G5 at a time when there was a lot of personal and professional uncertainty and tension;
• and now my MacBook Pro, purchased just a few weeks ago.

So where’s the change this time? Read the rest of this entry »

Last night I watched one of the more interesting DVDs I own: Pi, a bleak film about brilliance, madness and obsession. The outside plot centers on the endeavors of Max Cohen, a mathematician who is haunted by what he believes is a pattern to be found in the numbers of the stock market. In his pursuit he stumbles upon a 216-digit number; this number, while initially discounted by Max, becomes coveted by both a Wall Street firm as well as Hasidic Jews, both of whom see great value in this number but seek it for different ends.

As with most well-written movies with a misunderstood and complex protagonist, there is a mentor character who acts as a both challenge to the protagonist’s motivating action as well a vessel for offering an exposition to us, the audience, in an attempt to help us understand the backstory as well as the reason for the need for resolution following the build up of “Act 1″.

In this movie, Sol (Max’s mentor) comments that the 216-digit number is really meaningless because,

“You’re connecting a computer bug I had with a computer bug you might have had and some religious hogwash. You want to find the number 216 in the world, you will be able to find it everywhere. 216 steps from a mere street corner to your front door. 216 seconds you spend riding on the elevator. When your mind becomes obsessed with anything, you will filter everything else out and find that thing everywhere.”

And for me, 216 is Google. Read the rest of this entry »

In a twist of irony, the largest information-gathering company in the world is calling for privacy laws to be established (and, presumably, enforced) by governments and corporations.

Maybe I’m a glass-half-empty kind of person, but doesn’t it seem odd that a huge company like Google – which gathers more and more personal data every second of every day and stores it on it’s growing network of computers for reasons it won’t reveal – would appeal to the least-trustworthy sources, governments and corporations, to be the gatekeepers of all the personal data harnessed from the Internet?

Read the rest of this entry »

Since the first versions of the Mac OS, Apple has set the standard for the GUI appearance and functionality (most of which were “borrowed” by that other company), and each successive update raises the bar. And now that iPhone has finally been released in the US, Mac fans will be eagerly awaiting the release of Leopard.

I started using a Mac just as System 7 was introduced; at that time, it had many enhancements from the previous system, including virtual memory support, the introduction of aliases and, thankfully, the “Empty Trash” command, which was a change from having the trash empty itself upon shutdown. Subsequent OS updates included an interface and GUI appearance changes, implementation of multi-user support and improved search with Sherlock. Some features introduced with OS 9 were adapted for OS X, like Software Update, Keychain and file encryption.

OS X was a radical change in the user interface, and I think it took a while for people (incluing me) to warm up to it. First, it required that you essentially re-learn how to use your computer: there were all new files (or at least newly visible files) that were in all-new places, a different menu structure and many other interface changes. Then, the developers had to update all their software to be compatible with the new system, which meant you had to make a new investment in, essentially, new software.
Read the rest of this entry »