What’s your favorite office appliance? Is it the microwave that heats burritos or the small fridge which keeps your beverages cool? Ours is the ice maker: Mr. Freeze.

 

We had our first Mr. Freeze, purchased back in September 2006, go down at the start of summer and finally got around to buying a replacement.

My wife and I couldn’t agree on how long Mr. Freeze lasted. She thought it was like 2 1/2 years or longer. It seemed like less time to me. Turns out after searching back through this blog (a good reason to blog your purchases) it was less than two years. If you factor in the amount of ice this thing puts out when you use it regularly like we have compared to buying ice or messing around with ice trays (no thank you), that’s not as bad as it might sound. It’s a work of mechanical brilliance if you compare it to our lock with the Xbox 360 (we’re on #7 Xbox 360 console in less than 3 years).

Mr. Freeze will still set you back about $250 USD. As much as I’m liking Mr. Freeze, this one had better last at least three years. We bought it online.  Saw it once in Coscto, but never in any other local stores.

I don’t want email from Comcast telling me about either their partners or their latest, greatest offers.

As their customer you would expect they’d respect my simple request not to solicit me. Check out the creative subject line of their email received this morning at 6:25am: "Notification about Email from Comcast." Stay with me, it gets even more silly.

Now the body of Comcast’s email below, red penciled by me:

#1 - Comcast acknowledges that as their customer I’ve asked them not to communicate with me regarding "offers and promotions." They are calling this email a "service-related email" (see #5) and yet asking me to "Sign Up Now" (#3). Is that a service or an offer or promotion? You decide.

#2 - Comcast respects my privacy and promises to only send essential emails. Is this email essential to my Comcast service, really? It seems more like them reminding me that I have told them that I don’t want them to send me offers and promotions and yet wanting me to sign up so I can receive offers and promotions. If this is a small sampling of their urgent news, I’ll pass, thank you.

#3 - Call to action. A link is not always promotional, but if I’m being urged to buy something or sign up one could argue that yes, that is promotional.

#4 - Comcast appreciates my understanding? Really? Implied consent, I guess. No, really I don’t understand the purpose of this essential service email. Yes, I told them not to send me promotional emails but they somehow feel compelled to remind me that I’m not receiving promotional emails and appreciate my understanding and — by the way — I can "Sign Up Now" not to miss out on future promotional emails.

#5 - Just another friendly reminder in smaller, gray text that this, indeed, is not an offer or promotion, it’s only a service-related email. Did you get that? We appreciate your understanding.

Come on, Comcast, this pedantic email begs to be deleted. Especially with the Sign Up Now link it flirts dangerously close to spam, close enough to put it in the spam category. On the other hand, it’s kind of funny. Thank you for the essential email smile this morning.

Not sure what there is to be excited about in the Mariners race to having $100+ million payroll and being a mere 6 games away from an abysmal 100+ loss season, but I find myself tuning in to root for them to please, please, please not lose.

They play 9 more games and can only afford to lose 3 of them to stay at 99 or less losses for the season. Having lost the last 9 in a row, I think it’s safe to say that statistically odds are they will win at least some of the remaining games. This season has been a real mess though save for hard working players like Ibanez, that is a free agent at the end of the season and likely to move to greener pastures. Ichiro got his 200 knocks as well, tieing a record from the 1800s.

Don’t want to sound all fair weather fan here with this post, but the Seahawks aren’t off to a good start (0-2), nor are the Huskies (0-3) or Cougars (0-3). That’s 0-8 for the first time ever. Yes, it rains in Seattle, but we’ve had enough rain. It’s time for sunshine in the win column.

I’ve seen YouTube used by many people for many different reasons. Can honestly say it was a first this morning (credit James) seeing someone like William Shatner — it’s Captain Kirk, man! — using it to tell the world why he is not going to be in the next Star Trek motion picture.

Or maybe this is Shatner lobbying to be in the movie if there’s still time? I’ve heard plenty of stories that Mr. Shatner wasn’t the easiest guy in Star Trek to get along with (and that he hasn’t always handled his success with upmost humility) as told by other Star Trek OS cast members like George Takei on the Howard Stern Show. It might seem by him saying he wasn’t interested in a cameo — that could easily be axed on the cutting room floor — that this is him being difficult again. Tough call. Be in the movie as cameo or not be in at all? I think if he was offered a cameo he should have taken it.

Shatner says in the video that he wasn’t even offered a cameo. Here’s what J.J Abrams had to say:

We tried desperately to put him in the movie, but he was making it very clear that he wanted the movie to focus on him significantly, which, frankly, he deserves. The truth is, the story that we were telling required a certain adherence to the Trek canon and consistency of storytelling. It’s funny — a lot of the people who were proclaiming that he must be in this movie were the same people saying it must adhere to canon.

Then again, Leonard Nimoy seems to have gotten along pretty well with Shatner over the years. Whatever really happened off screen, history dictates that when the camera was rolling Captain Kirk was a major player in the Star Trek OS universe. I didn’t think all of the Star Trek motion pictures (like Star Trek V) were shining Kirk moments, but there were some really good ones like Wraith of Khan. I enjoyed The Next Generation phase too but will admit the final film was underwhelming.

I think bringing in J.J Abrams to pump some life back into the franchise is a great thing. I really enjoyed his work with Serenity.

So until I see what the new Star Trek movie is like, I’m going to reserve judgement on how this works without Shatner. I will admit as long as Shatner is still alive that having a Star Trek movie that goes back to the roots and doesn’t include him seems … sad.

Let’s not forget that miracle worker engineer Scotty (James Doohan) is alread gone and crotchety doctor Bones (Deforest Kelley) died in 1999. Spock (Leonard Nemoy) and Kirk (Shatner) are getting up there in age. Congrats to Sulu (George Takei) who just got married to his long time partner Brad. Haven’t heard too much about Chekov (Walter Koenig) or Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) but I believe both of them are still doing well, health-wise. They served as best man and best lady at Takei’s wedding. Congratulations!

The cruel, sweeping scythe of time is going to take all these actors away from us eventually, leaving only our memories in tact from the films they worked in year’s past. Call me greedy, but I’d like to see these actors as many more times as (good) story and their health will allow. And I like the whole Alfred Hitchcock cameo thing. Why wouldn’t this work in future Star Trek films?

If you thought Twitter was bad with their fail whale messages, at least Twitter doesn’t have a hold on any of your money. This morning I can’t login to my accounts at Zecco or Sharebuilder. Why not? Good ole’ "Technical difficulties."

Meanwhile a friend is also having trouble accessing his broker services (which aren’t the same as mine). I can get into Trowe Price, so not every brokerage with online access is having online issues, but it does make one think: what if there really was some major depression-like event and you wanted to trade your assets, would your web access be unavailable due to technical issues?

It’s time like these that we have to go back to face to face brokerage transactions or using the phone and waiting on hold. I wonder, though, if we’re having problems accessing our trading accounts, are the brokers also having trouble too?

Twitter problems seem minor at the moment. BTW, I don’t want to get in to sell any holdings, nor short any of the 799 financial stocks that have a temporary ban on short sales, I want to BUY. I haven’t sold any of my holdings this week. Check out the DOW over the last year:

-13.63%, down almost 1,800 points. Kraft (KFT) is replacing AIG in the DOW. This has been a wild, wild week on Wall Street.

Being our 19th wedding anniversary this Friday, I’m in the shopping mode. Can’t write about what I’m doing for my wife as she reads this blog and would see the telegraph. Will say that I won’t be buying her anything through GiftGirl.

The idea behind GiftGirl is straightforward: just pick options from a dropdown menu like how much you want to pay, who the girl is (wife, long time girlfriend, friend, colleague, sister, mother, etc.) and you’re shown a selection of gifts that match. There are preset templates for things like ‘west coast girl’ and ‘bohemian girl’ — somebody please tell me what a bohemian girl is?  I know Bohemian Rhapsody is a great Queen song that was in Wayne’s World.

Google informs that the definition of bohemian is: "unconventional in especially appearance and behavior" so answered my own question. Can safely say there aren’t many (any) bohemian girls that I know very well. Do you know any and, more importantly, would they be into any of the gifts.

Looking at the screenshot I’m not sure my wife would have wanted any of the things suggested above, but I’m wise enough after over 20 years together not to try and put any words in her mouth or thoughts in her head — ever. Not to get too sappy here, but one of the things I found appealing about her was that she couldn’t be programmed into some box-like algorithm like GiftGirl offers. Don’t think you could put me in a box service like this either.

Still, I’m guessing this type service will appeal to some folks. At least has to appeal to the webmaster who could tag all these gifts with his/her affiliate code.

Thanks dooblet for reminding me that I can’t be replaced Don’t think I’m on some ego trip, you can’t be replaced either.

Fortunately you can find replacements for common things like car model, software name, music group, technology names and more. If you don’t like the results, you can "discuss alternatives" in the Dooblet forum but don’t expect much action there yet (a big goose egg for posts as of this writing). Bonus points for the ability to use OpenID to register there though.

Dooblet seems a bit like it should be a plugin for a bigger search engine to narrow results rather than a standalone service but posted here because it’s a worthwhile idea.

Check out what dooblet offers as replacement for Metallica:

I would have put Judas Priest in there before ‘napster’ but with the whole suing fans stigma, you can see how that one is bubbling up for Metallica. Speaking of them, I did buy Death Magnetic over the weekend. Wife was sick on Friday so didn’t get there on the street launch date, but have been listening to it for a couple days still trying to wrap my ears around it.  Early feelings are positive.

My friend Lestat shared YearbookYourself saying: "I can see you doing this." He was right.

You need to do a better job lining up the size of your face than me. I got the angle right, but not enough face which made me look like Yul Bryner in Westworld when his robot face is taken off.

You can also save the pictures and share with your friends. Can’t save the whole yearbook though, bummer. Maybe that feature will be added down the road.

Yesterday I spent too much time getting my music organized in iTunes on the Mac so that the new iTunes ‘Genius’ would not suggest to me music I already own. Probably won’t bother trying iTunes for Windows, “bloated” or with unintentional or intentional problems as some folks are suggesting , as I’ve been happily using Zune on Windows for almost 2 years now, but what other compelling choice for music management is there on the Mac (suggestions, please)? It’s sort of a shotgun gadget wedding on the Mac.

Genius creates playlists based on a song you listen to from what you already own and I’ll get to that fun in a minute, but finding/exploring music I don’t own is something I enjoy. A true musical genius would be able to mine the world’s database of music and return me exactly the type of music I enjoy but don’t already own. AmazonMP3 does a decent job recommending me DRM-free MP3 albums I might want to buy based on what I’ve already purchased from them, can the iTunes Genius do better?

First, you have to activate Genius, which burped for me the first time:

But worked fine the second try:

This process took several minutes mining our family’s ever growing music collection of 272 artists and 50.35 GB of music. After running, I noticed iTunes 8 changed my default view to Cover Flow.

Cover Flow looks pretty when you have album art for every artist and ugly when you don’t.

A couple years back I hunted missing album art for every album but through time and circumstance I’m missing a lot these days, since iTunes on the Mac isn’t my regular music player any more. Good thing you are just a view click away from going back to the boring text view and can have iTunes automatically fetch missing album art.

Recommending to buy songs you already own = not Genius 

Even after a couple hours making sure the music library was updated — and Genius was updated too — the Genius was still recommending songs I already owned on best of albums instead of the studio albums. Bummer. I would think a song with the same name by the same band that’s not marked ‘live, unplugged, acoustic, demo’ etc., would not be returned as a result.

Not all the results were bad, I noticed a couple songs of possible future interest. This part of Genius shows promise, but sorry, it’s a long way from being genius.

Play a song and press the Genius button to generate a similar playlist of songs you already own = almost Genius

My first Genius playlist test started with the song "Born Again" by Black Sabbath, here’s the playlist Genius generated:

Cool results! I like many of these songs. They aren’t just popular tracks I’ve listened to with songs like "I’m Insane" by Ratt live and "The Eyes" from Dio’s Master of the Moon. And I totally dig "Keep It Warm" off the same Born Again album, "Heaven and Hell" Live by the renamed Sabbath. This Genius generated list of 25 similar songs is excellent.

I tried playing other less popular songs that I five star rated in iTunes to see what Genius returned. Next: "All Mixed Up" by The Cars:

Doh! Even after an update, no luck with this song. Next song: "Time and Time Again" by Counting Crows:

Another good list with some songs I recognize and like along with some lesser known titles. Thumbs up. Next song: "Comin’ Under Fire" by Def Leppard:

Another solid playlist, saved. I found while testing more songs with Genius, I wished there was some sort of way to quickly output the results of these Genius playlists as text files to share with others online. Wait, this could be where a service like Nutsie comes in. Remember me writing about Nutsie a year ago? Bet the Nutsie folks are ecstatic over Genius. I see where you can make an iMix out of these playlists but Nutsie seems like a better idea if it works with Genius playlists.

Overall, I like what Genius does. I don’t think the name quite fits because as you can see from a small sampling above that there are some holes. I suppose even Einstein wasn’t perfect, so maybe I’m being too harsh, but the Genius algorithm appears very, very good. This feature will encourage me to start using iTunes again. Mission accomplished, Apple.

New iPod announcements

Before exiting this post, I see Matt is curious what I think about the new iPod announcements. From an Apple shareholder standpoint (I’ve owned AAPL stock for a couple years now), I love these Apple events. Steve Jobs out on stage evangelizing like only he can. And what’s not to like about taking $100 off the iPod Touch?

Being excited about touch screen enabled devices like tablet PC, I really like the idea behind the iPhone and  iPod Touch but here’s my problem: not enough practical storage space for the price.

Realistically I’m only going to carry one music device. I’ve already got my Pocket PC which the iPod Touch could someday replace, but I don’t see it having enough space for me at the right price now. We have over 50GB worth of music and my current 30GB Zune isn’t enough. Why would I spend $299 for the iPod Touch 16GB and have 14GB less for music not counting cool iPod Touch applications? Even though the Nano’s price is right the storage is the issue there too. Always have liked the Nike+ tie-in.

Right now the 32GB iPod Touch is selling for $399. The money conscious side of me says: wait it out until the price comes down and storage amount increases. Inevitably it will. The cool gadget side of me is saying to stop thinking about it and drop down the bones now.

The iPhone remains out for me as long as it has anything to do with AT&T. If Sprint had the iPhone, the current cell phone carrier my wife and sons are using (I haven’t had a cell phone of my own for awhile), I might pull the trigger. Been checking out that Samsung Instinct and thought maybe, just maybe that would look good in my hands but then I think about having a phone contract for two more years and that keeps me at bay.

So it looks like I’ll be getting either a Zune 120GB or iPod 120GB classic. In the iPod corner is knowledge that my wife’s 80GB iPod has worked very well and I like the interaction with iTunes on the Mac. Also, I’m hoping this holiday season to upgrade my Mac. Last and my first ever Mac purchase was in October 2004. It’s time for me to get one of those shiny Intel-based iMacs. Santa, are you listening? Having the 120GB iPod would fit this scenario well.

In the Zune corner, bonus points for how the Zune has treated me as a customer by continuing to give me firmware updates on my Zune 30GB with features that are in their next generation devices. I’m intrigued by comparing the channels function to the ‘Genius’ and must admit not being one of the 50% using the FM tuner to date, so that FM to tune capability won’t play much of a factor. I spend 75% of my time in the Windows world and prefer Zune software to iTunes on Windows. Seems like jumping into the 120GB is going to fit my growing music needs well whether it be Zune or iPod.

If I let desire rule my wallet, I’d buy a new iMac, the Zune 120GB and the iPod Touch 32GB tomorrow. Oh temptation, you cruel beast!

Repeating the tradition started last year by showing randomly rotated victims from 9/11 on pages at Hmm. This year instead of flying in the header section, the victims are being randomly displayed on every directory page, including the home page above the first post.

Will be leaving these up there for at least the next week. I noticed the victim details links that are supposed to lead to september11victims.com (didn’t link intentionally because don’t want to compound the problem) appear to be broken. I’ll see if I can link to a Google cache or something else as this site might be getting pounded if this continues.

Update 8:37pm PST: CNN has a complete list of victims by name sorted that you can learn more about each of the victims.