Ozzy and multi-colored hair daughter, Kelly have recorded a duet of Black Sabbath Vol 4.’s somber mellow piano song: Changes which is reported in this article from teenhollywood.com. The song is supposed to appear on Ozzy’s next (new?) CD which will appear on a new label because Ozzy jetisoned from Sony a few months back. No date seems to be set yet when this new CD will come out. Ozzy is touring a few dates with Kelly and vows to be on the stage with baseball bat in hand if anybody throws stuff at Kelly like what happened to her at a recent concert date in the UK.

This father-daughter cover be interesting to hear because Ozzy’s voice is fading and Kelly’s voice hasn’t come into her own (without lots of studio magic). Wonder what this is going to sound like …?

Hormel, who owns the trademark for that, er, unique tasting food product known as SPAM, and the company which make the product spam arrest are at odds, according to this article from CNN. Hormel goes on to say that they don’t object that the internet uses the term spam but they want SPAM in capital letters when it refers to SPAM which ”…American classic, is a favorite of consumers worldwide.”

I don’t think I’ve bought SPAM ever, honestly! So there must be a whole lot of other American consumers that will refer to SPAM as their “favorite.” I took a few seconds and perused Hormel’s fine recipes for SPAM and I’m glad I haven’t eaten yet, because after looking at some of this fine cuisine I’d be thinking about making a porcelean god donation.

Cajun Coconut SPAM Fritters - Cajun and … coconut? Yummy! Just one person use the comment function below and tell me, admit honestly, that you like eating this. Please! No way.

SPAM Cupcakes - Man, look at the picture on the page, it’s GREEN! I wouldn’t know whether those had stayed too long in the fridge or not. SPAM cupcakes? I think even the boy scouts would send these back.

As for Spam Arrest being able to win trademarking their name? I’ve never tried their software or service but the article cites a 50/50 chance of them prevailing in trademark court. Forgive me I’ve got to go arrest some spam in my inbox, but I’ll await (or maybe I won’t hold my breath) somebody, anybody, anywhere out there to post a comment saying they like eating SPAM. Hmm!

In this article from PC Magazine the following quote about broadband penetration by the end of the decade:

“Intel predicts that by the end of the decade there will be 1.5 billion computers with broadband connections and 2.5 billion phones with more processing power than today’s PCs.”

Somehow as I look at my cell phone I still have a hard time imagining it being more powerful than the PC I’m typing on this on, but then again 10 years ago, what 286, were the blaze of the day? How about the 80’s where the Commodore 64 came onto scene for me and I remember thinking: now that I have so much more memory than the Vic-20, just imagine what I can do!. I am one of those who wish there was more broadband penetration (as I listen to radio @ aol streaming in the background). Hmm …

Just logged onto AOL — wait, don’t throw anything, I have an account for my development testing and I noticed the following icon advert:  

But … this is what it seems like is really happening with them. Didn’t they just release version 8.0 for broadband like a few months ago? I am pretty sure they’ll get to version 999 before I die. It’s almost like everytime you login to AOL they have a new version! Incremental versions are one thing, but what more can they add to their software in version 9.0 that 8.0 didn’t already have? Maybe there will be a hundred thousand new fonts I’ll never use. Hey, I think it’s great that they are upgrading their software, but are their upgrades worthy of full major version number jumps? Hmm … what do you think?

In this UK Guardian story, it deals with what has happened at Microsoft since the lawsuit settlement with the government. I can think of one major thing recently and that is making IE as part of the OS (no more standalone releases of Internet Explorer) which is what the big story was not too long ago. This totally could change the browser landscape over the next 1-2 years as consumers very well might not be interested in upgrading their OS just to get the newest whiz bang IE. See my irider review below about one possible browser alternative, irider.com Certainly there are plenty of others: mozilla.org towards the top of the list, I’d think.

There is also talk about what Microsoft giving some 10 billion dollar dividend out? And the XBox division continues to hemmorage cash, and Microsoft contends that they are still fully behind trying to make the XBox the #1 video game console. In other XBox news, Free-X released an exploit for the XBox which would allow linux to run UNmodded and they were quickly put in the M$ crosshairs. Lots of puzzling things happening at M$ headquarters and definitely something making me go hmm … huh … what?

I mentioned the irider  browser on the Script School Radio show yesterday. Of all the new and different browsers I’ve looked at, this one caught my attention enough to download it.

Here’s 6 things I’ve found useful (so far) about this browser:

1. You can one-click through books, as irider calls them, and a list of sites you frequently visit will open in a convenient, adjustable pane on the left hand side of the screen with thumbnails of the website.
2. You can search multiple websites easily through the special irider search menu.
3. The ability to pin and unpin certain sites in the thumbnail preview menu along the left hand pane and conveniently close them. You can click one button and close all the unpinned sites, therefore making it easy to keep important sites in front of you.
4. How you can read one site and if you find a link you are interested in then you can right click it and it will load in the background so that when you are done reading the article or page you can click to the link you clicked and it is immediately available.
5. The ability to open many links on a page in new thumbnailed windows at one time.
6. Zoom in and out on any web page by holding down the CTRL + or CTRL -. Useful for guys like me with not so good eyesight and those pages with small text and graphics.

You can download and try it out for free (30 days) and in fact I encourage folks reading this to do just that and use it in tandem with your favorite browser. It ain’t perfect of course, there are features that you will miss in your current browser, but it is useful as sort of a complimentary working browser. There’s no spyware or ads in the version I downloaded, nor is the download version crippled in any way feature-wise. The price is $29.95 as of this writing (2.06).

Will iRider take off? Hmm …

Update 7/11/03: Related review by Kingsley

This is my first entry for things that …(M)ake (Y)ou (G)o (H)mm … just remember makeyougohmm.com or mughd.com (for Make yoU Go Hmm Daily). What kind of things make you go hmm? Go ahead and test out that comment thing.