One More Thing: iPod Hi-Fi's hidden features

I don't know why most of the Apple event recappers left off the most important part of Stevie-J's keynote, so i've transcribed it here.

10:49 Oh, one more thing... [The crowd goes wild]
[Steve pulls off back panel of iPod Hi-fi to reveal a fat wad of cash.]
10:51 Every $350 iPod Hi-Fi comes with $200 cash in the back of it! That's why the damn thing costs so much! It will also be available in a $450 version that comes with $300 dollars.
[Much applause from apple shareholders. Exeunt omnes]

Much better.

Thomas Pink... Panther... Get it?

Thomas Pink was clearly a classy brand up until about six months ago, so what the hell are they doing? First I hear about this stupid iPod nano tie, which everyone is quick to point out will be unavoidably uncomfortable, and well, retarded. Fine, plenty of high-fashion brands have tried to profit off of the iPod or PSP brands with overpriced unusable accessories. However, right after that I backed out to their main US page and am greeted by... The Pink Panther?

OK, ok, back up there fella. About three years ago, Thomas Pink was the pinnacle of metro fashion; a businessman's way of declaring individuality from behind a boring double-breasted suit. Even pre-Queer-Eye, this posh british import convinced us that you can wear pink and purple stripes while still grooving on the vertical smile. New York magazine still refers to the store as "a wardrobe mainstay for cosmopolitan businessmen." Any New Yorker who visited a Pink store during their seasonal sale days would be confronted with a veritable shopping bloodbath, with grown men tearing through stacks of clothing like twenty-something girls at a Louis Vuitton sample sale.

Maybe they've just spread too fast. While it used to be a arduous task to find the oddly located Pink stores, they now have locations in prime spots, such as the Time Warner Center (which, let's face it, kills everything it touches). In either case, why would they tie their upscale menswear brand to a mediocre kids movie remake? OK, I get it... you both have the word "Pink" in your title. But are they really trying to spread the message "when you think of our brand, think of cheap foreign accent and fart jokes"?

Is this the new Dell Dimension B210???

We have zero idea what this thing is, if it's real, or if it's some kind of factory leak, but this does look a bit promising as the new Dell Dimension B210 that fans have been speculating about for a while now (and yeah, we're assuming that's a USB slot at the bottom there). Dell Inc.'s marketing department has yet to confirm or deny the veracity of these leaked pictures, but they certainly look like they are in keeping with the existing Dimension aesthetic that fans have come to recognize. A VERY GOOD SOURCE suggests that these exciting new boxes will ship with 256 MB of DDR SDRAM, a CD/DVD combo drive and a whopping 80 GB Hard Drive!

More details are expected at Dell's widely expected press event this Thursday, and we will be sure to post more news as it comes to us!

Google Page Creator and spam.

Google launched its page creator today... the fact that your third-level-domain is forced to be the same as your gmail account means that the whole "use my name as my e-mail address" gmail thing is probably going to go out the window now. At the very least, I'm going to start registering as many gmail addresses as I can to soak up some free web hosting space, and to give me more options with the naming.

My major concern is this: The fact that your third-level domain has to be the same as your gmail address could have some unfortunate consequences. By finding an active googlepage, they automatically find an active gmail account. Theoretically, I can envision spammers harvesting active e-mail addresses in this manner; once these pages are indexed, a simple google search for "site:googlepages.com" will return thousands of active gmail addresses. I'm surprised that they didn't let people choose their own prefix, as they did with blogger accounts; when I had an active fastmail.fm account, they recommended that you host your public files using an alias, and specifically warn you that the hosting of files under your active mail account could potentially lead to address harvesting. Until Google reveals that it has some ingenious way to stop his kind of address harvesting, I would recommend that anyone that wants to play around with this new service create a "shield" gmail account that they don't plan on using.

I have some other minor irritations, such as the inability to use custom CSS skins and the fine control of the actual HTML of the page. I can't figure out any way to edit the HEAD information of the page, which severely limits my ability to customize the styles or behaviors of the page. I still have yet to explore this fully. However, it's just like me to inspect this gift horse's teeth. It's free web storage at this point, right? For all the times I've tried to transfer semi-large files to another person and had to deal with awkward AIM firewall issues, I think this will definitely come in handy in some fashion or another. I do hope they fix the naming thing.

UPDATE: Well... rather than fix the third-level domain issue noted previously, Google has apparently shut down the creation of new accounts. This actually circumvents the possibility of creating a "shield" account to test this service with a fack gmail address. I would recommend that users be very cautious using this new site without seriously considering the risks of exposing your e-mail address publicly to the spammer-bot community. What's funny is a google for site:googlepages.com is actually returning no hits at this point, but a Yahoo search for the same term returns about 109 active pages. Is it possible that Google is aware of the spam risks to their googlepages users and was hoping to prevent this malicious usage by preventing the pages from being indexed for the time being?

The Set of Unrelated Homonymic Songs that Rock

Ö = { all song titles x : | R(x | > 1 }

Where the function R is a function enumerating all songs with that title that totally rock, but are completely unrelated to one another.

Thus,

Ö = {
"Forever Young",
"Changes",
"One",
"Photograph",
"Push It"
}

NOTE: "It's My Life" was a close contender... but the Bon Jovi song really only has cheese factor.