Project OrielEmbracing Change

* Image: Before phones had built-in contact lists

* Quote: “Ever since Boot Camp appeared on the scene, there have been several comments about Macs being better Windows machines than Windows machines. The weird thing is it’s actually true.” – Steven Frank

* Best iTunes competitor yet: AmazonMP3.com “There’s very high “it just works” factor here. Music is easy to find, easy to buy, and easy to download once you have the Amazon MP3 Downloader installed. When you download music with Amazon MP3 Downloader, it simply shows up in iTunes, as you’d expect, with no manual importing or additional action required on the user’s part. Sync your iPods, and the new music shows up there, too.” – Daring Fireball

* Open Source Software in K-12 Education – the Open Minds Conference

* National Tap Water Quality Database. Check out Cottage Grove, MN or search for your own city

* Google wants to help you find cheap airline tickets

* “the NY Times has discontinued their Times Select subscription program and made much more of their 150+ years of content available for anyone to read” Find the first mention of the world wide web (1993), early reports of Lincoln’s assassination, reports of Germans using mustard gas in the First World War, the Titanic sinking report, etc. http://www.kottke.org/07/09/gems-from-the-archive-of-the-new-york-times

* Google is offering $25 million to the first who can get an unmanned craft onto the moon and transmit back high-def video with their Lunar X Prize

* Google Docs now sports a presentation tool (like Power Point) in addition to their documents (like Word) and spreadsheets (like Excel) http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/our-feature-presentation.html

* There are big Bruce Springsteen fans are among us. Check out his official site. For one concert, ticketmaster sold 18,000 tickets in 6 minutes.

* Professional Food Photographer talking about warming up the oven for Fall cooking and discovering that he enjoys apples.

* Fair Use Worth More to Economy Than Copyright says Computer and Communications Industry Association (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc) http://informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201805939

* “Satisfaction is people-powered customer service for everything. It’s a Web service that uses “community-sourcing” to provide better support for products and services, with or without company involvement. Satisfaction’s open discussion-based system allows companies, their customers and partners to work together to answer questions, identify problems and bugs, share great ideas for how to make products better, and connect in unexpected ways.” http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/09/satisfaction_cl.html

* Quote: “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” – Douglas Adams

Arrr, yes, tomorrow is September 19th. Talk Like a Pirate Day. T’ honor the day, we read How I Became I Pirate t’ our oldest son for his goin’-to-bed book.

Check out www.talklikeapirateday.com today, or o’ course, Wikipedia always has good info too. Be sure to brush up on your Pirate Phrases before y’ get too far into the day!

If talkin’ isn’t your thin’, then try readin’ Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts by Frank Richard Stockton written in 1898. If you prefer listenin’, thar is a free audiobook from the good folks at LibriVox.

Alternati’ely, you can just run your emails through the Pirate Speak Translator before sendin’ ‘em.

Ye’ll ne’er get me buried booty!

* Game: Bloxorz is a fascinating puzzle. Thomas had stage 1 and 2 down, I got to stage 11 (code to get there is 291709). Very addictive. http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/games/bloxorz

* “One million iPhones in 74 days — it took almost two years to achieve this milestone with iPod,” said Apple chief executive Steve Jobs. http://www.apple.com/iphone/

* Wine Wedge solves need for traditional wine rack: http://unclutterer.com/archives/2007/09/wine_wedge_solves_need_for_tra.php

* Did you know you can send money to anyone with only their email address? One of PayPal’s many features: http://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_send-money transaction Fees are paid by the recipient, and are 2.9% + $.30 per transaction. Not bad for avoiding writing or depositing checks. https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_display-receiving-fees-outside

* http://www.librivox.org/ … PC Mag says “Audiobooks are ridiculously expensive: The latest ‘Harry Potter’ title lists at $80 on CD. Librivox, however, provides pod fodder for free. The site features a collection of public-domain books read by volunteers-and anyone can volunteer. The audio quality is good. Some narrators are better than others-some may have listened to a little too much NPR-but almost everything is at least decent, and some performances are quite good. The collection (a bit more than 800 Project Gutenberg works so far) is a bit of a hodgepodge, with everything from Walt Whitman to Edgar Rice Burroughs. You’ll have to wait about a hundred years for The Deathly Hallows, though.”

* As of today, the year 2007 is 68.5% complete. I thought you would want to know. :-) http://www.vpcalendar.net/Julian_Date.html

* School has started, and if your students are looking to get by easy on the reading, point them to LitSum http://litsum.com/ — Free Literature Summaries and Study Guides. Cliff notes for the modern age.

* Apple updated all of their iPods this week. The iPod nano has a new look http://www.apple.com/ipodnano/ and they introduced an iPhone-like iPod, the “iPod touch” http://www.apple.com/ipodtouch/

* Speaking of the iPhone, want one but think it is too expensive? Apple dropped the price by 1/3 this week to only $399. http://www.apple.com/iphone

* A game link! PC Mag says about Line Rider “There’s something addictive about sending a fragile scarf-clad man hurtling down a steep, crudely drawn slope on a sled. This simple online game lets you draw any kind of sledding course for your character, who will bravely sled it with no regard for personal safety. If you really want to be wowed, YouTube has some crazy clips of Line Rider players’ creations.” http://www.official-linerider.com/play.html and http://youtube.com/results?search_query=line+rider

* Avonelle, our FFA developer has posted that she is experimenting with Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) http://www.coolbits.nu/Topic.aspx?topic=RFID find out more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFID