(sick today with sore throat. ouch. late posting, but got lots of sleep! :-)
You may have seen the Philips ad where a couple with a big flat panel TV try placing it in various spots around the house and end up putting it on the ceiling above their bed. That got me thinking about how flat panel displays are changing home decor and furniture design. With an entertainment center, you’re usually setting your television on a shelf or you have a big standalone TV. I suspect flat panel TVs are either hung on the wall or stand up like flat panel monitors. And the entertainment center, if you have one, still needs to have some depth for the A/V equipment. Or perhaps they’ll start designing A/V equipment sideways and heavily market flat electrostatic speakers and one day all your audio/video (and probably computer/Internet) stuff will be sitting right up against the wall. More room is always good! I’m wondering how much my cat will hate me if I replace my warm, just-the-right-size-for-sleeping-on computer monitor with a flat panel.

The Journal of Mundane Behavior. Its mission is “to recapture the extraordinary essence of our everyday lives”. The inaugural edition includes essays on shaving, elevators in Japan, and “plain talk”. (found on Yahoo’s Weekly Picks, which is actually in straightforward prose this week instead of their usual constructed nonsense.)

Landon received his $99 (plus shipping) iOpener today so he can start doing that Linux hack. The keyboard has a PIZZA key, which has an icon of a slice of pizza on it, to the right of the spacebar! You can see it on this page. I thought it was hilarious. All the other special keys are on the top of the keyboard, but pizza warranted special placement! Maybe they worried that you’d get so wrapped up in surfing, you’d forget to eat, but the conveniently placed key would remind you that food is just a click away. After all, I wouldn’t want someone to sue them for net-addiction induced malnutrition. If I had a customized keyboard, my special keys would be: dial-out to my ISP, log onto Blogger, and automagically clean the kitty litter box.

Interesting NY Times article: “Difference in News Cycles Is Testing the New Media“. It studies how CNBC broke the story of the eBay/Yahoo merger talks and the differences between the ensuing web, cable news, and newspaper reports.

I like the Clif Luna bar, which is a sports bar designed by and for women. I enjoy it more than the other sporty bars I’ve tried: Powerbar (yuk), Balance Bars (only Honey Peanut is edible), Clif bars (yummy but dense and too big), Clif Kicks (great size, but still dense and are they still making them?). With a Luna bar I can imagine I’m eating a dense Rice Krispy treat with a yummy chocolate coating on one side. My favorite flavors are the Chocolate Pecan Pie and Nutz Over Chocolate, and I want to try the new S’mores. I’ve been wondering if men have taken to eating them too since everyone can enjoy the texture and flavor. Or maybe this is like the time I was feeling not-so-peppy and, while scouting around the office for vitamins, was offered “Mega Man” vitamins, which I refused to take after reading that one of the ingredients was “Prostate Glandular”. (Just FYI, there isn’t any “Ovarian Glandular” in Luna bars.)

I bought a beautiful book at Kepler’s yesterday. Mapping the Mind, by Rita Carter, has gorgeous graphics, well-written text. It’s wonderfully designed and laid out, easy on the eyes. And the information is cutting edge, though I hope that when my kids are my age, it will be laughingly obsolete.

John Cusack’s new movie looks hilariously awesome. High Fidelity opens March 31. From what I can see in the trailer, it looks like John gets to portray his typical John Cusack character again, though this movie’s based on a book of the same name, so it’s not one he and his pals cooked up together. And, for any women out there who need a reason to drag your boyfriends along, you can intone the three magic words: “Catherine Zeta-Jones“.

Thailand bans caffeine in six provinces. Guess I won’t be going there with any typical hacker friends soon. I assume they serve Thai iced tea and coffee in Thailand too, not just American Thai restaurants. The point of the ban is to curb methamphetamine manufacturing. Maybe they’ll just give caffeine the prestige of an illegal drug instead.

I was reminiscing about the eighties sci-fi show “V” and suddenly realized that even though it was long gone before the web conquered the world, people have probably put up web sites devoted to it. And indeed, the V Web Ring lists 54 sites. This one is pretty cool. In case you’re having trouble remembering, perhaps because you were but a wee babe at the time, V was about alien lizard people, “the Visitors”, who put on human masks, came to Earth, and pretended to be friendly while they started storing up humans and water to transport back to their own planet for sustanence. The Visitors had excellent PR, even after they were revealed to be lizard-like. Good PR makes all the difference. Those lizard people could’ve had an astronomical IPO.

Ford is buying Land Rover from BMW. They already own Jaguar, so their British car collection is growing.