Well if Gates believes that Apple’s claims about Vista and Macintosh are a pack of lies he obviously thinks that they’re powerful lies because he appears worried. And why wouldn’t he be?

The part about a Vista upgrade being major surgery and the PC guy offeing to donate his peripherals if he doesn’t come through it has some real elements of truth.

Refering to the new I’m a PC, I’m a Mac ads (also in HD).

Please consider this letter notice of your termination, effective immediately. Despite clear expectations and requirements — January temperatures not to exceed 40° F, consistent snow and blustery conditions, minimum of one blizzard with white-out per annum, &c. &c. — you have failed to date to meet expectations and deliver even rudimentary winter weather. A forecast high of 72° today in New York City is clear proof of your failure to do your job.

Make a template, a form, a petition – whatever. I’m so gonna sign this too, Meg!

Now it’s raining cats and dogs again. It’s supposed to be -10 C (14 F). My daughter said today “Dad, do we have something we can cover the snow fortress with?”. A friend and her collected absolutely ALL the snow in our neighbourhood, to make a snow fortress that covered both of them – if they were flat on the ground and didn’t move (it was 30 cm/a foot tall). This is miserable winter.

Screenshot: Front page of Apple.com as of 2. January 2007

The Power Of Video Editing Video – video powered by Metacafe

Related on brilliantdays: How to make special effects in movies

…a “power ring” that gives the user great control over the physical world as long as the wielder has sufficient willpower.

Great. So for 2007 I decide that you all start behaving. Ok? No more hitting each other in the head or taking things from each other. And start sharing stuff, ok?

You are Green Lantern

Green Lantern 70% Superman 65% The Flash 65% Iron Man 65% Hulk 60% Supergirl 56% Robin 55% Spider-Man 50% Catwoman 45% Wonder Woman 41% Batman 30%

Hot-headed. You have strong will power and a good imagination.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

Update I’m in the “Green Lantern Club” with Michael Arrington, Jason Calacanis and Robert Scoble (who really doesn’t like memes like this – I think that’s what he’s trying to say).

My sister is visiting from halfway across the country. I asked her how long she’s staying. She said “Till Sunday.” And I realized… that meant absolutely nothing to me.

This is a good thing. A thing worth celebrating. I had (for that brief time) achieved a state of blissful disconnection from the Real World… to the point where I truly had no idea what day of the week it was. Woo hoo. Here’s to holidays from clocks, calendars, and duties of all kinds.

That is the real beauty of holidays: A “blissful disconnection from the Real World” – what a wonderful expression. And having “…no idea what day of the week it was”.

Thanks, Mary-Anne! You put words on something I have been feeling the last days.

If you’re a U.S. resident, listen up: You must rid your vocabulary of the term “cell phone”. We’re one of the few economies on the planet to refer to a mobile phone accordingly. If you care to find yourself in any of the worthwhile mobile development circles, begin using terms more widely accepted: “mobile” or “mobile phone” or “handset” or “handy”. If you’re not sure which, go for “mobile”. Such as, “Yo dog, check out my new mobile.”

I live in a country where 102,5% of the population has a mobile phone. That doesn’t mean that all have, but that many people have more than one number (and a few still doesn’t have a mobile). In comparison, 82% of all homes have a landline, and 44% have a DSL (or faster) broadband connection. Even with 5 and 6-year olds, 6% of Norwegian kids have their own mobile. By the age of 8, the number is close to 40%, by 12 the number is over 90%.

Make sure your site look good on mobile browsers. I just installed a WordPress plugin for mobile browsers on brilliantdays.com. There’s also a similar plugin if you want to make your site look good when browsed on a Wii.

Twice the last 24 hours it has changed back to the default theme. Very strange. So if brilliantdays.com looks like it just has been set up, now you know why.

(googling “switching back to default theme by itself”…)

Update: This is getting ridiculous. I thought it would help to delete the standard theme. But then WordPress just changes the theme to the empty theme, making the whole site go totally blank for the whole night. Aaaargh. If you have any idea what this is caused by, please leave a comment here.

Update: Problem solved (I hope).

I agree with msjenbee: “This thread is far better than any makeover show I’ve seen on TV.”

But what on earth is Andrew talking about? “See, I was going to say “You look Norwegian,” rather than German.”

But an independent review is to recommend the terms are not extended, a well-placed government source has said.

Gee, let me think. So “Love me do” will be out of copyright in 2012? Out of copyright as in f-r-e-e? Hmmm. Better start selling…

If you live in Norway, you can give money to Medecins Sans Frontieres by contributing when people are coming to your door today. See the official site of Leger uten grenser (Medecins Sans Frontieres in Norwegian).

At this stage in development, the encounters are very carefully placed. Sometimes that means you’re in frantic firefights (on a significantly bigger scale than in Halo 2, although all I will confirm numerically is at least one more Grunt.) but there’s also time for exploratory reflection and the, “Oooh, maybe I can climb up there and check that thing out,” sort of play.

If this holds true, I may have to buy a 360 after all…

The comments at Joystiq has this gem from “existonfile”:

I am all for it feeling like Halo 1′s “beach assault” or “midnight sniping” stage, but if you give me another GD “Library” stage I will kill all of Bungie’s employee’s with my bare hands.

LOL. And so true. One more “Library” stage and I’m selling the 360 again.

I understand what “LordMinogue” talks about too:

Halo had a dark atmosphere (think Battle of Helm’s Deep) while Halo 2 is almost giddy (think the Ents taking Isengard and Orthanic)

The videoes are excellent, and be sure to use my e-mail tip.

Great new ad from Coca-Cola. Truly a brilliant idea. Turn something completely around. When will we see the next ad doing this? Doom monsters sharing Mentos? Hitman dancing in the park with his iPod nano?

This is what our kids will be using.

Look at the way he zooms in and out of the map application. Now remove the map and insert your sound editing app of choice. ProTools. Final Cut Pro. Soundtrack Pro. Audicity.

Now, zoom in and out by moving your fingers outwards on the screen, cut out a piece by pinching it and lifting your hand. Wow. My Wacom tablet almost got 50 years older just by thinking about this.

Speaking of Apple, they are readying a dizzying amount of new products. I wish I could camp out at an Apple store during the World Wide Developer Conference on August 7th. I wish I could say more, but that’d get me sued by Steve Jobs and I don’t need that kind of heck right now.

…says Robert Scoble on his site today. Interesting. He usually knows more than most others…

I especially liked Nathan Ziarek’s ideas on how to share music between members of a family. Infact, Apple should take this even further, and make an Xserve for families.

It could work like this: A special Xserve with special Apple software is installed somewhere safe in your house, a place cold and where no one can hear it. It is used as a central for all media of the different Macs in the house. It stores backups of all pics in iPhoto, all music in iTunes and everybodys documents in general. When someone enters new music on their Mac, it’s sent to the family Xserve so others can use it, both in iTunes and on their iPods.

The family Xserve should also have a tv-tuner and an EPG, making it possible for all users in the house to plan recordings even if they where “off-site” with their Macbooks.

…trash, backup and refresh your Final Cut Pro preferences with the click of a button. Can be used with all Mac OS X compatible versions of Final Cut Pro (version 3.x thru 5.1).

(via The TV Weasel)

…if people look at it and their initial reaction is “Oh, it’s an iPod rip-off,” that’s a pretty crummy first impression. Does anyone at Microsoft realize that rip-offs aren’t considered cool?

A: MY SOURCES SAY NO.

Q: Then again, Pablo Picasso said, “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” By that standard the people on the Zune team must be a bunch of Michelangelos, eh?

A: CONCENTRATE AND ASK AGAIN.

Excellent analysis as always from John Gruber.

28 chapters is – or rather will be – a movie with 28 parts (“chapters”) that will be made by 28 different people or groups from around the world. The story is developed along the way, but will progress more or less in the same way as a regular short movie will, even though the actors and setting will change every 30-45 second. That is: Even though the actors and setting change every chapter, the story of the movie continues like nothing had changed.

28 chapters is one continious movie with 28 actors playing the same main caracter in 28 different locations around the world made by 28 different moviemakers.

As of today, six chapters are finished. So you can still have your 45 seconds of fame.

www.google.com/trends?q=norway&ctab=0&geo=all&…

A asks: “What would you say is the biggest flaw at Microsoft?”

Its inability to see small things when those things are still small.

Hello every boss out there. Copy. Open new text document. Paste. Select all. Font size: 300 pts. Print. Put on wall in front of desk. Read loud every morning.

(And the word “Microsoft” is not the important word. You can replace that with almost any company or brand name I can think of – a few excepted).

The promos will be judged on “…originality (30% of score), creativity (30% of score), and ability to generate interest in watching “The Office.” (40% of score)”. The winners will appear at the end of selected episodes of “The Office” and on NBC.com.

If you came here from MacSurfer, you might want to check out my other Mac posts.

Some recommendations:

Use your body to control the computer
Broadcast vCard
Getting things done with Automator and Spotlight

What I like the best is the fact that you need to move more to use it: You use a pen and make circles, lines across the desktop. Not the static mouse we all have gotten so used to. In other words: More Africa in your computer.

With gems like

• The Top 10 Most Ridiculous Products Of The Future
• Top 10 Movie Sequels That Should Have Been Made
• Top 10 Ads Banned in America in 2005
• Top 10 weirdest USB drives
• The Top 10 Craziest Science Stuff you didn’t know
• 100 things we didn’t know this time last year

If you don’t know Wists, you might want to read why I think Wists is so cool.

In order to learn something, first you must have enough interest to activate whatever brain chemistry it takes to first concentrate on the subject and second to burn the rules into your long term memory. Apparently this is easy for people who believe that their gambling decisions have a strong influence on whether they win or lose. To me, every casino game except the slots looks like an annoying set of rules layered on top of what should be a simple process of taking your money and giving you nothing in return.

I’m not the biggest Dilbert fan, but Scott says some funny things on his blog. I belong to almost the same group as him: The ones who couldn’t bother to learn enough about poker and other gambling to actually have a chance to win something.

Update: A friend of mine (HUGE Dilbert-fan I must add) read this. So I have to explain a bit better what “I’m not the biggest Dilbert fan” means. So: Sometimes I fall off the chair reading Dilbert, more often I just smile, and sometimes it’s not too funny. Or as my friend says: “You’re not smart enough to understand it.” Sure.

Update 2: The discussion about this continued with someone else, and I spent some time reading the latest posts on Scott’s blog. He hits the nail on the head most of the time, and this one from the December 24 is brilliant:

I’m a busy fellow. My normal day is 100% scheduled, including weekends. Christmas requires an additional 20% of my time for about a month, which I manage by eliminating sleep, exercise, recreation and physical intimacy. In return, I get presents that sit in a huge pile for weeks while I wonder where to store them.

LOL. I’m falling off the chair. Scott is now in the “top10″ folder in NetNewsWire.

Go read the December 24 post. If you miss the punchline, read the comments.

Have a look here.

“To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.”

Read more at CNN or download the verdict (pdf).

Judge Jones is a wise man. “…an untestable alternative hypothesis…” is a sentence people should write down.

So even very experienced people like Thomas can be fooled by low prices and great reviews. The company Thomas bought from, had a four star rating at Yahoo Shopping, with almost 900 reviews. How could they get that score if they are just bad?

Here are a few tips of mine when shopping online:

• When shopping online, always Google the name of the site and the words “scam”, “bad customer service” or similar words. Try this with the company Thomas dealt with, PriceRitePhoto…

There will of course be people who complain and cry wolf with even the best shops. And if you google “scam” and some of the bigger ones like Amazon and eBay, you will get thousands of links about scams related to the companies, like phishing.

• When shopping products at Amazon, check the lower ratings first. Sometimes you get interesting information others haven’t told about.
• Advice from people you know is always good, not just a web page somewhere.

My friend Eirik says (freely translated from Norwegian): “The joy of the low price is always shorter than the anger about the low quality.”

It’s from security cameras at the Panama Canal, timelapsing 1 week into 11 minutes. The video is made by Stephan van der Palen, and he has made the software that made this possible, PhotoLapse 2.0:

PhotoLapse is a freeware jpg to avi convertor.
It will convert any number of jpg into a (by codec compressed) movie.
I created it for making timelapse movies of large series of digital jpg stills
and couldn’t find any freeware programs to do the trick.
PhotoLapse needs no installing nor does it modify your registry, just an executable.

It’s for Windows only. See other examples of work made with PhotoLapse at Google Video.

VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field.

Link

London Mind Camp 1.0 is a self-organizing, digitally minded, entrepreneur-driven, socially-aware event. We want to find out what happens when you put 150+ of London’s smartest media and technology thinkers together. A lot of clever people with ideas in a huge space with breakout rooms, Wi-Fi, projectors, white boards – and you.

I’ve always liked Keith Haring’s figures. Buy them from Blik. Stick them on a wall. Dance.

This isn’t about surfing the Web anymore – it’s about having a lifestyle that doesn’t require you to think or reprogram. The days of the blinking 12:00 are long gone, but it’s obvious Microsoft and its vendors don’t know that yet.

Chris Pirillo thinks.

Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.

And 9 more reasons.

A. J. Jacobs outsourches his life to India.

“I’m not wasting time while I drool on my pillow; things are getting done.”

Image Apple or Intel showing lots of übercool products on shows every 4 months, products that we never got to buy?

PS, Toyota (and most other car companies): How about an RSS-feed on your press release pages?

Update: And if you didn’t know – Battlestar Galactica is now available for download in the iTunes Music Store! Watch on the bus, at work, in class, in the pool (oh wait…)

The Noguchi Filing System is fascinating. You put papers you want to file in envelopes, write a title and a date on them and stack them in a shelf. No classification, tagging or anything.

On the left side you put new envelopes, on the right the older ones that you still need.

Over time, some documents will “survive” and stay in the shelf – on the right side. Other envelopes are emptied and taken out of the shelf. You assign time once in a while to go through your documents, which will be quite fast as all the envelopes are marked and easy to open.

Unless you have several hundred envelopes, I think this would work! Anyone who have tried this exact system? Comment below or contact me.

“Early in the game it is often best to get out as soon as possible so as to have more opportunities to buy property. Later in the game, it is best to stay in jail as long as possible to avoid landing on an opponent’s property.” – Truman Collins.

Go ahead – start rating. And DO people have some amzing axes…!

pluto

Originally uploaded to Flickr Brandnewbrain.

For several years my name will be flying through space on a CD on a NASA spacecraft. I like the idea.

This is a good thing. Start the competition! Hotel wifi has been too expensive for long, and hopefully others (like Best Western) will follow. See this post at Flickr.

I recently paid NOK 50 (7,84 US Dollars or 6,33 Euro) for 30 minutes in a Norwegian hotel. It was at Fru Haugans hotel in Mosjøen, Norway. Way too expensive, even though it was better paying a lot for it than not getting it – which was the option at the other two hotels I asked at in Mosjøen.

Update

Doc Searls posts about ridiculous prices for broadband at Royal Sonesta Hotel Boston. 56K is free, Premium service is $10 day. Bally’s in Las Vegas is even worse.

If you experience bad service with wifi at hotels, upload a screenshot or even a picture from the hotel at Flickr. Tag it “bad service”.

Update 2
Hotelchatter lists best wifi hotels 2006. The winners are Kimpton hotels.

Kimpton doesn’t count on their lobby WiFi network to reach the top floors of their buildings, instead, at the hotels we visited, Kimpton actually had two separate WiFi networks–one for the lobby and the other for the guest rooms. Both networks are easily accessible by clicking on a standard terms and conditions. Furthermore, during our Kimpton visits, friendly staffers went out of their way to ask us if we were getting a good reliable WiFi signal in both the lobby and our room, and guess what? We were.

“You will spin the dough counter-clockwise if you are right handed; clockwise if you are left-handed. Before you toss, reverse spin about 1/4 turn – then gently but quickly spin the dough and toss it up in the air simultaneously.”

Some background first: In Norway, wine and spirits are only sold through staterun shops called “Vinmonopolet” (or “Polet” – as most people say). Recently there has been a case where employees in Vinmonopolet are suspected to get money from wine importers, to have the importers wines on Vinmonoplets shelves.

The executives in Vinmonopolet gave their yes to an internal investigation, where lots of e-mail of employees were searched, both job-related and private. Including deleted documents and e-mails still on servers.

Minister Dørum does not like this, and wants to improve the laws protecting employees privacy.

(Original image from sxc.hu)

Parlamentic leader of Dørums party Venstre (the liberal party), Trine Skei Grande says to nrk.no:

“Recently the Minister of justice started a project that will examine everything concerning individuals doing surveillance on others, and employers control of e-mail is something that should be included in this project”, says Grande.

(My translation – feel free to correct me in comments if you have a better one!).

R.E.M. is playing here in Oslo tonight.

I feel like the man on the moon.