Month: May 2005

Will Young – Friday

A DJ friend of mine in Jordan first introduced me to Will Young over a year ago, and I remember really liking the songs I heard. Lately I’ve been listening a lot to his song “Leave Right Now“, which I really love. I also caught his new album’s title track “Friday’s Child” on some music channel, and I decided to get the album.

So, I finally got around to listening to Will Young’s album “Friday’s Child”, and I have to say that I really really like it.
It’s easy-going pop music with soulful tunes and a jazzy touch, nice lyrics and Will’s warm voice floating over it. Really good stuff.

My favorite songs off the album up to now are: Leave Right Now, Very Kind, Your Game, Love Is a Matter of Distance.

Will Young is the winner from the first season of the UK’s Pop Idol show.

I truly recommend this album. The songs are very smooth and Will’s voice is so soothing.

English Al-Jazeera in 2006

One more year to wait…

Al Jazeera has announced it will launch an English-language channel at the start of 2006, as it named a senior management team.

British national Nigel Parsons will head operations at the company’s Doha headquarters, while Trish Carter, formerly of New Zealand television, will head a new Asia desk in Kuala Lumpur.

Sue Philips, formerly employed by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp, will take charge of European coverage in London, while Will Stebbins, formerly with Associated Press Television News, will head a North American desk in Washington.

[Source: Al Jazeera]

Since Al Jazeera started, I thought the best thing they could do is start an English language channel. So when they started talking about the possibility, I thought it was great, and I couldn’t wait for it to launch.

What excites me about it is the fact that it will present news from another point of view for the whole world.

I thought it was supposed to launch this year, and they’ve had recruiting ads up on their Arab site for some time now.
Anyway, I hope it’s worth the wait.

Microsoft’s Xbox 360 Unveiled

Xbox 360

Microsoft finally unveiled the new Xbox 360, their next generation game console with which they aim to take over the gaming console market from Sony.

In development for three years, the Xbox 360 will include a DVD player, a 20-gigabyte hard-disk drive, high-def game support and a 500MHz ATI graphics processor. Owners will be able to remove and upgrade the hard disk, which is used to store games in progress and digital music and photo files.

Consumers will be able to hook up music players and PCs running the Windows operating system to the Xbox. They’ll be able to substitute a game’s music with their own.

Unlike the first Xbox, users will be able to stand the Xbox 360 vertically. They’ll also be able to buy a variety of front panels, such as a wood veneer, part of an effort to make the design, and not just the performance, a selling feature

The console will be released at the end of the year in Europe, Japan and North America.

Check out it’s full technical specifications.

This is looking cool. I wonder what Sony’s Playstation 3, which is due out this year too and will most probably be unveiled at or a bit before the E3 games show, will be like.

I was waiting for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 to come out this year so I could compare and choose which one to buy.

[More: Engadget, Bloomberg, CNet News]

Pro-Israel Bias in US TV News

A two-year study by If Americans Knew of US network television coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict revealed troubling patterns of omissions and disparities in emphasis that profoundly hamper the ability of US viewers to understand the conflict.

ABC, CBS and NBC gave 3.0 to 4.4 times more coverage to Israeli deaths than they gave to Palestinian deaths in 2000-2001, at the beginning of the intifada or popular uprising against Israeli occupation, and again in 2004.

The difference is even greater when the networks cover children, giving 9.0 to 12.8 times more coverage in 2004 to deaths of Israeli children than to deaths of Palestinian children.

Why the bias?
Israeli public-relations campaigns; journalists who are based in Israel; US news media bending to pro-Israel pressures; or pro-Israel leanings of reporters, editors or media owners.

[More: If Americans Knew Report]
[Source: Al Jazeera]

Crazy Clutter

I always thought my old bachelor appartment was the most unorganized place on earth. I had my clothes thrown all over the sofas. The tables had pyramids of empty takeaway boxes, soda cans, chips bags and what not. My shoes were scattered all around the place. The dishes were piled for ages in the sink.
In short, my place was certified as the most unorganized place by all my friends.

Even nowadays my wife goes mad at how I just leave my stuff lying around all over our appartment.

To me, organization is about putting your stuff where it’s the easiest for you to put them when you’re done with them 😛

Anyway, now after seeing these pictures, I think I’ve truly been outdone, lol.
This is just crazy.

[Via: eclecticism]

Google Web Accelerator

A few days ago, Google released Google Web Accelerator, a tool created to accelerate web sites and pages.

This reminded me of the early days of the internet when most people connected through slow modems and had to download applications like this to speed things up a bit.

I also knew a lot of people would come up with a bunch of privacy concerns and ramble on about how Google can now track every single move we do online. They did. Althought I think Google already had a lot of that information through their Toolbar. Plus a little reminder that this information is available to all our ISPs already.

Anyway, I thought I’d download the application and give it a spin.
I didn’t really feel a big difference in speed with it, but one thing I did feel is annoyed.
Applications like this are based on creating a cache of web sites and pages and loading from it instead of getting the page from the server everytime. This one also uses prefetching of available links on a page.
Now, what’s annoying about all this is that you don’t always get served fresh pages when they’re changed, you sometimes end up being shown pages of other logged in users, and some links you don’t want are prefetched.

It also raises a number of problems in web applications, some that I have experienced myself while using Backpack. Links are prefetched and cached resulting in the web app functionality being messed up.
More on the problems with web apps here and here.

So I’ve uninstalled this application and don’t plan on using it again for the time being. I don’t really advise you guys to use it either. Not for now, at least.

Anyway, Google have taken the application off their site saying that they have currently reached their maximum capacity of users and are actively working to increase the number of users they can support.

iPod Vending Machines

iPod vending machine

So they’ve added iPod vending machines to some airports in the US.
I think that’s a really cool way to market iPods and get more of them out there.

Apple mostly has a thing for coming out with good products but not distributing them well enough. Especially in our parts of the world.

In Tunisia for example, the iPod and other Apple products have barely been marketed and distribution is pretty poor with only a few products available and at very high prices.

I was very interested in getting an iPod, but when I checked with the official distributor here, I only found iPod mini’s at a price much more expensive than that of the iPod.

Ok maybe, Tunisia isn’t such a big market for Apple, but the gulf is a potentially big one for them that they’re not really taking enough care of either.

[Via: Boing Boing]