More active filtering...

David Letterman: "It's getting ugly out there.  The governor, the recall Governor, Gray Davis, was making fun of Arnold Schwarzenegger's accent.  He said if you want to be governor of California, you have to be able to pronounce it.  And so, this upset Arnold, and Arnold said to be governor of California, you should be able to govern it."  Yep.

Robert Scoble has an interesting perspective on 9/11/01.  "Wow how has life changed in just those short two years for me.  Car wreck.  Divorce.  Move.  Ship Radio.  Grandma died.  Lay myself off from UserLand.  Get job at NEC.  Engagement to Maryam.  Wedding.  Move.  Get job at Microsoft.  Move.  Whew."  I moved and changed jobs in the last two years, too.  Two years can be a long time...

The other day I noted Bill Joy's departure from Sun, the company he co-founded and led as a technical visionary for many years.  It reminded me of Bill's controversial and thought-provoking Wired cover story from 2000: Why the Future Doesn't Need Us.  "From the moment I became involved in the creation of new technologies, their ethical dimensions have concerned me, but it was only in the autumn of 1998 that I became anxiously aware of how great are the dangers facing us in the 21st century."  I think he overstates the problem, but he makes a good point.  If you haven't read it - or haven't read it for a while - check it out...

Important news, apparently Orange is launching the Treo 600 in Britain next week!  Does this mean the U.S. launch is imminent?  Who knows - I hope so.

So, I signed up for Vonage!  This is a Voice-over-IP (VoIP) service that lets you use your broadband Internet connection as a 'phone line.  A little back of the envelope figuring convinced me this could save us some serious money.  Stay tuned for my review...

Vint Cerf, one of the original architects of the Internet, hears VoIP calling.

Here's another way to use your Internet connection for voice - Skype.  They offer a P2P voice chat service.  Maybe there will finally be a reason to have a microphone on my computer?  [ via John Robb, who says it works great. ]

Sharp is going to start selling their 3D laptop.  "The computer display produces 3-D images by sending a slightly different image to the right eye and the left eye at once by bending them in different angles, according to Sharp.  The special screen has applications in architecture, medicine, science and gaming."  Yeah, applications in medicine.  I can see Aperio's virtual slide images being displayed in 3D.  COOL.

Think movies aren't going the way of music?  DVD recorders are flying off the shelves, and blank DVDs are now under $2 each.  Yeah, people are just burning old episodes of I Love Lucy...

Sony has announced a PVR which records video on memory sticks, intended to be played back on their Clie PDAs.  Yet another way to watch I Love Lucy.

Wired: BigChampagne is watching you.  And big music is hiring them to do it...  (Note: this is "watching you" in the Tivo sense of watching what users in aggregate are doing, not watching you in the sense of watching you.)  [ via Cory Doctorow ]

Andrew Anker ponders Tivo's first-mover disadvantage.  "Tivo suffers from a great entrepreneurial problem - it's a feature, not a product."  I don't know about that.  Almost any product can be a feature of a more complicated product.

Messing about in boats dept: Please check out the Mari Cha IV, the world's largest racing yacht, 140' long.  This is about twice as long as the America's Cup boats, which means everything is about eight times as big.  (And probably at least eight times as expensive.)  Wow.

Blogger is going back to free!  Now that they're part of Google, they are no longer going to charge for their Blogger Pro service.  If you've ever thought about starting a blog but didn't know what or how, this is your chance.  See you online :)

And here we have a USB-attached noodle strainer.  The uses for this boggle the mind.  I am not making this up.  Really.  [ via Gizmodo ]