Bob Dylan wrote some amazing songs back in his day (which was around the time I was in diapers), but looks like he’s now at the point at which he’ll criticize the music biz with one side of his mouth while sucking up cash for endorsements with the other.

Quoting from this article : “Bob Dylan says the quality of modern recordings is ‘atrocious,’ and even the songs on his new album sounded much better in the studio than on disc. … Dylan said he does his best to fight technology, but it’s a losing battle. ‘Even these songs probably sounded ten times better in the studio when we recorded ’em. CDs are small. There’s no stature to it.'” read more

Macrumours.com notes that Apple doesn’t score particularly well in environmental awareness. Quoting from their site:

Late last week, environmental watchdog Greenpeace released their Guide to Greener Electronics (pdf) which rates how eco-friendly different tech companies are based on publicly available information. Apple scored 4th lowest, beating only Leveno, Motorola, and Acer. Among the top-scorers were Nokia and Dell.

[quoting from the report] For a company that claims to lead on product design, Apple scores badly on almost all criteria. The company fails to embrace the precautionary principle, withholds its full list of regulated substances and provides no timelines for eliminating toxic polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and no commitment to phasing out all uses of brominated flame retardants (BFRs). Apple performs poorly on product take back and recycling, with the exception of reporting on the amounts of its electronic waste recycled. read more

This article in today’s New York Times about the new self-created suspect in JonBenet Ramsey’s killing describes Boulder as a “rustic college town.” Okay, there’s a big university here, and yes, the city is about 125,000 people which makes it a town in the eyes of a big city, but rustic? I don’t get that, particularly with all of the commercial development that’s happened in the years since she was killed. Clearly that reporter has never seen Ward, for instance. read more

Just in case you’re curious about what’s going to happen down the road with airline security, in the wake of the recently foiled liquid-bomb plot, there’s an article by a Time correspondent here that pretty much paints the picture. It’s about airport security in Israel, a country that has forgotten far more about conflict and terrorism than we know, that has never had an outbound airplane hijacked.

The gist of it is this: you can’t win this game by looking for the weapon. You have to look for the people whielding the weapons. It’s like any other arms race: as soon as one side invents a new weapon, the other side invents a way to disarm it, a means to protect against it, or a bigger weapon. Ultimately nobody wins. Just like copy-protection for software, DVDs, and CDs: a few bright people inventing ways to prevent something from being copied are no match for an endless number of fanatics figuring out ways to circumvent that protection. read more

Our neighbor Lisa has two pugs. I’m not much of a dog person but I have to admit that pugs are kind of charming. They’re compact, good-natured, and so goofy-looking that it’s hard not to like them.

A couple of days ago, in a moment of weakness and insanity, Lisa agreed to board two other pugs–pugs belonging to friends of hers who were about to leave town on vacation and found out at the 11th hour that their kennel couldn’t take their pugs. So we now have four pugs of varying ages and dimensions next door. read more