Artists are born as such...

C. and L. are two 5 year old adorable twins who attend the kindergarden at a tiny little village in East Flanders, Belgium, with a wee little kindergarden for a dozen or so toddlers.

Yesterday, Feb 25th, was Rita's birthday (my celeb spouse you already heard of in earlier blogs) and, when she arrived at her desk this morning, the twins surprised her with two beautiful cards they designed themselves.

I like both cards equally, but the one shown here is quite funny with all objects in the classroom shown in a typical for young kids perspective-less space. Rita in olive green jacket and blue skirt (I didn't know she had those), the table where the toddlers eat at noon with a tablecloth with pets on, a file cabinet against the wall with Rita's admin files, a dozen light blue midget chairs, black tiles covering the floor, a clock on the wall, etc...

Beautiful compositions from two kids that promise to become serious artists one day... who knows how prophetic this statement of mine can (will) be?!

Too good to let go...

I know... it's not fair to make a fool of the Clintstones, especially now that they are losing the election battle... but this photoshopped shot was too good to let go...

I wonder whether Fidel will get to read my blog... I wish!

AppleTV

I owned one of these for some time but I gotta tell you, I haven't used it much. And because it can get really hot on top (you can bake an egg on a hot day) I usually pull out its power cable, especially after one day my spouse rushed to me in panic afraid that the thing would blow up in her face. I don't know why Apple doesn't fix this. We are not used of their products getting at such high temps; I mean, compared to Vaio, Apple laptops are icebergs.

Anyways, yesterday Apple released version 2.0 of their AppleTV software. Let me tell you! This promises to bring them over the tipping point to another iPod look-alike in terms of success.

The seemlessness by which things happen with this new update is stunning. Let's talk about pictures first. Mac geeks with .Mac accounts post their shots on .Mac galleries. The rest of us probably use Flickr. So, you go out there on a shooting spree and come back with dozens of shots and you die to show the world (family and friends) what you done. If any of your targets owns an AppleTV (your mom for instance) then all it takes is turn on her TV set and the AppleTV set-top and enjoy a slideshow of your shots in HD (from Flickr or .Mac galleries).

As for your digital video creations, if you wanna show-off your Spielberg talents to your friends and family, all it takes is post those on your YouTube account and then again, your mom, dad and the rest of the family and friends can enjoy your masterpieces by pointing their AppleTV box to your account at YouTube.

A third amazing pandora's box AppleTV opened up are the thousands of podcasts, especially videocasts from all around the world. Especially if you point your store to the US, you will be overwhelmed by the vast content folks already provide in the form of pod- and videocasting. Wanna see the ABC LATE NIGHT NEWS? Piece of cake. Prefer CBS? or MSNBC? Whatever! You name it, they got it. Download speed? Phenomenal. Just a few secs for lengths of casts up to 10 minutes. Quality? Better than SD, sometimes better than DVD. Not HD though, unless you want to watch HD clips. Beware of your bandwidth and download storage being consumed in the process though. HDs are fun but still need GBs where other resolutions need MB's. But, let's be serious; it's the content that counts, not so much the quality, as long as it's still on SD or DVD quality and it's not a National Geo documentary, that is.

As for the rest, you can buy music, TV shows, movies, etc directly via wireless connection to your router (no need for any other PC to be on for that purpose) and you can also channel your laptop's music to the set-top as it's often connected to a better set of active loudspeakers than the laptop.

You can even download (via syncing with any PC or Mac) any content of your liking (audio and video) for permanent storage on AppleTV's hard disk and play it back when you're lying in your sofa or bed (as in my case, since the box is connected to my bedroom TV). So, you don't need to stream that same content from live PCs/Macs (which seems to often be the problem with the media managers of the competition). On the other hand, if you prefer streaming, that's fine too, unless your kids are making heavy use of the wireless network at the same time which might introduce some hick-ups to your streaming.

In conclusion, AppleTV 2.0 provides an intelligent box for all sorts of media display, own or third party buys or rents, from music and slideshows to motion pictures and TV shows or your own HD or SD productions. I am sure this whole thing is going to start an avalance of success eventually. I don't even mind the high temperature or the panicking spouse any more...

We want more! We want more! We want more!

Cool. Yahoo wants more dough to sell its skin. How much more? We'll have to wait and see. Rumor has it that Microsoft is prepared to move to 35 or 36 bucks a share from its original bid of 31. In the meantime, MSFT shares lost the best part of 15% off their market cap since the takeover bid was announced. And they are still heading south. If the deal gets thru it's gonna be tough on Microsoft, not only in terms of the challenges associated to joining the two monsters into one organization but also in terms of how much cash is gonna be left in monkey Boy's pockets as well.

Very likely that the whole thing was really a scum, as was reported earlier. I wonder. Watch this space.

Learning from the other Steve...

Arik Hesseldahl is a technology writer for BusinessWeek.com. In addition, he writes the Byte of the Apple column. Previously, Hesseldahl was a senior editor and technology columnist at Forbes.com. Before that, he was senior editor at Electronic News, a contributor to Electronic Business Asia, and a reporter, columnist, and business editor at Idaho State Journal. Hesseldahl is a graduate of the University of Oregon and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Good ol' Arik wrote an open letter to Monkey boy. Go read the whole article at BusinessWeek. Here's a taste (a part where he tells Ballmer to focus like the other Steve in California does... the one who invented the iPod):

"So who has focus? That other Steve. You know, the turtle-necked guy in California who keeps annoying you by selling iPods and computers that typically don't run on Windows. You could learn a lot from him. Focus saved his company from oblivion. Apple (AAPL) does what it's good at, and it expands into new areas carefully. (Examples: iPod, iTunes music store, Apple retail store, iPhone.) Consider this: With sales data showing that Mac computers are growing more popular than ever among consumers, you might think it's a perfect time for Apple to ride that momentum and go after corporate computing. But it won't. Why? Apple knows it wouldn't work because you have the corporate market all tied up with your pals Dell (DELL) and HP."

LMAO...