David Hasselhoff: International Superstar, Domestic Joke

All the war, famine, natural disasters and bloodshed may have convinced some that the end of the world is near, but I've never bought it. That is, until I heard about Hasselhoff: The Musical. It seems that "The Hoff", as he is known by fans, is planning to give audiences an intimate look at his genius by creating a musical about his life. It will reportedly open in Australia, where this video has surfaced.

The musical comes on the heels of a rough couple years for The Hoff. Once a hero to the dim-witted masses, a recent divorce, self-inflicted wounds and drunken antics have all taken the shine off the international superstar and domestic joke. You can now routinely find The Hoff at celebrity events shouting "don't you know who I am?" No, sir. Sadly, we do not.

Hans Rosling on TED Talks

This is a really fascinating presentation from the 2006 TED conference. Rosling provides very compelling visualizations of public health and global economic data.

Just downloaded Windows Vista Beta and installed it on a fairly new Dell Precision M70 (which I hate, BTW). It literally took 2 hours to install, after which it rebooted several times and then presented me with the Blue Screen of Death. Hooray!

My advice? Don't try the Beta. Don't even try the final release. Switch to a Mac. :)

Smart (?) Car

Get a load of this little Smart car. SF Gate did a feature article on its rising popularity. Now, I'm all for smaller, smarter cars, but this one doesn't seem to make any sense. It costs somewhere in the mid $20,000 range and it gets a mere 40 MPG. Exqueeze me? I'm gonna pay $25k for a car that barely seats 2, has 60hp and only gets me 40mpg? That's just plain silly. Do these cars have a chance of being popular outside of a small niche of the population willing to make a somewhat rediculous and expensive social statement? In a word, no.

Web auctions, the new jackpot for middle Americans - Yahoo! News

Regular folk attend this years' eBay Live! event hoping to learn the secret to making big money on eBay. The truth is, it's just like most anything else. A lot of work.

Everyone's buzzin 'bout Parallels

Have you heard? Parallels, a little startup that makes virtualization software has just released Parallels for Intel Macs. What is Parallels, you ask? It's a piece of software that mimics a PC and lets you run Windows on your Mac.

What's the big deal about that, you ask? Hasn't VirtualPC been doing this for years? In a word, yes. But this time it's different. This time, the virtual Windows you run on top of the Mac is not unbearably slow. No, in fact it's about as fast as most relatively fast PCs on the market today. That's thanks in large part to the fact that there's less emulating to do since the new Macs run on an Intel platform. Less emulating means faster performance.

You're still skeptical. I can sense it. You want to know why this is such a big deal when Apple already introduced Boot Camp which lets you run Windows on any Intel Mac. Again, this time it's different. Parallels lets you run Windows in a window on your Mac desktop. Follow that? Run Windows in a window. Funny, huh? And amazing too, because it means you don't have to reboot your machine in order to switch to Windows. You can work in both OSes at the same time!

Fine, you say. So it does all that and makes toast. Who on Earth actually needs to run both Windows and Mac OS at the same time? Well, people like me. I am a Web developer who prefers to work on a Mac. I also need to ensure that my creations work equally as well (okay, almost equally) on a PC as they do on a Mac. Given that IE/Windows is about 90+ percent of the general Web population, it's pretty important that I have a Windows platform to test on. Now I can do that without needing 2 machines or a reboot. You have no idea how sweet that is... unless you find yourself in a similar situation. There are also some apps that run only on the PC that are really cool. Take Microsoft One Note for example. I have tried about a dozen note taking apps for Mac OS, but none of them holds a candle to One Note. Now I can run One Note and still keep my Mac! Hallelujah! Oh, and don't even get me started on how much better Google's Picasa is than iPhoto. Sheesh!

There. Are you convinced that Parallels is the coolest thing to happen to computers since the Apple IIe? Are you ready to run out and pay top dollar for a PC in Mac clothing? Perhaps not, but don't begrudge me my happiness. There's so little that gets me excited these days.

Food Network.... why?

So, I'm channel surfing this weekend and I happen to catch the Food Network show Unwrapped. I've seen Unwrapped before, but this time something sets me off. I'm watching some candy mnufacturing process and it starts to occur to me that even though this is a candy I haven't seen before, it's the same damn process I've already seen 100 times on this show. I mean, how many vats of rotating hard candies can you watch before you get bored? The answer is one. No more Unwrapped for me, thank you.