We all know that Asia has a lot of people, but did you know there are 55,000,000 kids in China that take piano lessons. I haven't found anything to back this up, yet, but just wait until I Google it. In other news, my iBook is "in the shop" with a bad harddrive. More to come on "Karma, as Illustrated by AC's Apple experiences" when I get it back.

Instead of saving links by emailing them to myself too look at or act on later, I'm just going to post here, and hope I come back to them sometime soon. (Also, I'm editorializing a few links, well.)
Special thanks to Engadget, Slashdot, and Boing Boing for supplying a lot of links, and to Bloglines for aggregating them all.

First up is this, page that describes how you can download This American Life episodes instead of streaming them. Right now, if you want to download the programs, you have to buy them at Audible.com. I haven't figured out how to make this work, and I'll probably wait until someone puts torrents of the episodes online.

There wasn't very much information in this article, but it seems that there may soon be peace in the battle between hot dog makers and hot dog bun makers. Two companies have agreed to market packages with the same number of dogs and the same number of buns, unfortunately, neither company is one of which you've ever heard.

Do you remember Oregon Trail? Here's an interview with the creators. Scroll down past the cake to get to an interview with the three creators.

STOP THE PRESS: A Boston sportscaster has filed suit against the writer of a comic strip. Bob Lobel is suing the writer of "Get Fuzzy" for a comic on May 13th that implies he is is drunk during telecasts. From the Boston Globe: "His on-air demeanor mixes humor and news, and the occasional lapses of focus that have led to rumors that he may have been drinking before going on the air." For some reason, they don't mention his lack of balance or bright red nose. Not sure if this is lawsuit, worthy, though, because Darby Conley, the writer of "Get Shorty" seems to only have written what most people in Boston think. From the Associated Press article, Lobel's attorney, Harry Manion, had this to say: "People can say, 'Is he on something?' The answer is, 'No.' You can sort of bandy it around a water cooler. That's one thing, but to publish it in 450 newspapers? Here, Lobel said, 'That's enough.'" Which kind of plays to the fact that people ARE talking about it. Don't mistake my coverage of this as any slight at Lobel. I see nothing wrong with drinking while working, unless you drive cars, fly planes, operate heavy machinery, put out fires, or do anything else for a living where you should be sober. I pledge to keep you updated on this delightful turn of legalism.

From the Little Engine that Could department: Wal-Mart has raised the white flag. That's right, they are surrendering their online DVD rental service to the small upstart Netflix in exchange for Netflix's agreement to urge users to buy DVDs from Wal-Mart. Netflix has it's work cut out for it, though, because Blockbuster is still charging hard.

I'm really just putting this in here so that when I have $2500 or so, I can easily figure out how to turn a Mac Mini into a media center. Not sure if I'll ever do it, but It's DIY, it's pleasant looking, and it's not powered by Windows.

I just found QuizFarm.com. Seems like a pretty interesting site that I'll spend more time on, hopefully soon. And soon, I might even make my own quiz. That'll be great.

On Tuesday night, I did something to my iBook and it got very upset. It had stalled when I tried to do too many things at once and when I tried to reset, it hung on the gray apple start up screen spinning indefinitely. No amount of restarts or PRAM zaps would get it back together. I even took out the Airport card and thought I might try to take out the after market memory because I've heard that helps. Unfortunately, I didn't have any after market memory and I continued to be stumped. I was forced to use JR's craptastic PC to search for a cure.

Eventually, I tried some system discs from 10.2 that I had (I had been running 10.3.7). The hardware test disc gave me an error message saying "Invalid Memory" which freaked me out and the system software gave me another error message which told me I had to restart my computer. By this time, I was depressed and distressed. There was nothing to do. I thought of the possibility of losing the majority of my college work and anything I've felt the need to save since then. I imagined losing 4 years of AGP Quicken. I'll write a post on great amounts of material loss soon, where I'll delve into this more deeply.

I did think that maybe system discs for 10.3 might work better and I knew I could get some at work on Wednesday morning. Fala, fala. You can't imagine my glee on Wednesday when I reinstalled the system software and got my computer back. I ended up not fairing too badly. I lost my bookmarks for Safari and my email settings for Mail. Plus, Thunderbird and Firefox seemed to stop working and needed to be reinstalled. I was able to save my Firefox settings, though. The biggest loss was my calendar, but I hadn't used it for much except birthdays, and I always forgot to call people on their special days anyway!

I have an external hard drive, and if anything, this experience will get me to set up some sort of system for backing everything up a couple times a week. That way, the next time my computer decides to die, I'll be ready!

But for a second week in a row, I went shopping for a product that should have been fairly simple to buy. For the second week in a row I didn't read the box, and for the second week in a row, I bought something something that's similar to what I wanted, but not it exactly. Instead of an iron, I bought a steamer. I think they're similar, but I'm not sure and tomorrow I get to go back and return it. Sweet!