Meet Olive's Symphony

I forgot to mention this yesterday, but ACL 2006 has been announced to take place on the weekend of September 15-17, so mark it on your calendar! I bet you've never heard of a little company called Olive, huh? They might just give Apple a run for their money with a new media device called Symphony. What you see above is conceptually much like an 80GB hard drive strapped to a stereo with WiFi and other bells and whistles to boot. Once you feed it all your CDs, you can toss them because it has a built-in CD burner for you to burn your own mixes and such. Have an iPod? It supports that, too. Do you have a wireless network at your place? Then you can just connect to it wirelessly and it even acts as an access point (plus it has 4 Ethernet ports). How freaking cool is this thing?! If you get tired of your own music you can even tune into internet radio. It's only drawback seems to be that I don't think it can play copy-protected music and it's $900 price tag. It does have an 80 GB hard drive though, and it serves all your music needs.

There's really very little other tech news of interest. BBC is running a short piece on Microsoft's plans to usurp power once again over Google and Apple, and the only thing I think he's really been skimping on is what part the Xbox 360 plays in his whole home media center vision. Can it DVR or can it just show some stupid pictures? Sony has decided to start a process to gradually phase out CRT production it seems as they have closed some factories following some losses in September. Could we be facing a day when all that's available is LCD? Lastly, Dennis Hastert (the Speaker of the House) has started his own blog and he sounds surprisingly reasonable for a Republican. I may even keep up with it because he may talk about some stuff worth noting.

I'm going to start out here with the series that keeps getting better: Harry Potter. Yahoo! Movies has a clip introducing some sort of maze competition (I haven't read the books) and Moviefone has one showing our heroes in danger. The latter almost makes it seem as if the KKK have overrun Hogwart's. We now have word that King Kong is now 3 hours long and it's confirmed that Peter Jackson has no concept of time. Will people really pay to sit there for three hours to watch another King Kong adaptation? They'd better to cover the $207 million budget. In a strange turn of events, Lindsay Lohan is joining the cast of Bobby alongside the likes of Anthony Hopkins and Demi Moore. The idea of the movie is to intertwine the stories of key players leading up to the death of Robert Kennedy; I only hope that Emilio Estevez can pull it off. Lastly, we now have a poster for The New World featuring Mr. Christian Bale.

Now for the 3x Thursday meme:

1. Do you like the fact that we have different seasons? Does it matter to you? Why/Why not?
I think it's important that the weather isn't the same all year-round for our sanity. I can't handle 12 months of heat, and I like the cold but I'd flip out if I had 12 months of that either. Change is good, and plus it adds more variety to our wardrobe.

2. With changing seasons comes changing weather. What weather changes do you like and dislike that come with this?
I like the change from unbearable heat to briskly cold, like the weather we have in Austin right now. It feels so nice to just wear a shirt with a light jacket and not sweat at all. I dislike the shift to spring though, because it's not much longer before the summer.

3. Which season do you dislike the most? Why?
Definitely summer since I've always hated summers in Houston. The heat makes it hard to do anything outside, and the evening doesn't alleviate matters much.

Bonus Question for Comments: What's your favorite seasonal activity (This could be anything)? Why?
Celebrating Christmas? It gives me a warm feeling to think of being with family and exchanging gifts, especially with the hectic life I have this semester.