Nothing But Black And White Snow

-In the spirit of Artificial Night's theme, it's with some glee that I approach the fact that today is the nation-wide switch to digital broadcasting. I don't know why, but the idea of millions of television sets showing nothing but black and white snow, making that disconnected noise, gets me excited for the future. The fact that it is so easy for stations to just cut off their signal makes me nervous, I won't lie, but the chaos factor is so high here, I can't help but giggle.

Or maybe the Sox sweeping the Yankees just has me acting disturbingly morbid and out of whack. Could be.

Either way, here's a Lifehacker post on how to prepare for the switch, if you even need to, and here's the obligatory CNN article that sums up all the shit we already know and packages it in between a personal story meant to resonate deep inside the reader.

-Bill Simmons posted on Twitter today about an interview he did with Avi Zenilman of newyorker.com regarding his new book. Here's the interview and here's the book. Not sure if I'm going to buy it yet--don't know if I care for 700 pages of basketball, even if Simmons is the one wrote it. Although really, could it be that much longer than one of his NBA Playoffs preview columns?

-David Fincher apparently wasn't busy making some dark, depressing, long-ass movie that appeals to me and like, 14 other people, and got convinced to do an Apple commercial. Oh, and it's the first iPhone 3G S commercial too. Check it out:



-As someone who is always on the lookout for better digital audio quality (although with FLAC, it's hard to find something better), I found this interesting. Gizmodo posted the results of their "Great MP3 Bitrate Test." Looks like 256kbps won out, which I'm not shocked by, and they also discovered that the better the audio equipment, the higher the threshold for people to hear a difference was, something I'm also not shocked by. I still stand behind my Klipsch ProMedia 2.1 computer speakers. I do all my music-listening on them, have used them for various-sized parties, and they've never disappointed once. And considering they cost around $220, I can't and won't complain.

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That's all I've got for now. I'm in a major, major funk today, as you can probably imagine, although I think Danielle and I are going to pre-order our 3G S's tonight, so, the junkie that I am, will be quieted for a few hours at the very least.

And the thought of all those blank TV's.

They keep me going.


More soon.

JS