New scanner arrived today 

Click on the pic for the Amazon page.

Aside: I'm now using Flickr to store all the little pics on Scripting News. As before I just drop them in a folder that my script is watching, and when it sees a new pic, it uploads it and puts the HTML for the image in a little window for me to copy/paste.

Later: The scanner is here. An example of a scan.

David Bianculli on the Sopranos finale 

Fresh Air TV critic has a great summary of how fans view the Sopranos finale.

Just saw an iPhone ad on CNN 

And it's good. Really good.

Here's how it goes...

Narrator: "You're watching Pirates of the Caribbean (on AppleTV of course), and someone says they'd like calimari."

The user clicks a button. Google Maps comes up. Click. A keyboard comes up. Types C-A-L-A-M-A-R-I. Enter.

Pushpins appear on the map. (The phone knows where you are?)

The user touches a pin. A small card with a phone number pops up. Clicks the number. The phone dials. Hello, please send over some calamari.

It's a subset of the Knowledge Navigator without the guy in the bow tie.

Quite compelling. My Blackberry can't do it. Okay maybe I just decided to buy one.

Ooops.

PS: Rich Karpinski says my Blackberry can do it, and iPhone doesn't have GPS. At least it's a good ad.

PPS: The ad is on the Apple site, along with all the others.

Party fire pit 

I tried to post a movie of a fire pit at a party I went to last night, but YouTube doesn't seem to like it. So I put it on blip.tv. That's better.