Greg In The Desert

• Most Dobson students watched Obama on TV – Some lucky Dobson High School students watched President Obama promenade through their campus on Wednesday, enter the gym and give a national speech about stemming home foreclosures.

  But for most of the school's 2,200 students, the best seat they could get for the 20-minute speech was in their classrooms, where the event was broadcast on closed-circuit television.

• Is the 5-USB Mac Mini a fake? | 9 to 5 Mac – So, one of our readers, Dave – who happens to be an expert at PCB design, has spent some time looking at the Mac Mini image posted today and he believes it is a fake. There have been many posts around the web on why. We've put it all together for your consideration.
• Verizon gives Chandler employees substantial bonuses – Verizon Wireless, which has its regional headquarters and a big call center in Chandler, on Friday gave the vast majority of those employees bonuses of 9 to 10 percent of their annual salaries.
• Newspapers excel when they don’t mix news and opinion – The Albuquerque Journal’s excellent reporting on the federal investigation into New Mexico’s “pay-to-play” culture deserves more than the tangential praise I have offered earlier. For if newspapers don’t do original reporting, who will?

  True, there’s outstanding reporting here at NMI and its fellow online publication Politico. com and some other Web sites, but they are exceptional; mostly, the Internet is punditry.
  Newspapers, those nifty hand-held gadgets, still carry a lot of useful information. And they focus the public’s attention on how institutions serve us for good or ill.

• Intel replies to solid-state drive ’slowness’ critique | Nanotech – The Circuits Blog – CNET News – In response, Intel made a statement on Thursday. "Our labs currently have not been able to duplicate these results," Intel said. "In our estimation, the synthetic workloads they use to stress the drive are not reflective of real world use. Similarly, the benchmarks they used to evaluate performance do not represent what a PC user experiences."
• ‘Atlantis’ spotted on ocean floor off Africa | The Sun |News – THIS is the amazing image which could show the fabled sunken city of Atlantis.
  It shows a perfect rectangle the size of Wales lying on the bed of the Atlantic Ocean nearly 3½ miles down.

  A host of criss-crossing lines, looking like a map of a vast metropolis, are enclosed by the boundary.

• More than 500 protest Obama’s arrival | Mesa Arizona News – Mesa News – Mesa AZ news | eastvalleytribune.com – Presidential protesters made their voices heard in chants and signs Wednesday outside Dobson High School.

  The protesters, about 500 to 600 strong and growing, began arriving as ticket holders walked in.

  Mesa police set up a protest area along Guadalupe Road.

  They held their signs up high: "Don't tread on me," "Spend all you want, I'll pick up the tab," "I'll keep my freedom! You keep the change!" "Free fertility drugs now." And "B.O. smells and so does Socialism."

  A Gilbert woman, with a sign that said, "Fund bikini wax now," said she is entitled to the beauty treatment.

• Sarcoma: A Zoey Update – Right now, Zoey is home, with three different medications to help with the pain. And it has been helping. She ate twice today, and has shown periods of curiousity and liveliness that have been missing altogether in the past two weeks. However, I am noticing bouts of panting, and she is sleeping a great deal as the tumor robs her of her energy. And her mobility is severely compromised by the location of the tumor under her front left leg. I know that as time goes on, there will be more bad days and fewer good ones, until Zoey's number of days is fulfilled.

  We are preparing ourselves to say good-bye to our dear Zoey. Today, when I took Lily to our local vet for her shots, I spoke with her about what would happen when the time comes to put her down. They will do it at the local clinic, in an old house under a cottonwood near Tijeras Creek. We will bury Zoey's ashes here, at home, in her beloved mountains.

• BofA to rebrand Countrywide unit – New Mexico Business Weekly: – Bank of America Corp. will rebrand its Countrywide Financial Corp. mortgage unit, a company spokesman confirms.

  Countrywide will be renamed Bank of America Home loans in late April.

• Revenge of the Sith – There’s a large segment of Star Wars fans that try and delude themselves into thinking that Revenge of the Sith is actually a pretty good film. They try and say that while it isn’t as good as A New Hope or The Empire Strikes Back, it’s certainly better than Return of the Jedi. My friends, these people are fucking morons. Revenge of the Sith is the worst Star Wars film of all. Lucas has taken his cinematic legacy, and after raping it hard, has shat in its mouth.

News that Intel wants to rip off the Mac mini.

A new Wintel prototype that openly apes Apple Computer’s popular Mac mini is due out this week, sources told Wired News, giving Intel a showcase to prove its chips are a match for anyone when it comes to tiny PC designs.

Working prototypes of the Mac mini look-alike running Microsoft Windows and based on Intel’s Pentium M CPU have already been built by Taiwan PC maker AOpen at Intel’s request, according to two sources in Taiwan’s PC manufacturing industry who have seen them.

Engadget posts a pretty good write up on turning the Mac mini into a media center. They cover everything including connecting to video, I wasn’t aware that Apple made a DVI to S-Video adapter. Also to watch HD content you need to directly connect to the DVI cable. I don’t quite get it, the Mac mini can handle HD using the DVI connector but not through adapters? Anyways, the way their suggested set up works, you need more than just the Mac mini to do this which is not probably what many were hoping for. Clearly, this thing isn’t fully up to the task of a Media Center. Hopefully Apple is listing and planning to come out with something better.

You might also be interested in two open source media center projects that have appeared. Both iTheater and The Mac Media Center Project claim the same thing, but neither have anything working. It’s hard to say which project is going to have the best chances but looks like The Mac Media Center Project has more active users than iTheater.