For reasons unexplained, I was on the iTunes Music Store, happened to click the American Idol section and remembered how offended I was at the performance of John Lennon's Imagine.  And I was compelled to write the following review:

He's got a good voice, but I'm sorry... there are songs that should be off limits to the contestants and John Lennon's Imagine is one of them.  I find it highly disrespectful and pretentious of a 16 year-old to try and rewrite one of the most important and cathartic melodies ever penned.  The American Idol producers need to impose a moral authority, as protectors of art, to stop this kind of nonsense.  What worries me is that we'll see a lot of this butchery this season now that the Lennon/McCartney catalog is available to the contestants.

Who's with me?

Last Thursday I received an email from a friend, George Colombo, that pointed me to an article that Apple had filed a patent for "customized podcasts."  I was immediately surprised and dismayed, quite frankly, because my business partner, Matt Thompson, and I had actually developed the technology (we called it Modcast) and implemented it on our former podcast, The Cubicle Escape Pod, back in June 2005.  I wasn't miffed at Apple for filing the patent, though with very little research they could've figured out there was prior art, but I was upset because I started to have second thoughts and regrets about why we didn't push our concept harder.

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It's not quite been eight months since iPhone entered my life, but it's close enough and I've been thinking about this blog post for a couple of weeks.  After only having the phone for a day, I made a few predictions that I felt would be fun to revisit to see if I should quit my job and become a palm reader.  So let's dive into it...

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I was on my way home work tonight when I stopped at a Exxon/Mobil gas station, surprised to see the above sticker plastered on the pump.  I immediately thought that it was very odd.  In my limited experience with merchant accounts and credit card processing, I thought this sort of practice was not acceptable per the credit card companies and merchant services.

A rather boring topic for my first post in three months, but whatever.  Has anyone seen something like this before?  Doesn't this break some terms of service with merchant services?  Is it even ethical?  I don't know.

On a completely different note, I'm testing the upgrades I made to my blogging software, so that's the real reason for this post :)