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My brother Sean, way back into my high school days, wrote a short story about a toothbrush fairy for a silly little magazine I helped edit. So today when Hasbro announced that they are going to market a musical toothbrush that uses the jawbone to amplify music while children brush my attention was caught. They are reportedly going to try and commission Hilary Duff to perform a piece. They have patented the device as a dental mandibular sound transducer.

Boy the world is a weird place.

Who on earth thought it was a good idea that a commercial entity be a broker of background and private information? Sales of private information really is a troubling trend in the U.S. When someone can simply send a cheque to a company and gain access to information on folks ranging from social security numbers to mother’s maiden names it reduces identity theft to a mere formality. The California authorities think that as many as 400,000 consumer records may have been comprimised. This is really terrifying stuff.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/02/24/choicepoint.victims.ap/index.html

I’ve just returned from Baltimore where a collegue and I were doing artist workshops on how to use ZAPPlication ™. There were about 1000 artists there and we talked with probably 175 of them. There was one gentleman during the first of four presentations who had some rather nice things to say about the ZAPPlication ™ system. Its always pleasant when people have good things to say about your work. Its not always the case.

Today my collegue and I walked the show to get a sense of the work and community who take part in this show. The work was of very high caliber and the artists very professional. I wasn’t surprised to see the gentleman from the first night in his booth, but much to my delight he is an artist that my wife and I are familiar with. His name is Ralph Prata and we own one of his pieces. He is from NY, we bought the piece in CO, and I met him in MD on this trip.

It always amazes me at how small the world really is and I’m just tickled.

I wouldn't count them out yet. But an interesting article was posted on engadget.com. Stock value has plummeted, DirecTV seems to be abandoning the platform. Its a shame really. The only three DVRs that ever seem to have had decent software are disappearing--ReplayTV, UltimateTV, and TiVo. With all the really cheap DVR options coming out of the satellite and cable providers and a consumer base that really doesn't know the difference...well, the writing is on the wall. Lets hope DNNA and TiVo manage to pull a rabbit out of the hat.

Because my TiBook has a pretty tiny hard drive, I bought a FireLite drive to use as additional space. This was a year or so ago. Much to my frustration, the little drive died on my last business trip. Suspecting that it was the enclosure and not the drive itself I bought a 44 pin to 40 pin IDE adapter and slapped it into a full sized Firewire enclosure. Much to my delight, the drive itself is fine. Its just the enclosure that went bad. I think I'll buy a small enclosure to put the little drive into--something like this.