well, i forgot to link to the Canwest Festival site, so I reposted the last blog. So now you have it twice. Plus this apology. I'm sorry. Hope it was even better the second time.

The crack seems to be on the inside of the screen; I can't feel it with my finger.  And it's spreading.  And no, I won't use a holster (too geeky even for me) or a case (I need it all the time, and quickly). 

After dropping my Blackberry a thousand times, this morning, turning it on, whilst still plugged into its charger, it dropped and cracked. Just as I am about to spend a week flying around the globe. Crackedberry. This is what happened when I had my first Blackberry back in 2000 or so. I dropped it so many times that the cracks just spread and spread until the screen was unreadable, and I didn't go back to one until last year. I'd sworn off them, in fact. Bulky, nerdy (my carrier doesn't have the slimmer Pearl or the cooler 8800 yest), I mean who needs 'em? Damn, I don't want to be so available all the time, I once said. Now I can't live without it. Its full QWERTY keypad is a godsend, and I'm a texting, emailing, web surfing fiend on it now. I just hope this crack doesn't continue to spread all week. That would suck deeply, though it may just be a message from Electrogod to, in the words of my friend John Sulek, just lay off it for a bit.

Maybe we should just tear it all down and start again .

This sucks.  I can only guess that flickr's next.  Oh well. Life was good there, for a while. 

And so does the fact that Kurt Vonnegut is dead.  So many of his books changed the way I thought as a teenager and as a young man.  He was always sad and bitter, but he always approached the world with a fresh viewpoint and a keen sense of satire.  It made me very sad to see that decline into misanthropy in his last book.  Now, at least, he has what he's wanted for so long.

I can't believe I forgot to link to this earlier!  It's a review (and a good one; these are precious and few), and it's by Cory Doctorow, heroic copyfighter, homeboy, Sci-Fi writer, and all around busy cutting edge fellow.  Boing Boing is one of my favourite blogs, so it was a thrill to be mentioned!

I guess everyone has already condemned the Zune to death, but I figured I'd through my kindling onto the funeral pyre as well.  I've said it before and I'll say it again, but the whole concept of limiting how, when and where people listen to their music is suicide, whether or not you allow sharing.  3 times?  5 times?  100 times?  Doesn't matter.  Same goes for proprietary file formats.  What I really want is a portable Squeezebox.  It's already a great unit (though, we'll see what the Logitech buyout does to it), but a portable version would rule.  Imagine that - access your own library online from anywhere in the world.  Listen to internet radio, get rss feeds.  Lossless encoding if you so desire.  No drm, no limits.  Too good to be true, probably, but a man can dream, can't he?