I am the ghost of groovymother.com. Woooooo!

New but Old Movies, with Anna and Bobbie: No. 1 – the Sound of Music

Anna livetweet’s her boyfriend’s reaction to seeing The Sound of Music for the first time. “This has been on for 52 minutes? Where are the Nazis?! YOU SAID THERE WERE NAZIS. This is all SINGING.”

The Best Tech Writing of 2010

Gentlemen, start your Instapapers!

Lending Kindle Books

Just launched, Amazon now let you “lend” Kindle books. A fab feature, but sadly crippled in this (initial?) form.

1) You need to initiate the process from Amazon.com — you can’t do it from a Kindle
2) Publishers have the right to disable lending, and a quick scan through my Kindle purchases show that most large publishers have blanket blocks in place.
3) Loans are currently limited to 14 days, and you can lend a book once and only once. Publishers currently cannot adjust these limits.

Despite these gripes, this is clearly a big step in the right direction. Hopefully this is just Amazon’s first stab at shifting the digital-media-lending Overton window.

CIO update: Post-mortem on the Skype outage

Interesting post-mortem on the Skype downtime last week. Due to a bug in the client version used by 50% of their users (which had already been patched in a newer release), a small server overload feedbacklooped into taking out their entire P2P system.

An increasing number of services are forcibly updating their users clients (most notably, Google Chrome, which pushes releases to users without notification or interaction). How long until we reach a point that this is the norm?

Polar bears get the better of spy cameras

In related news, polar bears are FUCKING AWESOME AND DON’T TAKE NO SHIT FROM NO ONE!