Jeff Milner

I made a screen saver advertisement for the Swim Meet coming up on the weekend. Here it is in all its shockwave flash glory – in other words you don’t have to save it and install it in order to view it. I may only leave it up for a month or two, so if you missed it… well that’s too bad! :)

You may have learned about something like this from watching My Big Fat Greek Wedding, but apparently it really did happen:

A 7 year old boy living in Kazakhstan, who doctors originally diagnosed with a stomach cyst was actually carrying his dead siamese twin inside his belly.

“The foetus had developed into a tumour but was found to have hair, nails and bones.”

The XML Feed for the site is now up and running thanks to Blogger’s Atom Feed. I just downloaded Macromedia Central to use as my news aggregator. I really like it so far except for the fact that some of the weather and movie features only work around your zip code and not around a postal code. Hopefully they update it for us Canadians, but in the meantime I’ll stick with it because it’s sweet.

Update: I’m now using Mozilla Firefox with Sage XML reader. It really IS sweet.

Corry Doctorow over at BoingBoing.net summarizes the important parts of Scoble’s blog post on the ins and outs of iTunes DRM, Microsoft DRM, and whether you should get an iPod. The bottom line is that in order to save music, the consumer should only buy music that isn’t in a lock-in format, and to break the locks on any music you do own, while you can. He gives many examples – and the one most familiar to most of us is probably the VCR. Remember how in the early 80’s the movie studios were trying to get the VCR banned because of the worry of piracy? “With the VCR, though, Sony delivered what its customers wanted, and the movie companies got rich off of it, dragged kicking and screaming to the money-tree again.”

What really goes on in the back rooms of car dealerships across America? What does the car salesman do when he leaves you sitting in a sales office and goes to talk with his boss? What are the tricks salespeople use to increase their profit and how can consumers protect themselves from overpaying? These are the types of questions that undercover journalist Chandler Phillips answers in his informative account of day-to-day experience on the car lots.

Reading this article will broaden your understanding of the dealership sales process and cast a new light on the role of the car salesman. Most importantly it will help you get a better deal — and avoid hidden charges — the next time you go to buy or lease a new or used car.

Favorite quote:

I was an undercover car salesman for Edmunds.com, sent to a dealership, which sent me to a seminar, which sent me to another dealership as an undercover shopping evaluator. I guess that made me a triple agent. Very good lines.

CNN reports that Mike Rowe has agreed to a settlement with industry giant Microsoft. They even threw in an Xbox to seal the deal.