Technobabble

iWTF?!
Add two more superlatives to the resume of the iPhone. Life blogger Justine Ezarik, who has attached a webcam and mic to her head to document every minute of her life, has a must-see video on YouTube and her own site showing her 300-page iPhone bill. Apparently the AT&T bill itemizes every “data transfer” individually, even if it is not a charge. Every text message, call, Web browsing experience, etc.

And Blogger Adam Aronson is claiming to have received the world’s largest phone bill in terms of cost. After a recent hop across the pond to England, Aronson racked up a bill for $5,086.66 without ever making a call on his iPhone. He calculates he was charged roughly $20 a Web page while surfing the Interwebs in roaming mode.

I still plan to get an iPhone by year’s end, but I’ll see if I can get my bill as a 300-page PDF … and I won’t be playing online Tetris while abroad.

A CD B-Day and ABBA
The compact disc just blew out 25 candles on its digital birthday cake. Born to the proud parents Philips and Sony in a factory in Germany, the CD grew up to revolutionize the music industry. What college students may not know is that the CD still dominates the music industry worldwide, despite the rapidly growing popularity of its younger brother, the MP3.

Two pieces of trivia that co-eds may be able to use at their pub’s next trivia night:

1.) The CD was designed to hold 74 minutes of music in order to hold a complete recording of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.

2.) The first-ever mass-produced CD was ABBA’s The Visitors.

Free Wi-Fi Saves the Day
I don’t necessarily want to jump on the terrorist/natural-disaster scare-tactics bandwagon, but I’m going to anyway. To rewind for a moment, I have received a few well-thought-through e-mails that took some time to type from the city of Chico regarding my plea for free Chico-wide Wi-Fi. I can sum them up in one word: resistance. Maybe the definition of government, at least in the U.S. (excluding Dennis Kucinich and most of the Green Party) is to resist.

Perhaps I was a bit optimistic thinking that our fair city could be a pioneer into the digital future. An interesting side note can be seen in the recent I-35 bridge collapse in the Twin Cities that killed at least 13 people. So what happened when the main Minneapolis artery crumbled and emergency radio systems and cell phones didn’t work? The corporation that was building the wireless network disabled its paid-login process and usage shot up six times. Think how many more worried citizens and emergency workers would have taken advantage of that clear communication path if they knew it was available.

So to copy my favorite Republican Stephen Colbert, this week’s “Babble Award” goes to U.S. Internet co-founder Joe Caldwell for providing his service for free to the emergency workers and common people so they can communicate in their time of need.

Fake football, real snow
How cool is this? The EA Sports’ NCAA ‘08 Football video game (Xbox, Xbox 360, PlayStation 2 and 3) will collaborate with the Weather Channel to have real-time weather for the stadium in which you are virtually playing football. If it’s snowing at the real Lambeau Field in Green Bay when you start playing the game, then it will be snowing in your Green Bay Packers stadium on the video game. I might just have to start playing video football.

Wacky Web site of the Week
I wish I thought of this. I’ve run out of space so all I can say is: check this out. Brilliant.