Holiday Season.  Yippee!  (Sorry, but with two weeks eleven days until Thanksgiving it is time.)  Fa la la la la, la la, la la... 

Powerline reports on The death of Mr. Bastard.  The part that grabbed my attention was this: "He leaves behind 13 children fathered with an assortment of women."  Whew.  Unnatural Selection in action. 

NYTimes: Gates vs. Jobs, The Rematch.  "As was the case in computers, Apple has sprinted ahead in the music market with an innovative product, elegant design and tight links between its hardware and software.  Plodding along after it is a vast army, organized by Microsoft, of rivals that may be less skillful than Apple but offer a broader array of options and cheaper prices."  How will this play out?  Will Microsoft win in the end?  Or will Apple hold their early lead?
Stay tuned :) 

Related: Engadget reports Patent for wireless iPod turns up.  Cool.

This is excellent; Ben Hammersley reports: "I’ve cobbled together a server app, RadioPod, to record streaming radio stations, convert them to MP3s, and then provide an RSS 2.0 feed for a PodCasting application to download and then throw into iTunes ready for my iPod."  Woah.  This sounds like something I'm going to have to check out...  I've stayed away from Podcasting pretty much because there wasn't much content; I love the idea, but still.  However this might be the reason to get excited about it. 

Oh, and Pedro Alcocer reports How to never miss an episode with Bittorrent and RSS.  (Next up, how to never split an infinitive :)  Anyway this is awesome: "In this post you will learn how you can never miss an episode of your favorite shows ever again.  This will be accomplished through the magic of BitTorrent and RSS...  The are many solutions to this problem, but this is how I do it.  The BT client checks an RSS feed for torrents that match certain criteria.  When it detects those criteria, it begins to download the torrent.  The result is something like TiVo, but free."  Okay, this looks cool.  Stay tuned for report. 

Slashdot discusses Microsoft's Upcoming Desktop Search Tool.  "Back in July, Microsoft purchased a company called Lookout who made a tool that allowed users of Outlook 2000+ to search through their email at greater speed and accuracy to the standard Outlook search tool.  Since Microsoft acquired Lookout, the MSN team have been steadily working on Desktop Search and web search technologies."  So be it.  Personally I don't trust Google or Microsoft; I use X1, which is faster and which is a single-purpose utility without grand pretensions to rule the world.