Steve enters the room and the 14 lackies and the god they call Ivie all stop their conversation and turn to business. Steve drops a pad and pen at the head of the table, adjusts the collar on his mock turtleneck and cracks open a bottle of water.

“All right,” he says, “show me the line up for tomorrow and lets run through this thing. I think we have to lead off with the Mini DVR shit. That’ll get it rocking!”

So what if Microsoft had created the iPod instead of Apple? This isn’t a commentary on the business effects of silly what-ifs. Its more of a celebration of Apple’s ability to create clean, easily-accessible interfaces and packaging, vs. Microsoft’s propensity for package and feature-bloat.

Or, if you see it the other way, its about Apples’ need to dumb down everything from the packaging to the products so “the rest of us” can use them. Hmmm…I think I’ll go with the first thought there….check out this short video.

No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy is the author’s first since his critically lauded and award winning Border Series (which began with All the Pretty Horses, one of my personal five favorite books of all time). Its a thriller underneath with bad people doing bad things to other bad people, drug money leading to killings, and a pile of money. You pretty much know where it will end as soon it gets started.

Kevin 2.0 looks to have uncovered the agency video for the Origami project at Microsoft that we talked about yeaterday. Click over to his site and follow the directions to the video. It looks like all the fuss is over a new micro-tablet, dockable and wireless connected. Looks kind of fun…

Is it just a coincidence that Apple is launching some secret new products on Feb 28 (next Tuesday) and Microsoft has staked out March 2 (next Thursday) for its Origami unveiling? Is this some sort of geeky one upmanship? Who staked their date first?

Check our linky friend Thatedeguy for a nice concise guesstimate about what the Origami thing might be all about. It’s kind of fun to see Microsoft getting a bit of Apple’s normal pre-announcement treatment and hype. By the time they announce their actual G3 enabled tablet (or whatever) the blogosphere will have built expectations for a feature set that would make the Jetson’s proud.

Can’t get enough video feeds? Haven’t ponied up for that video iPod yet and need some PC entertainment? Check out the Democracy Internet TV platform. It works on both Windows and Macs, so no excuses for anybody. Its open source based and free.

Download the player and let the Channel Guide load you up some choices. Let me recommend Beer Activated Girl, Mercedes vs. Granny, the MPAAORIAA Warning Parody, the William Shatner rendition of Rocket Man, and the Daily Show clips on the Cheney Shoots Pal story.

I know that these site udate posts are a bit boring and you’re seeing a lot of them right now as I make some changes. Sorry. But I wanted a post that was available for comments on another change I made. If you subscribe to our RSS feed in the past you saw just a short tease of the last ten postings in the feed. I clicked the Wordpress button last night to change that to offer the full text of each post in the feed. I had thought it was better to have you click the link to come to the site to read the full post, but have been reading a lot of blogging links this week about offering full text feeds and decided to try it. Hopefully you’ll still drop by the site once in a while

I serve the Atom and RSS feeds from my site for those of you who prefer to keep up with new posts through an RSS Reader instead of having to come to the site. But I couldn’t figure out a way to see how many readers were using the feeds in any good way. So I made a change last night and dropped the links on the site for those feeds and instead added a Feedburner Feed. This should make little difference to the readers, hopefully. If you subscribed using one of the buttons on the left sidebar to the old feeds, I think they will keep coming. But if you are willing I would appreciate you dumping that link and resubscribing using the RSS Feed link in the left bar that links through Feedburner (or click here).
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So is Dilbert just a bit too tame for you? Does he not quite capture the true pain and suffering of the cubicle world? Is Dogbert just too cute to actually let you think of him as truly evil? Well, I may have a solution for you. That’s why you come here. We both know that you see this as just a one-sided relationship where you can take and take and TAKE and never feel even a short pang of guilt! We both know that YOU ARE JUST USING ME FOR MY HOT WORDS!

It can be easy to make fun of all the Web 2.0 hype. I expect to see that tag attached to a new multiplayer tic-tac-toe game shortly. But Flyspy looks brilliant! Check out TechCrunch’s write up. Its still in development stage and not public yet, but soon…very soon….

This looks like a much more entertaining way to waste some hours than Sudoku…and maybe I’ll actually go somewhere.

Korey Rowe, Dylan Avery and Jason Bermas have posted their conspiracy theory documentary Loose Change 2nd Edition on Google Video. You can watch the low quality stream, or download a better copy as an AVI, iPod or PSP version of the film (though it will take a bit of time to download the 82 minute film).

For me, this video starts out with some important questions about the WTC and Pentagon attacks before dropping into that neverland of conspiracy theory where every uncorroborated piece of information is given full weight and the filmmaker uses hanging questions instead of proving his points.

I’m not really sure what to say to you about this one, but check out OneOfTheLads.com. If it doesn’t open to the Carwash, click on that link. Then drop back into the mindset of a 14-year-old boy and enter your commands. (Hint: Be sure and ask them to tease you. And if you find any good commands, be sure and post them in the comments). OMG