My dad wrote this article for CBS about the difference between professional and amateur journalists. It starts out talking about videos made by American GIs in Iraq. Very good article and definitely worth a read.
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Archive for March, 2006
As you probably already know from my previous posts, I am a big fan of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Lats night, while watching a recorded episode of Wednesday night’s show, I saw a segment about the recent Israeli Knesset (the Israeli equivalent of Congress) elections. Jon Stewart’s monologue at the beginning was great, but then comes a big surprise. When he introduces his "Senior Israeli Bureau Chief," instead of being Rob Corddry or Ed Helms, it’s Samantha Bee! Samantha Bee, who is the only female correspondent on The Daily Show, spent the past two to three months on maternity leave with her newborn baby. I always liked Bee’s segments and thought she, like the other Daily Show correspondents, had great wit and a sense of humor. Bee did a very good job in her first segment (besides an audio-only one of her about a month ago) with some good lines, like when she is describing which parties got seats in the Knesset ("Lefkowitz, party of four"). Jason Jones, her husband and also a Daily Show "correspondent" did some humorous coverage of Hamas’ reaction to the Israeli elections ("Hamas would not be very happy with the Israeli elections if Israel were a country, which it’s not"). Overall, this was a very nice way to usher back in one of the wittiest people on The Daily Show.
technorati tags: daily show, jon stewart, samantha bee, maternity leave, israel, knesset, indecision 5766, TV, television, humor, election, elections
Apple has a new email newsletter-thing for showing off and featuring podcasts on iTMS.
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Google has just unveiled their new service, Google Finance. I understand that this means absolutely nothing to a lot of the readers of this blog, being that they or bored by the stock market or just don’t follow it. I, on the other hand, do follow the market and am a very small investor, with 10 shares in Apple Computer and 10 shares in SanDisk Corporation. So, if you don’t really want to know about Google Finance, read no further.
Google Finance has a very nice interface. It is sleek and easy-to-use, just like all of Google’s other products. The actual pages for the stocks are organized beautifully. Each page for a stock features the current price on top, along with the same basic stock info. such as Market Cap. Volume, Highs and Lows, and Change that you would find in the stock charts of a newspaper. Then it has a chart of the stock, which if you move your cursor along, will show you in little text in the upper-right hand corner of the stock its price and volume on that one day. There are also "flags" throughout the chart that are labeled with letters. Each "flag" corresponds to a news story from Google News on the right of the chart that is also labeled with that letter. The flag appears on the chart at the time that the news story was published. When you click on the flag, the news story becomes highlighted. Below the news stories and charts, there is also a summary of the company, basic facts about it including number of employees and HQ location, and the management of the company (who’s CEO, COO, etc.). And below that you have financial figures and ratios about the company. Google also added two other things unique to Google Finances. They show blog posts on the web (from Google Blog Search) and posts in discussions (from Google Groups) that have to do with the company. Now that is cool. Google also now includes a portfolio for your stocks, so you can see how much money you’ve gained or lost in the stock market.
Overall, Google Finance is very, very cool. It’s trying to go head-to-head with companies like Yahoo and Microsoft which also offer very similar stock analyzing and tracking services, but of course, Google outdoes them with its easy-to-use interface and its own search technology built right in. I really think that Google has truly matured in the finance department.
technorati tags: google finance, money, stock, stocks, stock market, finance, finances, google
It is a sad, sad day. Actually that was Monday, but it’s still sad. If you read my previous post, you know that I tried but failed to get a fake ID for The Daily Show. That was really bad, because we went down to The Daily Show studio, and the door people ask us for an ID for my age. Of course, we have none. My dad tried queitly bribing them, yet still no hope. Eventually we just left. That was just heartbreaking. There still is one last hope; one of my dad’s friends/collegues has a student who works for The Colbert Report. He may be able to get us into The Daily Show, or at least The Colbert Report. Let’s hope. But if your Jon Stewart or one of the door people, I really really really want to go and I know I’m only 14 but I’ve watched it on TV and my parents allow me to see the sexual content and curses, so PLEASE let me go.
technorati tags: daily show, fake ID, colbert report, underage, television, tickets
If you live on the East Coast and always wanted to go to the Macworld Expo, but can’t. Please sign my petition so Macworld can once again return to the East Coast.
technorati tags: macworld expo, east coast, petition
This has got to be one of the coolest sites EVER!!!!! The Wayback Machine is a site that keeps archives of pages on the Internet that go as far back as 1996! For more information, check out my MacUser post on the subject, or just read it below:
Have you ever wanted to see the page for the original OS X? What about the iPod? Well, now you can with the Wayback Machine. The Wayback Machine, which is run by Internet Archive, a site dedicated to making a digital library of all the pages and media on the Web, allows you to visit archived pages that have long since vanished. Simply put in the URL of the site you want to see an archive of, click “Take Me Back,” and you will see a list of dates that the site you requested has been archived on. For example, I can see archives of the the Apple.com homepage that go as far back as October 1996! And I can even click on links on the archived pages and go to their archived pages! Awesome! The Wayback Machine is a great research tool, but you can also have a lot of fun. Now you can finally relive the glory days of System 7.
technorati tags: internet archive, wayback amchine, web pages, archives, archived, apple, os x, ipod
On Friday night, we had one of my dad’s friends and her son over for dinner. We talked about politics, technology, and "stuff." Somehow, I ended up telling a story about how in Zitomars, a clothing/make-up store and pharmacy in the Upper East Side, I was bored and found myself looking at the dog food aisle. Don’t ask me why, but when I looked at the ingrediants for some dog biscuits, I noticed that they contained some very healthy ingrediants including all-natural and organic chicken, beef, begatables, and fish. That got me thinking on how it would be cool if they made biscuits like that for people. I mean, think about it. You’ve got all of these healthy, nutritious ingrediants all in one little, tasty package. Yum! And they could also be good for children in poverty who can’t afford whole chickens, steaks, fish, etc., but they can instead get all of these foods from a biscuits. Wow, I gues great ideas really can come from strange places.
technorati tags: dog food, dog biscuits, chicken, beef, fish, healthy
If you’ve seen my previous Daily Show posts, you know that I got screwed there because we came too late and weren’t far enough up in the line to get in. But what I didn’t tell you was that you need to be at least 18 to get in, which I’m not. We now have VIP tickets to a Daily Show taping, which guarantees us entry, but they’ll turn us down if they catch me as being 14. So, after a tip from a friend, my dad and I headed downtown to near NYU to pick up an item that college students love dearly, the fake ID.
We arrived at the tattoo shop that we were instructed to go to. It fit the description perfectly: small, scuzzy, and it had a back room that employees were constantly going in and out of. We walked in to the shop waited on line with several other people. While we were waiting, I obsrved my surroundings, which consisted of jewlrey, some fetish, and a man playing a game on his Treo while waiting to be tatooed, and most likely infected based on the look and feel of the store. After a minute or two, a man came to the counter and started taking orders for tatoos. When he asked my dad, he answered, loudly enough so that the whole store could here (which, to be fair, isn’t too hard) that he needed a fake ID for me his 14 year old son. The man started repeating things such as "ID, ID, what’s an ID? I don’t understand." After my dad clarified, the man insisted that he didn’t sell anythiing of the sort. After my dad giving the man a look, we left the store.
At first I was a bit puzzled at why they didn’t tell us they sold IDs, which they obviously did. But then it hit me: they thought my dad was a cop. My dad, a cop, NYPD, undercover, a narc. Just the thought made me bend over with laughter. I mean, come on, when my sister heard this whole story even she blurted out "Daddy’s too old to be an undercover cop!" True, but apparently the tattoo store guy didn’t want to take any chances.
Anyway, after that we went to another tattoo store across the street, and a couple down Christopher Street, yet to no avail. This closest we ever got to a confession to the existence of the fake IDs was at a store on Christopher Street when the man there, after saying "You know, that’s [buying fake IDs] illegal," told us that you could try the East Village, which was far too long a trek from Christopher Street right next to the Hudson River.
So, alas, the day ended with no fake IDs. Hopefully The Daily Show won’t catch us, but just in case my dad’s bringing $100 of bribery money.
technorati tags: daily show, fake id, downtown, christopher street, tattoo shop
Check out the post I made on MacUser!!!!!
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Aaron Freedman is a 16 year old who's very passionate and knowledgeable about technology and journalism. He enjoys working on his two main projects, 
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