While I get myself back up to speed blogging, you should be checking in with Frank Field's Furdlog. He's posting a lot of the stuff I would have for the last week, including pointers to Big Champagne (a Nielsen-like rating service of the most popular songs being downloaded) and today's FoxTrot comic about Kazaa users and Disney.

As for me, I got around to doing a few things last week that I'd been putting off. I'm pretty much caught up on my print Entertainment Weeklys, and I noticed an ad in last week's that made me look twice. It's for Allegra allergy medicine, and it shows a woman using a laptop out on a patio. I'm pretty sure she's accessing the internet wirelessly, but I can't be sure. So now Wi-Fi has become background for ads!

I started playing with my Archos Multimedia Jukebox more. I took some video of Brent's basketball game, and I plugged the Archos directly into my ReplayTV to record the wonderful Danny Kaye-Louis Armstrong duet "When the Saints Go Marching In" from the movie The Five Pennies. Of course, it's only an MP3 file since Archos hasn't released the video recorder yet, but I still like having it. I'm thinking of testing RSS enclosures with it, because I'm starting to really like the idea of getting audio and video in my news aggregator.

MJ vs. MJ

"Coming up in this Sunday's Commercial Bowl, the ultimate basketball matchup. 'Super Bowl advertising is a high-tech art form unto itself. Witness the new spot pitting Michael Jordan at 23 against MJ at 39.' [SunSpot.net]" [Steven's Notebook]

I've been hearing and reading a lot about this commercial, so I earlier this week I went to Gatorade's site to see if there was a preview of it. Of course, there isn't. For another take on how they made the commercial, check out ESPN's article MJ's Ready for His Close-up.

Then the next day, I saw a very funny commercial for Compaq computers. A little boy asks a little girl how she got her shiny, new bike. She tells him that they have a swear jar in her house, and her dad has to contribute to it every time he swears at the computer. Then they show the father yelling at his laptop, and the girl says, "Cha-ching!" At the end, the girl refuses to let her father write a check for that day's contribution. I wanted to see it again and actually link to it here, but I couldn't find it on the Compaq site. I even tried Ads.com but they've already closed up shop.

Go figure - when I actually want to watch TV commercials, I can't!

Sharp Unveils Well-Connected Home Server

"At its heart, the HG-01S is a hard drive-based video recorder with an additional photo album feature but what differentiates it from some of the other digital video recorders or home servers on the market is the inclusion of a Web server and networking functions that allow recorded video to be viewed from other computers across the Internet.

It has a 120GB hard drive and records in MPEG-2 at 720-pixel by 480-pixel resolution at either 8 megabits per second, 4 mbps, or 2 mbps. This translates to 30 hours of video in the highest quality mode, 60 hours at medium quality, and 115 hours at low quality. It can also transcode MPEG-2 video into MPEG-4, which is a newer and more efficient video compression system.

At home and in front of the television, accessing the device is much like any other hard drive-based video recorder. A graphical menu offers quick access to recorded TV programs.

Away from the living room, there are a number of options. Around the house, a built-in wireless LAN (802.11b) adapter offers access to any suitably equipped computer while the Internet can be used to access and view recorded programs and images when away from home--if the device is hooked up to a broadband connection via its Ethernet port.....

From a personal computer, it is possible to view recorded TV programs and it is here that the MPEG-4 transcoding function becomes handy.... The MPEG-4 data stream is much lighter. This can also be viewed on some PDAs.....

Another function of the device is its family photo album feature which collects and can display snapshots. These can be transferred to the server directly from a memory card via a PC Card slot on the front of the device. If the user wishes, some can also be published on the Internet for other people to view either from a personal computer of cellular telephone. Members of the family can also send images taken with camera-equipped cell phones back to the server which will store them in its memory.

The HG-01S will go on sale in Japan on February 15 and cost around $848. Plans for overseas sales of the device were not announced." [PC World]