Ted August

Oil traded near a two-week low in New York as concern that damage from Japan’s earthquake will curb crude demand outweighed speculation of supply disruptions in the Middle East.

Futures tumbled the most in almost five months yesterday after explosions and fire struck Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima nuclear plant. The March 11 temblor caused a tsunami that disabled cooling systems at the facility. Bahrain declared a state of emergency as a second contingent of troops from Gulf nations poured into the kingdom, while Libyan government forces moved against rebels.

An unexpected and unintended side-effect of the disaster in Japan: a drop in worldwide oil and gasoline prices. Expect more of a drop if the Middle East stabilizes. It's sad that a major disaster to an industrialized country needs to occur oil prices to significantly drop. Depressing.

Jon Bon Jovi in an interview with The Times' Sunday magazine pinned an alleged devolution of music on Apple's Steve Jobs. A move to digital music spearheaded by iTunes has all but ended the "magical" music experience the rocker grew up with, including the surprise of discovering unknown music at a physical store and listening to a full album without distractions. He implied that the lack of mystery and the option of buying by the track had taken the romanticism out of music.

You have got to be kidding me. Hey Jon: The music business was already going down hill well before iTunes and the iPod came along.

But here I am at the umpire school alongside 158 students who have invested at least $3,000 apiece for the five-week course, the vast majority wearing full umpire gear and uniforms they personally purchased for up to $500, all racing into position and authoritatively barking calls, hoping and praying they will be among the few dozen good enough to receive an offer to umpire in the minors this summer for barely minimum wage, with the dim possibility they could be the one from the class who might reach the majors in about a decade … and I can't even take my stupid mask off properly!

Great article by Jim Caple of ESPN about the difficult road to becoming a professional umpire.

For all you Apple-heads out there, iOS 4.3 has been released for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. Go download and install it through iTunes, it's worth it! If you have an AppleTV, 4.3 is out for that device as well, which adds MLB.TV and NBA internet streaming support.

Gas prices are on the rise. But a few iOS apps can help you keep fuel costs in check, either by finding low-cost gas at nearby stations or helping you with car maintenance.

A nice compilation of iOS apps that can help you get cheap gas and help calculate fuel efficiency.

Yesterday’s iPad 2 introduction felt like a repeat of last year’s event for the original iPad. Same place. Same pace and structure for the presentation: a brief prelude of statistics showing how well Apple is doing company-wide; a positioning statement for where the iPad fits, why it exists; the reveal of the product; the specs; a tour of the system software; and, then, some demos of a few impressive iPad applications from Apple that are available for just $4.99 in the App Store... 

...The biggest difference, though, was this: last year Apple didn’t yet understand the iPad. They knew it was good. They knew it had potential. But they didn’t know what it was. They had a sense that in the conceptual space between an iPhone and a MacBook there was uncharted, fertile territory. And they set for themselves a wise metric: the iPad would only succeed if it could do some of the same things a Mac can do, but do them better. If it wasn’t better in several important ways for several common tasks, it would not succeed.via daringfireball.net

Excellent analysis of Apple's iPad 2 event.

Power users work their Macs faster than regular folk do for a variety of reasons. More important than a speedier processor is a speedier computist. Since your fingers are nearly always on the keyboard, controlling your computer that way—instead of taking your hands off the keys to control your mouse—can put you into the upper echelon of efficient Mac users.

via rss.macworld.com

Some very handy tips. There's lots of tools out there that allow you to get away from using the mouse.

Nobody’s going to shed a tear for an oiled microbe, but the Deepwater Horizon’s impacts include bacteria, underscoring just how subtle and fundamental the blowout’s ecological consequences may be.

The findings, based on comparisons of microbial flux before and after oil washed ashore, are not a final analysis. It’s too soon to say how long-lasting those fluctuations were, or what they meant to other creatures. Instead they’re a starting point, an early observation in research that will continue for years, even decades.

“While visible damages are evident in the wildlife populations and marine estuaries, the most significant affect may be on the most basic level of the ecosystems: the bacterial and plankton populations,” wrote researchers in a study Feb. 28 in Nature Precedings. “Abrupt and severe changes in the microbial metabolism can produce long term effects on the entire ecosystem.”

With the original iPad, you had a simple choice to make: to 3G or not to 3G. But with the addition of Verizon 3G data options alongside those from longtime Apple partner AT&T, you now have to not only decide if you want 3G connectivity in addition to Wi-Fi, but which carrier you want service from as well.

There are separate versions of the 3G-enabled iPad 2—one for AT&T’s network, and one for Verizon’s. You can’t just get a 3G-enabled iPad 2 to use across both carriers. In fact, if you include the new black and white color options, as well as the three storage sizes of 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB (the same sizes of the first-generation iPad), Apple sells a total of 12 different 3G-enabled iPad 2 models between both carriers.

Hmmm... Verizon's $20/1GB seems to be a good deal for 3G data, compared to AT&T's offering. Only issue is that you get charged an additional $20/GB if you go over - if you subscribe to a higher plan, its only $10/GB for overages. Seems like you get screwed no matter which you choose.