Category: Tech

Zappos zapped

Once, only once, did I order shoes from Zappos. The money I saved buying running shoes online, instead of at Marathon Sports, wasn’t worth the hassle of having to deal with the likelihood that my account information was hacked. Zappos is owned by Amazon, so I’m changing my login there, too.

First, the bad news:

We are writing to let you know that there may have been illegal and unauthorized access to some of your customer account information on Zappos.com, including one or more of the following: your name, e-mail address, billing and shipping addresses, phone number, the last four digits of your credit card number (the standard information you find on receipts), and/or your cryptographically scrambled password (but not your actual password).

THE BETTER NEWS:

The database that stores your critical credit card and other payment data was NOT affected or accessed.

Nifty gifts

I don’t consider myself to be a particularly good gift giver, but a couple of my sisters can have a knack for finding fun and/or unusual presents. For Christmas my sister Jean gave me a Peanuts wall clock that plays the “Linus and Lucy” theme on the hour, but not when it’s dark. It’s hanging in my office now.

My sister Marianne found some cool things this Christmas. 3D Holiday Specs look like 3D glasses, but when you look at Christmas tree lights with them you see them transformed into Santa’s face, or snowflakes, or stars, etc. It’s fun seeing which patterns give the best effects.

Something else Marianne found, that’s both fun and practical, is a type of wallet I’d never seen before, made of a folded sheet of Tyvek. Mighty Wallets come in all sorts of designs, including some with Star Trek themes. Highly recommended!

Ho, ho, ho Nöelco

One of the Christmas gifts for my son this year is a Norelco rechargeable razor. Norelco is a unit of Philips in Holland, the company that introduced Compact Cassettes, LaserDisc video, and co-developed Compact Discs with Sony.

In the 1960’s Norelco started to advertise using a stop-motion animated Santa in their holiday TV commercials. When I was a kid I looked forward to seeing the Norelco Santa. Here’s a video survey of his appearances through the years. The first voice you’ll hear is one the all-time great announcers, Peter Thomas, born in 1924 and, from what I can tell, still working.

Norelco’s Santa disappeared in the 1990’s, but this year he made a digital comeback.

Christmas Eve!

This is me, Christmas 1976, shortly after I had my first paying radio station gig. My brother-in-law Marc is in the background…

… and this was what I was reacting to. A beautiful, old Zenith console tube radio that my brother Jeff gave me. He traded an enlarger for it. (Back in the age of analog photography there were these little things called negatives and to make a print you had to… oh, never mind.) Years later, I had it refinished and restored.

The radio was one of the last made before war production took over, so it was 35 years old on that Christmas Day, which was… 35 years ago?? Yike! I’m not going to think about that and instead I’ll go get some ‘nog.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Fe Fi Fo FiOS

I’m one of the lucky ones who has Verizon FiOS. Not only is the Internet service the best there is for American consumers, HDTV is also the best it can be, because the system delivers the signals exactly as they are received, with no re-compression. I do have one quibble, however, and that’s the HDTV DVR. It pretty much sucks. So it’s good to see that Verizon is working on improving their set top boxes, with an eye toward eliminating STB’s all together.

http://youtu.be/QogfVxtsOP8

And I want FiOS TV to carry BBC America in HD.