waiting

Links from Monday's episode of Loaded:

Facebook asks permission to change its privacy policy

Skype tweaks Skype To Go, letting you make international calls as local ones

Sony drops the price of the PlayStation Portable to $129.99

A Chinese version of Groupon is announced

Motorola sues TiVo for alleged patent infringement in its DVRs

Motorola is sued for using the name Xoom on its new tablet

New York Sen. Charles Schumer wants HTTPS to be the default security setting on major Web sites

A man in Florida is arrested for allegedly planting viruses in Whac-A-Mole arcade games

A … Read more

Hey, if you dump your boyfriend, you'll be happier. How do I know? Because you could be with me.

How do you know you could be with me? Because I'm in your waiting room. No, not in the waiting room at your dental surgery. I'm in your Facebook WaitingRoom.

You might have thought that the Breakup Notifier was enough to make love's course run smoother than your own sometimes coarse behavior has managed to effect. Breakup Notifier is a Facebook app (since blocked by Facebook) that notifies you the minute one of your many crushes became … Read more

Some months back I read with interest your amusing series of articles about buying an iPad. I myself have held off but have been recently considering picking one up as a Xmas gift for myself. However, I just read about how the iPad 2 might be shipping in February. Also, I saw that Apple lowered the price for refurbished iPads, which got me wondering, all things considered, whether it was a bad idea to buy one now. Know you're busy, but can you give me any advice?"

Charles, St. Louis

Ah, Charles, I just went by … Read more

You'd think that, nearly two months after launch, post-antennagate, an iPhone 4 should be fairly easy to come by.

As recent reports have stated, the iPhone 4 seems to be sold out in a number of Apple stores, despite supplies that are constantly arriving. Apple's Web site states a three-week wait before new iPhone 4s are being shipped.

It's worse than that, I discovered. Not only is it hard to come by, but there are still lines nearly as long as they were on the original launch day, even on August 13. How can this be? … Read more

OK, Michael Jackson is weirder, but Tom Waits is a more interesting sort of weird. I thought so before I read Barney Hoskyns' "Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits," but now I know it.

Thing is, Tom Waits is his own genre; there's no other songwriter or musician that does what Waits does. No one ever tagged Waits a folkie or rock musician, or even all that much of a musician. Waits is Waits, and that's all he has to be.

Hoskyns tries to nail down exactly who Waits is, but never really succeeds. We learn that in the early 1970s Waits was a beatnik poet of sorts, but somehow his tunes were covered by mainstream acts like the Eagles ("Ol' 55") and Bruce Springsteen ("Jersey Girl"). During his early days he was based in Los Angeles, but Waits wasn't really part of the radio-friendly LA singer/songwriter pack led by Jackson Browne and Warren Zevon. His early heavily textured, noir-romantic records were populated with stellar jazz players.… Read more

Jeff, Wilson, and Justin recover from their hangovers with ace reporter Caroline McCarthy. We chat about Wilson's drunken debauchery and Caroline's bacon tattoo.

Some days on The 404, there isn't much news to report, so we do something we like to call "milking," and boy are we good at it! It's not for lacking of trying. We spend as much as 10 minutes every day looking for stuff on the Interwebs to riff on, and while we could talk about hackers taking apart Safari in seconds, it's really not that funny. And it's not 404-esque material. See how much text I've written, and really I haven't said anything!

In actual stories today, Caroline McCarthy tells us that there are bacon tattoos at SXSW. We think someone spammed our poll. President Obama makes a terrible, terrible 404-style joke about bowling and the Special Olympics. (We wish he would come on our show.) Google gives you an "Undo Send" feature in Gmail. We think it would be more effective if it had a five-hour, post-hangover undo-send feature. And we're really, really tired of Jason Seigel & Co. movies like "I Love You, Man." But it does bring up fond memories of Jennifer Love Hewitt in that teen classic "Can't Hardly Wait."

It didn't take a check of other CNET stories to confirm that Apple/AT&T's registration servers have either went back to bed or checked out early on a Friday. After the cheers at 8:00 a.m. the line moved less than 20 feet within the first hour. There were at least two announcements from Apple reps (one in a utila-kilt even) that things are "a little bit slow," because of the "overwhelming demand." An insistent, we could always come back later was touted too.

At one point, I was getting discouraged. … Read more

Some things never change: Despite being a stranger in a foreign land (a San Franciscan in sales-tax-free Portland on business), despite only getting 4 hours of sleep and despite iPhone 1.0 waffling towards getting iPhone 3G, I found myself in line in front of the Apple Store at 7:00 a.m. in Portland, Oregon waiting for the new iPhone 3G. And, of course, I wasn't alone.

My goal: the white 16-GB iPhone. Will I get it? Only time will tell. But like last year's wait in San Francisco, those earliest of the early adopters are primarily … Read more

The new iPhone is looming, right? Current iPhone models are not being restocked or are 'sold out', buzz is being generated. It's a different kind of buzz than last time around though. There aren't 'leaked' pictures, there aren't many purported leaks, or any increased amount of feverish patent-trolling to see what's coming. It seems that there won't be a ground-breaking paradigm shifting this time around, right?

On the larger vein of waiting, though, I'm a pretty impatient type. A bit ADHD too. But you know the type of person I'm talking about: people … Read more