m06orama – nerdly musings from Winnipeg (Wordpress)

Jeez, I can’t believe I wrote that last post – why do I care about blogging?  Er, how about like I feel I should know about these things?  After all, I do describe myself as a nerd.  Plus you’ve got to have some content.

iGoogle’s default home page includes a “Free iTunes Downloads” widget, but you can’t actually get the downloads unless you are in the US and have an account at the US iTunes store. Otherwise you just get bounced back to the store in your own country, and no free downloads for you!

Someone else who was having the same problem commented that non-US users were being “duped” and sent on an “eChase”. Ha!

I posted the following in knee-jerk response mode, but then I thought better of it as I don’t want to end my days as a political prisoner in some Arctic gulag after the “Empire of Good” annexes Canada in the interests of National Security and “defending the American way of life”.

Okay, so I have an overactive imagination. But here goes anyway:-

“So ‘duped’ was how I was feeling eh? Not very pleasant, but at least now I have a name for it.

“I slurpose there must be some complicated legal weasel why these things are only free in the “Empire of Good”, and so I won’t write a snotty letter to Mr.Apple about that just yet.

“Meanwhile, um, didn’t I this ‘Free iTunes Downloads’ Blogger widget thingy as a part of the standard iGoogle ‘home tab’, or did I just imagine that?

“Maybe Mr.iGoogle will take note and provide more useful ‘regional alternative’ default setups, such as ‘Free American Joke Downloads’ here in Canada, for example.”

My stummick apres …

here there is a mighty great wind and
i think my stummick just moved to Hyderabad

M.I.T. physics professor Walter H. G. Lewin, 71, has emerged as an international Internet guru, thanks to his global classroom created to spread knowledge through cyberspace. Professor Lewin’s videotaped physics lectures, free online on the OpenCourseWare of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have won him devotees across the country and beyond.

See http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/19/education/19physics.html?hp