Just reading about the nutty opening of the Ginza Apple store in Japan. The japanese seem to love this retail as art worship stuff. I first observed this when visiting Honolulu and saw all the high-end stores catering to the Japanese tourists.

This guy's blog about the opening is facinating and nutty!

I just had a thought of what this whole Apple cult reminds me of. It's kind of like being in high-school again and the really cool kids wear the right clothes and do all the cool things. Of course, Steve Jobs is the ring leader of this coolathon. The problem I have is it is pretty elitist and exclusionary. Apple is exclusionary by over charging for what are underneath pretty ordinary pieces of electronic equipment that are easily duplicated by millions of chinese factory workers. But, slap an Apple logo on it and a shiny monochrome paint job and you have instant retail as art object d'arte pagan god worship.

Sheesh!

Holy Crap! Comcast just doubled their download speeds for all their customers. Amazing. They are obviously having teething problems since I still get a a lot of DNS "address not found" errors but I remain hopeful that this will settle down.

This does explain why things have been so inconsistent of late with Comcast. Comcast is truly a mysterious company. It would be great if they would choose to be more communicative with their customers.

Anyway, I'm doing a download of the latest Knoppix Linux CD to see what kind of speeds I can achieve. It looks pretty good right now. Around 200k with BitTorrent. I think it could be better?