Dan Olsen’s Weblog

Geico is suing Google to trademark infringement, unfair competition and dilution of its marks.

Geico gets green light to sue Google, Overture
Referenced Sep 2 2004 4:50 GMT-0600

The ECLab will be holding weekly seminars in 2204 TMCB at Brigham Young University. We will be discussing the books on this list in order. The seminar is open to the public.

A music store plus some.

I went and checked out the new music store that has been launched by Microsoft. I heard that Microsoft was planning on having more services available than iTunes did and I was interested to find out what those extra services were. The extra services weren’t what I was expecting.

I’m not sure how much functionality I may be missing since I use Mac and Linux most of the time. However, they have listings of radio stations located around the US. I will have to check to see if their service allows you to listen to those radio stations when I am logged into my Windows box. I was able to find my favorite stations found in Utah.

Another feature is the Movies Preview section. This part of the service provides users with a place to find showtimes & tickets as well as see movie trailers. This section also provides information on movies now playing as well as movies coming out in theaters and DVD/Video.

Now, the part that I didn’t expect to see is the TV section. The TV section of Microsoft’s new music site is down at the moment I am writing this. However, I looked at it yesterday. This part of the site provides television listings which I found to be easier to use than the TV Guide website. It also gives information about current and upcoming shows.

Currently this new service provided by Microsoft is in beta and can also be used with the new Windows Media Player 10. So far, this rival to iTunes has features not found in iTunes but from the looks of it there are still some wrinkles that need to be ironed out.

RSS feeds! As a person who uses a news aggregator to subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds I must say that the benefit of a class website having an RSS feed is awesome! In Blackboard I have to log in to check what the latest announcements are and due dates (if the teacher posts them). With my 462 class all I have to do is subscribe to the RSS feed and I get the updated announcements with the rest of my news. I can also subscribe to the calendar so I know when changes have been to the assignment due dates. Will Blackboard eventually provide feeds for students using Blackboard?

Before I give all hail to RSS feeds in this field, I must add that this may only be something that people who are tech savvy will enjoy. I know many people that prefer to just log in when they need information.

However, it wouldn’t hurt to have an RSS feed for those of us who prefer to subscribe to a feed to get updates with all their other updates in their aggregator.