Null

That was today's headline in my daily email notification from the NY Times.

Null. Null, I asks myself?

Was there an intern at the Times who neglected to update a field in some arcane script that populates the subject line of an email? Was there a solar flare aimed directly at the mail server at the Times? Did Blackwater spew a horrible cocktail of Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears' bathwater all over the MIS group, thus incapacitating the staff with their collective egregious funk and prevented every one of them from pressing the 'Enter' key at a crucial moment? The world may never know.

What is even bigger news is that I won the captioning contest at my work. We get a company-wide bi-monthly email in which a wonderful cartoon by the late great Bill Keane is presented sans caption. Employees are invited to provide a witty comment, preferably relevant to the search industry, specific to the company, and must give the reviewers a decent chortle.

What brilliant humor earned me a $25 GC for iTunes, Starbuck's, Peet's, or a local coffee house? Well here it is...and remember...it's dork humor, so put on your dork hat and dork it up, dorky!

I haven't been this happy since I found that handful of Milk Duds at the bottom of my backpack.

iTunes secret assassinator for Outlook?

Word on the street is that the latest version of iTunes software is obliterating some Outlook recurring events. Not a big deal if you're using it at home to listen to the Sphincter Sister's podcast while you dial Mom and looking at the photos your cousin sent you from inside Space Mountain.

But if you're one of those people who have admin rights and can install the iTunes software on your work machine AND your work mail solution just happens to be riding on the Exchange/Outlook backbone, well then...for now you might want to consider disabling automatic updates of the iTunes software if the MS Outlook Calendar-iPhone synch is a concern for you.

The affected version of the software is version 7.3.2.6. If have already have this version installed and have not yet synched, you can also disable the Outlook add-in.

For Outlook 2003, follow these steps to disable third-party add-ins:

1. Open Outlook 2003
2. From the Tools menu, choose Options.
3. Click the Other tab.
4. Click the Advanced Options button.
5. Click the COM Add-Ins button.
6. In the add-ins "iTunes Outlook add-in" and "Outlook iTunes Sync add-in" please uncheck and disable this.
7. Deselect the checkbox for each third-party add-in in this list.
8. Click OK.

For Outlook 2007, follow these steps to disable third-party add-ins:

1. Open Outlook 2007
2. From the Tools menu, choose Trust Center.
3. Select Add-ins from the left column.
4. Look at the list of add-ins beneath "Active Application Add-Ins" iTunes/Outlook add-ins ("iTunes Outlook add-in" and "Outlook iTunes Sync add-in") select the iTunes add-in
5. In the Manage box, click COM Add-Ins, and then click Go.
6. In the COM Add-Ins dialog, deselect the checkbox for each iTunes add-in in this list.
7. Click OK.

Folks who were troubleshooting this couldn't find any other alternative order of operations or impact from other applications that would cause this problem, so tread lightly. This looks to be affecting Outlook Calendars on both PCs and Macs. More troubleshooting from Apple here. Although in this case installing the newest version of iTunes probably shouldn't be part of the solution. Steve Jobs wants to kill your Microsoft calendar...muah-ha-ha-hahahaha!!

CD sales suck, and it's not your fault

It's not your fault, Will.

Highlights (from WSJ.com):

"One week, "American Idol" runner-up Chris Daughtry's rock band sold just 65,000 copies of its chart-topping album; another week, the "Dreamgirls" movie soundtrack sold a mere 60,000. As recently as 2005, there were many weeks when such tallies wouldn't have been enough to crack the top 30 sellers. In prior years, it wasn't uncommon for a No. 1 record to sell 500,000 or 600,000 copies a week."

"The music industry has been banking on the rise of digital music to compensate for inevitable drops in sales of CDs. Apple's 2003 launch of its iTunes Store was greeted as a new day in music retailing, one that would allow fans to conveniently and quickly snap up large amounts of music from limitless virtual shelves."

"It hasn't worked out that way -- at least so far. Digital sales of individual songs this year have risen 54% from a year earlier to 173.4 million, according to Nielsen SoundScan. But that's nowhere near enough to offset the 20% decline from a year ago in CD sales to 81.5 million units. Overall, sales of all music -- digital and physical -- are down 10% this year. And even including sales of ringtones, subscription services and other "ancillary" goods, sales are still down 9%, according to one estimate; some recording executives have privately questioned that figure, which was included in a recent report by Pali Research."

"Meanwhile, one billion songs a month are traded on illegal file-sharing networks, according to BigChampagne LLC."

Let's not blame this all on Best Buy and illegal downloads. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the majority of music that gets cranked out suffers from being soulless, contrived, and manufactured. Am I old and crotchety for saying that DJ Unk doesn't inspire me to walk it out?