Pixar, once-owned-by-ILM and sold for $10M at a fire sale, is now purported to be sold to Disney for $7.4B in stock.

So is this the greatest play Jobs has yet to pull off?  iPods fly off the shelves and iTunes spits out videos for a song, finally making portable video usable and affordable.  Regardless of the multiitude of Apple goodness over the last few years, the Pixar buy puts Jobs on the Disney board and I can already smell the exclusive distribution of Disney content to Apple devices.

I wonder if Gates & Co. might be re-thinking the abandonment of Windows Media Player for the Mac?  Who cares since WMP sucked anyway.

I’d venture to say the biggest fuss around Intel’s new Core Duo line of processors isn’t the processor itself but the device it’s living inside of: the Macintosh.

An early benchmark of the iMac 2.0 Ghz Core Duo (sorry, I can’t find the source story) put it around 1.8x faster than a full-on Power Mac G5. About in line with Apple’s 2x number. Considering this is the first generation MacIntel that’s a good, although not extraordinary, start.

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Every so often I attend a Learning Annex course about writing, finance, or real estate. Many of those classes showcase an unknown speaker with proclaimed experience in something and very eager to sell you their book and tape rather than give you some juicy nuggets during the course you paid $40 for.

But every so often there’s an interesting bit of something I learn. Last night’s class entitled Building Your Financial Portfolio on $25 a Month or Less was one.

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Greenpeace activists parked a 20-ton dead whale outside the Japanese embassy in Berlin on Thursday to protest against the country’s whaling program.

For a country so dependent on the sea for food and related products, you’d think they would be the model for sustainability. Instead they seem to fly in the face of it as if somehow, perhaps magically, the sea will offer limitless abundance regardless of the volume of catch.

(Via MSNBC.com: World News)

I recently finished listening to the audiobook of How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. Although written in 1936 the topics and examples are poignant today as they were back then although the English language has changed a bit.

This is a must-listen, easily in my top ten.

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