I was happy enough with my old pair of Bose Qui­et­Com­fort noise-canceling head­phones, which I pur­chased through the Apple Store when they first came out some­time in 2004, I think. But they even­tu­ally bit the dust, the vic­tim of many, many travel miles.

I tried a pair of high-end ear buds, but didn’t like them.

So, when I was in the Apple Store again a few days before set­ting off for Europe, I checked out a new pair of Bose Qui­et­Com­forts. The new ver­sion of the Bose QuietComfort1 no longer con­tained noise-canceling fea­tures, though it’s being sold at the same price as the orig­i­nal ver­sion, which did con­tain noise-cancellation.

So the Apple Store sales­man steered me to the pricier Bose Qui­et­Com­fort® 2 Acoustic Noise Can­celling® Head­phones, which was more com­fort­able, seemed to play iPod tracks in higher fidelity, and, yep, con­tained noise-canceling fea­tures. (It retails on the Bose site for $299, plus shipping.

There’s one thing the new ver­sion con­tains that the old ver­sion didn’t con­tain: a sin­gle AAA bat­tery. No big deal, you say? Per­haps, but I’ve had my AAA bat­tery die three times in the past month.

See, the unit has no way of know­ing when you take the head­phones off. So you’re expected to turn off your head­phones every time you take them off. Hav­ing never had to turn off my head­phones in sev­eral decades of music lis­ten­ing, it’s a hard prac­tice to get into.

The kicker is this: If you don’t put in a bat­tery and turn the unit on, you can’t lis­ten to music. That’s right. The Bose Qui­et­Com­fort® 2 Acoustic Noise Can­celling® Head­phones don’t work if you sim­ply plug them into your iPod or other MP3 player.

News flash to Bose: Music can­cels out­side noise! Let your cus­tomers lis­ten to music with­out the need for a stu­pid AAA bat­tery. Jeesh.

This is one of the most bizarre things I’ve encoun­tered in 13 years on the Web:

Gmail Lock­down in sec­tor 4!

Our sys­tem indi­cates unusual usage of your account. In order to pro­tect Gmail users from poten­tially harm­ful use of Gmail, this account has been dis­abled for up to 24 hours.

If you are using any third party soft­ware that inter­acts with your Gmail account, please dis­able it or adjust it so that its use com­plies with the Gmail Terms of Use. If you feel that you have been using your Gmail account accord­ing to the Terms of Use or oth­er­wise nor­mally, please con­tact us using this form to report this problem.

The only “unusual” activ­ity is that Gmail has been unusu­ally slug­gish of late. I get hun­dreds of emails a day, and it’s begin­ning to take its toll in terms of Gmail’s respon­sive­ness. After using Gmail for daily for more than a year, this is a pretty per­sonal affront when I have dozens of busi­ness emails I need to attend to.

“An Incon­ve­nient Truth” opens in San Fran­cisco, Berke­ley, Mill Val­ley, Nevada City, San Jose, Palo Alto and hun­dreds of U.S. the­aters this Fri­day. MoveOn.org is ask­ing mem­bers to pledge to see the movie and get tick­ets in advance. They’re also spon­sor­ing a con­fer­ence call with Al Gore this Sun­day, June 4, at 7 pm EST / 4 pm PST.

Also, you can mark the movie’s open­ing night with its pro­ducer and local eco-glitterati at an After Party on Fri­day, June 2, from 9 pm to 2 am at The Hold­ing Com­pany (Prom­e­nade, 2 Embar­cadero Cen­ter, San Fran­cisco; a short walk from the Land­mark Embar­cadero cin­ema) fol­low­ing the 7:50 pm and later screen­ings. It fea­tures some cutting-edge solu­tions to global warm­ing, hors d’oeuvres, wine & beer, and organic vodka.

Here’s an inter­view World­Chang­ing did with the film’s direc­tor, Davis Guggen­heim, ear­lier this month.

Mean­time, Exxon is behind a major ad cam­paign designed to dis­credit the film and the sci­ence behind it. Why? Because “An Incon­ve­nient Truth” has the power to fun­da­men­tally change the way we act on global warming.

Here’s what The New Yorker says:

Log on to Fan­dango. Reserve some seats. Bring the fam­ily. It shouldn’t be missed. No kid­ding… …There is no sub­sti­tute for Pres­i­den­tial power, but Gore is now play­ing a unique role in pub­lic life. He is a sym­bol of what might have been, who insists that we focus on what likely will be an unin­hab­it­able planet if we fail to pay atten­tion to the folly we are com­mit­ting, and take the steps nec­es­sary to end it.

Oh, by the way, from today’s New York Times:

Looks like Al Gore was right. 2 Stud­ies Link Global Warm­ing to Greater Power of Hur­ri­canes.

Plus, the Times reports, sci­en­tists have greatly under­es­ti­mated the power of green­house gases to warm the planet.

Later: Paul Krug­man in today’s Times tells this telling but obscene story: Swift Boat­ing the Planet.

A brief seg­ment in “An Incon­ve­nient Truth” shows Sen­a­tor Al Gore ques­tion­ing James Hansen, a cli­ma­tol­o­gist at NASA, dur­ing a 1989 hear­ing. But the movie doesn’t give you much con­text, or tell you what hap­pened to Dr. Hansen later.

And that’s a story worth telling, for two rea­sons. It’s a good illus­tra­tion of the way inter­est groups can cre­ate the appear­ance of doubt even when the facts are clear and cloud the rep­u­ta­tions of peo­ple who should be regarded as heroes. And it’s a warn­ing for Mr. Gore and oth­ers who hope to turn global warm­ing into a real polit­i­cal issue: you’re going to have to get tougher, because the other side doesn’t play by any known rules.

Dr. Hansen was one of the first cli­mate sci­en­tists to say pub­licly that global warm­ing was under way. In 1988, he made head­lines with Sen­ate tes­ti­mony in which he declared that “the green­house effect has been detected, and it is chang­ing our cli­mate now.” When he tes­ti­fied again the fol­low­ing year, offi­cials in the first Bush admin­is­tra­tion altered his pre­pared state­ment to down­play the threat. Mr. Gore’s movie shows the moment when the administration’s tam­per­ing was revealed.

In 1988, Dr. Hansen was well out in front of his sci­en­tific col­leagues, but over the years that fol­lowed he was vin­di­cated by a grow­ing body of evi­dence. By rights, Dr. Hansen should have been uni­ver­sally acclaimed for both his pre­science and his courage.

But soon after Dr. Hansen’s 1988 tes­ti­mony, energy com­pa­nies began a cam­paign to cre­ate doubt about global warm­ing, in spite of the increas­ingly over­whelm­ing evi­dence. And in the late 1990’s, cli­mate skep­tics began a smear cam­paign against Dr. Hansen himself. …

There’s a con­cise way to describe what hap­pened to Dr. Hansen: he was Swift-boated. …

Now­Pub­lic, the par­tic­i­pa­tory news net­work, just announced that it has closed a $1.4 mil­lion (USD) round of angel fund­ing. The deal was led by Brightspark Ven­tures of Toronto along side sev­eral vet­eran angel investors includ­ing mem­bers of the New York Angels and cur­rent and for­mer exec­u­tives from Nokia, Register.com, Info­s­pace, Microsoft, Alliance Atlantis and Warner Bros. Tele­vi­sion. I’m on NowPublic’s advi­sory board, so this comes as wel­come news.

Front-page story in today’s San Jose Mer­cury News: The new must-see on your PC: YouTube. Video-sharing shift­ing enter­tain­ment options. Excerpt:

Allen Ng’s YouTube habit is eat­ing into his TV habit.

Every chance he gets, the 14-year-old from Fre­mont checks the Web site YouTube to watch short videos of bad­minton clips, excerpts of Chi­nese movies and funny, ama­teur pro­duc­tions made and posted by strangers from around the world. At school, the buzz among Allen’s friends isn’t about TV but about quirky YouTube videos — like the Nor­we­gian man recently per­form­ing as a human sound effects machine.

“I go to YouTube when I get bored,” Allen says.

YouTube and other video-sharing Web sites sig­nal a shift in the way enter­tain­ment will be made and con­sumed in the future. They’re cre­at­ing a new form of tele­vi­sion that’s at once per­sonal, grass-roots and unfettered.

With the emer­gence of tech­nol­ogy for eas­ily shar­ing video over the Inter­net, view­ers are gain­ing the auton­omy to choose what, when and where they watch — be it on an iPod, lap­top or desk­top com­puter. And the masses are get­ting an oppor­tu­nity to cre­ate and exper­i­ment with video while bypass­ing the cen­tral fil­ter of a TV network. …

“Peo­ple don’t want to be the next Spiel­berg but they want to express them­selves,” says J.D. Lasica, exec­u­tive direc­tor of Our­me­dia, a not-for-profit Web site for videos and other content.

Oh, and for those won­der­ing how videos get pro­moted to YouTube’s front page, it’s not done by the com­mu­nity — they’re hand-pcked by Kevin Don­ahue, vice pres­i­dent of programming.

YouTube, the cur­rent leader of the pack:
– has 12.5 mil­lion vis­i­tors a month
– serves more than 50 mil­lion videos a day
– accepts 40,000 new videos per day (no esti­mate on how many of those are infringing)

The arti­cle was accom­pa­nied by a graphic, which I don’t see online so I’ll repro­duce it here:

Watch­ing video on the Web: monthly visitors

YouTube 12.5 mil­lion
MSN Video 9.5 mil­lion
vids.myspace.com 8.95 mil­lion (look for MySpace to be No. 1 within 6 months)
Google Video, 7.28 mil­lion
AOL Video 5.4 mil­lion
Break.com 2.81 mil­lion
video.search.yahoo.com 2.63 mil­lion
iFilm 2.44 mil­lion
Atom Films 1.92 mil­lion
Meta­cafe 1.69 mil­lion
Guba.com 1.2 million

By the way, word is that Yahoo will be launch­ing its own video site (apart from search) tomorrow.

NY Times: Ken Loach’s ‘Wind That Shakes the Bar­ley’ Wins Top Prize at Cannes.

Plus, images of the Palme d’Or.

An Incon­ve­nient Truth opens in wide release this week. It could be the most impor­tant you’ll ever see.

As I blogged ear­lier this month, I saw Al Gore’s slide pre­sen­ta­tion in San Fran­cisco and blogged about it here, but I didn’t have a chance to trran­scribe my brief notes because I was about to leave the coun­try on a trip. Here are a few high­lights from Gore’s talk:

Gore quoted Mark Twain: “What gets us into trou­ble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”

He said the snow­cap atop Mount Kil­i­man­jaro will be com­pletely gone in 15 to 20 years.

“We’ve lost 40 per­cent of the arc­tic ice cap in the last 40 years.” The glac­i­ers are dis­ap­pear­ing from Glac­ier National Park in Mon­tana. And “the skep­tics are retreat­ing faster than the glaciers.”

Left unchecked, in 50–70 years, “the ice cap will be com­pletely gone” dur­ing the sum­mer months.

“This not a polit­i­cal issue. This is a moral issue, an eth­i­cal issue, a spir­i­tual issue.”

If left unchecked, the con­se­quences will be “utterly cat­a­strophic for human civilization.”

“The hottest 10 years on record have all been in the past 14 years,” with 2005 as the hottest.

He quoted Win­ston Churchill, who in 1936 said, “We are enter­ing a period of consequences.”

Last year’s wave of hur­ri­canes — “We not only broke the record, we absolutely shat­tered the record” — may be only the beginning.

The most chill­ing stats came when Gore dis­played maps of the new global coast­lines, after sea lev­els rise by 10 feet or more. Bei­jing: 20 mil­lion peo­ple dis­placed. Shang­hai basin, 40 mil­lion. Ams­ter­dam, half flooded. Lower Man­hat­tan and South Florida, submerged.

“It is our time to rise and meet this chal­lenge,” he declared.

Net­Squared is host­ing an online con­fer­ence Tues­day and Wednes­day (which, oddly, Our­me­dia has been shut out of, despite three over­tures). The focus is on the future of technology-enabled social change.

You can access the chat room and see the full remote con­fer­ence lineup here.

The fea­tured Q&A ses­sions include:

• Judith Feder on “Health care and web 2.0 patient communities”

• Rolf Kleef of Greenpeace

• Alexan­dra Samuel of Social Sig­nal on “Build­ing Online Com­mu­nity: Behind the Scenes at NetSquared”

• Micki Krim­mel of Par­tic­i­pant Pro­duc­tions on “Media that Mobi­lizes: An Incon­ve­nient Truth, Cli­mate­Cri­sis and more tales from Participate.net” (at 4 pm PT Tuesday)

• Beth Kan­ter on “Tag­ging in the Non­profit World”

• Lisa Stone of BlogHer

• Robyn Deupree of Bloglines

• Mike Linksvayer of Cre­ative Com­mons on “Lever­ag­ing Tech­nol­ogy for Free
Cul­ture and Your Nonprofit’s Mission”

• Enoch Choi of Palo Alto Med­ical Foun­da­tion on “Tech Tools in Med­i­cine: Per­sonal Health Records, Mobile Devices, Blogging,Podcasting, Health Search & Tag­ging @ Google Co-op”

• Boris Mann from Bryght on “Open Source and your non-profit”

• Scott Heifer­man from Meetup.com

• Nancy White of Full Cir­cle on “Online Facil­i­ta­tion Open Discussion”

• Edward Viel­metti from the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan School of Infor­ma­tion on “Super­pa­tron: view­ing libraries from a patron’s point of view”

Dan Gill­mor at the rel­a­tively new Cen­ter for Cit­i­zen Media blog: Stock Option Scan­dal: Make Share­hold­ers Cit­i­zen Journalists.

Today’s the last day of the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val. I attended — for the first time — this past week and felt the rush of an inter­na­tional event filled with beau­ti­ful peo­ple. Here are 35 shots in a Flickr photo set.

Tech­no­rati tags: Cannes, pho­tos, film , pho­tog­ra­phy