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.