Not sure what to wear this coming Friday? Here are my suggestions for Halloween party costumes, based on stories flying around the technology weblogs this week:

• Dress all in black, with a long white, butcher paper strip wrapped around you with with a URL in big bold letters. When asked, tell people you're a namespace.
• In the same all black clothes, this time take shiny pieces of aluminum foil and fashion into angle brackets (< >). Tape or otherwise attach sets of them, angle part pointing outwards, on both sides of your head, torso, and other body parts (use discretion). When asked, tell people you're dressed as well-formed XHTML. This is a particularly scary costume in Redmond, Washington.
• Show up late, demanding attention. Be loud, obnoxious, and disdainful of everyone around you. When asked your costume, say you're dressed as...wait, this one is going to get me into trouble, isn't it?
• Stay home, and when people asked why you didn't show up at the party, tell them you were dressed as Twitter.
• Dress up as the semantic web: carry several Stick-it notepads with you and slap metadata notes on everything and everyone. Do not expect to get invited back to the same party, next year.
• Glue cotton balls all over your body and go as a cloud. To differentiate yourself from an atmospheric cloud, carry a large ball and chain.
• Dress in an expensive suit. When asked, tell people you're the RIAA. When playing Musical Chairs, take all the chairs. And then sue the host.
• Take two large pieces of cardboard, spray paint a dull aluminum color and put a white Apple logo in the center of one of the pieces. Add a bright orange sale sticker, printed with "$800.00", to the top of the piece with the Apple logo. Strap the two cardboard pieces together and wear like a sandwich board. When asked, tell people you're a fat, cheap Macbook Pro.
• Ladies, forget Sexy Kitty, or Naughty Maid. Try Sexy Coder, instead. Wear a skintight, white body leotard with your favorite source code printed in tiny, black letters all over it...except introduce one bug into the code. Tell people to find the bug.
• To dress up like Vista...no, no. There are some costumes that are just too scary.

And yours?

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I'm incorporating my Just Shelley weblog into my regular feed, and several of the stories showed up "fresh" yesterday. My apologies for your getting inundated with my writing from yesterday.

We resolved the planetsvg.org domain. I will be donating the domain to the SVG Interest Group, and they will be creating a Planet SVG as part of the new general SVG web site. Hopefully, we'll be able to find more SVG-related feeds to add to the aggregation lists, as I know there are sites I'm missing.

I'll keep the current aggregation site up and running until we make the transfer.

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I just finished Eureka, in HD, on my TV. The shows are expensive, yes, but they're quite lovely. The show was free, as are several other shows in Apple's rollout of HD quality TV shows to go along with the movies. I know that several Battlestar Galactica fans are going to be happy that the first show of this season is also free in HD.

NBC is back with iTunes. I had a feeling the companies would kiss and make up. You can still get the shows like Eureka and BG at Hulu, but the quality just doesn't compare. I figure I save the bucks by not having cable, UVerse, or the like—I'll just get my shows ala cart.

I was a little disappointed today that the Apple show didn't roll out any new computers. I had my heart set on getting a decent deal on a late model iMac or Macbook Pro. Now, I'll have to wait and see what Apple rolls out in the Spring, and make do with what I have.

I may be doing it wrong, but I didn't like the iTunes "Genius" at all. It kept pushing songs at me to buy. To me, that's an annoyance, not a feature.

My iPod is still working, so wasn't interested in the rest of the show. Sacrilege! Not want the Apple eye and ear candy!? I must be tired. However, I am glad that Apple is finally taking some of the "green" stuff to heart.

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I did get the Genius to output several playlists. I'll load them into my iPod tomorrow, and see how it did. Still, the ads for songs to buy are irritating.

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Per Dave in comments, recommendation sidebar can be collapsed out of view. Much better.

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When you download one of the HD TV shows, you also get the SD quality show. I have to wonder if this isn't a direct shot at Amazon, which provides both the larger show for your TV and a mobile device version. Regardless, it would be nice if Apple provided an option to turn this off.

It would also be nice if Apple provided Amazon's digital media storage, so that you don't have to keep copies of the movies and TVs on your own external drives.

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Lastly, this forum thread states that the HD tv shows are only in 853x480 resolution, but that sounds like the SD show. I have noticed that you can't seem to buy the HD quality shows directly via AppleTV, but only through iTunes. I haven't checked today to see if this has changed.

I'm only interested in purchasing shows for two series, so I'm not going to be adding overly to Apple's coffers by going hog wild on HD TV shows. Well, unless Dr. Who also comes out with HD quality.

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And according to this thread there is confusion about which version a person is buying. I noticed that the AppleTV lineup doesn't seem to be keeping pace with the new iTunes rollout.

It does seem like you can only get the HD shows on your iTunes, and then sync them up with the AppleTV. Rather a pain, that. That's an unusually clunky move on Apple's part. I wonder if this is a signal that Apple is becoming indifferent to the AppleTV?

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