Caught “Costas Now” with an episode about Barry Bonds about to break the home run record. Featured an interview an uncomfortable Bud Selig and with Curt Shilling, who is outspoken as ever. But Chris Rock stole the show in a discussion about Bonds. He ripped into Babe Ruth homeruns because he played in an era of segregation, saying the stats are bullshit:

“Because they didn’t play against black players. It’s like saying I won the New York City Marathon but no Kenyans ran that year. Babe Ruth has 714 Affirmative Action home runs.”

He had similar comments on during a Letterman appearance recently.

The Startup Weekend series is coming to Boston the weekend of October 18-21st. This experiment was previously run in Boulder, which produced vosnap, a “social quick voting tool”. Not convinced this is a great way to start a company, but could be an interesting hacking weekend.

Video of Merlin Mann’s talk at Google about his “Inbox Zero” series on controlling your email. Full of good tips extracted from his series of posts on the same subject. Thankfully my professional and personal email inboxes are quite sane. At work, we use the Lotus Notes client which, putting it mildly, I don’t love using. Especially when compared with Gmail which I actively enjoy. Although I wonder if Notes’ annoyances are not a bug, but rather a feature? I receive an order of magnitude less than the 500+ daily emails a Googler mentions getting in Merlin’s talk. Perhaps having a tool that isn’t quite as satisifying means people are slightly less likely to fire off unnecessary emails? I’ll tell myself that the next time I’m waiting for Notes to replicate or swearing at the built-in search.

The TiVo Lovers blog has a review of the $300 TiVo HD, the previously rumored “Series 3 Lite”. Even though I love my TiVo Series3 as the beautiful, life-changing device that it is, the $300 less TiVo HD looks like the better deal now. Still dual-tuner, records HD and great interface with only a smaller hard drive (160GB vs. 250GB), a non-backlit remote and no OLEDs. The TiVo on Comcast DVR is also worth comparing depending on cable providers and budget.

Update: Amazon now has the TiVo TCD652160 HD DVR available for pre-order, becoming available on August 25th.

AT&T signed up 146,000 iPhone customers in the 1st quarter, far short of the 500,000 units that some were estimating around the launch. The pricetag is quite high for a mobile phone, and even potential buyers like myself are waiting for the next generation. Analysts compare it with the launch of the iPod, which also didn’t initially match the hype but seems to have worked out okay for Apple.