So why'd we miss a Monday broadcast this time, you ask? Well, as it turns out, we didn't actually have to, but we hate to waste a good excuse when the opportunity presents itself. So when the Patriots won that Super Bowl thingy on Sunday night and the rest of Boston's population exploded into an impromptu orgy of alcohol poisoning and testosterone overdose that sapped Monday-morning productivity to near-zero levels, what choice did we have but to nix our own output? After all, we certainly don't want to make everyone else look bad. And besides, how often does anyone get to use the excuse of "our team just won the Super Bowl"? It can't be more than two or three times a year, tops.

Why, no-- we aren't really football fans. Why do you ask?

Truth be told, we didn't even bother to watch the Big Game, since we missed buying a square in the office pool, so we had almost zero interest in the outcome. In fact, we didn't even tune in for the ads, since we knew there wouldn't be an Apple commercial, and we'd already seen the Pepsi spots flogging the resurrection of last year's iTunes promo. We almost TiVo'd the evening to check out the launch of Napster's big go-for-the-throat assault on the iTunes Music Store, seeing as the company saw fit to blow something like $2.4 million of its $30 million ad budget (because, you know, they're just swimming in cash over there at Napster headquarters) by telling however kajillion many people who tuned in for the game that it costs $10,000 to load an iPod up with music. Given all the speculation of late that the advent of portable music-rental services like Napster To Go may signal the beginning of the end for the iTMS, we figured we should probably bear witness to the coming of the apocalypse.

In the end, though, we didn't go in for the Chicken Little routine-- and we're glad we didn't, because as faithful viewer James Hedrick points out, a CNN/Money article on the Super Bowl ads not only says that most of the commercials were yawners (having been tamed down and lamed up thanks to the skittishness following last year's halftime hijinks), but also points out that USA Today's Ad Meter ranks Napster's big "iPods cost 10 grand to fill" commercial dead last among this year's batch of 55 ads. Yes, Napster's big gamble-- in which the Napster cat in the crowd at a football game holds up a sign comparing Napster's prices to those of the iTMS-- scored a dismal 4.37 with USA Today's focus groups-- roughly half the score of the number one pick, and placing it behind every other ad of the evening. Yes, even the commercial in which "people float in bubbles for O2OPTIX silicone hydrogen contact lenses." Ouch.

Now, a flop commercial doesn't necessarily indicate that predictions of the iTMS's imminent doom at the hands of Napster To Go are six or eight realities to the left of the one the rest of us are living in (and it's not like the Pepsi ads ranked much higher, 172 percent increase in traffic to iTunes.com notwithstanding), but hey, it's a great start. In any event, it's always nice to see that Napster remains the king of flushing investor capital down the toilet at speeds previously thought unattainable given the limitations of modern plumbing and the physical laws of the universe. Is anyone running a pool on when Napster itself goes swirling down the bowl to the Great Sewer of the Beyond?

It's a simple truism: these days, everyone who doesn't own an iPod wants one-- and even more of them want a free one. We've done our part to help over the years, occasionally providing helpful tips on easy ways to score a 'Pod completely free of charge (perform at the Grammys, for example, or fly Air France), but the thirst for free iPods seems never to be slaked; indeed, if anything, it's growing every day. So what do we do now? Start pointing you folks towards potentially dodgy pyramid-type schemes like FreeiPods.com? Hardly; our advice is far less tacky: enroll at Duke University as a freshman in the Class of 2009.

"But AtAT," we hear you ask, "wasn't that 'free iPods to all Duke freshmen' thing last year just a pilot program?" Well, sure, but that's no reason to believe that the ship has sailed. We know, we know-- what are the odds that Duke professors would honestly incorporate creative iPod use into their curricula, or that students would use the iPods for anything other than shuffling through the oeuvre of Linkin Park while cramming for a calculus midterm? But amazingly enough, we're really starting to think that the iPods are going to get a big thumbs-up when the university issues its report on the pilot program next month.

Check it out: according to the Associated Press, Duke Center for Instructional Technology director Lynne O'Brien claims that the program is "going very well," with a couple of dozen classes having incorporated some sort of iPod-based integration since last fall-- mostly of the "download the lecture you slept through in class last Wednesday so you can sleep through it again in the comfort of your own room" variety, but some classes are, for instance, having students analyze waveforms of music snippets from their iPods, or use them to record interviews with people for writing projects. (All the Duke iPods came with Belkin voice recorders.) And apparently the whole experiment has been generating enough outside buzz that the school is getting "queries from textbook publishers, who might include more audio material with their print offerings as a result." So someone, at least, is taking the whole thing seriously.

So yeah, while the cynics in us originally pegged Duke's iPod program as a one-year grab for attention (both of the media and applicant varieties), it's sounding more and more like it might be renewed for the fall. So if your free-iPod-cravin' behind happens to be college-bound this year, you might consider applying to Duke, because all else being equal, we don't know of any other colleges out there willing to kick in a free 'Pod to sweeten the deal. Of course, there's no guarantee that the free iPod program will be renewed, you understand, and Duke's application cutoff was apparently January 14th, so you'll need to invent some sort of time machine if you really want to apply. But hey, isn't that a small price to pay to get a $299 iPod for free?

You know, folks, we're so far out of the loop and behind on world events right now (Apple-flavored or otherwise), we're not even going to bother incorporating topical "ripped from today's headlines!" plot material into our final scene today, because what with how long it takes us to finish producing an episode given our current distraction load, by the time it'd finally get out on the airwaves, it'd be as stale as week-old sourdough doing a standup routine about the First Continental Congress. So instead, we're sure you won't mind sinking your teeth into a juicy slice o' drama that stays fresh on the shelf no matter how long you leave it up there. Yep, that's right: it's time once again for Stupid RAID Tricks!

By now you know the drill, right? A quick tech recap for those who think we're yammering on about bug spray: a RAID is a Redundant Array of Independent Disks, a volume that acts like one disk but is actually made up of a bunch of them, either "striped" for speed and capacity (so that, say, two 80 GB disks act like one 160 GB one) or "mirrored" for fault-tolerance (so two 80 GB disks act like one 80 GB disk, but if either disk dies, the RAID just shrugs and pretends that nothing happened). Unlike Windows XP, Mac OS X apparently lets you build RAIDs out of just about any volumes you can mount-- which led to that 4.22 MB floppy-based RAID some guy slapped together on his Mac last year, a technological stroke of inspired genius we still rank somewhere up there with the invention of Post-It Notes. Well, Jim Wright of Wright This Way comes darn close to achieving floppyRAID-class geekitude for describing how he built a working RAID out of four 1 GB iPod shuffles.

It was only a matter of time, we suppose; after all, the iPod shuffle lets you use any storage not claimed by music files as just another hard drive, so who wouldn't string a bunch of 'em together to create some wacky Frankensteinian RAID that costs way too much for the available storage? Certainly not ol' Jim, who bought one shufflePod himself and borrowed three others from friends, purchased a four-port USB hub, plugged everything into his G5, fired up Disk Utility, and striped those puppies together into a single 3.9 GB RAID. When he was done, he tested his handiwork by copying 1.86 GB worth of files to the RAID (which wouldn't fit on a single shufflePod-- clever, right?) in "just under 11 minutes." Success!

Okay, maybe it doesn't have quite the geek quotient of the floppy RAID, but at a cost of about $612, the shuffleRAID does probably have the distinction of being one of the most expensive 4ish GB logical volumes anyone's built out of new equipment these days. Of course, that all goes away as soon as some sick freak daisy-chains an armful of hubs and mounts 128 Celestron VistaPix Digital Camera Binoculars (each with 32 MB of Mass Storage-compliant flash RAM) to build an equivalent RAID to the tune of about, oh, $18,000. What are you waiting for? Get crackin'!