Apple announced Final Cut Studio this morning at an event at the Paris hotel in Las Vegas. The promo session by Apple is a lead-off event to this week's National Association of Broadcasters convention in Sin City.

Among the outstanding presentations was the real-time use of iChat AV by the folks over at Scrubs to show how they can review video remotely and collaboratively edit with remote locations. The whole world of live remotes for local TV and other real-time production work.

Included in Apple's announcement were lots of cool features but none that top Final Cut Pro 5's emergence as a multi-camera editing platform. Not only does the new revision of Final Cut do multi-camera but it does so in an incredibly slick way. Watch your feeds in a 4x4 to 16x16 viewer window and select from amongst as many high definition feeds as you would like. Read more about Coming soon

The name Network Solutions might lead you to believe the company is in the business of providing solutions for networking issues. It seems they are instead in the business of providing excuses.

Following several hours in which their account manager login returned an error I called customer service. The form says to "please try again". I did. Many times. A call to customer support led to a few minutes on hold listening to a very poor rendition of the Cannon in D.

Speaking to Chris PHADEUS001 (no last names please), I learned that the problem is an unscheduled maintenance window where they are either incapable or too lazy to put anything on the web. This is more akin to the service expected from Ma Bell in 1960, where their lack of posting to a website could be understood. Even beyond that what sort of call center cannot put a message on their menu explaining the problem.

Evidently Network Solutions discovered a problem that would have caused the information entered to not propagate properly.

Hopefully somebody in the trade press will pick this up and explore how the coincidence occurs that an unscheduled outage occurs late on a Friday evening when seemingly few would notice. I guess the domain registrar migration may come sooner rather than later.

In an interview with the Washington Times Speaker DeLay continues the Republican assault on families. Asked whether he agrees with the White House on guest worker and immigration issues DeLay responded:

I've talked to the president about this. He thinks the country of origin is a good idea. He's open to other ideas. He's a little tough on bringing your family. But the key here is you don't want to bring your family, don't allow it - they go home anyway now illegally. They go back and forth all the time. It's not a matter of breaking up families, it's a matter of good sense. If they bring the family and they get established here, they'll never go home.

In other words it's about family values as long it is not one of those families. This kind of subterfuge just makes my blood boil. Congress has proven, very recently in the Schiavo, case that they are willing to throw their traditional family values out the window for a few political points. So if I am to understand correctly the only families that deserve to be together are those of United States Citizens and those who can come on programs that aren't guest worker programs? How does one expect that the immigrant families of guest workers are any different than students? Foreign students can have their families stay with them in the United States and they are expected to leave the country when the visa expires. What is it that would cause Mr. DeLay to expect something different of blue collar workers and their families? This sort of insidious racism and classism is thoroughly disgusting, all the more so in national leaders. Read more about Our family values

Former Senator Bob Dole was on Morning Edition yesterday talking about his new book. The interviewer asked him about plans to scramble the rules in the US Senate in order to weaken the minority Democratic Party and push through judicial nominees. Senator Dole suggested that Republican lawmakers should tread very carefully. The rules protecting ensuring a voice for the minority party are very important.

Several other important topics need to be covered here. In the coming days expect to see more about Community Development Block Grants (CDBGs) and developments with the sudden halt to a small town school construction project that leaves the students worse off than when the project started.