My best birthday present? Dave Winer gave me a little tiny adapter for my MacMini. What does it do? It plugs into the audio-out port of the Mini and converts that port into an optical out one. So, now my optical cable plugs into that adapter instead of my headphone jack. My receiver has optical ports. If you have a recent receiver your receiver probably has optical ports too.

Man, what a difference that makes. My Mac Mini sounds a LOT better now. Dave Winer said it was the best thing he did to his Mac Mini too.

I wonder how many people have Mac Minis and don’t even know that it has optical out capabilities, but you gotta get that little adopter first.

Thanks Dave for making my system sound a lot better!

Why does this work? My theory? The digital-to-analog converters in the MacMini suck when compared to the ones in my Denon receiver.

Ahh, now you know why I still read my feeds. TechMeme doesn’t catch stuff like this, invaluable as it may be.

Frank Shaw works for Waggener Edstrom and heads the Microsoft account and has his take on Apple’s week at MacWorld.

I agree with his analysis and I too had the reaction “Apple’s doing a book reader” after Steve Jobs told a reporter that the Kindle would fail because no one reads books (he said the same thing about video on the iPod, remember?)

Along these lines, I can’t believe how some companies treat bloggers. Target, for shame! I guess I’m not a “core guest.” Funny enough I once had a Target credit card cause I spent so much money in Targets.

Last night I took Patrick to the Crunchies, where we sat in the last row. Definitely the highlight of the show was when Apple won a Crunchie for the iPhone. Problem was that Mike Arrington doesn’t have any pull at Apple — they refused to send anyone to pick up the award.

So, who picked up the award? Fake Steve Jobs, of course, only he did it through a video. Beware of the language, if you’re going to play that around the kiddies this morning.

Oh, after the Crunchies? Mark Zuckerberg, founder/CEO of Facebook, came over and we had a really nice chat.