5) Sony 27" flat screen television. The picture still seems enormous compared to my old 20" Mitsubishi and is much sharper. Finally, those always important news crawls don't get cut off from the screen. I didn't go for a HD-compatible TV because although the Knicks and Rangers are both broadcast in high definition, things that are more interesting, such as MSNBC and The Weather Channel, are not.

4) Sony TV stand made for Sony 27" television. Initially, it looked like the old TV stand, from Crate & Barrel in 1996, might support the new TV even though it is nearly twice the weight of the old one. However. a survey of engineer friends convinced me to get a new one.

3) TV swivel. No more twisting the TV during dinner and then twisting it back to face the couch for watching late night Food Network.

2) Radio Shack thermometer/hygrometer. This handy and inexpensive instrument has been useful for determining the effectiveness of my humidifier, as well as for confirming the incompetence of structural work supposedly done to insulate my building. (Next to the air conditioning/heating vent, the temperature drops from 65 to 56 degrees.) Using one of many Web sites, I can convert the relative humidity reading to dewpoint, which I prefer as a measure of moisture in the air.

1) Ficus relocation and watering upgrade. Since moving this 22 year-old plant from the corner of my apartment to the center part of the window, and increasing watering from once to twice per week, around 15 new leaves have begun growing. Ideally, the ficus will fill out generously, blocking the view of the now-overly-congested area where I live and keeping the apartment cooler in the summer.

I guess the phone business is just too boring. IDT, well known for its blunt television commercials touting discount long distance calling rates, has acquired a 5% stake in Archie Comics. Well, this makes sense--if animation can be used to improve the quality of telephone calls.

But it turns out that IDT has a whole entertainment subsidiary, called IDT Entertainment. This unit also engaged Christopher Reeve to direct an animated full-length feature film. I am sure a telephone company will do a great job of running an animation studio! Maybe they can lease that old Disney Store space to showcase what happens when people responsible for telecom traffic also try and entertain you.

Looks like someone is getting bored and needs other things to do.

There seem to be a lot of new developments recently indicating that the Canadian and U.S. markets are a little more intertwined than before. First is in the area of phone plans: every unlimited landline calling plan either includes unlimited calling to Canada or offers that option for a few dollars more per month. As for cell phone carriers, AT&T Wireless offers a North America calling package that makes all of Canada part of your home calling area, and Verizon Wireless offers a similar package for west coast customers.

Now it's spreading to consumer product packaging. In the last few months, the following have been observed to feature packaging both in French and English: Starbucks coffee cups, various eye drops, humidifier wicks, and Kleenex tissues (a-choux).

I'm all for bilingual packaging if it allows companies to produce one set for both Canada and the U.S. and keeps costs down for consumers overall. But what about Spanish? In the U.S., that would appear to be far more useful than French. Newark Airport now has many signs in Spanish and English, generating a distinct competitive advantage over other New York area airports. If I had to guess, the more logical choice for bilingual packaging in the U.S. would be Spanish and English, with a separate French/English run for Canada.

It closed.

The Disney Store at 66th and Columbus had all the promise of synergy going for it. Sure, there are other Disney stores, but only this one was in the same building as ABC, also owned by Disney. An extra corner space at a high-traffic intersection would allow Disney to leverage is expertise in managing television stations, making movies, running theme parks and owning sports teams to sell more Disney toys. Peter Jennings would be right nearby delivering a world news update, providing added value to consumers that wanted the latest Princess DVD.

Now, Disney may have to think about actually leasing the valuable space to someone else that, you know, might actually want to pay money for prime real estate. This would have the terrible effect of adding to the bottom line and undermining conglomerate harmony.

In search of Ben & Jerry's Phish Food frozen yogurt (one of the few yogurt flavors that is a reasonable alternative to the real thing), I was disappointed to find that the Food Emporium had stopped carrying it to make room for reduced-carb New York Super Fudge Chunk ice cream.

Enough with the low carbs already. Low carbs bread--fine. But ice cream? Also, things like water are now highlighted with signs saying "low carb." This is one fad too many.

5) Apple, for a fruity flavor twist and texture diversity in an otherwise ordinary garden salad. The red-skinned variety adds nice color, too.

4) Red bell pepper, for crunch and color.

3) Shredded carrot, preferable to carrot slices because it adds color and flavor without intrusively large vegetable pieces.

2) Havarti cheese, plain enough to complement any dressing or mixture of other ingredients but with a distinctly creamy texture.

1) Mesculin greens, the optimal combination featuring slightly bitter lettuce and shades of green and purple. (Iceberg, at the hopelessly boring end of the lettuce spectrum, should be banned.)

Every 3-5 weeks, the atmosphere tends to reconfigure itself in the way storms travel across the country. The good news: it looks like that change is about to occur after this weekend. The relentless cold and wind, generated by a frigid pool of air over Eastern Canada known as a polar vortex, will finally give way somewhat to a more active southern jet stream. This will set up a more active weather pattern with fluctuations of warm and cold more typical for New York City.

With this pattern, the likelihood of a snowstorm increases because cold and warm air are interacting more along the Atlantic coast, but nothing is a sure bet. The pattern could be active, but all the storms could pass to our south. Also, there is no assurance that any one storm will take the path required to generate snow instead of a mixture or rain in the city. Past performance is not necessarily an indicator of future developments, and the suggestion of a pattern change is not intended for reliance in the purchase of snow shovels.

I guess this explains how an interest in weather could easily lead to an interest in the stock market.

AT&T Wireless must look like a great buyout target--Cingular and just about everyone else is expressing interest in the company. But what will be most interesting is whether any of these proposals go through (or if so, at what unexpected expense) because of dreadful operations issues within the "company America trusts."

AT&T Wireless owns two overlapping networks, GSM (the newer network of the same technology widely used in Europe and Canada) and TDMA (the incumbent network that cannot support Internet applications). AT&T Wireless has been trying to shift as many customers as possible to GSM, because this opens the door to higher margin data services. However, when a customer switches from TDMA to GSM, the account must be re-created in a totally separate database. This migration winds up becoming irritating for the customer or expensive for the company--neither of which is a good situation.

These problems may or may not be related to the other widespread problems with AT&T Wireless's GSM customer database, which malfunctioned to the point where for weeks, the company was having colossal problems enrolling new customers. Wireless number portability rules beginning November 24 only made a bad situation worse. The result of all this has been an operations disaster with the primary symptom of call center hold times exceeding 30 minutes. Currently, one person I know has been waiting five weeks for AT&T Wireless to figure out how to send him a shipping label--so he can return a phone and end his free trial.

As if that's not enough, in a recent customer satisfaction survey, AT&T Wireless placed at or near the bottom in all 12 major U.S. markets. The company's response to these results was that the survey actually misses the point; what is more important is how wireless telephony has "changed people's lives." OK.

So why am I with AT&T Wireless? Their services are a good fit with my needs, and after some haggling, they agreed to give me a break on a multi-band phone that creates an acceptable situation for now. But I'm not considering whether to pay $30 billion for a company. My question would be whether this $30 billion includes the cost of untangling a network of quadruple knots.

"Please do not remove plastic. We are in the blue car. Ask for Steve."
-- written in black marker on the covering of a produce stand on Columbus Ave. and 72nd Street

Over the last few days, I've been using the Firebird browser from Mozilla, a technology organization focused on open source development. This browser is fantastic even in its pre-release (version 0.7) state. However, many of its attributes are relative to what Apple's Safari, somehow, could never do.

Apple Safari never worked with Citibank online. The discussion boards on Apple's support site feature lots of finger-pointing (it's Apple's fault; no, it's Citibank's fault) but at the end of the day, this meant I had to run Internet Explorer to use the Citibank site. Firebird handles Citibank just fine, and that's all I need to know while Apple and Citibank continue to blame each other.

Apple Safari never worked with animated maps on The Weather Channel site. One frame of the animation loop would appear and then stall. This animation problem seemed particular to the Weather Channel, though, because animated loops on other weather sites worked fine. But so what? With Firebird, animations work everywhere, whereas with Safari they didn't.

Apple Safari also never worked with Lexis/Nexis and a remote access corporate email system I use. These too required running IE separately. Now that hassle is over.

Apple says Safari is in line exactly with established standards. I'm sure it is. But the Web browser development market is tough: all that matters now is that, even if The Weather Channel, Citibank and others are at fault, I've ditched Safari until further notice. (I would gladly try the new version of Safari, but Apple requires purchasing an entire operating system upgrade to enjoy the benefits of the latest release.)

At first glance, the weather section of The New York Times looks impressive: color maps, fun charts and extensive information. However, there are five dreadful design flaws that make the section both misleading and confusing.

5) Frontal misnomer. The four kinds of fronts listed below the U.S. map are cold, warm, stationary and complex cold. However, the fourth is not actually called a complex cold front; the proper name is an occluded front. "Occlude" is a plain English verb meaning to close up or block off. An occluded front forms when a cold front "catches up" with a warm front by wrapping around a low pressure center. This usually happens in the later stages of storm development.

4) The metro split. Under "Metropolitan Forecast," the narrative forecast for the New York area appears with forecast temperatures for New York City proper. However, to locate pinpoint temperature predictions for suburban locations, you must look for small print in the opposite corner of the weather section, under "Cities." This is very confusing compared to how other newspapers and TV stations present regional temperature predictions, as one map of the entire metro area.

3) Chart confusion. The chart to the right of the Metropolitan Forecast is confusing because the current day is in the middle. Showing today in the context of past and future temperature trends is a good idea, but the presentation here can mislead readers into thinking that data presented from five days ago is the current day's prediction.

2) Afternoon abbrevation. Technology has advanced to the point where newspapers can report final scores of sports events ending as late as 1 a.m. How come this technology hasn't made it to the weather section? The Metropolitan Almanac features data for the previous day ending at 4 p.m. This results in a gaping lapse on days like Tuesday, when the temperature fell from 44 to 19 in the evening, or in the summer, when high temperatures frequently occur around 5 p.m. (on days with no sea breeze).

1) Max/min mix-up. As a general rule in New York, low temperatures occur in the early morning and high temperatures occur in the late afternoon. However, the Times presents high and low temperature information in a misleading way, demonstrated by days like today. It says the forecast low for New York City is 3, but this isn't tonight's temperature--it's the forecast low for last night (which was actually 1), in other words, for a time before when readers are receiving the information. A quick fix would be to reverse the order of the minimum and maximum forecast temperatures to indicate the general chronological order of these events.

After a three-month delay, it finally happened on Tuesday: RCA released Bruce Hornsby's Greatest Radio Hits album.

Of everyone, Bruce himself is probably least interested in this collection, and "radio" has become something of a pejorative term among Hornsby loyalists. While Bruce is best known for his late 1980s hits including "The Way It Is" and "The Valley Road," he has since veered off into Dead-influenced jazz/rock fusion that, to the great delight of his fans, is simply too good for mass market airplay.

I'll get the greatest hits album when I have a chance, but am more eagerly anticipating the new studio album Bruce has been working on recently. It will feature Elton John, Sting and Eric Clapton, so maybe even as the haute musique of Hornsby goes, it will have a bit more radio appeal.

So it was too good to be true--maybe.

CremaLita, the purveyor of that wonderful frozen dessert of magically microscopic calorie and fat content, is the latest target of the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs. In a recent press release, the agency accuses CremaLita of misleading advertising and fictitious nutritional guidance.

CremaLita posted a response on its own Web site.

The truth? Who knows? I don't have my own food science equipment at home to verify just how many calories are in each serving. From a common sense perspective, it's probably leaner than Ben & Jerry's, though I'm not thinking about any frozen dessert much these days.

Enough with Don Chaney--both he and Dolan should be sent as far away from Madison Square Garden as possible.

The more interesting story is coach Hubie Brown in Memphis. He's done a fantastic job of leading a young team to a respectable 19-18 record, with 2 victories against the Nets, one against Boston and one against Utah. They won't win the championship, but you have to admire the way Brown has given the team hope.

When Brown coached the Knicks through the mid-80s doldrums, one always had the sense that the pile of losses wasn't his fault. Brown's only asset was Bernard King-- the supporting cast featured Louis Orr ("who?"), Ken Bannister (!) and "Medical" Bill Cartwright. It's nice to see Brown, one of the nicest, smartest people in the NBA, return to respectability.

Memphis visits MSG to play the Knicks on March 24.

It's amazing that I can spend all weekend north of the border in temperatures between 0 and -15 and be not that cold, and then go out today in 35 degrees in NYC and find it intolerable. Next step: go to Miami for a brutally "cold" outbreak of 60-degree temperatures.

Authentic Arctic air has now arrived. Here are five places in Manhattan I have found to make the cold even worse:

5) The 72nd and Broadway subway station. Extensive ventilation makes this station a welcome alternative in the summer. But in the winter, cold air pours in, and there isn't much of a way to move around because the platform, bordered by tracks on two sides, is so narrow.

4) Anywhere south of Chambers Street. Lower Manhattan seems like one giant wind tunnel on the coldest days. The warm water of the Hudson River and New York Harbor create an effect that is basically the reverse of a summer sea breeze. Heat rises over the water, creating a vacuum that cold air from the land accelerates to fill. This acceleration of air is the lower Manhattan wind gust that always makes the winter even more intolerable.

3) The endless "Don't Walk" at 66th and Columbus. This intersection has one of the most one-sided delays of any in the city, and if you're crossing 66th Street on Columbus Avenue (as opposed to crossing Columbus on 66th), you feel it. Even if no traffic appears in sight while you walk down Columbus, by the time you arrive, there is sure to be a constant stream preventing you from jaywalking.

2) West 4th Street between 6th and 7th Avenue. This narrow corridor is ripe for wind, and its compass orientation frequently coincides with the wind direction if you are walking east to west. While you are racing to the 1/9 subway stop at Sheridan Square, unforgiving traffic light timing adds insult to injury.

1) Broadway between 66th and 68th Streets. The worst wind tunnel in the city, period. Whatever the wind speed at Central Park, multiply by two. Somehow the effect is worse walking southeast than walking northwest, probably because of the unusual triangle-and-towers configuration of the Lincoln Square area. Recommendation: walk east on 68th to Columbus, then walk down.

It's chilly outside, but the date is January 8, climatologically the coldest time of the year. What do people expect?

The New York Times--in addition to a Metro Section cover story about the so-called bitter cold--featured a map showing regional temperatures last night at 11pm. Apparently, readers were supposed to be impressed at the frigid readings. But at that time, it was in the low 20s throughout the entire area--right around where it should be this time of year.

Highs on Saturday may be only in the middle teens. But we have already run out of adjectives for the winter.

Poor AT&T.

A few months ago, I switched to AT&T for its unlimited U.S. and Canada calling plan. The company rewarded me with $50 in credits.

Whenever I checked my bill online, AT&T urged me to sign up for paperless billing. I consistently ignored this invitation. But then AT&T threw in an incentive--if I signed up for online billing exclusively, I would get a $20 credit from Amazon. So I signed up.

Three days later, however, I saw that MCI was offering the same package for $10 less per month and would reward me with a $50 credit for signing up. So I switched. Then I used the AT&T credit to buy Pearl Jam and Dave Matthews CDs.

I'm happy with MCI so far. It's tough to distinguish one commodity service from another, but MCI provides voicemail existence indication services--my telephone's "new call" light flashes when a message is waiting. (AT&T was unable to provide this service without a $10 display add-on.)

Now I'm on hold with AT&T one last time. I just received email welcoming me as an AT&T customer. This was a technical error because its system did not process my migration to MCI correctly.

Yesterday I bought Parmalat-branded milk (actually from Sunnydale Farms). This morning, I noticed on the carton that it had the phrase "milk money" with the number 5. I suppose this is 5 milk dollars, or rewards points, or something like that.

However, the carton provides no further information as to how to accumulate points, or where to send in something for rewards, or what this actually means. So I guess this is a first clue in where that fictitious bank account of $5 billion actually came from.