2004 ends in a little less than nine hours, so it's late enough in the year to put together this highlight reel:

• The consistent excellence of small Upper West Side restaurants such as Lenny's, Baluchi's, Burrito Box, Chirping Chicken and Rigoletto.

• Continued wasteful and pointless advertising by Con Edison, whose advertising and marketing departments should be eliminated.

• AT&T, AT&T Wireless and Cingular--a business tale of enough confusion, drama and woe to make even the most seasoned heads spin. Now AT&T is launching wireless service next year using Sprint's network. I'm much happier over at Verizon Wireless.

• The rapid disappearance of Yahoo's "Life Engine" ad campaign, as predicted right here on April 22.

• A new appreciation for La Guardia Airport, the metropolitan area's best.

• The end of Phish, and of Warner Wolf on Channel 2.

• "And that foul was on Kurt Thomas..."

• Finally having "Life Is a Highway" (Tom Cochrane), "I Got Id" (Pearl Jam), and "Disconnected" (Face to Face) on my iPod. (Still waiting for "Last Train Home" (Lostprophets) without having to buy the entire album.)

• Voting--for the Budget rental car bankruptcy plan.

• Kerry picks Gephardt (New York Post) and Vodaphone buys AT&T Wireless (New York Times). Missing: Dewey Beats Truman.

• LensCrafters ads with meaningless location cues such as "1199 First Avenue."

• "Someday" by Nickelback--a great song.

• The Red Sox winning the World Series on a night with a lunar eclipse. Hopefully they won't win it any more often than that.

Yes! "Disconnected" by Face to Face, a relatively obscure alternative pop hit from 1994, has finally appeared in the iTunes music store. I had checked a few months ago and it seemed to be the only Face to Face song missing.

Still waiting for "Last Train Home" by Lostprophets, but this is one song I've wanted to have for a long time.

To the people in this NYT article who complain that Amazon's customer phone number is hard to find: no sympathy here. Amazon is an efficient marketplace in which, for the most part, consumers sacrifice full service in exchange for lower prices. By withholding its customer service number, Amazon prevents costly hand-holding phone calls and keeps prices low for me.

It's a free market. If people want full service, or are buying something they think may require assistance, they should go elsewhere.

I'm on vacation this week, so it's been home improvement time. Some notes and comment:

1-800-Mattress. A recorded voice thanks you for calling and then says "leave off the last 's' for sleep." Huh? Everyone knows it's "leave off the last 's' for savings," a slogan that has been around for years and years.

Here's a tip: when you are told that a bedding consultant will call you back after you provide your name and number, don't believe it. This call never happened. Instead, simply press redial and eventually, within 4-5 attempts, you will wind up with a live person. Just to clarify, this is to place an order. Of course, it's very intelligent business strategy to make hot, active leads jump through hoops and figure out new systems in order to buy your products.

The delivery, however, was outstanding. My window was 11am-3pm and they arrived at 10:49am, providing a huge windfall of free time.

But here was the most incredible part: their customer data goes back 20 years, so they had the exact name and model of the mattress I ordered back in 1994. All I had to do was provide the phone number I had at that time.

Sleepy's (72nd and Broadway). I initially went here first because, let's face it, Sleepy's has a much less annoying TV ad, and I could view the beds in person. However, my generous disposition quickly turned to resentment when the pushy salesperson pressured me into buying something quickly because "on New Year's Day, all the prices go up." This may be true (we'll see) but the salesman would have been better off laying low.

Bed Bath & Beyond (Lincoln Square). I just love those cool escalators just for shopping carts. The staff was very helpful and friendly. For some reason the checkout line had dispersed into random clusters of people, the first time in several visits to this location that the checkout was not perfectly orderly.

West Elm (Chelsea). I was excited that the 2005 colors are on display and you are no longer hit over the head with loud purples and blues. They didn't have what I wanted, but the store atmosphere is vastly improved.

The Door Store (Chelsea). Always reliable and a nice place to walk around. I'm happy with a TV stand I have from there and they had two possibilities for a chair and night table. We'll see.

I'm sure Kurt Thomas is a really nice guy. And he doesn't have the Shaq-size ego or Kobe-type sketchiness of other players. But Kurt Thomas, as good a person as he may be, is just in the wrong line of business.

It seems that any time I randomly turn on the Knicks game, Thomas commits a foul within 30 seconds. This happened two days ago--it was early in the 3rd quarter, and he committed his third. Then he turned over the ball 20 seconds later.

Yesterday, the Knicks were leading by 16 points late in the 2nd quarter, and with 20 seconds to go, Thomas committed his 3rd foul.

And who can forget last season when Thomas committed an offensive foul from behind the three point arc?

The poor guy is just always in foul trouble and I'm sure he'd be very good at some other career opportunities.

I'm really enjoying Verizon Wireless. My phone, the Motorola v710, has a great color display on which I can view nearly live Doppler radar images downloaded on the "mobile Web." While on a bus yesterday and snow about to arrive, this was incredible. I can also read National Weather Service technical discussions and view infrared satellite images using the NWS's mobile Web link, www.srh.noaa.gov/wml.

The browser takes some time to load, but after the first time and if your phone stays on, you can switch between calling and browsing mode quickly.

Since Verizon Wireless measures Web usage in minutes, not data amount, I don't have to worry about how large these images are. If it's the weekend or nighttime, I can use it as much as I want. This is a far superior and consumer-friendly business model than the data-volume-based service offered by other mobile phone carriers.

Memo to bar and nightlife DJs: it's no longer funny or hip to play the theme from "The Jeffersons." The show itself, of course, was fantastic, but the theme song has already lost its recent ironic hipness. (And using the phrase "movin' on up" to describe a move upstairs in the same building is no longer funny, which is why I didn't use it.)

On the other hand, the theme from "The Golden Girls" is great, but should not be overexposed now that it is "in."

Usually I browse the iTunes music store to look for specific songs identified for a specific kind of mix. But today, I started just downloading individual favorite songs with no real plan as to what to do with them; I'll figure it out at some point.

Anyway, it's funny when your memory of a song doesn't match up to reality. One song I downloaded today was "How's It Gonna Be" by Third Eye Blind. I had not remembered that the last verse takes a well-crafted song with good lyrics and throws it into screaming chaos. This is completely misguided--they should have just retained the overall tone of the first two verses.

On the other hand, "Life Is a Highway" by Tom Cochrane sounds even better. Not only am I hearing it in digital sound through a modern stereo (as opposed to on a radio station in 1992), but also those harmonicas specifically sound better than ever.

Actually, today's downloads weren't totally without a theme; many of them will probably wind up in a late 90s rock mix. Other songs included "Going the Distance" (Cake), "Ruby Soho" (Rancid), "What Do I Have to Do?" (Stabbing Westward), "Bound for the Floor" (Local H), "One Week" (Barenaked Ladies), and my favorite, "Pardon Me" (Incubus).

There's also "Angels" by Robbie Williams, just because. This pop song is as sugary as I remember. Piano intro, seventh chords, semi-dramatic chorus with long, drawn out notes, strings at the end--it uses every pop gimmick in the book, and it works. Also, it's a nice alternative to his other hit, "Millenium," which is extremely annoying.

The big news today is Barry Diller's decision to split up IAC/Interactive. The two buckets will essentially be retail and travel, with Ticketmaster and Lending Tree going in one camp and Hotels.com, Expedia and Hotwire going in the other.

This is great news. Companies lose value when they are blanketed under conglomerate bureaucracy. The loss in value of a company when it is submerged in delusions of synergy--as much as 15% in some cases--is called the diversification discount. When a business is let free from monolithic empire-builders, it realizes more of its true value and is not cramped down by Cablevision-style mismanagement.

Hotels.com, Expedia and Hotwire under one umbrella makes sense. I hope the next move is to split up Ticketmaster and Lending Tree, by selling one of those businesses or doing yet another spinoff.

For now, this conglomerate breakup story is the best news of the day.

Well, the big news is the cold. It didn't snow much, but the Arctic air is definitely here. This little cold snap is notable for a couple of reasons.

First, it's just, well, extremely cold. At 3pm the Central Park temperature was 17. Anytime you have a midday temperature below 20, that's frigid for around here. Last winter, the lowest maximum was 15, although that was after a low of 1. This time, the center of the cold air mass is passing through the area during the day, so we started around 10 and only went up a little.

Of course, it could be worse. In Burlington, VT it's -7. Montreal started the day at -13. Then it fell to -15, where it stayed through 2pm. Now it's back up to -13. These are unbelievable daytime temperatures even for southern Quebec.

Second, a heat wave quickly follows this Arctic blast. The cold air leaves tomorrow morning and we have a major warmup in store for midweek. By Wednesday, highs could be in the lower 50s. That will feel tropical compared to the coldest air around here in 11 months.

For those of you wondering why this site is the #1 Google search result for "recent conglomerate breakups," beats me. There was an entry some time ago about Time Warner's sale of its music division, and that's what's coming up as the search result.

This was not intended, though it's an association I definitely don't mind having.

Busy trying to wrap things up before vacation, but not too busy for a quick look at the computer models and forecast discussions. Here's a best guess for the possible storm on Monday.

It could be a near miss or a significant snowfall, but it's way too early to tell. The upper air energy to form the basis for this storm has just entered western Canada. Up to this morning, the computer models have been using data gathered from extremely sparse soundings over the Pacific Ocean. The margin of error in this data could easily translate to an erroneous prediction for the surface coastal storm three days away.

The debate is whether the trough will be negatively tilted (keeping the storm track along the coast) or progressive (steering it out to sea). It's too soon to tell. At any rate, Monday looks cold and windy--and snow would only add to pretty nasty conditions.

With nothing else on last night, I flipped on the Knicks game to watch the last minute or so. I hadn't watched a Knicks game in weeks.

When I turned on the game, the Knicks were up by 1 point. Then they fell behind with 2.5 seconds remaining on, of all things, two free throws. On their last chance to win the game, Marbury bobbled the ball and threw up a hopeless brick. After leading by 16 points at the half, they lost.

If this is just a random sample of the Knicks, I can't imagine watching an entire game--or season.

When it comes to describing the weather, NY1 is not known for toning it down. A year or so ago, a parade was described as having occurred in "hot" weather when the high that day was 78 degrees.

Now, the weather graphic for tonight is characterizing a low of 22 as "frigid." At this time last year, NYC had already seen lows of 25 or below six times.

What's going to happen when the low is 10? Or 1? Journalists that value hype more than science will be out of adjectives once again.

Two big business stories in the news today:

1) Con Ed is selling its telecom business to FiberNet for $37 million. I don't know what Con Ed was doing with a telecom business in the first place, but it's nice to see the company focus on energy. I still think its advertising and marketing departments are pointless and should be eliminated.

2) Oracle buys PeopleSoft. Finally. But the New York Times business reporters covering the story got taken for a ride by the Oracle PR machine. They actually buy Larry Ellison's analogy that Oracle is striving to become the next Microsoft. Give me a break! First of all, Oracle has 5% market share. Second, you don't casually pop down to CompUSA and pick up a copy of Oracle in your spare time--these ERP systems cost millions of dollars and months, if not years, to implement. Look for merger integration costs to be insane over the next few years.

Let the fun begin! A major pattern shift will happen in the next 48 hours as a deep upper-level trough becomes established over the East Coast. This means cold air (highs will only be in the low 30s by midweek) and a better chance of snowstorms.

It's important to emphasize that this kind of cold outbreak does not necessarily mean a snowstorm. There are any number of other factors required for the "perfect storm," including jet stream placement and the position of the polar vortex over eastern Canada. Even once a coastal storm gets going, its path has to be just right--too far out to sea and we miss the boat; too far inland and winds turn to a warm easterly direction, changing snow to rain. Some on-air meteorologists have been hinting that next week may be "active," but this hype is premature.

What this cold outbreak does mean is that it's time to start the annual flurry of e-mail among weather geeks, analyzing computer model predictions, second guessing forecasts, and reporting obscure technical data that may or may not indicate that the big one is finally here.

The album The Story of the Ghost took an awful lot of time to get into. It's thick and intricate--although many tracks feature hooks, they're submerged in polyrhythmic acrobatics and dissonant harmonies. Coming off the sugary Billy Breathes, this was a hill to climb.

After a few listens, though, this album emerged as a favorite. Precisely because of the challenging material, the simple, drifting harmonies of "Brian and Robert" and "Wading in the Velvet Sea" are refreshing. Then on the other end of the spectrum, you have "Limb by Limb," in which drummer Jon Fishman seems to be taking on a time signature that can only be expressed in fractal dimensions. Somehow, it adds up to an incredibly rich percussion foundation for a song with meaningful lyrics and a triumphant melody. "Water in the Sky" layers Page McConnell's dizzying piano runs on top of a traditional middle America chord progression. And "Guyute" starts off with an immediately pleasing chorus melody before a long, winding road of eerie and bizarre diversions. Then the end repeats the chorus, and it's all the more satisfying; the song is a classic and played often in concerts.

Six years later, I'm still never sick of any track on this album. I love albums such as Billy Breathes also, but sometimes I'm not in the mood for something too cute (such as hearing "the bottom" repeated 86 times). The Story of the Ghost is the intricate and finely seasoned salad you wouldn't want to eat every day but can't savor enough on the occasions you do have it.

Of course, thanks to all of my Phish material being on my iPod, it was easy to end this listening session with a live version of "Taste," a terrific piece of ear candy.

Tough week for weather radar. If you look at the current radar, there appears to be no rain over NYC. But we've had steady light rain and drizzle.

This rain is falling from an extremely low cloud base, so the radar beam is overshooting the precipitation and therefore not registering any echoes.

Environment Canada has a terrific Web page on common radar interpretation errors such as this one.

Looking for a holiday gift for someone you don't like? Get them a subscription to Investor's Business Daily.

Here's more nonsense, dispatched today: you can tell when a stock will rise based on institutional buying. This is supposedly not only because of the volume, but also of the commitment (in length of time) institutional buyers typically make. The article goes on to say:

Because the accumulation takes place over prolonged periods, it's probable the stock will make a significant advance thanks to those institutional traders who are buying.

This is just plain garbage. It assumes that in the period of accumulation following a purchase, the value of a company will stay relatively constant and the price will increase primarily due to institutional buying. But institutional buying can't prop up a stock that will ultimately fall on account of subsequent bad news.

This article, in effect, asks individual investors to adopt a herd mentality and blindly trust the big banks. Has IBD learned nothing from the last five years?

Winter is here. A genuine Arctic air mass is just to our north and it's just a matter of time until one pushes a little further south. Although it's around 40 here in NYC, in Montreal it's 14, in Caribou (Maine) it's 1, and in Quebec City, it's 0. (It must be fun walking up those giant hills this morning.) The dewpoint in Boston is -1 -- very dry air typical of an Arctic air mass.

The 10-day GFS computer model (called by its old name, the MRF, on that site) has been hinting at a period of storminess on the East Coast sometime early next week. This is a speculative prediction subject to huge changes, but it's nice to see the models getting into winter mode as well.

I'm pretty sure my Yamaha YPP-55 keyboard is now 10 years old. I know I got it at Sam Ash in December 1994, though I don't remember the date.

Ten years and many thousands of hours of playing time later, this keyboard still sounds as good as new. I remember being told that the Yamaha piano sounds are better than those of other equivalently-priced brands. The YPP-55 features two piano sounds, one that sounds like a Steinway and another that sounds more like a Yamaha. The harpsichord sound is also great as is the electric piano. The pedal is useful. Of course, even with full-size, touch-sensitive keys (meaning the harder you press a key, the louder a note will sound), it doesn't compare to a real piano, but I only notice that on the rare occasions I actually play a real piano.

In 1995 I bought Opcode software to try and connect the keyboard to my Powerbook. After spending an entire weekend reading a manual with all the clarity of a physics textbook, I gave up. Friends tell me this is easier now. It's probably a good project for a snowy weekend.

I switched to Verizon Wireless today. The porting process took all of five minutes, and the service is orders or magnitude better than what I had with AT&T Wireless (now Cingular). Starting last summer, I considered the termination fee a sunk cost so that wasn't a concern.

I'm impressed so far. I'm getting a lot of indications that Verizon Wireless is a business that was designed properly from the beginning. Not only was the porting easy; online registration was a snap; the Web site features every kind of account and support information you'd want to know when logged in; and when my AT&T Wireless number was ported over, I didn't even have to re-register--the Web site automatically reflected the change. (I tested the phone first for a day with a temporary number before bringing over my cell phone number.) Contrast this with AT&T Wireless's data systems nightmare, which forces you to create a new account even if you simply upgrade from TDMA to GSM and use the same phone number.

With Verizon, I have not waited on hold for more than 3 minutes. Activating the phone and updating its network settings were a snap--you simply have to dial *228 and press "1" or "2."

AT&T Wireless has poured $2.8 billion into upgrading its GSM network. Although I saw dramatic improvement in many areas of the city, at the end of the day, the signal just couldn't reach where I needed it. Whether in Bed Bath & Beyond on 65th Street or in my kitchen, those with Verizon could talk freely with clear reception, while my AT&T Wireless phone reported no signal.

Moreover, the Cingular acquisition may actually make things worse. Cingular has been using T-Mobile cells in New York City; there are actually no native Cingular towers in Manhattan. Now that the acquisition is complete, supposedly Cingular will be migrating all of its customers over to AT&T Wireless cells, having the effect for some people of subtracting coverage until Cingular adds more coverage.

Finally, Verizon has a much smarter business model for data. For its "Mobile Web," usage is measured in minutes, not data volume. This is far more sensible--who can guess, off the top of their head, how many kilobytes that sports score or radar image takes up? Now I can access anything I want during nights and weekends and not know anything about byte sizes.

What happens nationwide may be up for grabs--Cingular will surely do everything it can to keep its #1 position. But in Manhattan, there is no question that Verizon was the one to get it right.

Having walked by the Greek restaurant Aegean (on 70th and Columbus) thousands of times, I finally ordered in from it this week. I found the food to be uninspired.

The "country tomato salad" was advertised on the menu has having "vine ripened tomatoes, romaine, arugula, green peppers, red onion, barrel feta and virgin olive oil vinaigrette." I envisioned a bright, colorful combination of vegetables with large, bold tomato slices and feta cheese sprinkled throughout. Instead, Aegean's country tomato salad consisted of a large bed of lettuce, two small tomato wedges (and they were not as red as the vine-ripened ones at Fairway), two large pieces of feta (so they were not distributed evenly throughout the salad), and miniscule bits of green pepper.

The chicken breast with cumin and vinegar was fine, but nothing special. It came on a bed of rice pilaf and sauteed spinach. Those were okay too, but standard, not interesting.

I had more of a problem with the salad. From the menu, it looked great and I have seen much better salads with the same ingredients. If you call a salad a "country tomato salad" and the menu says "vine ripened tomatoes," then for $7, those tomatoes had better be bursting with flavor and be at least as good as the ones I buy at Fairway to put on a bagel with lox.

Aegean seems like a reasonable place to eat. The service at the restaurant is probably good. This food, however, was boring.