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A good story cropped up this morning on the tech blogs about a high school student getting a free copy of Final Cut after a personal appeal to King Steve.  The company did right by the kid and got loads of good press as a result.

My experience with Apple on the education and cooperate side has been equally positive.  I am incredibly blessed to be in a career that affords me the ability to purchase huge amounts of Apple software and hardware.   Each year, on behalf of the college, we invest high five figures and low six for their products.  Complimentary on-site training and workshops is a common “extra” they offer their higher ed customers, a benefit I have seen of fostering a nice working relationship with their higher ed reps.  The company, as you would expect bends over backwards to please and to keep our business.  It is nice to see them going the extra mile for the little guy.

Sometimes Xmas comes earlier and when you less expect it: A Greenwich High School student wrote a letter directly to Mr. Jobs himself asking politely for an student discount on Final Cut Studio 2. Two weeks later, he got way more than he wanted, shipped directly from Cupertino.

Apple: Student Writes to Steve Jobs, Gets Free Final Cut Studio 2

I love Xbox 360 and Xbox Live.  David Matthew loves Live and playing Team Fortress 2 against people around the world.  I have blogged that he is spooky good at this first person shooter, beyond the skills I would expect a seven year old to possess.

What Rhonda and I don’t care for is the foul, very foul language you can hear on Xbox Live from time to time.  Some games gather more jerks and testosterone-fueled tirades (*cough* Halo) than others.  Interesting to see the news on a new Microsoft patent this morning.  I remain skeptical as real-time voice filtering strikes me as highly ambitious and error-prone, but I wish them the best of luck.  As a parent who wishes to embrace video games and sharing them with my son, rather than reject them, I welcome things like this.

An input audio data stream comprising speech is processed by an automatic censoring filter in either a real-time mode, or a batch mode, producing censored speech that has been altered so that undesired words or phrases are either unintelligible or inaudible.

Xbox Live: Microsoft Patents Real-Time Audio Censorsing

This is actually a good idea that makes a lot of sense.  HP has a lot of R&D money and is in the midst of a massive turn-around.  The company has a “soul” again and if anyone could try this and make it work, it would be HP.

Report: HP trying for ‘end-run’ around Windows
An article appearing in BusinessWeek this week cites anonymous sources who say Hewlett-Packard is at least looking into it. “Sources say employees in HP’s PC division are exploring the possibility of building a mass-market operating system,” the article states.