Angry Birds for Chrome.

Angry Birds for Chrome is in beta, but it's a lot of fun...and there are some little tweaks specifically for Chrome...Chrome eggs, I guess?  When you hit one of these, it explodes and the Chrome icon rises up like the sun...still not sure what else it does.

Netflix drops like a dead fly...anyone buying?

52 week high is 304.79; 52 week low is 108.44, which is today's low. If you're keeping score, that's over 64% drop between the 52 week high and today's low. Just today, it's down over 14% with an hour to go. 

Call me crazy but with a new market capitalization at $5.74B, it's about ripe for the picking, no? And by picking, of course, I mean buyout of Netflix.

So who's got very strong interest in buying out an online streaming content provider, that it ponied up a reported $4B for one such company?  Who, indeed?

SW Imperial March...using floppy drives.

It's all about being old enough to recognize the floppy drive and Star Wars' Empire Strikes Back.

(via Make Magazine Blog.)

Amazon announces new Kindles -- stock price jumps.

Four new devices with a complete refresh of the entire line, and it seems they've got the right price points to get the holiday season rolling.

Here's the lineup (note the Fire is only pre-ordering with shipping set for Nov. 15th; the Touch version e-readers are pre-order with shipping for Nov. 21; the non-touch e-reader is immediately available to be shipped today):

• Amazon Fire = $199 Android tablet running customized Android 2.2 OS, a dual-core processor, with 1024x600 7" IPS touch screen, 14.3 oz., 8GB internal storage, 3.5mm headphone jack, mini USB and free cloud storage / syncing.  (There's no external memory slot, so you're stuck with 8GB max.) 
• Amazon Kindle Touch 3G = $149 for 6" touch screen b/w e-ink with lifetime free 3G access and ad-supported w/ Special Offers; $189 w/o Special Offfers.
• Amazon Kindle Touch WiFi = $99 for 6" touch screen b/w e-ink and ad-supported w/ Special Offers; $139 w/o Special Offers.
• Amazon Kindle WiFi = $79 for 6" b/w e-ink screen and ad-supported w/ Special Offers; $109 w/o Special Offers.

Note that the Special Offers ads are only seen when you're not actively reading / using your Kindle, making them fairly non-intrusive.

$79 / $109 Kindles w/o Touch interface.

$99 / $139 WiFi Touch and $149 / $189 3G Touch Kindles.

Kindle Fire 7" tablet.

Updated: Only the non-touch is available to be shipped out today, while the touch-enabled versions ship on Nov. 21. Talk is, there will be a future announcement of a 10" Kindle Fire.

Wacom intros new Bamboo tablets.

These are much slicker than previous iterations of the Wacom Bamboo series pen/touch tablets, and they come with better software, too.  Which probably explains the price increases.  I'm particularly partial to the Bamboo Connect that comes with Autodesk Sketchbook Express (SBX).

Fake or foto?

I've done this in the past and have gotten 100% correct; this time I only got 75% right (images have changed from years ago when I last took it). Autodesk's Fake or Foto site is a fun challenge.

Doing a lot of 3D rendering, I can usually tell when an image is using texture maps, and I can always see the faked shadows.  A few 3D animations - particularly commercials - have poor shadows.

This time around, in trying to judge whether these images were photos or renderings, they may not have manipulated actual photos, but they set the scenes up, such that they obscured the usual signs that would distinguish one from the other.

Samsung Galaxy S-II on T-Mobile.

Available for pre-order October 10th, and in-store on October 12th -- that's two weeks from now.

My phone's been rebooting itself when I'm on the phone and plugging it into the charger, and is just all around sluggish even after a factory reset...and no wonder, considering it's weeks away from being 3 years old.

Why now, why this phone?  It's the first of two new phones on T-Mobile that will run at 42Mbps, with real-world speeds averaging 8Mbps and peaks at 20Mbps.  On a smartphone, that would be faster than either Sprint or AT&T, but half the speed of Verizon's LTE.  If you're lucky and you have a legacy SIM and contract, it means you have no speed throttling or data caps...making T-Mobile's network far more useful than Verizon's, on a value basis.  (One more reason to oppose AT&T's buyout, right?)

Anyway, in the near future Verizon will have a next-generation LTE Samsung Android phone, but until then, the fastest speeds you'll find is on T-Mobile's version of the Galaxy S-II.  Also, both the Samsung and Qualcomm dual core CPUs are ARMv7-based, but apparently the Samsung core has a better built-in GPU, but does not support the higher speed HSPA+ 42Mbps.  This explains why T-Mobile went with Qualcomm's Snapdragon S3 compared to AT&T's choice for Samsung's Exynos.

Just for comparison, all have:

• 2 MP front-facing camera
• 8 MP rear camera w/ flash
• 16 GB built in storage
• 1 GB RAM
• Bluetooth
• WiFi
• No slide-out keyboard.

Sprint's version:

• Android 2.3.4 Gingerbread
• 4.52" AMOLED screen
• 1800 mAh battery
• Standby 10.5days 
• Talk 8.7hrs
• 1.2Ghz Samsung dual core Exynos C210
• 5.11" x 2.74" x .38"
• 4.6 oz.
• no NFC
• CDMA / WiMax
• SAR (body) 0.54 W/kg
• $200 w/ 2 yr contract
• Already available

AT&T's version:

• Android 2.3.4 Gingerbread
• 4.27" 480x800 AMOLED screen
• 1650 mAh battery
• Standby 400hrs
• Talk 8hrs
• 1.2Ghz Samsung dual core Exynos C210
• 4.96” x 2.60” x .35”
• 4.3 oz.
• NFC
• HSPA+ 14Mbps
• SAR (body) 0.90 W/kg
• $200 w/ 2 yr contract
• Available Oct 2.

T-Mobile's version:

• Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread
• 4.52" AMOLED screen
• 1850 mAh battery
• Standby 167hrs
• Talk 7hrs
• 1.5 GHz Qualcomm dual core Snapdragon S3
• 5.11" x 2.71" x .37"
• 4.77 oz.
• NFC
• HSPA+ 42Mbps
• SAR (body) 0.99 W/kg
• $280 - $50 MIR = $230 final price w/ 2 yr contract
• Available Oct. 10 pre-order / 12th in store

The Prius C.

I'm guessing after watching Toyota's newest Prius advert showing the whole family of vehicles including the c-Concept, that it's no longer a concept, but soon to be a 2012 model, no?

You can watch the video below if you haven't seen it.

NBC Show: Free Agents

New NBC show set in Portland.  Can you tell?  It's the new trend...Portland's cool.  Didn't you know? :D

Shows promise.  Didn't you enjoy that line in elementary school: "shows promise"?

Hey, can you spot the Ikea furniture throughout the show, and all the Portland paraphernalia?

My only question is, is NBC trying to hide the show? Only by accident, did I stumble on its second episode.

I'm not saying USC would have won...

Without a doubt, USC lost the game because of all the turnovers deep in ASU's territory, but the officiating made it impossible for USC to win, with three phantom personal fouls called on TJ McDonald and a host of missed calls.


On USC's last drive into ASU territory (on which they failed to score), ASU's safety used his helment to spear USC's Robert Woods while he was falling backwards with the ball.  Which was in contrast to the first personal foul called out on TJ McDonald for giving the quarterback a forearm to the chest...not a blow to the head mind you and not a helmet hit, but a forearm to the chest.

On ASU's drive that resulted in its 14 point lead, the officials called a phantom personal foul on TJ McDonald. It was a terrible call made by the field judge deep in the secondary, and it was a late flag.  20 yards away, the field judge had better vision than the side judge who was just a couple of yards from the play?  Give me a flipping break.

So what do the officials do, a few plays later?  They followed up with a no-call on an obvious late substitution by ASU.  That illegal substitution was made obvious, because the guy was running off the field while the ASU players were already lined up on the line of scrimmage.

The last time I saw such bad officiating, was the 2006 Oregon - Oklahoma game where the officials made a series of consecutive errors that changed the outcome of the game...not as bad as that game, but it ranks just below that one.

PS: If it hurts too much, I have good news...The USC Women's Volleyball team beat #1 Cal and #2 Stanford, Friday and Saturday.

Texas is (still) burning.

According to Reuters, Texas temperatures and conditions have worsened lately, that could bring back to life existing wildfires, while allowing new ones to proliferate.  Texas Forest Service however, indicates that in the last week, there were 64 new fires that have burned 10,527 acres.  It's not as though new fires have stopped, but that they are readily contained for the time being.

Already, 3.8M acres / 5937 square miles have burned, which is equal to 2.2% of all of Texas.  In perspective, Rhode Island (1545 sq mi), Delaware (2489 sq mi) and Connecticut (5543 sq mi) are each smaller than the area burned in Texas.

Aurora from space and the clutter up there.

First: an aurora flyover by the ISS.  (via Spaceweather)

Second: a video of the clutter being tracked by the US. (via Aerospace Corp)

More on tracking the UARS' reentry.

Ever get the sense that things won't go exactly how you think it might go?

Take a look at Aerospace Corporation's (US research arm) satellite reentry tracking site, specifically the UARS reentry tracking map (below).

First, I suggest you go to the Aerospace site to read the map key and information about their predicted time and location and debris field of UARS' reentry.

Look very closely at the map, and you can see Hawaii and the US Pacific Northwest, just minutes within the general path of the satellite's predicted reentry.

According to their prediction, visible reentry starts at 4:04 am UTC Sept 24.  That's 6:04 pm on September 23, in Hawaii, and 9:04 pm September 23, in the Pacific Northwest...regardless of sunlight or not, it should be visible if it's burning up upon reentry.  There is a decent chance of seeing part of the reentry.  I will definitely be keeping track of this and plan to get outside if it continues down this path.

NOTE: Heavens Above is not showing any passes (visible or otherwise) in their tracking, anymore.  But it is useful to see where the current location of the UARS satellite is.

ADD: Weatherspace has a live Ustream video of tracking the location.

Stream videos at Ustream
And of course, nothing goes as planned, even at the last hour...it's now scheduled to reenter between Antarctica and Australia, at 5:10 am Saturday, UTC (10:10pm Friday in Portland / 7:10pm Friday in Hawaii). It's not slowing down its orbit, but it is slowing down its descent.

---

UPDATE: Nothing...na da...zilch...zero. Was outside, no such luck with any glint of the UARS flyover in Portland. It's past reentry time now, and it's still tracking online, so there's a glimmer of home in the next 30 minutes, if it doesn't fall down by then.

---

UPDATE2: Apparently it came down, somewhere, at some point, because they're no longer tracking it.

---

UPDATE3: NASA says the satellite dropped down sometime between 4:23 and 5:09 UTC, or 9:23 pm and 10:09 pm in Portland -- that should have placed it closer to the Pacific Northwest and into Canada, according to its speed and path. And an astronomer enthusiast in France captured some video of the spacecraft rotating around in its trajectory, with sunlight reflecting off the craft while in orbit.  Note that this was not of the spacecraft burning up in the atmosphere upon reentry.

Bing bleeds money.

via CNNMoney.

I had to snicker when I read the associated article.  According to Stefan Weitz, director of Bing, Bing has the upper edge because, "we are able to try things with much more flexibility...if we make a mistake, it's not going to take down the company."

That's just pathetic FUD.

First off, why would Google completely revamp its code, when they've got a solid search engine to begin with? But furthermore, Bing isn't exactly taking on the search engine world with a wildly updated algorithm every month, either. Bing is doing nothing more than tweaking its own code in small increments, and I bet those small tweaks get sandboxed and beta-tested in-house before it is released to the public.  And of course, there's something called BACKUP...if Google were to truly mess the code up, all they need to do is restore the last saved code.

So what's this all about?  Seems to me, that Bing's director is trying to paint a facade of Microsoft as a faster-moving company than Google.  Anyone who uses Google products on a regular basis, knows this is absolutely false.  Sometimes, frustratingly so, Google updates things in rapid progression, resulting in something temporarily breaking.

No way, would any unbiased person cite Google as being cautious.

Youtube create.

Have you discovered all the tools that you can now use, in conjunction with Youtube? Go to Youtube.com/create, and there you'll find an assortment of tools to create and edit videos.

An old favorite, xtranormal, has linked up its tools with Youtube, and I had some fun playing around with it.  

It was a bit of a struggle at first, to get the app to work, because you need to go to xtranormal's website first, to ensure that you have cookies turned on, then log in with your Google ID.  Then you can go back to xtranormal's Youtube channel and authorize the app to connect to your Google ID.

Once you've authorized the app, you can start creating a video by selecting from one of the several themes they have, though not the full assortment on xtranormal's website.

Once you select a theme with the number of actors that you want, you're able to start creating dialog, background music, and so on.  Note, that if you get sent back to the authorization screen, it's because you haven't enabled cookies on xtranormal's website, and linked your Google ID with it.

Fun, right? And here's the completed video below.

UARS' closest approach over Portland before it falls.

The only UARS pass near Portland, before it falls out of the sky.

Date	Mag	Starts		Max. altitude		Ends
		Time	Alt.	Time	Alt.	Time	Alt.
9/22	0.6	21:56:12	10WNW	21:57:45	32NW	21:59:17	10NNE

It's not visible - you need the sun at the right angle to shine off the body - but if it's in the process of entering the atmosphere at that point, it should be burning up. Doubtful, but worth a peek to see, no?

via Heavens Above

Stocks plunging.

Over at the LA Times' Money & Company blog, the headline says, "Stocks plunge on concerns about new Fed program."  They're not upset at Operation Twist so much as they are upset that the program will not be enough to stave off a double-dip, if it hasn't already begun in parts of the nation.

As Paul Krugman notes, the Feds are planning to shift $400B (=1.1%) of a $36T worth of nonfinancial short-term debt to long term debt, in an effort to drive down long-term rates.  So it seems unlikely to have a major impact in terms of rates.

Nonetheless, the 10-year UST yield has dropped quite a bit over the last several days, all because of the state of the economy and renewed fears of a Euro-crisis domino effect.

Date	3 Mo	10 Yr
09/15/11	0.01	2.09
09/16/11	0.01	2.08
09/19/11	0.01	1.97
09/20/11	0.01	1.95
09/21/11	0.01	1.88
09/22/11	0.00	1.72

Investors are leaving the stock markets for the safety of the bond markets -- better to lose out to modest inflation, than to get hammered by a failing stock market.

Today's plunge however, is being fed by yesterday's FOMC release:

"Information received since ... August indicates that the pace of recovery in output and employment has slowed in recent months ... the pace of economic recovery is likely to be modest in the near term."

Translation: bad news, folks!  Unfortunately, Republicans are standing in the way of any meaningful efforts to stimulate the economy, so long as a Democrat is President of the United States.

UPDATE: On the plus side of things, Netflix closed the day with a three-cent gain, breaking the 7-straight trading days of declines.  After losing $81.55 in those 7 prior days, $0.03 isn't much, though.

UPDATE2: Edited chart to include today's closing UST yields.

Gaming search results and privacy.

Google chairman Eric Schmidt was in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Antitrust, explaining that Google does not game its search engine to benefit Google.  Think about it for a moment: If you're using Google, it's a good bet that you're also interested in Google's other products; likewise if you use Bing, you're likely interested in using Microsoft's other products; and so on.

Of course, Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) suggested it was no mere coincidence that Google products would come up third (as opposed to being the top result)...as if that was evidence that Google was cooking its results.  Why third, why not the top result?  After all, isn't that the goal of search engine optimization (SEO)???

So I thought I'd conduct several different types of searches using Chrome's Incognito browser, and the results were a bit odd to say the least...see below.

First thing you notice is, that Bing returns results that are automatically localized to Seattle, WA.  Google apparently doesn't localize search results for the search term, "news".  So I thought this deserved a closer look.

Turns out when you do any private browser search (Chrome Incognito, Firefox Private Browsing, IE InPrivate Browsing), the pattern is the same: Bing automatically assigns Seattle, WA as the default location, but Google assigns results (on key words that it chooses) to your actual location. I'll ding Bing for defaulting to Seattle, but I'll ding Google even more, for using IP to return localized results, despite end users utilizing private browsers.

How do I know Google's using IP?  Because I connected to a proxy server and  the localized results reflected the proxy server's location.  And I also switched out Google public DNS for IE's preferred list of DNS.

I suspect the browsers themselves could probably obfuscate your IP.  I know sites themselves - Google especially - could ignore your IP if they wanted to.  But this just goes to show, that even if you block cookies, and turn off scripts, any site you visit can find out where you're located, by looking at your IP.

Operation Twist.

Did it backfire on Republican attempts at political intrusion on the Feds?  The timing seems impeccable.

Some people have noted that the Republican plan, essentially, is to stall government, or purposely make the US economy fail, purely for political reasons.  Ezra Klein has suggested that it's a psychological issue that is blinding Republicans by their own politics.

So while the Feds are trying to do all they can to push the economy, and the President has a jobs proposal in Congress, the Republicans have decided that the solution to debt and the economy is simply to cut taxes.

Operation Twist could help the US economy a lot, but there's a problem: Republicans won't allow it to work.

Oh, and that 283 point Dow Jones Industrials drop today, was not a negative reaction to the Feds directly, but an indirect reaction to the signal that the economy is quite bad, and that's why the Feds announced Operation Twist.  And even before they could start, the 10-year UST plummeted to 1.88%.

UARS. Where in the world is it?

You can watch it being tracked at heavens-above.  Oh, and by the way, that website is also a great place to track satellites, the space station, comets and all other sorts of space-related things.

If you want to freak out your friends, find the day and time of the brightest ISS flyover or any other satellite.  Then at the appointed time, let them know that you have a premonition of a streaking star in the sky at a certain location and time, and drag them outside to witness the powers of your psychic mind.

And by the way, on the 23rd - the predicted day of UARS' imminent demise, it WILL pass over the Pacific Northwest twice. Here's one of the tracks.

UPDATE NOTE: This track (above) changed since last entry, because it is a direct link to a server-generated image.  If you pinpoint your coordinates on the website's map, you can find a list of flyovers over the next 10 days -- of course the UARS will cease to exist in just a couple of days.

Here's the current flyover schedule near Portland, subject to change as it enters the atmosphere.

Date	Mag	Starts		Max. altitude		Ends
		Time	Alt.	Time	Alt.	Time	Alt.
9/21	3.0	03:30:26	10n	03:31:05	11nne	03:31:44	10ne
9/21	-0.5	05:01:02	10wnw	05:02:53	43sw	05:04:43	10sse
9/22	-0.8	04:34:46	10wnw	04:36:31	47sw	04:38:17	10se
9/22	0.6	21:56:11	10wnw	21:57:42	32nw	21:59:14	10nne

You can either go here to the page dedicated to tracking the UARS' path, or you can stare at the image below.

Spotify - College fight songs.

This is cheesy yet awesome...college fight songs on Spotify.  Quality isn't what I would consider top-notch, but they're fight songs.  36 schools included....9 of 12 PAC-12 teams included; all 12 of the Big-10 are included; the rest are mixed.

Fun to listen to, you know, on the off-days when there's no college football on TV.  For the record, I own the USC Silver Celebration, so I've already got Fight On!, with the whole lead in with Tribute to Troy.

Netflix and Qwikster.

Is this newest announcement subterfuge?  Here's the gist of Netflix' CEO Reed Hastings' blog and email to customers (copy and paste portions of the entire entry -- you can find the original here):

"I messed up. I owe you an explanation. 

It is clear from the feedback over the past two months that many members felt we lacked respect and humility in the way we announced the separation of DVD and streaming and the price changes. That was certainly not our intent, and I offer my sincere apology. Let me explain what we are doing.

We need to focus on rapid improvement as streaming technology and the market evolves, without maintaining compatibility with our DVD by mail service.

So we realized that streaming and DVD by mail are really becoming two different businesses, with very different cost structures, that need to be marketed differently, and we need to let each grow and operate independently.

If you subscribe to both services you will have two entries on your credit card statement, one for Qwikster and one for Netflix. The total will be the same as your current charges. We will let you know in a few weeks when the Qwikster.com website is up and ready."

So the bottom line is: Netflix is going to further inconvenience its customers who saw their prices rise by as much as 60%, by forcing them to split their accounts and now track them separately.  Instead of the convenience of having a single screen to see which movies were available for streaming and which ones were only available on DVD / Blu Ray, now you have to go back and forth between two websites to select the appropriate method you'd like to receiver your movie.

How much you wanna bet Netflix' revenue per customer ends up falling instead of increasing?  Netflix is really pissing customers off.

The absolute worst college football uniforms, ever.

Maryland is following the Oregon Ducks path, but with one big difference: they're going all in with U-G-L-Y.

I think they were going for Two-Face.

Why bring this up? Because they've wearing their second uniform in as many games they've played this season...again, following Oregon Ducks, but for the love of U-G-L-Y.

And that's why I have a deep appreciation for tradition.

Windows8 - no more BSOD.

Forget the Blue Screen of Death.


Welcome to [sad] Faces of Death.

Light Squared.

Republicans can't get enough, I guess.

Yet another project that got started under the Bush Administration and had received preliminary clearances under Republicans, is now getting attention because the Obama Administration asked General Shelton (Air Force Space Command) to soften his prepared testimony to Congress.  Specifically, General Shelton (and the military in general) believes that Light Squared's LTE implementation would interfere with the military's GPS.

Here's what really bugs me: this is a technical issue that can be overcome, not some intransigent incompatibility. And if Congress were truly concerned about internet access and competition in the US, they'd be working with Light Squared, not against it.  Most of the lesser wireless networks as well as Sprint, have signed up to lease bandwidth from Light Squared to better compete with Verizon and AT&T.  LTE also holds the promise of making access easier for rural areas, in order to create a more-seamless wireless network.

So what's this all about?  Just to win political points against the Obama Administration, really?  This is exactly what Paul Krugman predicted Republicans would do, and though it started out mildly, it's starting to pick up.

You know, it's not like the Republicans bothered to investigate the fake claims of WMDs in Iraq, or the missing billions of dollars in either Afghanistan or Iraq, that may have ended up in the hands of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, or the no-bid contracts that Dick Cheney's old firm got.  No, they're upset that Obama asked government to work faster and to have a general change his hard stance against a technology that would benefit millions of Americans with lower prices and greater access to the internet.

That's the Republican Party.

No Portland area radar?!?

4:45 this morning I did what I always do: I checked online to see if there was any rain on the radar and the outdoor temperature.  I didn't see anything on the radar, so I set out with the dog.

Outside it was cool and dry, and very nice.  Then about 8 blocks into the walk, it started pouring, and not just a light drizzle, but a hard downpour.  I stopped under a canopy and pulled my phone out to double-check the radar...and the radar said there wasn't anything there.  Say whaaaaat?

I get home, all soaked, change out of the drenched clothes, get my breakfast going, and turn the news on.  According to their radar and their outdoor report, just a light rain.  I'm rolling my eyes, looking at the completely soaked ground in the video.  He goes on to say that there might be some light, scattered showers, but nothing heavy.

Obviously the weather guy is wrong.

So I go online and check the NOAA radar, and there it is...

THE KRTX PORTLAND, OREGON, NATIONAL SERVICE DOPPLER RADAR WILL BE TAKEN OUT OF SERVICE AROUND NOON TODAY (September 12). THIS BEGINS ITS PREVIOUSLY ADVERTISED DUAL POLARIZATION UPGRADE. THE UPGRADE FOR THIS NEW EXCITING RADAR TECHNOLOGY IS EXPECTED TO TAKE FROM 10 TO 14 DAYS TO COMPLETE.

Ahhhhh!!!  Why did they wait until the middle of September to replace the radar???  Surely, surely, SURELY, they would have looked at the statistics, and chosen JULY - the driest month in Portland - and not September, which averages three times more precipitation than July, right?  RIGHT?

WHY, NOAA?  WHY?

Fascinating image overlays.

Carnovsky, a design duo of Francesco Rugi and Silvia Quintanilla, based in Milan, creates these very colorful images that are actually overlaid layers of images in red - green - blue. When filtered out by those hues, a specific image is revealed for each hue. The composites are interesting in themselves, but the fun is to discover what each of the layered images is.

You can click through to see their exhibition at the Jaguarshoes Collective, here, via design boom.

Have Photoshop? You can grab these images then separate the channels to separate the images out. Try it...it's quite a bit of fun.

Little boy, did you drop your stuffed rabbit?

Solyndra.

I've been watching the local, national news and reading the papers, but some things not being talked about:

• Solyndra's loan was under OMB review since the Bush Administration.
• If this had been any other small business that had applied for a loan, and it took the government over a year to sign off on the loan, Republicans would be holding this up as a sign of how slow government is.
• The implication is that the Obama Administration pushed through the loan approval, but what actually happened is that the Obama Administration pushed the OMB to speed up its review.
• This sort of faster review is the same sort of accelerated process that Republicans have been pushing for approval of nuclear and offshore oil approvals.
• The Department of Energy had already signed off on the loan.
• That initial approval was in August 2007.
• Solyndra applied for the loan program in December 2006.
• It was part of a program that was first created in 2005 (The Energy Policy Act of 2005) under 100% Republican control of the House, Senate and White House.
• The failure of Solyndra represents 1.3% of the $38B program's loan portfolio.

The media is either lazy, or attempting to hide the facts.  The entire timeline is outlined by the Republican-controlled House Committee on Energy and Commerce, here.  Don't get me wrong, I think it should be investigated, but the political rhetoric from Republicans is at odds with its own dogma, here, claiming that the government has too much red tape.

GOP plan to steal the Presidential election.

Mother Jones has a look into a tactic that Pennsylvania Republicans are pursuing, and other red states might follow, that essentially allows a state to assign electoral college votes to district-level voting results instead of statewide results.

States redraw their districts every 10 years after the US Census shows changes in demographics.  In a red state, this allows Republicans to redraw district lines to wither down the advantage of concentrated Democratic districts into slight Republican majorities.

The result: a popularly elected President (one who wins a majority of votes, including one with a large majority) may lose.

Just more proof Republican lawmakers are actively defying the US Constitution by disenfranchising voters by changing the rules of how you can vote, and how much your vote counts.  It's not stealing, if you make it legal, eh?

Sept 13, 2011 Living Social Deal: Whole Foods.

Quite the popular buy with over three-quarters of a million purchases!  It's a $10 buy for $20 worth of groceries from Whole Foods.

ComScore: Android #2 in Euro 5 group, July 2011.

Via comScore's MobiLens, Android's explosive growth has led it to grow 16.2 percentage points in a year, nearly matching Symbian's decline, in MobiLens' Euro 5 index of Italy, Spain, Germany, France and the UK.

Note that Microsoft's market share in those countries has slid 4.8 percentage points, or 42% overall.  Yes Symbian had a 16.1 percentage point decline year-over-year, but that's a 30% decline, by comparison.  And one year ago, Microsoft actually was ahead of Google and RIM, despite having a legacy Windows Mobile 6.5 and not the new WP7 platform.  I'm thinking this could be another sign that live tiles are not so popular, eh?

Top Smartphone Platforms in EU5 by Share of Smartphone Users* 3 Month Average Ending July 2011 vs. July 2010 Total EU5 (DE, FR, IT, ES and UK) Mobile Subscribers, Age 13+ Source: comScore MobiLens
Smartphone Platform	Share (%) of EU5 Smartphone Users
	Jul-10	Jul-11	Point Change
Total Smartphone Users	100.00%	100.0%	0.0
Symbian	53.9%	37.8%	-16.1
Google	6.0%	22.3%	16.2
Apple	19.0%	20.3%	1.2
RIM	8.0%	9.4%	1.5
Microsoft	11.5%	6.7%	-4.8

Contractionary policy is contractionary.

I loved that quote from Paul Krugman's blog post today, "The Death of the Confidence Fairy".  Citing the IMF, he points out that the fiscal conservative fallacy (that a lack of business confidence due to growing sovereign debt is why businesses have so far failed to invest in labor) is, and always has been, wrong.

But this time around, there are a few more constraints that would otherwise cover-up the effects of a contractionary fiscal policy:

• Inflexibility to devalue one's own currency owing to:
• individual countries using a single currency (the Euro);
• the reality that if everyone tried to devalue their currency at the same time, no one would effectively benefit, as the relative values to each others' currency would end up being the same;
• Monetary policy is against a wall -- the zero-bound wall where interest rates are practically at zero.

Which basically means that austerity will end up pushing countries into a double-dip recession, if they haven't already done so.

And, oh by the way, did you notice the little bank problem they have over in Europe?  Besides the Greek problem, the undercurrent that is pulling Europe down, is the fear that major European banks are under-capitalized, and will end up falling like dominoes.  You can see it in the Bloomberg Europe 500 Banks and Financial Services Index (BEBANKS:IND).

Bender's Big Score.

Was re-watching Bender's Big Score, and I couldn't help but notice Cartman's head in the Head Museum.

Moon set over Portland.

Seemed only fitting to do a moon set after the sun rise, no?

Inside Republican details his party's scorched earth policy.

I've tried to believe in the past, that Republicans in office were typically well-meaning, but with completely opposite ideas about how to make government work.  Then came the Tea Party folks, and the embrace of the Tea Party lunacy by Republicans.  Their crazy rants led me to believe early on, that the debt ceiling would actually stay in place and we would have to have a collapse of the economy in order to change the politics of Washington -- turns out Democrats caved in to stupid.

Now comes this piece written by Mike Lofgren, after 28 years working as a congressional staffer as a Republican.  A complete confirmation of how Republicans have taken to a scorched Earth policy, with complete disregard for the effects on American lives and livelihood.

"A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

When pressed, Republicans make up misleading statistics to "prove" that the America's fiscal burden is being borne by the rich and the rest of us are just freeloaders who don't appreciate that fact.

About a month before Republicans began holding a gun to the head of the credit markets to get trillions of dollars of cuts, these same Republicans passed a defense appropriations bill that increased spending by $17 billion over the prior year's defense appropriation.

If you think Paul Ryan and his Ayn Rand-worshipping colleagues aren't after your Social Security and Medicare, I am here to disabuse you of your naiveté."

Pinch yourself.  This was a former Republican congressional staff member who wrote this, not some outside political writer or observer.

I said during the debt-ceiling debate, the only way Democrats could come out ahead, was to let Republicans fail.  It may seem to some, to be an irresponsible position to take (to let the debt ceiling stay in place), but look at what we have facing now: another debt ceiling debate in a few months, practically automatic cuts to Medicare and domestic spending, and the continuation of the lie that the debt is holding back growth.

And who is to blame?  President Obama and the Democratic leadership in Washington.  Obama's continued embrace of compromise means that the only way to resolve gridlock is to capitulate to the farthest Right.  And the Democratic leadership - specifically Senator Reid - has continued to follow lock-step with Obama's embrace of the right-of-center, instead of pushing Obama (and the nation) to follow them.  The rhetorical battle is not whether progressive policies have benefited Americans, but how rich people can best create jobs.

Portland sunrise in smoky haze.

Up early enough, I figured I should run out on the bike and see if I can make it to the waterfront and find a nice spot...and  boy, was there a lot of traffic.  Some sort of running event going on in the early morning, combined with Saturday Market folks up early getting ready, and dragon boat racers going to and fro.

A Riverfront sunrise through the Marquam Bridge.

Orange sunrise through the long lens in South Waterfront.

Allstate's city ranking of safest drivers.

Allstate released its 2011 Safest Driving City rankings, and I guess it finally bothered me enough to analyze the data and present some obvious conclusions: the greater the population density, the greater the likelihood of an accident.

And by the way, the population density comes from the 2010 US Census data, and required manual copy and pasting...no quick task when looking up the 193 cities in Allstate's data, whose inclusion seems random at best.

Spotify's got long play mixes.

I learned via my eMusic days, that a lot of club music albums also had their tracks mixed by a DJ into one continuous track.  The trick therefore, if you didn't want to waste your credits on all those individual tracks, you'd just download that single mix with all the songs in it, for basically one credit.

This ends up to be the case - where these long mixes are included in an album - on Spotify.  But here's the bonus on the free version of Spotify: it'll be a very long time (over an hour in many cases) where you won't hit any ads.

So how do you find these long mixes?  Search for: "continuous".  And if you click through on some of the well known mixers, you'll eventually find yourself with well over 70 mixed titles to choose from.

Rick Perry vs. Mitt Romney...

Rick or Mitt?  Does it matter?

Republicans shouldn't have to choose between two men that look almost exactly alike with the same intentions: to cut taxes.

So I'm quite proud to announce that earlier this year, a massive genetic experiment was undertaken, to combine the DNA of both men. Applied with massive amounts of human growth factor hormones (HGH) and given an intense, accelerated learning program, with specialized ebonics software and hooked on phonics, we've created a man of the people.

His name is Rick Romney, and he's running for President of the United States of America in 2012.

Power outage in Southern California...

And all I can think of, is how in the world are those people going to survive without access to the internet?

And by the way, this is the reason why you don't live on a high floor in a building -- do you really want to go up and down 10 flights of stairs to take the dog out for a bathroom break?  Here's the scenario:

• Power goes out at 4:00 pm.
• You work on the 20th floor in downtown, and in order to get to your car, you have to walk down 22 levels (underground parking).
• You try to drive out of the parking garage, only to realize that there's a backup of cars trying to get out, all stalled, because there's confusion as to how bill and pay for parking without a credit card and not enough cash on hand.
• Finally, you get out of the garage, but now it's stop and go every single intersection because the traffic lights are all off.
• Well over an hour later you've reached your condo building, and it's the reverse, where you have to climb 10 flights of stairs just to get to the front door.
• You open the front door and are sweating bullets because the power had cut off the central air in the building's common areas, now above 78 degrees.
• Once you open your front door, your dog is panting because you left the blinds open and with your own central AC off, the heat is up to 86.  The dog is also begging to use the bathroom.
• You went up 10 flights of stairs, now you get to go back down with the dog, and up again.
• You have a smart phone and find out that the power won't get back on until Friday morning.  So you know what that means...you still have to go down and back up with the dog, to use the bathroom before going to sleep, and maybe once again in the morning.
• It's 11 pm and you are ready to take the dog downstairs for the bedtime bathroom walk, but then uh oh, the battery backup packs in the emergency lights in the stairways are dead after running out of their 90 minutes of juice.  Oh wonderful.
• In less than 24 hours, you will have traveled 50 flights (10 flights x 5 trips) of stairs up and 50 flights of stairs down, if you lived on the 10th floor.  Hey, you should be able to run a marathon, now!

And that's why you don't live on a floor higher than what you're willing to walk up and down for several days.