10 Thoughts for March 12, 2014

1. I find it odd that Republicans are pinning the FL-13 win on the ACA, seeing as the seat has been Republican since...1983.  In the 2012 elections, Republican Bill Young won this seat by 15 percentage points.  Gloating over winning by about 2 percentage points, what has been a safe seat for the last 30 years is strange don't you think?  Or, it could be a case where Republicans are actually not safe at all in 2014?
2. Oh look...Lisa Murkowski's been acting more like a moderate these days, ever since she beat the Tea Party favorite with a write-in campaign to win reelection in 2010.
3. Google Apps (docs) now has add-ons.  They are basically gadgets from within docs that allow you do more things with your docs, faster, easily.  Looking over the Add-ons, it seems that they educational and enterprise crowds the most.
4. It's hard to believe that the world can't seem to find Malaysia Air flight MH370.  The latest report indicates that the plane's data transmitted back to Boeing points to the plane flying for an additional 4 hours after last radar contact.  There are other ways of tracking location, of course.
5. I'm not going to get too deep into this, but if you keep a smart phone with you at all times, you can turn on location services and track your travels.  If you have Google Now, then you already know this intuitively as Now reports back each month how many miles you walked, etc.  There also happens to be another useful reason for enabling location services: Verifying what time you were at a particular location, for use in forensics. You can delete your tracking data however you wish, whether your entire history or particular days.
6. I had the Pink Screen of Death from Chromecast, and I think I know what may have caused it.  The device was working fine earlier, and then just a moment ago when I was trying to cast a tab from Chrome browser, I got the PSOD.  I checked, and casting from apps worked fine, so it had to be the Chrome browser.  I then checked for an update, and sure enough there was one.  It downloaded and installed, and when I restarted Chrome and tried to cast a tab, everything was back to normal.  It could be, that when an update is waiting to be installed, it turns pink.
7. Toyota just doesn't get it.  First it was Entune with Bing, and in 2015 it'll be Apple's Car Play.  Android owns 80% of the global smartphone market.  You're driving us away from the brand by being such stubborn fools.
8. Remember that retired police officer in Florida who shot a guy in a movie theater for texting during previews?  Turns out he had been texting in the theater moments before...to his son...who arrived at the theater in time to see and hear the gun go off and attempted to save the guy who was shot by his father.  Wow.
9. Google lowered prices for Drive storage while boosting the amount of paid storage.  Since hard drive cost / MB keeps dropping, eventually these plan rates will also drop.
10. Target has a big red target on its back, now that it has been revealed that Target actually knew about the attempted hack for months, and did nothing.  I don't think it's by coincidence that Target's CTO resigned last week -- BBW probably got the ball rolling when they asked for comments from Target, prior to publishing this story.