This won’t go over too well with Internet citizens, most of whom despise Microsoft with a passion. “Microsoft courting Google for possible takeover“.
MSNBC has the same story. MSNBC is partly owned by Microsoft.
I don’t know how many people are following the off-year elections. Here in New Jersey, the radio ads are hilarious. The dems have been running an ad in Bergen county with someone doing a bad Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonation. I mean, it’s bad!! I could do a better Arnold accent. There have been lots of ads because the dems and republicans are tied 20-20 in the NJ senate and the assembly has the dems up 42-38. The one thing that McGreevey does well is fund raising, and the dems have lots of cash to spend on radio ads. TV ads are too expensive because you have to buy airtime on the New York City stations. Here’s hoping that all the ads don’t matter and McGreevey and the dems get slapped good next week.
There’s an interesting election for governor of Louisiana that most people haven’t heard about unless they’re a political news junkie like me. The republican candidate is Bobby Jindal. He’s leading the democrat candidate by eleven points in the most recent poll and he seems to have the momentum. Jindal is only 32 years old. His parents are Punjabi, so if he wins next week he becomes the first Indian-American to win a statewide election in the United States. Jindal is a Rhodes scholar who was appointed to a job by George Bush in the Department of Health and Human Services. Jindal has also been president of the University of Louisiana system and the secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals. He’s got a pretty good resume for a young guy (I feel old all of a sudden!!)
Jindal is a solid conservative on all the issues, and a victory for him next week would really be a great story. Most of the left wingers on the web scoff at his chances, saying there’s no way all those backwoods rednecks in Louisiana will elect a “foreigner”. Let’s hope the dems get to eat their words on November 15th. Go Bobby!!
Interesting list at the UK’s Guardian web site, where they published a list of “The 40 Greatest US bands Today“. I can’t tell if this is the result of a poll or just one reviewer’s opinion, but it’s an interesting list. I’m a bit embarassed since I’m an American and I haven’t heard of all these bands (#10 is Lambchop, #21 is Wilco and #25 is Calexico) and I like to think I’m up on music and pop culture. #1 was some band from Oklahoma that I never heard of, The Flaming Lips. Outkast was #2, the White Stripes #5 and Eminem was #6.
I work in the chemical industry, so I don’t have the same fear of chemicals as the average person. If I’m on one end of the scale, then the Sierra Club is on the other. They haven’t met a chemical that they don’t like. If they had their way, every industry in New Jersey that used chemicals would be banned from the state, and with it would go a lot of high paying jobs. In particular, hourly workers with only a high school education are paid extremely well by the chemical and pharmaceutical industries in New Jersey. There’s no way these workers are going to make nearly the same amount of money working for Wal-Mart.
I was looking at the Sierra Club of NJ site [link], and they have this feature called “Get Local!!” You type in a zip code and they’ll tell you who the polluters are in your area. I guess when you find out the names of the polluters in your county then you’re supposed to pick up pitch forks and torches and charge the gates of these companies. Well the polluters list for Somerset county is funny, because one company made the list for releasing 10 pounds of chemicals and another company made the list for releasing 20 pounds. Releasing 10 pounds makes you a major polluter?? I think my lawnmower puts out more than 10 pounds of chemicals a year. I’m not in favor of pollution, but singling out a company for reporting 10 pounds of chemical releases is ridiculous. The Sierra Club even states elsewhere that in Somerset county, 93% of the cancer risk is from vehicles and 6% is from sources like gas stations, dry cleaners and auto body shops. A whopping 0.48% is from major industrial facilities.
I’ve been cutting back on beer (trying to lose a few pounds) but at least I have coffee to get me through. Everyone is allowed one vice. But then I read this report from a professor at Southwest Texas State University that coffee induces “caffeine psychosis”. I didn’t know there was a Southwest Texas State University, but they should be studying the effect of too much bar-b-q on the waistline, not giving me a guilt trip every time I’m sucking down a few hot cups of coffee. The article says that British prime minister Tony Blair was recently hospitalized for an irregular heart beat, and it may have been caused by Blair drinking too much strong coffee in Brussels. But at least the article mentions some of the positive effects of drinking lots of coffee, like lowering the risk of colon cancer, gallstones, cirrhosis of the liver and Parkinson’s disease. I’ll take my chances.
“The Today Show” had a lot of fun with the Rush Limbaugh-drug addict stories. Never mind that the juicy bits of the story were mostly in the “National Enquirer”. The pixie-like Katie Couric couldn’t control her glee. Well, what are they going to say now that the Enquirer has a story that about Matt Lauer’s alleged drug usage? The lead story in this week’s edition of the Enquirer has an interview with a guy who says he was Lauer’s cocaine supplier. Can’t wait until Monday’s show. My guess is after a few weeks of respectability in the major media, the Enquirer will go back to being a supermarket check-out rag.
I was reading an article posted on the Insurance Council of New Jersey website and saw this article about political donations for the upcoming elections in New Jersey. Doctors are donating over four times as much to republicans as to democrats. Trial lawyers aren’t worried about spreading the money around. All of the money from the New Jersey chapter of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America for the third quarter went to democrats. But the article mentions that during the “lame duck” session, between the election and when the new senate and assembly is sworn in, the democrats will try to ram through a gasoline tax increase and they will try to make it easier to sue for “pain and suffering” after auto accidents. New Jersey drivers lose, trial lawyers win. Isn’t New Jersey great??
Megan McArdle runs the Asymmetrical Information weblog, one of the top weblogs on the ‘net (ranked #39 at The Truth Laid Bear). She’s one blogger who drives the left wing bloggers crazy even though she’s not the most conservative writer out there. I believe she’s an economist by trade, and she has written two columns over at Tech Central Station about the upcoming crisis in Social Security (here and here). It’s not encouraging. Megan predicts Social Security will in the red (money going out exceeds money coming in) in 2017. Medicare’s expenses will start to exceed benefits four years before that. Rather than looking at ways to fix this, our politicians are looking to make it worse by adding a prescription drug benefit that could cost $400 billion over the first 10 years it’s in place.
Megan has a few suggestions that will ease the pain, but even she admits won’t fix the problem. The major problem is that there are too few workers paying in to support the increasing numbers of citizens that will be drawing benefits. Increasing the retirement age will help, but she says that even increasing the age to 70 will only temporarily help, because in 20 or 30 years, we can expect the average life expectancy to be higher than it is today. Means testing will also only be a slight help to the system, and that will cause too much political heat to implement. Allowing a portion of the social security deduction to be invested in private accounts will have to be part of any solution, but Bush is having trouble getting that through.
I think the major problem is that one political party is willing to fix the system while the other party looks at social security as a means to win elections. Remember those disgusting condo commandos from the 2000 Florida election recount?? Those wretched old ladies from Palm Beach crying about how they thought they screwed up their votes for Gore?? Those people are core democrats, and the democrat party needs issues like social security to get them riled up. The democrat solution is …. what do you think?!?…RAISE TAXES!! That’s OK with the old ladies in Florida and the unions. They propose raising the threshold (right now, the cutoff is something like $77,000 a year) but not increasing the benefits to the high payers. In other words, making social security a welfare program. No thanks.
I cannot get enough of that new iPod commercial that’s been playing lately on TV. The ad features silhouettes of people dancing wildly on different bright colored backgrounds. The song is great, it’s by some garage-type sounding band named “Jet” and the song is called “Are You Going to be my Girl”. You can view the ads at Apple’s site [link], but since it’s Apple you’ll need Quicktime. I’m a Windows guy, but this ad makes me want to go out and get an iPod, and I’m still not 100% sure what an iPod does. Now that’s good advertising!! I know it has something to do with digital music, and I think you have to download the tunes from the iTunes website, which is doing really well. Maybe someone has finally found a way to get people to pay for music downloaded off the internet.
It’s also started a little Microsoft-Apple war. iPods use MAC OS, and you need a Mac to download the tunes and transfer them to the iPod. Apple is now distributing a free program that will allow the iPod to connect to Windows PC to download tunes onto the iPod. Apple should be happy, because Windows users might now go out and buy an Apple product, but Apple people are so anti-Microsoft they don’t want to do anything that might have any benefit at all to Windows users.
My daughter just had her first birthday, actually it was her one month birthday and it was last Saturday. She’s doing really well. Here’s a picture of her last night watching the World Series. She was happy at the time because the Yankees were loosing, but she started crying later on when they took the lead. Everyone loves this picture because of all her hair. She’s got a lot for a one month old.
Yes, we’ve definitely won the war in Iraq. They just got their first Burger King. It’s the first one ever in Iraq, and it opened in May. It’s at the former Saddam International Airport, and soldiers come from miles away to get a Whopper and fries. It’s one of the busiest Burger King restaurants in the world, cooking up over 5000 patties a day. Let’s really take care of our soldiers and open a White Castle in Baghdad.
I’m stunned. I found a blog that has nice things to say about our boy governor, Jim McGreevey. This guy calls McGreevey “My candidate for president of the usa, 2012“. He must not live in New Jersey, or this weblog is actually authored by a member of McGreevey’s immediate famuliy using an assumed name.
Actually, McGreevey may have some fans outside NJ as did our last governor, Christie Whitman. I call it the Rutgers Effect. I’ve traveled all over the country, and I’ve found that the further away from New Jersey you are, the better reputation Rutgers University has. I’ve spoken to people in Texas and California who think Rutgers is Ivy League. There were people in the republican party who thought Christie would make a great national candidate, but anybody who was paying attention in her home state knew that (1) she was an awful campaigner and (2) other than cutting state income taxes, I cannot think of one conservative thing she ever did. My guess is the further away from New Jersey you are, the better you think of McGreevey. Since governor Gray Davis was tossed from office in California, republicans now control the governor’s office in the four biggest states, so McGreevey is a big fish in the democrat pond. And even after eight years of Bill Clinton, I’m sure McSleazy could teach the dems a thing or two about fundraising.
If you follow political discussion on the internet, you’ll know that it’s pretty nasty. Don’t expect any deep, theoretical discussion of issues. Usually someone says something, and that person is then called a “whore” or worse. End of debate.
As an example, former first lady and mother of the current president Barbara Bush was on the “Today” show pushing her new book. She was asked about the democrat candidates running for president, and her answer was:
Pretty tame stuff. On a scale of one to ten on the nastiness scale, this is probably a two. But check out the response at one of the leading left-wing blogs, DailyKos. The former first lady is called every name in the book, including curse words you would only call a woman. This is what goes for political debate in this country nowadays.
This is the kind of stuff we’ll see during next years presidential election. There won’t be any thoughtful debates concerning the war on terror or the future of entitlement programs. It will be stuff like “You suck!!” or worse. This is the residue of eight years of Bill Clinton. Clinton believed that it was impossible for people of good intentions to disagree with him. He had his plan for something, and republicans would propose an alternate plan. Republicans were then labeled “baby killers” or “environment destroyers” or worse. That’s Clinton’s legacy.
When I’m looking for oddball stories on the internet (stuff like someone thwarting a carjacking using a can of Cheese Wiz) I go over to Ananova.Com and check out the Quirkies page. Just in the last month they’ve had articles like:
And these were only within the last couple of weeks. Good stuff!!
The Courier News had a headline in today’s paper, “Landfill’s possibilities excite Somerville officials“. My first thought is why would any town be excited about a landfill?? Are Somerville officials that easy to excite?? Actually, the story is about a 75 acre landfill/garbage dump that is about to be turned over to the borough of Somerville. The landfill closed in 1983. But since this is New Jersey and we have more lawyers per square mile than any state in the union, the actual closing and transfer of the site has been tied up in courts. The property is prime real estate, close to route 202, and developers are getting into fist fights and wrestling matches to get first dibs on the property (only kidding, though I could see that happening).
The Courier News has a poll going, asking readers what should be done with the site. The paper suggest affordable housing, a shopping center, a golf course, ball field and playgrounds or condominiums. My guess is it will end up being just what New Jersey doesn’t need, another bunch of box stores. Lowes or Home Depot, Target or Walmart, Old Navy, Rag Shop, Toys-R-Us, Best Buy, you know the names. Throw in a bank, a drug store and a dollar store and you’ll have another blight on the suburban NJ landscape.
They mention ball fields. Ball fields are one of those things everyone says they want, but once they get them they are rarely used. The only use is from organized baseball or soccer teams. You rarely drive by an open field and see kids just playing on them.
PDA’s (personal digital assistants) were the rage a few years back. Palm was the leader with the Palmpilot. Well, it’s 2003, and the PDA seems to have faded from the face of the earth. The Economist reports that sales are flat, and the electronics industry feels the growth will be in the combination PDA and phone gadgets (”smart phones”).
I still use a Palm IIIxe that I got through work almost three years ago. In PDA terms, the IIIxe is a Model T with it’s grey scale display and 8mb of memory and no wireless networking. I was previously a Day-Timers user. I always thought it was cool when I went to meetings and saw the leader with one of those big old Day-Timers with lots of different inserts. I used an 8-1/2×11 sized format, two pages per week and an 1-1/2 binder. I’ve tried my best to stay away from paper and only use the Palm. I like the size of the PalmPilot. I can fit a Palm IIIxe in my shirt pocket. Having a central place for phone numbers and addresses is key. And I use the calendar features. I never was into the note taking part of using the Palm. I am actually very good at Graffiti, which is the hand writing language the Palm OS uses, but I still like having manila folders containing all the notes and correspondence for a topic or project. Most Palm users I know never used Graffiti, instead they used the pop up keyboard, which is very slow using the stylus. I did the hot-sync with MS Outlook, but reading a long e-mail on a Palm display wasn’t that easy. I downloaded and installed a few games and a database program. Most users did not know how to install apps.
A lesson to be learned from the experience of the Palm is that it didn’t really give us anything new, it just replaced something that we had. It made it better, but not that much better. And casual users never understood all the features. We’re constantly being bombarded with new technology, “The Next Big Thing”, but if it’s trying to replace technology that everyone uses and everyone is happy using, then the new technology better be good or “must have” or it will join the PalmPilot in the scrap heap of history.
I wasn’t pulling for Chicago or Florida in the National League playoffs, but I did watch most of the last two games. The Cubs were up 3 games to 1 and then lost three straight. No World Series since 1945 for the Cubbies. In game 6, they were five outs away from winning the thing when a foul ball went down the left field line. Cubbies outfielder Moises Alou reaches into the stands to try and catch the ball when a Cubs fan reaches in and the ball falls to the ground. Florida then went on to score eight runs and win that game and then come back to win tonights game. That Cubs fan is now villain number one in Chi-town. The Chicago Sun-Times, the windy city’s equivalent of the New York Post, published the guy’s name, home town and the name of the company he works for. Ouch!!
A big complaint about weblogs is that a lot of bloggers spend too much time linking to articles about blogging. I try not to, but I found this article to be very interesting. The company, Perseus Development Corporation, surveyed almost 4000 weblogs on eight major blogging providers (Blog-City, BlogSpot, Diaryland, LiveJournal, Pitas, TypePad, Weblogger and Xanga) and found that almost two thirds of the blogs had not been updated in two months. They also found that out of the over 4 million (!!) blogs on those eight providers, only 106,000 were updated at least once a week.
DynamoBuzz is not hosted on one of these providers, and I think alot of heavy duty blogs are also independent, i.e. they rent their own space. I think the big eight services make it easy to get started in blogging, but casual bloggers find that keeping a weblog up and running is hard work.
These statistics are skewed a bit based on the sample population which is only these eight providers, and demographic data is not totally reliable, but this study said only 7.5% of the blogs are run by people over 30 years old. I find that a little hard to believe, but I guess there are millions of blogs out there run by teenagers. LiveJournal in particular seems to be populated with teenage girls blogging on about how lousy their day was.
I was just reading the analysis of the NJ Senate race for my district, district 22. Our incumbent is toe sucker Joe Suliga, who dropped out of the race when the news of his booze fueled incident in Atlantic City caused a little too much heat for him or the democrats. The democrats replaced him with Nick Scutari who I think is a buddy of Suliga. Republicans are running Scotch Plains mayor Martin Marks.
The analysis has the voting profile for my district, and I found out to my horror that … I LIVE IN ONE OF THE MOST LIBERAL DISTRICTS IN NEW JERSEY!!! McGreevey beat Schundler 62.4% to 37.6% in the 22nd district, but Gore beat Bush by an even bigger margin, 63.2% to 36.8%. Less than 15% of the voters in my district are registered Republicans. I feel like I’m living in San Francisco or the Village. Our district is one of those specially drawn districts that was designed to protect incumbents. It runs from Linden in Union County to Middlesex Borough and picks up left leaning towns like Rahway and Plainfield. I guess my best hope is that in 2010 when the district lines are redrawn, I’ll get lumped in with some more conservative towns.
On September 25th, I wrote the following about the democrats running for president [link]:
Well, today, Washington Post columnist David Broder writes in his column:
I wonder if Broder reads DynamoBuzz?? If so, he owes me at least an acknowledgement for using my ideas.