Entries for the 'General' Category

This just in from the Eastern Shore...

As many of you know, the Peninsula Regional Medical Center Foundation has been raising money for the last 10 months or so to purchase a new mobile health care van.  The van was named in honor of late stepmother, Debbie Wagner, to honor her thirty-plus years of service to healthcare on the lower Eastern Shore.

Community outreach was a huge part of Debbie's vision.  The drive-through flu clinic conducted by PRMC every year and the Wound Center were just two of her innovative and highly successful ideas that have affected thousands of Lower Shore residents.

Well, the latest fundraising update is in, and to date, the Foundation has raised $363,000 for this important project.

The response from the community, friends, and families has been tremendous, and I want to thank everyone who has contributed to this tremendous project.

The New York Times lives in Fantasy Land when it comes to Mukasey nomination (and vote) for attorney general.

Sorry I haven't been posting as of late.  It's been a busy weekend.  Had some work projects to wrap up at the end of the week.  Then, I had dinner with the old man on Friday.  His 55th birthday was today-- so if you see him, congratulate him.

Then I spent Saturday prepping for my nephew's birthday party today. He turns 4 on Tuesday, so we got together for cookies and cake and then an afternoon a Chuck E. Cheese.

Editor and Publisher are reporting pretty serious declines in circulation at some of the nations's major papers.  As "news" becomes more of a commodity, newspapers will continue to see their circulations decline if they don't change their business models.

It was 28 years ago today that Iranian students -- including Mahmoud Ahdamindejad -- stormed the United States Embassy in Iran, committing an act of war, and beginning 444 days of capitvity for (eventually) 52 United States citizens (including the Marine guards).

Well, that is what Robert X. Cringely thinks.

Cringely makes some serious points.  Google -- at $700 per share -- is a very secretive company that dominates a large part of the web space.  I know that I spend many of my hours working with clients on Search Engine Optimization -- a specialty that Google literally created with their search engine rules.

The problem?  Google doesn't publish any rules on optimizing your site for their search engine.  It's really an art.

Their behavior is very much like Microsoft's when it comes to business partnerships.  I know this all too well -- as a product manager for InterAct Accessories in the 1990s, I saw how Microsoft liked to bring in "potential" partners, then steal their ideas.

Microsoft plays for keeps.  So does google, especially when it comes to web advertising.

It's something to keep in mind.  We could very easily see a dichotomy build up, with Microsoft's virtual monopoloy on the desktop versus a Google monopoly on the Net.  Soon enough, we could have a substantial oligolopy that breaks down innovation and harms the consumer experience.

Be sure to read the article. Cringely is smart, and sees things a lot of others don't.

I recently started trying out the new Amazon Unbox service in conjunction with my much-beloved TiVO.

Unbox is a neat service which allows you download videos to your TiVO or your PC at a very low cost.  From a rental perspective, the price isn't as good as what you would get with Netflix or Blockbuster.  But from a purchase standpoint, it's pretty good.

The one downside, though, is that the downloads aren't "immediate".  Depending on the speed of your connection, it could take some time to download the video to your system.  Because of the bizzarre way that TiVO has to encode video for display, it's pretty much a 1:1 download.  A one-hour show will take you at least an hour to download.

But that is the only drawback I have seen so far, other than the limited library.

Give it a try... I am sure you will like it.

Hey Harry Reid-- yeah, you, the Majority Leader.  Still think the war in Iraq is lost?  We haven't heard much out of your fat mouth lately on this, since you declared unequivocally in the spring that the war was lost.

Yet, the daily count of combat deaths has shriveled in Iraq.  Between October 19 and 23 there were no deaths among coalition forces.

However, here in Baltimore -- the city where your gal-pal Nancy Pelosi grew up -- there were a number of murders.  Is the city of Baltimore lost?

You can read more about it here.

Thanks to Michelle Malkin for bringing this up, since the drive-by media has no interest in reporting good news out of Iraq.  I guess if it doesn't bleed, it can't lead.

Just like the Majority Leader.

Ever since Hillary Clinton's doublespeak debate event last week over NY Governor Eliot Spitzer's new "Driver's Licenses for Illegals" program, there has been much said about the complete lunacy behind such programs.  Why?  Well, thanks to the left's vaunted "Motor Voter" act in the 90's, states are now REQUIRED to provide voter applications to anyone granted a driver's license.

Smart people immediately realize the danger here:  if you give a driver's license to anyone who wants one, and you don't verify their legality, then you open the voter registration rolls to all sorts of corruption.

The Left in this country says "oh no you don't." Unfortunately, you do.  As we found out after 9/11...

Gail Collins over at the New York Times begins her latest column with an astonishingly stupid comment, even for a lefty.

About the latest Democrat debacle -- I mean debate -- she writes:

Hillary Clinton stood on a stage for two hours Tuesday night, being yelled at by six men. Now this is what they mean by pressure.

That is pressure?  Ohh puhlease.