Morning Paper

If By Sea Or By Air Powered Moped!

Fitted with pair of carbon-fiber air cylinders, two rotary air engines, Jim Stansfield has taken a blast from the past and created a "I hope this isn't our future".   That being said, all props to the guy.

Sure the average 62 year-old jogger could get to their destination faster than this moped topped out at 18mph.   Sure the average pack a day smoker could walk further than the 7 miles this Puch will take you on two tanks of air, but all that aside, you have to tip your hat to a person who comes up with gadgetry like this.  It's a step in the green direction.

Source

With Eliot Spitzer on the Budweiser "Hot Seat", here comes Dave Paterson!!

With the N.Y.GOP basically telling ESpitz to "kick rocks" for his very public call girl scandal, embarrassing himself, his family, and constituents, his resignation should be imminent. With that being said, who is David Paterson? David Paterson is the Lt. Governor who is the first African-American and legally blind person to hold his position. He has optic atrophy, and is unable to see out of left eye and seriously limited vision in his right eye. History could be made very shortly, but I seriously hope that he doesn't have any career ending skeletons in his closet as well. Read

Billy Crystal is the Jack Nicholson of the N.Y. Yankees!!

Who said the "Make A Wish Foundation" couldn't work for senior citizens? With his 60th birthday quickly approaching, my New York Yankees have awarded a one-day contract to a home game regular and pretty nice guy, Billy Crystal. Crystal, who is known more for his acting/directing is an avid/rabid Yankees fan, not to mention he directed and produced "61" the movie about Roger Maris. He will wear number sixty, work out with the team, and have to channel his high school baseball experience as he will face the Pittsburgh Pirates in an TBD role. All I can say is, "you lucky bastard!" I am eagerly awaiting my call from the N.Y. Giants, they had better hurry up because although I am maintaining my sexy quite impeccably, my ass is getting a tad bit old. But with my luck, they would put me on kickoff return, a plot orchestrated by my wife no doubt to get the insurance money, oh well. Swing for the fences Billy and don't throw out your back! Read

Sports Illustrated 2008 Issue...see it here!

Blog site randomhot.com has the entire spread of the 2008 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition available for viewing (uh..ehm reading).  Not only do they have the SI spread, but many other great photos :D   

Check it out.

Microsoft drops the price of some retail versions of Vista significantly

This is sort of old news at this point (originally saw it last Thursday), but just in case some of you missed it...  Microsoft will be slashing the price of some of its retail versions of Vista.   Apparently this will become effective when the SP1 version rolls out later this year. Vista Ultimate's full version will go to $319 from $399 (an upgrade is now $219, down from $259); Home Premium's upgrade is now $129, down from $159.

This isn't entirely surprising to me. Personally I wouldn't want either of these versions...Ultimate is too bloated with things I'll never use and Home Premium is missing too many things I need for my office environment. 

Although if you have been putting of upgrading and you want to get it all, and go for Ultimate, or don't need some of the missing "workplace" tools missing in Home Premium, this price drop is your opportunity to score.

Comparison chart of the various Vista versions can be found here.

Stanford is doing something great for Students and Parents!!

With what is starting to look like "University Wars" heating up, in response to Harvard reducing it's tuition for low-income families, Stanford has gone one better. According to Financial Aid Director, Karen Cooper, Stanford plans to ELIMINATE tuition for students who's family income is less than 100k and they will pay most of room and board if they make less than 60k. With an annual tuition topping 36k and room and board at 11k, this is fantastic news for all students that fit this criteria, granted they have what it takes to get into Stanford. I believe that most private universities such as Stanford have the means to actually do this and what is great is that it holds other "institutes of higher learning" accountable. Damn, this makes me want to go back to go school, this time I could correct the problems I faced in from 88-92. But what would I do with my three year-old, ahh yes, campus daycare, it's settled! Read

Opera 9.5 this way cometh (at some point (soon))

Another week, another "Holy Grail" of mobile web browsers for Windows Mobile.

Remember last week? It was Skyfire, from a company nobody heard of and most tech sites were tripping over themselves hailing it as the greatest thing since sliced bread? Ugh, enough already. Actually ship the product instead of talking about it and then I'll be a little more impressed.

This week, it's Opera Mobile 9.5. At least Opera is a company that many of us already know. It's even the default browser for my Motorola Q9h.

From the official Opera site:

Built on Opera's unique core architecture, the Opera Mobile 9.5 desktop-like browsing experience has been enhanced with innovations such as zooming and panning that make it easier to navigate, load pages quicker and get users closer to the Web content and entertainment they want. With Opera Mobile 9.5, users can experience the real Web and interact with content exactly as they do on their PC.

The Opera Mobile 9.5 experience includes many of the innovations found in Opera's trend-setting desktop browser including:

• Intuitive user interface
• Tabbed browsing
• Improved text wrap
• Page overview, zooming and panning
• Landscape mode
• Save Web page for future offline access
• Call phone number from Web page
• Send link as SMS/MMS
• Send image as SMS/MMS
• Small Screen Rendering™
• Password manager
• Web address input auto-completion
• History and bookmarks
• Copy text
• Opera Widgets

I've never been one for mobile web browsing, but I'd be more inclined to go with Opera Mobile than anyone else at the moment. Not because I think Opera Mini on my Q9 is better than IE Mobile, I don't.

As slow and clunky as IE Mobile is, the few (count on one hand) times I've ever absolutely, positively HAD to access the web from my phone, I found Opera Mini to be just as clunky as IE Mobile. But, with the integration of Windows Mobile with my Windows PC and IE7, I'd already saved my most critical sites as Mobile Favorites so I could get on and off as quickly as possible.

But, to be fair to the good work that the folks at Opera have done, once you get passed the gratuitous IE Mobile bashing at the beginning of the Opera Mobile video demo, it does look like it might even get me to think twice about reaching for my phone to browse the web instead of waiting to get to a real computer.

Punxsutawney Phil spend 364 days in invisibility...get up you lazy good for nuthin'!!

Why do we even still bother with this tradition? I loved the movie, Groundhog Day, "Ned, Ned Rierson?" But I guess this little unknown/misunderstood animal has made his prediction....he saw his shadow, so that means six more weeks of winter. What are ya' gonna do? Some people care and others don't, either way, have a great Saturday.

Skyfire making the big Windows Mobile go-round

In today's age of instant Internet access, it's getting increasingly hard to differentiate between good PR and good products. Case in point: Skyfire.

Now, I know you've never heard of Skyfire but most people hadn't either until it's lit up every Windows Mobile tech site with the announcement that the private beta is up and running with promises of a public beta and then a real product one day soon. How soon? Well, that's why I'm writing this post.

What's got the Windows Mobile community all excited is the promise of what Skyfire is supposed to do: the "real" web on a Windows Mobile phone.

The Skyfire website looks really snazzy, any site that uses my Motorola Q9h to hype it's product can't be all bad. It starts off with the web on a PC then transitions to the same thing on a Windows Mobile device. Nice.

Clicking on the link to sign up for the free beta asks that you surrender your name, e-mail and wireless phone number. At that point, they will let you know when the private beta will start, followed by the public beta, followed by the actual product.

Currently, the whole beta process is only open to Windows Mobile Standard devices (i.e. smartphones) with the promise of a Windows Mobile Professional version coming soon (despite the pictures used on the site).

I don't mean to be a wet blanket, but there have been other products that made a tremendous splash lately only to be complete under performers (yes, I'm talking to you Zumobi) of the final product not living up to the initial hype.

Some folks have seen a private demonstration via Skype that they are saying will live up to the hype but for the rest of us mere mortals (and Doubting Thomas'), we'll have to wait to see.

Could Skyfire be the world's greatest browser to hit Windows Mobile ever in the history of mobile web browsers? Sure it could, but wasn't that supposed to have been Opera Mini? We now have a new player on the block who's promising the stars.

I may be alone in this (certainly not the first time) but I feel we are all going to be inundated with these type of announcements with increasing regularity. It will soon be hard to separate the hype from the facts.

Could the folks behind Skyfire kept it under wraps until it was ready for prime time? Yes. Would they still have the "iPhone killer" for web browsing on Windows Mobile (arguably it's Achilles heel)? Yes. Is it "sexy" anymore to come from nowhere to trump the competition? No. Not in this age of hype and F.U.D. (fear, uncertainty, doubt) though why you would want to do that against Apple at this point is a little irrational to me.

No one is NOT going to get an iPhone because of the promise of Skyfire. No one is NOT going to get a Windows Mobile device because of the promise of Skyfire.

I've signed up for the private beta and will let you know if and when this goes live and what I find. I'm all for hoping Skyfire is all the Monday morning buzz is making it out to be. But increasingly, a part of me really wishes people would let their product do the talking and leave the PR and spin (along with their egos) checked at the door.

Toshiba pulls back the curtain on new Windows Mobile phones

Toshiba, according to PocketPCItalia, has officially released three new Windows Mobile phones that have been teased for awhile, well, at least one of them anyway.

But what caught my eye was this piece of loveliness called the Toshiba Portege G710. Now, the specs are nothing to write home about. In fact the only reason I'm bringing this to you is because of the sheer deliciousness of the design. This is one very elegant, classy looking device.

Take a BlackBerry 8830, some backseat action with the Samsung BlackJack, nine months later you have a potential patent violation lawsuit an amazing looking device.

If that trackball works as well as it does on the BlackBerry and the keys work as well as they do on the BlackJack II, the reported $440 price tag holds true, and neither RIM nor Samsung unleash the hordes of lawyers (maybe they struck a deal?), Toshiba has a real winner on their hands come March.

No, not in the specs department, my Q9 has better specs than this device. But it sure looks purdy.

via Engadget Mobile