A live shot from the camera on my phone.

Awesome! Google Maps added Street views of Houston!

From TechCrunch:

Google continues to add cities to its Street View maps product that launched earlier this year. You can now view and stroll through high quality photos of most of the downtown areas of San Diego, Los Angeles, Houston and Orlando. Nine cities are now covered – click on the camera icons to dive into the city and see it.

Google Street View Adds Four Cities

From Houston Biz Journal:

Google Inc. has turned on the cameras in Houston.

Google puts Houston on camera

A live shot from the camera on my phone.

A pretty cool life-hack…

“Wired News has a great story today about “Mileage Runners” who tweak the airline reservation system to plot insane (and insanely cheap), multi-hop air trips that accumulate bazillions of air miles. A hacker friend of mine recently came out to me as a mileage runner, and described a system he’d worked out for gaming the reservations computers to get $400, round the world business-class fares.”

Mileage Runners hack air travel for maximum miles

A live shot from the camera on my phone.

A live shot from the camera on my phone.

More on the Rent Vs Buy Debate…. 🙂

Renting vs. Buying: The Realities of Home-Ownership

I’m going, are you? 🙂

Microsoft’s Windows Live Local armada

I’ve seen this chart before, and its just nuts how crazy this current housing boom is…

A History of Home Values

A live shot from the camera on my phone.

This is a pretty detailed article about the bottled water industry…

What day of the week you should buy stuff to save money…

Thanks to online coupons, price-comparison search engines and reward memberships, savvy shoppers can pay less than full price on any day that ends in “y.” But depending on what you’re planning to buy, some days of the week may yield better bargains than others.

The Cheapest Days to Buy Certain Items

Interesitng discussion about how weatlh is being distributed based on age groups…

The median net worth of people 55 to 64 has climbed to nearly $250,000, while it has dropped to about $50,000 for those in their late 30s

Generation gap? About $200,000

A radical viewpoint on how to slow down the spread of STD’s…

It’s true: AIDS is nature’s awful retribution for our tolerance of immoderate and socially irresponsible sexual behavior. The epidemic is the price of our permissive attitudes toward monogamy, chastity, and other forms of extreme sexual conservatism.

You’ve read elsewhere about the sin of promiscuity. Let me tell you about the sin of self-restraint.

‘More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics’

Ever tried ordering a “short cappuccino”?

Here’s a little secret that Starbucks doesn’t want you to know: They will serve you a better, stronger cappuccino if you want one, and they will charge you less for it. Ask for it in any Starbucks and the barista will comply without batting an eye. The puzzle is to work out why.

Solving the mystery of the elusive “short” cappuccino.

A short 12-min video about Houston…

So it seems that déjà-vu is NOT a glitch in the matrix….

Neuroscientists at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT report in the June 7 early online edition of Science that they have identified for the first time a neuronal mechanism that helps us rapidly distinguish similar, yet distinct, places. The discovery helps explain the sensation of déjà vu.

Research deciphers ‘déjà-vu’ brain mechanics

Watch your car get smashed on video!

ConsumerReports.org – Car crash test

A live shot from the camera on my phone.

Among the “car people” I hang out with, its clear we know that SUV’s aren’t very safe… and we joke about how people believe that SUV’s are the definition of safety (as my father does)… As the article discusses, I do the Pepsi-Challenge between an SUV and a roadster regularly, and I can tell you that its a night and day difference in both driving confidence and collision avoidance.

How the S.U.V. ran over automotive safety

Big and Bad

You can create your own Simpsons Avatar at:

http://www.simpsonsmovie.com

Wow… another one bites the dust…

SysAdmin will be folded….

In Major Restructuring, CMP Focuses Online

I find this confusing as well, the pump should actually say whats going on instead of just shutting off…

“Using my Visa card, I commonly hit a limit and I would be standing there scratching my head,” Shawn Bloomfield, who pumps premium gas into his SUV, said from his home in Allentown, Pa. “I would always assume it is the gas station setting a limit on how much gas I could purchase. It felt like a ration scenario.”

As the price of gasoline rises, rules to limit credit card fraud at the nation’s pumps are confusing consumers who just want a full tank of gas.

Caps on transaction amounts — or the total dollar amount of gas a customer can pump into their car — are limiting some drivers.

Credit cards cut off gas purchases

Maybe pursuing the “creative class” isn’t the right course?

So you’ve heard all the discussion about how cities must lure the so-called “creative class” if they want to be great places, right? Basically, the idea is that the creative class — knowledge workers, artists, intellectuals and creative types, a subset of workers identified by economist and author Richard Florida — spurs economic power, high-tech industry, new ideas and growth in places that court it. Sounds like something Houston should be trying to attract, right? Well, no, according to one urban strategist.

Houston and the rise of ‘opportunity urbanism’