Tired of everyone talking about their Macs?

“If I were Apple, I’d be worried about this. Two lifelong Mac fans are switching away from Macs to PCs running Ubuntu Linux”….

Canaries in the Mac OS X and Red Hat Coal Mines?

And the guys at Best Week Ever are privy to this too! 😀

I wonder how many more lessons Chris B needs before he can ride one of these 🙂

This is interesting…

Anyone who has ever used the internet probably knows about Google’s web search, but did you know that Google does a lot more? We’ve discussed many Google services on TipMonkies before, but there are some which some of you may not be aware of. Read the full article to get the giant list of Google services and what each does. We’ll try to keep this list up-to-date as Google begins rolling out more services (because you know they will).

The Ultimate Guide to Google Services

For all you people who can’t tie a tie… 🙂

Instructions on how to tie a tie, different ways of tying tie knots, caring for a necktie and more.

Tie Guide

Everything you ever wanted to know about SED:

Sed – An Introduction

For consumers, diminished capacity could mean higher average fares, fewer choices, fuller flights and fruitless searches for mileage upgrades and award travel. For communities, it could mean deteriorating or disappearing air service. For the airlines themselves, it could mean a fighting chance to regain profitability.

Airlines cram more fliers into fewer seats, flights

Le Reve is my favorite restaurant… its one of the things I miss about San Antonio. I make a point to visit it or its sister, Sandbar, whenever I’m there as well.

Le Rêve is a spectacular case in point. Who in his right mind would expect to find a fairly formal French restaurant — jackets for the gentlemen, please — on a drab downtown corner in easy-living San Antonio, a city known for air bases, the Alamo and Tex-Mex, and most certainly not haute cuisine? But there it is on Pecan Street, a “rêve” (dream) in more ways than one, flanked by a Greyhound bus station and a barbecue joint.

Not just formal and French but fabulous — worthy of the most exigent tastes, Texan or otherwise. Patricia Sharpe, the authoritative food critic of Texas Monthly, considers it the best restaurant in the state, which is saying a lot when the competition includes places like Cafe Annie in Houston, Abacus in Dallas and the Driskill Grill in Austin. I doubt there is a better restaurant in the country so little known.

Back From France, Winning the Heart of Texas

Wow – these are some expensive tires!

Racy-looking — and pricey — performance tires showing up on many new cars are proving to be the salvation of the tire industry

Sporty tires jazz up cars, but cost burns hole in wallets

Last night I managed to make it down to Buddha Lounge for this month’s Refresh Houston meeting… What’s that?

Refresh Houston is a community of designers and developers working to refresh the creative, technical and professional culture of new media and Web endeavors in the Houston area.

So much for the skeptics. 😉

The nation’s top climate scientists are giving “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore’s documentary on global warming, five stars for accuracy.

Scientists OK Gore’s movie for accuracy

Nearly 11 million households are the wealthiest 10% of all U.S. households in net worth with:

• Minimum net worth of $750,000
• Average net worth of $2.7 million
• Average income of $270,000
• Earn nearly 40% of the total income of all Americans
• Own 65% of the personal assets of all U.S. households

Richest gift shoppers rein it in a little

This could be a reasonable replacement for rsync on Windows…

Good Sync is FREE file and folder synchronization software for Windows.

This software uses an innovative synchronization algorithm to synchronize your data between desktop PCs, laptops, USB drives and more. Good Sync combines bulletproof reliability with an extremely easy-to-use interface.

Good Sync

All of a sudden a huge batch of global warming related articles popped up….

The Earth is running a slight fever from greenhouse gases, after enjoying relatively stable temperatures for 2,000 years. The National Academy of Sciences, after reconstructing global average surface temperatures for the past two millennia, said Thursday the data are “additional supporting evidence … that human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming.”

Earth hottest it’s been in 2,000 years

And this is interesting:

Hawking, who suffers from a degenerative disease, uses a wheelchair and speaks through a computerized voice synthesizer, said he was “very worried about global warming.”

He said he was afraid that Earth “might end up like Venus, at 250 degrees centigrade and raining sulfuric acid.”

Stephen Hawking warns about global warming

And, now that Futurama is coming back… check this out:

Update: Here’s another one:

Global warming has been a popular topic among scientists

The Earth’s average temperature over the past quarter century has been the hottest in four centuries — and part of the world has been warmer during the past 25 years than any period in the past 1,000 years, according to the National Academy of Sciences in a recently published report. The data published in the report contains “additional supporting evidence: “that human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming.” Congressman Sherwood Boehlert, chairman of the House Science Committee, requested the 141-page report by the National Academy of Sciences.

Last 25 Years Warmest on Earth in Four Centuries

This is HUGE!

WRT54G v5 and V6 can now be flashed to linux without JTAG!!!

Its back baby! Oh ya!

Comedy Central is going back to the Futurama.

Three years after the show last aired on prime time, the cable net has signed a deal to resurrect the former Fox animated series for a minimum 13-episode run.

“Futurama” Pulls a “Family Guy”

BumpTop aims to enrich the desktop metaphor with expressive, lightweight techniques found in the real world.

Sometimes, you need stories like this to put things into perspective 🙂

The owner of a Los Angeles car dealership is suing Mercedes-Benz, its parent company DaimlerChrysler and other affiliates, alleging that a $1.7 million car purchased in 2004 wouldn’t run for more than 10 blocks without problems.

World’s most expensive lemon?

What is a Halo car?

Solstice is, in auto-industry speak, a “halo car.”

It’s one of those rare models that can draw a halo around a brand, bringing into showrooms potential buyers who, ultimately, may drive off in a totally different vehicle from the same nameplate.

Halo cars are hot and sexy. They generate buzz even before they go on sale. They often pack a wallop under the hood. They may echo hallowed automotive names or conjure up happier days.

Automakers hope love for car equals love for brand

See more Halo Cars here.

Are the home-price corrections coming?

If you haven’t bought a house yet, some good deals might be coming…

In 2003, Anita Britten refinanced her two-story brick cottage in Lithonia, Ga. using a hybrid adjustable rate mortgage, or ARM. Her lender reassured her that she could refinance out of the riskier loan into a traditional one when her interest rate started to reset.

Three years later, Britten can’t get a new mortgage and her monthly payment has jumped by a third in six months. She can’t afford her payments and may face foreclosure if her financial situation doesn’t change.

Foreclosures may jump as ARMs reset

I’m a bit torn about Volvo’s new collision warning system.

On one hand, its a really great idea… and I actually believe it will probably benefit a lot of drivers – particularly those yapping away on their cell phones.

But on the other hand, I feel like such automatic systems freak people out… and occasionally the systems themselves freak out – I have no idea what a failure in such a system would do, but I can’t imagine it would be good.

I’ve had the priviledge of hearing Al Gore speak about the global warming issue ealier this year… then, I had the priviledge of actually sitting down with him one-on-one about the topic some more about a month later.

I could ramble on about what we discussed, or you could simpy just watch his new movie and you’ll pretty much get the jist of what we spoke about. 🙂

Google Video: An Inconvenient Truth – Trailer- 2min 30sec

I urge everyone to watch the film – its pretty shocking.

Looks like I got snapped while at BarCamp Houston:

Lots of great conversations, smart people, and plenty of energy at this camp.

If you’re reading this, and its still going on, I highly recommend stopping by… good stuff going on here. 🙂

Meanwhile, here’s the Flickr Pool.

Wow – times are changing… there was a time when nobody would dare own a Hyundai – now its almost silly to drive anything else!

Porsche and Hyundai leapfroggeda to the top of the influential J.D. Power Initial Quality Study, potentially boosting sales at both automakers as consumers continue to focus on quality as a leading factor in buying decisions.

Hyundai lands in top 3 for quality

At the bottom of the above article, you’ll find the complete list for 2006.

Here are the results for previous years:

• Rankings for 2005
• Rankings for 2004

Ok, this is awesome… anyone who has a mac should have this running…

SmackBook Pro

Everyone knows I love Vonage… so a lot of people have been asking me if I was going to participate in their IPO. Many where shocked to hear me say:

No.

Don’t get me wrong, as a customer, Vonage is awesome… there’s no other phone service I’d ever have. However, this is an investment decision and here’s why I was down on them:

• With BIG competition like AT&T’s Call Vantage and Time Warner’s Digital phone – its going to be tough going for Vonage… for the incumbent carriers, VoIP is life or death for them… so they’re not going to down without a serious fight.
• At about $17/share – Vonage is saying that they’re worth around $2.5billion. I don’t know about that – especially when you consider that Vonage has never turned a profit.
• Don’t forget the whole Net Neutrality issue.
• To me, its clear that Vonage is involving their customers in the IPO because they want to build excitement and demand for their stock… the problem is that 3 days before the closing of the “customer round” they sent out an email reminder that it was “closing soon” and that we’d better hurry up and get our money in… which sounds like they had problems getting people to sign up. So Econ 101 says that when there’s no demand, prices go down.

So what ended up happening? Lets go see…

Shares of Vonage Holdings (VG), the Internet telephone pioneer, dropped in their trading debut Wednesday after pricing late Tuesday at $17 a share, the middle of the expected range.
Shares of Vonage fell $2.31, or 13.6%, to $14.69 in late trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

Investors drop Internet phone pioneer Vonage

And my favorite:

“Internet phone service provider Vonage Holdings Corp.’s initial public offering encountered shareholder static Wednesday morning, and appeared headed for the worst IPO debut in two years.“

Vonage IPO is a Train Wreck

Perhaps Buffett was right – maybe investing (or not investing) in things you understand the most is a good thing. 🙂