October 10, 2014

Google's Shamu.. ( I WANT one)

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/10/09/google-hopes-whale-of-a-phone-will-make-splash-in-phablet-market/

Oct 9, 2014
Apple
Google Hopes Whale of a Phone Will Make Splash in Phablet Market



By
Alistair Barr and Rolfe Winkler



Google this month expects to release its largest smartphone, intensifying competition in the fast-growing market for super-sized mobile devices known as phablets, according to three people familiar with the situation.

The new phone — code-named Shamu after a killer whale — will have a 5.9-inch screen, a high-resolution display and be sold under the Nexus brand, two of the people said. Motorola Mobility, the phone maker that Google is selling to China’s Lenovo Group Ltd.0992.HK -5.05%, is manufacturing the phone, the people added. A Google spokeswoman declined to comment.

The new phone will be larger than Apple AAPL iPhone 6 Plus, which is 5.5 inches, and the Samsung Galaxy Note, the first truly successful phablet, which is 5.7 inches. Google plans to release a new version of its Android mobile-operating system at the same time. Tech blog The Information reported in July that Motorola was working on a Nexus phablet with Google.

Phablets, defined as smartphones with displays five inches or larger, were once ridiculed as unwieldy bricks for short-sighted, older consumers. But as phones have evolved from calling devices into computers for work tasks and watching videos, larger devices have caught on.

In 2011, phablets accounted for 1% of global smartphone shipments. This year, these big phones will make up 24% of the market, according to consultants Strategy Analytics. Stats like that forced Apple to drop its aversion to larger iPhones this year and now Google is responding.

“The phablet wars are in full effect and vendors need any possible edge they can get,” said Neil Mawston, a mobile-industry analyst at Strategy Analytics. “Having a large phone will help Google.”

snip

October 6, 2014

Ashoka Mukpo once hailed as reincarnated lama

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/04/us-ebola-patient-ashoka-mukpo-liberia

What an interesting background this young man has..


Associated Press in Providence, Rhode Island
theguardian.com, Friday 3 October 2014 22.49 EDT



A passion for Liberia and the plight of its people drove Ashoka Mukpo to work there, first to aid relief efforts and then as a photojournalist to tell its story. But Mukpo has an unusual story of his own: As an infant, he was identified as a reincarnated Tibetan lama, a role he chose not to pursue.

Mukpo, 33, was diagnosed Thursday with Ebola and was being cared for at a treatment centre in the Liberian capital, Monrovia. His family said he was expected to leave there on Sunday and arrive at the Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha on Monday.

His mother, Diana Mukpo, comes from an upper-class aristocratic family in Britain. At age 16, she left boarding school in Scotland and married Tibetan Buddhist leader Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who founded the Shambhala community that spread Buddhism in the west. She was one of several wives.

They moved to Boulder, Colorado, in the 1970s and set up a Buddhist centre, where notables such as Allen Ginsberg, Joni Mitchell and William Burroughs studied and Trungpa advocated tantric sex.

snip

October 5, 2014

Just binge- watched Transparent...WOW!!!

Now I am pissed because there are no more new ones

October 4, 2014

Dallas is fretting over "what happened that night at the er".

Anyone who has ever been to an er at night pretty much knows what happened.

Our youngest son was a sports guy, and we have spent lots of time in ers waiting for an injury to be attended to.

Once, there was a kid next to us who had cried for so long that no sound came out anymore. He and his frazzled Mom took turns tending to the ugly gash and bloody rag on his head, and the blood that dripped (more like streamed) down his arm and off his elbow. She patiently moved their stuff as the "mop guy" mopped up the bloody floor at least 3 times. This little guy was about 7 or 8 years old.

They were there when we arrived at midnight. Our son woke up with palpitations so fierce that I could see his heart beating. He was a strong 15 year old, but it scared the life out of me. He was having trouble breathing too.

There was an elderly lady who was wincing every few minutes as she sat slumped in a chair along the opposite wall..

In total, there were about 50 people waiting to be seen

There were two nurses visible to us.

The little boy was seen a few minutes before we were.

We waited 4 hours to be seen, and they ended up admitting our son and a cardiologist fitted him with a holter monitor in the morning

Emergency rooms are chaotic, and a patient..a foreign patient with rather vague symptoms can easily fall through the cracks.

October 4, 2014

Because most Americans are so removed from sickness & death

we (as a society) do not know what happens in extremis.

When a person dies, their muscles let down, and their bodily fluids exit the body..feces, urine, etc.

Before their death, when they are unable to control their muscles, they will need to be cleaned up.

This is why medical people and family members are more likely to get infected, and why casual contact is less of a problem.

In the extremely poor areas of Africa where this is now an epidemic, there are few (if any) sewage treatment facilities, and raw sewage is in the streets.. dirt streets..in puddles. People are barefoot or wear rubber flip flops. When they walk through this slop, they are contaminated. They track it into their homes, and then children and family members are exposed.

Living rough, involves minor injuries that provide pathways into their bodies.

In everyday life in the US, people do not routinely come into contact with other people's "fluids".. When was the last time a coworker/friend/acquaintance shit on your floor or threw up on you?

There IS the "sex thing", but someone who is violently ill, is also less than likely to be an ideal sex partner. And anyone with active ebola is not going to be hanging out at bars, .looking to pick someone up.

As a Mom, I can tell you that I have been up-close & personal with some pretty vile "bodily fluid experiences" with our kids, but rarely, if ever with anyone else's kids.

Ebola is a personal experience between family members, and then in final desperation, with medical professionals. What is different this time, is that it has now moved beyond the village, and outsiders are exposed because of the total lack of sanitation.

No one wants to see their loved ones die, so they WILL do whatever they think is necessary in that desperate time, even if it is a useless effort, and even if they spread the disease because they do not understand how this spreads.

The fact that it has a 21 day incubation period is another problem because people may think they have escaped it, but have not, and by the time they are desperately ill, they have spread it to others.

We can try to abate the epidemics as they arise, but a better way would be to step up the sanitation and living conditions in areas that are prone to this disease.

Another helpful thing would be to make sure that people did not have to eat bush-meat.. http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/how-the-ebola-virus-got-its-name-and-how-we-caught-it-from-animals-9770193.html

October 3, 2014

When Mom ran the Secret Service

First of all, I DID see her testimony and it pretty much left me thinking "why on earth was she put in that position anyway?".

and then I started remembering all the "stuff" that has gone on (and probably still does) within the agency.

It is still considered to be a macho...male dominion. Sure, they do have women agents and employees, but the aura of the organization is male....bad-boy frat guy male.

The story about "wheels-up-rings-off" flights to exotic lands, where they routinely (some of them) frequented brothels, got drunk and routinely misbehaved, brought it into focus for me.

There is a cadre of agents who are probably pretty senior by now, who like to party, and many of them probably do not even like the Obamas all that much. (see papers given to Romney campaign story). They do their jobs minimally, and keep their fingers crossed that nothing too bad ever happens. They bide their time until their retirement perks kick in, and from time to time get to guard a president they like.

This group probably saw red when "Mom" was put in charge in March of 2013, and may have set out to discredit her and eliminate her.

As director, she had the responsibility to change behaviors that the ones committing them did not want changed.

She was probably never present at any of the incidents that have recently come to light, and may have only had reports about them. Anyone who has ever written an incident report knows how to write them in a manner that either downplays or amplifies a situation. The "whistleblowers" seemed very eager to see that Jason Chaffetz got the information they should have been sending to their boss..."MOM".. I don;t think they did it that way because they thought she could not handle the job.. I think they did it to prove that she was incapable of doing the job. They probably liked things the way they were..loose & free...and secret..(until a hooker blabs).

It's not surprising to me that she is now gone, and that the interim replacement is a man who was "one of the guys"..a former footballer, a guy who was in charge on the night the Salahis showed up for dinner.

my $.02

September 27, 2014

Welcome to the world, Charlotte Clinton Mezvinsky

http://abcnews.go.com/US/chelsea-clinton-birth-baby-girl-charlotte-clinton-mezvinsky/story?id=25723634

September 24, 2014

WGN's new morning news promo

Here's a fun little video..



http://wgntv.com/2014/09/22/new-wgn-morning-news-nobody-fking-likes-you-promo/#ooid=d3ZTdtcDqk0d59NKJHqoWlySstBSYKDj


New WGN Morning News ‘promo:’ Nobody f#@king likes you
Posted 8:15 AM, September 22, 2014, by Larry Potash,

September 20, 2014

'Hi, do you have water?'

http://www.latimes.com/local/great-reads/la-me-c1-east-porterville-20140918-story.html#page=2


'Hi, do you have water?' In a Central Calif. town, answer is often no.
By Diana Marcum

Column OneWater SupplyCalifornia Drought

The grandmother sat outside in her Sunday best next to a house with peeling paint, her canned iced tea resting on top of a washing machine that didn't work. She'd been without running water for four months.

Up an easy-to-miss dirt road, a 70-year-old woman moved 5-gallon jugs of water into her single-wide trailer. It was hard because she was weak from chemotherapy. Her water had stopped coming out of the tap three months ago. At the elementary school, a kitchen worker talked about all the children who were coming to school dirty.

This scattered Tulare County community may be the hardest-hit place in California's punishing drought. Of its 7,300 people, almost 1,000 have no running water. But few knew that until Donna Johnson, 72, started counting. Donna Johnson, 72, took it upon herself to collect donations of bottled water for area residents who no longer have running water.


Donna Johnson lugs bottled water for some of the hundreds around East Porterville whose wells have gone dry. She realized others might need help after her own well went dry in June. During a week when the temperature reached 106, Johnson drove her purple PT Cruiser past "Beware of dog" signs and up side roads that looked long-deserted. She found mobile homes hidden behind other buildings. She said to her newfound neighbors, "Hi. Do you have water?"

Again and again, the answer was no.

::

snip

September 16, 2014

Stats

An average 4 year old weighs about 40 pounds and is about 40 inches tall.

Adrian Peterson's stats: 6' 1", 217 lbs

Just because the child is "yours", does not mean you can abuse-at-will.

Size matters..

I know at 29, he is not a fully mature person, having been coddled and bravo-ed for most of his life, but he is a danger to his children because he obviously cannot control his temper.

4 year olds can be annoying, and tempestuous beings, but those things are no reason to hit them.

I was abused as a child, and was determined to break the cycle.. There were times I might have really wanted to hit them, but I also remembered how I felt as a kid..