The New York Times published this graph today:

At first, when I saw this headline, I thought someone was quoting from The Onion.

But then I realized that it wasn’t:

September 11 — what year? 30 percent of Americans don’t know – Yahoo! News
Some 30 percent of Americans cannot say in what year the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against New York’s World Trade Center and the
Pentagon in Washington took place, according to a poll published in the Washington Post newspaper.
While the country is preparing to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the attacks that claimed nearly 3,000 lives and shocked the world, 95 percent of Americans questioned in the poll were able to remember the month and the day of the attacks, according to Wednesday’s edition of the newspaper.

But when asked what year, 30 percent could not give a correct answer.

Of that group, six percent gave an earlier year, eight percent gave a later year, and 16 percent admitted they had no idea whatsoever.

This memory black hole is essentially the problem of the older crowd: 48 percent of those who did not know were between the ages of 55 and 64, and 47 percent were older than 65, according to the poll.

The Post telephone survey was carried out July 21-24 among 1,002 randomly selected adults. The margin of error is plus or minus three percentage points.

Well, on the upside, I guess it’s good that 95% were able to remember what day and year it was.

So Money magazine published the TOp 100 places to live…

MONEY Magazine: Best places to live 2006: Top 100 1-25

1 Fort Collins, CO 128,000
2 Naperville, IL 141,600
3 Sugar Land, TX 75,800
4 Columbia/Ellicott City, MD 159,200
5 Cary, NC 106,400
6 Overland Park, KS 164,800
7 Scottsdale, AZ 226,000
8 Boise, ID 193,200
9 Fairfield, CT 57,800
10 Eden Prairie, MN 60,600

I haven’t been to any of these places (well, I think I’ve driven through Fairfield.) The closest would be Bellevue, WA coming in at 21. Congrats to all my blue/orange badge friends!

But wait… SF/SJ didn’t make a showing at all?

MONEY Magazine: Best places to live 2006: 10 Best Big Cities

Rank City Population
1 Colorado Springs, CO 369,800
2 Austin, TX 690,300
3 Mesa, AZ 442,800
4 Raleigh, NC 341,500
5 San Diego, CA 1,255,500
6 Virginia Beach, VA 438,400
7 Omaha, NE 414,500
8 Columbus, OH 730,700
9 Wichita, KS 354,900
10 New York, NY 8,143,200

Ack! SF/SJ didn’t make a showing here either? Youch!

Wait… I know where I can find it:

MONEY Magazine: Best places to live 2006: Top 25 Pricey homes

1 Newport Beach, CA $1,362,500
2 Greenwich, CT $1,129,000
3 Santa Barbara, CA $979,500
4 Palo Alto, CA $929,000
5 Cupertino, CA $880,000
6 Goleta, CA $870,000
7 San Clemente, CA $848,500
8 Bethesda, MD $790,000
9 Pleasanton, CA $785,000
10 Santa Monica, CA $784,000
11 Redondo Beach, CA $777,500
12 Redwood City, CA $767,500
13 San Francisco, CA $755,000
14 Yorba Linda, CA $750,000
15 San Rafael, CA $745,000

Heh!

I saw this article today…

Oil company execs: Fuel relatively cheap – Yahoo! News

Americans paying $3 per gallon at the pump have it relatively cheap when compared with prices globally, say oil and gas company executives who defend their record profits as essential to maintaining supplies.

In parts of Europe and elsewhere in the West, gasoline prices are more like $5 per gallon to $7 per gallon, said the chairman of ConocoPhillips Co., James J. Mulva.

Now, no one likes paying more for fuel. I remember back in 2004 I thought expensive was having to fill up a MB G500 for a friend at $2.60 a gallon in Palo Alto. But if you think about it, at $3.xx a gallon, it’s still cheaper than Starbucks – and Starbucks is just cocoa bean flavored water! Something that’s pretty renewable, whereas petroleum is from dead dinosaurs. And let’s just say that dinosaurs aren’t dying any faster these days.

Here’s another key comment:

“On a global basis, we’re competing for resources,”

It’s a new era indeed.

Good grief:

GetDshirts.com Dustin Diamond House Foreclosure – Mortgage Loan

I’m Dustin Diamond and you probably remember me from the hit TV show Saved By The Bell. After the show ended I decided to leave Sunny Cailfornia for the midwest. My shitty credit meant that getting a loan for a house would be tough. I began looking and finally purchsed one on a land contract. I was thrilled! Now I call Wisconsin my home.

During the past years the land around me has developed for the better and my property value went way up. Now that the house is worth a lot more they want it back. Knowing my credit is bad, getting a straight mortgage would take some time. I received a letter stating that I had 30 days to pay $250,000.00 or get out. I was not thrilled.

Every once in a while, I see an article that makes me wonder what’s going on.

Here’s an example:

Anti-Terror Funding Cut In D.C. and New York

The Department of Homeland Security yesterday slashed anti-terrorism money for Washington and New York, part of an immediately controversial decision to reduce grant funds for major urban areas in the Northeast while providing more to mid-size cities from Jacksonville to Sacramento.

The announcement that the two cities targeted on Sept. 11, 2001, would suffer 40 percent reductions in urban security funds prompted outrage from lawmakers and local officials in both areas, who questioned the wisdom of cutting funds so deeply for cities widely recognized as prime terrorist targets.

[snip]

New York’s grant plummeted from about $207 million to $124 million. A DHS risk scorecard for the city asserted that the home of the Empire State Building and the Brooklyn Bridge has “zero” national monuments or icons.

[snip]

Undersecretary for Preparedness George Foresman told reporters that although the program was formed with anti-terrorism objectives in mind, the money is meant to improve readiness for “an act of terrorism or an act of Mother Nature.”

Yet one of the big losers was hurricane-ravaged New Orleans, whose grant award dropped from $9.3 million to $4.6 million.

Maybe I just don’t have enough information or something. I should probably stick to thinking about software.

I dropped by the
Market Place 2006
fair today, hosted at the Computer
History Museum by the Chamber of
Commerce Mountain View. Though I’ve worked in Mountain View for almost 6
years, and lived there for over 5, I’m always finding new businesses – so I
thought I’d drop by to see what was going on. Plus, it was within walking
distance of my office.

There, Minnie Ingersoll of Google was giving a talk about their Wifi
deployment in Mountain View. Neato!

Being a geek, and a network engineer in a past life, here are some of the notes I took:

• They are going to be offering 1 megabit access.
• Focus on outdoor areas (parks, businesses, libraries)
  versus homes.
• Will be promoting CPE’s (Customer Premise Equipment) so that you have
  better reception indoors.
• They have 350 Tropos units around Mountain View. (One of which is
  outside my office window!)
• They use a mesh network – the Tropos units talk to each other, so the
  only wiring they had to do was power.
• 1 in 7 (50) of the sites connect back to an Alvarion gateway.
• There are 3 of these Alvarion gateways: 1 at Googleplex, 1 at 444 Castro
  St in Downtown (it’s one of the tallest buildings around), and 1 at St.
  Greg’s High School’s Football Field lights.
• Rolling release: June-Small, July-Large, August-Really large.
• People who connect will immediate see a login page. They will need to
  login with their Google Account to use the wifi.
• After logging in, people will then see a portal page, with a map, a
  search box, and a few "modules" on the sides for things like weather, mail,
  and etc.
• A FAQ can be found here:
  
  http://wifi.google.com/city/mv/faq.html 

Here’s a picture of a tower that I took:

I also got some free chicken sausage samples from the Tied House – so much for the calories spent during the walk. In any case, I’m curious to see how this will work out when this service goes live and I’m in
Downtown! I’m pretty sure that MetroFi (the free wifi in Sunnyvale) doesn’t require a login. But they do something else… (my apartment only gets reception on certain days during certain weather.)

I saw this on TechCrunch tonight:

Language Line? Personal Interpreter” href=”http://share.skype.com/directory/%3Cb%3Elanguage_line%c2%ae_personal_interpreter%3C%10b%3E/view/”>Share Skype – Language Line? Personal Interpreter

Do You Need An Interpreter Now?

Introducing…Language Line? “Personal Interpreter” Service.

Be on the phone with an interpreter within seconds. Now all Skype subscribers can have immediate access to live, high-quality professional interpreters, who speak over 150 languages.

Whether for business or personal use, our “Personal Interpreter” pay-as-you-go service allows quick and easy access highly skilled & certified interpreters in more than 150 languages directly from your Skype phone, for only $2.99 USD per minute. Service is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

Wow that’s pretty remarkable! The list of support languages is pretty wild too!

1. Spanish
2. Mandarin
3. Russian
4. Vietnamese
5. Korean
6. Cantonese
7. Portuguese
8. Polish
9. French
10. Japanese
11. Arabic
12. Somali
13. Farsi
14. Haitian Creole
15. Italian
16. Hmong
17. German
18. Armenian
19. Tagalog
20. Hindi
21. Khmer
22. Bosnian
23. Punjabi
24. Bengali
25. Turkish
26. Amharic
27. Laotian
28. Albanian
29. Thai
30. Urdu

Whoa! They even have someone who speaks Hmong. There aren’t that many hmong speaking people.