Dan Rosenbaum / Center Ring Media

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Chasing Deuces

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Did you know the Federal Reserve issues a $2 bill? Of course you did. (Steve Wozniak sure does.) That puts you one up on the guy I just talked to at local WaMu branch.
I need to buy a bunch of dueces; never mind why. First stop was a Citibank branch, where I was told they didn’t have any. But if I wanted to order some, I’d need to get a “brick” of them, costing $2000. Umm, no.
So I went across the street to WaMu. I told the guy that I wanted to buy some $2 bills. He told me they only sold them in rolls of 25. No no no. Two. Dollar. Bills. Not a roll of dollar coins (although that would be interesting on another day). Bills. Currency. Two Dollars.

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Is a fresh start in the White House such a good idea?

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OK, now that I’ve got your attention…

At 12:01pm on January 20, the whitehouse.gov Web site got turned over to the Obama administration. The old site was swept away into the loving care of the National Archives, along with the rest of the Bush/Cheney documents — with the possible exception of the torture docs that I suspect VP Cheney threw his back out moving a few days earlier.

After every inauguration, White House operations start afresh. This is why the W-less keyboard meme from 2000 was so powerful; it was, in fact, possible — even if it isn’t true. But all files, all computers, all phone programming — all of it — gets zero-ed out at noon on January 20th. That may be one reason that the White House has been having such terrible trouble with e-mail this week.

But even though an inauguration is a transfer of power, it isn’t The Great American Reboot. Government continues. People continue to need services. It’s not like a new company taking over vacant office space. It’s more like getting a new CEO. The new boss may eventually want his own equipment in there — and some it may be open source — but it’s wasteful and bad IT practice to crash an upgrade on your way in the door.

There goes Plan B…

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So now comes word that Starbucks will close 200 more U.S. stores (in addition to the 600 already slated), putting another 6,700 people out of work. I guess all my friends in publishing will now need a new “last-resort” job option.

One wonders if the severance benefits include a high-value Starbucks card and free Wi-Fi. And it this is related to yesterday’s counter-intuitive decision to stop brewing decaf in the afternoons….

The Real Macworld Keynote

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So the “leaked” keynote was wrong on pretty much every count. What we got was a vastly improved Apple TV, interesting flexible video rental options, a neat network attached storage device, and the sexiest damned laptop I’ve ever heard about.
The MacBook Air will get a lot of ink for being so thin and so light, but the revolutionary thing about it is that it’s the first notebook from a big manufacturer that’s got just two moving parts: the keyboard and the hinge. Instead of a hard drive, the top-line MBA has 64GB of solid-state memory. It can’t crash, it can’t get jarred in a crash, it can’t wear out and die (well, it can, but it’s way more rugged than a spinning disk).
No one will use the thing as a desktop replacement, but if you’ve got the $3000 for a travel machine (hey — memory’s not that cheap), this one looks like a real sweetie. It ships in about two to three weeks, and expect a lot of people to line up and try the thing at the Apple Store.

Blown up in Iraq

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From the Middle Eastern Times:

I was blown up last Tuesday. Luckily I can write about it. Many others who’ve shared the experience can’t. They’re dead, or their bodies and brains are so messed up by shrapnel or concussion they can’t remember the details.

It takes a special kind of person to be a war correspondent. I know three: Jon Landay of McClatchy, Marie Colvin of The Times of London, and Robert W. Worth of the NYTimes. I’m glad I know them — and proud to have worked with the first two early in my career — but I’m even gladder I’m not one of them.
But if you’re going to cover the war in Iraq, and Lord knows we need good coverage, this is a hell of a way to do it.

Jobs Keynote Leaked?

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Steve Jobs’s keynote at Macworld is a lot like the president’s State of the Union, only with better security. That’s why it’s so remarkable that there’s been a possible leak on Wikipedia.
What makes it almost credible is the a) degree of detail and b) the modesty and probability of the products presented. No flying cars; just stuff like a thinner aluminum Macbook and a preview of the iPhone SDK.
Is it genuine? We won’t know until noon ET tomorrow (Tuesday). In the meantime, what fun to speculate!
Update: Computerworld debunks this and other show rumors. Maybe….

Gawking OKed by Top NY Court

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In a development sure to annoy natives citywide, New York State’s highest court says it’s OK for pedestrians to stand obliviously in the middle of busy intersections and force people to walk around them.
From the NYTimes:

[Judge Carmen Beatrice Ciparek] later added: “Something more than a mere inconvenience of
pedestrians is required to support the charge. Otherwise, any person
who happens to stop on a sidewalk — whether to greet another, to seek
directions or simply to regain one’s bearings — would be subject to
prosecution under this statute.”

And the problem with that is…..?

Tesla Wins! Tesla Wins!

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Infrastructurum Longa, Vita Brevis.
Forgive the piggish Latin. The geekier among you know that although Thomas Edison gets all the credit for the light bulb and municipal power and all that — Consolidated Edison, anyone? — he actually came out the loser on a big standards war: AC vs DC. Edison was a big proponent of direct current. It was Nicola Tesla (and his backer George Westinghouse) who invented alternating current, which allowed electricity to be delivered over distances unimaginable by DC fans.
But by the time AC’s superiority was demonstrated — in spite of some nasty competitive shenanigans by Edison — there was a fair amount of DC infrastructure in place. For about 100 years in New York. a small but stubborn set of clients demanded and got DC from Con Ed. (It was true in Boston, too; less than 15 years ago, I worked in a large-ish downtown building whose elevators ran on DC.)
Finally, ConEd pulled the plug on DC, closing the last direct current generator in the city. If a building wants DC, they’ll have to put a rectifier on site. From the NYTimes:

The direct current conversion in Lower Manhattan started in 1928, and an engineer then predicted that it would take 45 years, according to Mr. Cunningham. “An optimistic prediction since we still have it now,” he said.
The man who is cutting the link today at 10 East 40th Street is Fred Simms, a 52-year veteran of the company. Why him?
“He’s our closest link to Thomas Edison,” joked Bob McGee, a Con Ed spokesman.

The moral: make your technology infrastructure choices carefully. It may take a while to undo them.

Maybe they can use one of the leftover crocodiles from the NYC sewers…

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Over in the swamps of Jersey, they renamed what was once the Brendan Byrne Arena and was then the Continental Airlines Arena after Izod, the popular leisureware of the 70s and 80s. (The news angle is that someone’s suggesting that the building will be more valuable, not less, when there are no pesky tenants left.
But look at the photo. All the place needs now is one of those little crocodiles that adorned the Izod shirts, and the look will be perfect. (I’d even forgo the pink or green color. So not Jersey.)
And yes, I know that the croc was because of the long-standing and now-ended licensing deal with Henri Lacoste, the tennis player. Gimme a break.

How’d you like to be the guy in the next cube?

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From the AP, via WCBS Radio:

FORT WORTH, TX (AP) — A 47-year-old insurance company worker accidentally fired his gun in his office cubicle, shooting himself in both legs, police said.
The man, who hasn’t been identified, had put his .45-caliber gun into his jacket pocket and then draped the jacket over the back of his chair Tuesday morning, said Brett McGuire, Lake Worth police chief. The gun discharged as the man settled into his chair.