Coincidence? I think not

At his pow-wow with the major bankers, President Obama reportedly said "excess is out of fashion". Unlike most incoming Presidents, Obama has not renovated the White House and is reusing the furniture from the previous occupant. There are even stains on the carpet, as he pointed out.

Which brings us to the second piece of news, that ShamWow pitchman Vince Shlomi was arrested for punching a prostitute.

Coincidence? I think not. Shlomi may be peddling super-absorbent cloths these days, but I will bet that there isn't anything he doesn't know about removing stains from carpets. Time to send the miscreant up to Washington D.C. for a spot of community service at the White House.

YouTube - The New mac Mini! The Mactini

Brother toner cartridge low toner override - fixyourownprinter.com

So the Brother color printer started pleading for a new set of colour toner carts ($270). All three carts ran out at the same time, hmm. Time for a Google, which unearthed the following on a blog.

Re: Brother toner cartridge low toner override by Brett In SoCal (6/29/08 4:57 PM) reply + / -
Brother MFC 9440CN Toner Life End Message... The Final Solution!!!

1. With power on, open the toner access main door (You will get a "door open" message in the LCD.)
2. Hit the "Clear/Back" button and... ta-dah!!! you go right to the Toner Reset Menu' (cue Vienna Boy's choir sounds here).
3. Using the up ^ Down > "Search" arrow buttons, you can then scroll through reset options for each of the printer's [4] toner cartridges!
Code: B. = black; C. = cyan; M. = magenta and Y. = yellow
4. For each for these cartridges is the option to reset for low yield = S (small?) or High Yield = H
5. Using the number keypad, select option #1 (to reset each to the size you have installed.
6. Hit the "Clear/Back" button to get out of the menu, close door ad the problem is FINALLY solved.

Just tried it, works great!

Not a surprise...

So Apple iPhone controls over 66% of all mobile web use.

This does not surprise me at all as the difference between iPhone and other mobile web browsers is that iPhone works and they do not.

Palm ships the treo with an attrocious browser called blaser that seems to have been designed to use as much data service as possible. On the Palm you ask to download a page, wait two minutes, click a link, wait another two minutes, go back to your first page to go to the next link, wait two minutes for it to reload and so on.

It really does not take a great browser to eat into Apple's share. All it really takes is a browser that is not shitty.

And don't get me started on the Wap phone lunacy that had idiots thinking people would queue up to surf the web on a device with a display the size of a postage stamp and a browser that costs $1 to download the front page of CNN.

The mobile Web is about two things, one is access to relevant information, the other is the ability to perform relevant transactions. The key here being relevant. I might buy a book from Amazon on the iPhone, I am not going to do extensive comparison shopping. I might look up flight times, delays and so on, I am less likely to do online banking unless it is critical to do it right then and there.

The mobile web is not a replacement for the armchair web which is why ideas like walled gardens and such make no sense at all.

2012 the re-run

The Bush administration frequently appeared as an attempt to repeat every tragedy of US history as farce: 1876, Vietnam, McCarthyism and most recently the Great Depression. So its no surprise that the 2012 GOP Presidential field is shaping up to be a re-run of previous farces.

Palin, currently the front-runner is the Dan Quayle of the pack. Lets see whether she makes it to the starting gate. Quayle dropped out of the 1996 race before he was fully in it.

Last week it appeared that Bobby Jindal might well be the Bill Clinton of the 2012 race, a different type of Republican, at least insofar as being apparently competent and not visibly corrupt. Like Biden in 1988, Jindal threw away his entire campaign in a single speech. Given the opportunity to address the nation in the response to Obama's address, Jindal pitched the core Republican base and gave a Reaganesque personal account that turns out to be a total fiction.

If Jindal runs his opponents will run endless attack ads of the part of the speech where Jindal is prevaricating. If Jindal does not run it will likely be because there has been a major eruption of a volcano that makes the attack on volcano monitoring look Katrinaesque GOP myopia. If Jindal is nominated, Obama will spend the week of the Republican convention taking a quiet family holiday in his birth state of Hawaii, an island created by a highly photogenic, continuously erupting volcano.

It is hard to see how the 2012 campaigns of Romney or Huckabee can turn out any better than their efforts in 2008, they can certainly do worse. Huckabee cannot beat Sarah in the primaries if she runs. If Palin does not run it will prove that an evangelical nut-jb can't win.

Romney's principal strength in 2008 was the willingness of the LDS church to organize and fund raise for him. Always looking for mainstream respectability, the LDS church saw having a Mormon at the top of a major party Presidential ticket as a way to achieve legitimacy. From that perspective, LDS political activities were a clear failure in 2008, drawing attention to the weirder aspects of the church and in particular the racist and anti-Semitic aspects of its control-freak philosophy. After its controversial involvement in California's Prop-8, the church knows that its political involvement will be closely scrutinized. Romney will still take the LDS vote in 2012, but may well find that the church is less interested in playing a political role and fails to deliver the money and the organization that made Romney viable.