I am migrating to a Wordpress installation, here, at the same domain but at the root, so if you have this page bookmarked, just remove the /weblog. Or just click...
[daleyblog.com][...]
I am migrating to a Wordpress installation, here, at the same domain but at the root, so if you have this page bookmarked, just remove the /weblog. Or just click...
[daleyblog.com][...]
I think it's time to say goodbye to Moveable Type. First the comments broke after I was attacked by comment spammers. An upgrade broke my ability to go in and edit templates and I was getting tired of the interface and lack of customization. So I tried Wordpress. I [...]
An LA Times article looks back at the East Coast / West Coast rap wars that claimed the lives of Tupak Shakur and Biggie Smalls, among others. The evidence implicates Sean P-Diddy Combs' crew.
[...]It turns out now that support for Hillary Clinton is a vast right-wing conspiracy. I'm unconvinced.
[...]I think it's time to say goodbye to Moveable Type. First the comments broke after I was attacked by comment spammers. An upgrade broke my ability to go in and edit templates and I was getting tired of the interface and lack of customization. So I tried Wordpress. I [...]
First, there's the retro 90's visual explosion style of the page. Then, there's the 'then and now' photos of criminals, the bald guy news, the daily sentencing, the cops and robbers report, the radio promotions and the Outrage of the Month.
And here's our guy's page. Talk about [...]
The Speaker has dropped all pretense of having an open mind on casino gambling. Now we'll see how quickly all those undecideds become no's.
[...]I'm on the other side of the casino issue from Sal DiMasi but this Globe story on the speaker and the gambling moguls is a little thin if you ask me. He played golf with an old friend with an interest in a casino and discussed the issue. In [...]
First woodpeckers, now ice fishing. If the Globe keeps it up you'll be able to cancel your subscription to Field and Stream.
Was that a duck blind I saw in the marsh on Morrissey Boulevard?
[...]Did you know that nearly all McDonalds restaurants have wi-fi? AT&T has set up pay hotspots in most of the Golden Arches. But when is the last time you saw anyone surfing the web while wolfing a burger? You'll tend to see more laptops in Starbucks (which is [...]
I've gotten into the habit of reading Robert Cringely's weekly column when it's posted each Friday. It is, in my opinion, just about the best and most informed technology writing out there. Here's his take on the Microsoft / Yahoo! deal, which, by the way, appears to be [...]
As Clinton re-calibrates her campaign, I will, for obvious reasons, have to re-calibrate my prediction of a Romney vs Clinton general election. Mitt's out, that part is easy, but that's not the only upset in sight.
The Democratic race seems to be playing out like the Superbowl: slim margin throughout [...]
Hold that Diet Coke. Studies suggests that artificial sweeteners will cause you to put on more pounds than sugar will.
[...]The Webkit engine could be the fastest web browser ever. Give it a shot.
[...]In yesterday's column, Joan Vennochi called out journalists for unbalanced levels of scrutiny in covering the Clinton / Obama contest. She makes a point.
[...]I'm happy to see that, with the national spotlight having moved on, things have gone back to normal in New Hampshire.
[...]Most police departments only have to worry about crime. In LA, the scope of police work is a little more broadly defined.
Early Thursday morning, the plan was executed with about two dozen police officers, a helicopter and a special team that took [Britney] Spears out through a gate in [...]
I'm not sure why anyone would go to church to watch a football game but maybe that's just me. Apparently the practice is widespread and -- who would have thought? -- illegal.
[...]Go to school on your commute with these academic podcasts.
[...]Quiznos sponsored a video contest and the results weren't pretty for Subway. Now they're going to court and there's more than who has the meatiest sub at stake.
[...]David Brooks writes about Ted Kennedy's endorsement of Obama in light of Bill Clinton's dismissal of the candidate as inexperienced.
...“There was another time,” Kennedy said, “when another young candidate was running for president and challenging America to cross a New Frontier.” But, he continued, another former Democratic president, Harry [...]
I don't care how many ex-presidents are peripherally involved, it's a neighbor dispute over a driveway in a town in another state. How this got on the front page of the Globe or how it could be relevant to that 39 year old single mother from East Boston [...]
I'm all for wi-fi on the commuter rail. And the reason that the T is setting it up is to increase our productivity. Hmmm. My first thought was that riders would be gouged for the service but the Globe is reporting that it will be free.
[...]Apparently Romney is, as I imagined, a PC guy. From a Tech Crunch interview:
[Interviewer]: I guess that brings us to the most important question I have to ask you, which is…Governor Romney, Mac or PC?
[Romney]: I have a PC. My sons have a Mac and swear by it, [...]
Checking in with the latest polls for Democrats and Republicans. Scroll down to the graphs, especially on the Republican page, to look at the history of the standings. Wild.
[...]It's the time of year to get away to somewhere warmer. So do you need a passport to visit Bermuda, Mexico or the Caribbean? It depends.
If you fly, you need a passport. If you travel by land or sea, you don't. But as of Jan. 31, U.S. adults are expected [...]
Is the Romney campaign using Apple computers? According to the Herald, a boxed iMac was taken in a campaign headquarters break-in. I would have pegged him as a Windows XP type of guy.
[...]Out of control New York'ers taking cheap shots at the competition. Others threatening physical violence. And then there are the football fans.
[...]A 600 point day! Things look better today which is a little scary considering how yesterday played out against expectations.
[...]For those times when you know there's a free piece of software available but can't remember the name or where it can be downloaded, there's Downloadpedia. Definitely worth a bookmark. And here are some options to help manage those downloads.
And then there's the 'rhymes with Wickipedia' site, [...]
Walt Mossberg has posted his review of the MacBook Air.
[...]If the Pats win the Superbowl, will a certain ex-governor start to play up his Massachusetts links just in time for Super Tuesday?
Romney campaign spokeswoman Sarah Pompei said yesterday that the candidate will be campaigning across the 22 states holding primaries and caucuses on Feb. 5 and has not [...]
More than 20 days in, and the new year workout plan is still just a plan? Here, via WWD, are some geek tools for getting into shape. Or not.
[...]Microsoft is getting into virtualization. Apparently VMware and Juniper are making money and Microsoft wants to steal that market from them. The same goes for advertising and Google. Microsoft says it will become an advertising company, jealous of all that money Google is making.
It would seem to [...]
Stocks are expected to drop today (apparently we've gone from "irrational exuberance" to "indiscriminate panic") and after last night's debate, John Edwards' stock looks like it, too, is in freefall. In coverage of the dust-up between Clinton and Obama, he got this mention:
The third candidate on the [...]
Laptop battery life has improved over the years but you still won't make it across the Atlantic. This might be changing. 40 hours of battery life would get you from Boston to Beijing and back.
[...]More and more people do some work at home and this time of year the question of deductions for home office equipment comes up. Here's a thumbnail version of how it works.
[...]One more campaign post: In Nevada, Obama is being portrayed as a moral opponent of gambling. Sounds like a perfect opportunity to put Deval Patrick out front.
[...]There's an obvious upside to Bill campaigning for Hillary but the downside, increasingly, is his temper.
[...]The Rush Limbaugh wing of the Republican party, if it even exists anymore, will apparently go unenthusiastically for Romney rather than for Huckabee or McCain according to these statements.
[...]We have the answers: In Michigan it was Romney by almost 10 points over McCain. It's not over for McCain with South Carolina coming up. And Romney isn't out of the woods yet either. How does this sound for a prediction, a Romney / Huckabee ticket on the Republican [...]
It's a big day in Michigan for the Republicans. A loss for Romney could doom his candidacy and a poor showing by McCain could hurt his momentum and raise questions about his electability.
It's also a big day in San Francisco where Apple chief Steve Jobs will make his [...]
One of the last hurdles facing the Cape Cod wind farm has been passed. Good. It could be operating by 2011. Opponents are still likely to pull a trick or two out of their bag but momentum is clearly on the side of the project now.
[...]I suppose I should thank all those people who worked from home yesterday. Despite the heavy snow, it was a faster commute than usual. Let's see how today stacks up.
[...]Here's another sighting of one of my photos, this time on a Chinese language blog. Roughly translated, it's a description of the occupation of shoemaker in Singapore who apparently can make about 300 a month.
[...]Better the Colts than the Chargers, I suppose, although I'm afraid that I'm setting myself up for a huge case of 'be careful what you wish for'. Laurel Sweet searches the web for Patriots haters and finds a few. In this case it's a good thing that no links [...]
Clinton as the comeback kid? So much for the polls. And yesterday makes two losses for Romney who's strategy was to win the first two. But it's still early. Neither party has a clear frontrunner, which will make things exciting but will strain the candidates. Oh well.
Jay Cost [...]
It's only ten minutes since the polls closed and we're talking less than 1000 votes, but still, Clinton is leading. After listening to an afternoon of 'forgone conclusion' commentary about an Obama win, that is a surprise.
I hit the refresh button and the 1000 votes became 600, so the [...]
It looks like the last new site design at the Herald was transitional. There's an even newer, simpler layout up today. I was just warming up to the old new Herald site but I do like the new one. Or I like the way it looks. Functionally everything is [...]
Waiting on hold to resolve a credit card problem can be a pretty aggravating waste of time. A reader at Consumerist has a solution: Use the 'outside the US' number and call collect.
When the credit card thinks that they are paying international collect call charges, they do NOT put [...]
If your New Years resolution was to be more organized and you use Microsoft Outlook, here are a few tips to get started.
[...]PC World uses a magic 8-ball to predict the tech trends for 2008.
[...]Of 43 presidents, only Kennedy and Harding moved directly from the Senate to the White House. Of the 54 presidential elections, only 15 were won by current or former senators. Voters in presidential elections historically prefer candidates with executive experience, usually governors.
So where does that leave us with the current [...]
Both Alex Beam and Hiawatha Bray weigh-in on next year's conversion from analogue to digital TV. It's not too soon.
[...]Pollsters don't generally call cellphone-only voters. Are they getting the full picture? As more young people eschew landline phones for mobiles, there is a concern that the polls are skewing towards older, more traditional voters. (Strangely, to illustrate this point, the Globe highlights the cellphone-only demographic of a 35 [...]
Last year around this time we read about a heroic rescue from the subway tracks. Another year, another subway platform rescue -- this time to save an iPhone. A lot can change in a year.
[...]I took a few months off from everyday blogging and a strange thing happened. My stats went up. Dramatically.
Actually most of the hits arrived from searches for photos in the archives. And, my Google rating is pretty high (thanks Google!) so search engine hits in general [...]
Physics is in kind of a mess these days. Scientists do have a detailed mathematical knowledge of how things work but physically no one has a clue why things are the way they are. Quantum physics does a good job of describing things at the atomic level and [...]
I didn't read most of them but I did notice that The Globe seemed to have an article nearly every day in the Business section about Alpha Omega. I knew it was a jewelry store that went bankrupt around Christmas. But given the ink, there must be more to [...]
Actually, not many surprises in Iowa, at least relative to the polls in recent days. I thought Romney could have done better, and Clinton, but Iowa is Iowa. Guliani in single digits (3.5!) wasn't good for his campaign, though.
Best of all was this Herald front page. On [...]
Somewhere on my stats page I stumbled on a link to this news story on Pravda. Check out the photo bottom right. (Click on the image for a closer view.)
Apparently we've formed a business partnership, Pravda and I, in which they publish my photos to [...]
The Consumerist is asking you to confess your money sins. Do those stories sound sadly familiar?
[...]Mr. LeBovidge sounds like an able no-nonsense manager and maybe he can turn the Turnpike around. But why is he inheriting an agency that is broke? Where did all the money go? The Turnpike should have been making money, not losing it.
Maybe the best solution is no Turnpike Authority. [...]
Talking on the phone (texting, checking email, surfing the web, etc.) while driving is not only dangerous it's also slowing us all down. That's according to a new study:
Motorists yakking away, even with handsfree devices, crawl about 2 mph slower on commuter-clogged roads than people not on the phone, [...]
it's almost 9:30 in Iowa and it's Obama, Edwards and Clinton in that order but all within a few percentage points of one another. On the GOP side it's not so close with Huckabee more than ten points ahead of Romney who's ten points ahead of Thompson. McCain is [...]
I'm really waiting for New Hampshire to get the ball rolling, but my predictions for Iowa? Thanks to this Des Moines Register poll, I think I'd have to say Obama and Huckabee.
[...]He (the Governor) knows that they (legislative leaders) know that he knows that they have no intent of letting a gambling bill get passed, but they won't say that and will pretend to be studying the matter until we all forget about it. It's high intrigue.
So this is good. Patrick [...]
During his later years at the Globe it seemed to me that Paul Szep was loosing his edge, which was too bad since for most of my life he defined the idea of political cartoonist. So I was pleasantly surprised to see that in retirement he's producing some great work. [...]
The one good thing about hitting $100 a barrel, at least in comparison with the spike in oil prices in the late 70's, is that it happened gradually. But that won't be much consolation when the heating bill comes in. Right now I can hear the furnace banging [...]
More Turnpike follies. What is it about an authority that just can't keep themselves out of the negative limelight? If it's not a toll increase or a grab for money through tickets, it's an infrastructure issue.
Frank Morrissey, judge in the BMC and friend of the Kennedys, is in the obits this morning. He was 97. I'm sure he was a good guy and he certainly had influence in politics, locally and nationally. But as a judge? Well, let's just say it was interesting to [...]
According to the LA Times, William Shatner has been hawking Pricline for 10 years now. How did he get the job? Apparently it was down to him and Bill Cosby and he won because he was "futuristic".
After listening to this you might even say, spaced-out.
[...]There's a story in today's Globe about a new phenom: dog washes. Not so new, really. The Stooges were all over this concept way back in the day.
[...]The Edge question for 2008 is up and it is, What have you changed your mind about? This particular question tends to focus the contributors to respond within their areas of expertise (and there is a lot of that) rather then generally. I think that makes the excercise [...]
In the early 90's Microsoft was the fast moving upstart, eating a lumbering IBM's lunch. Nowadays, Microsoft looks like IBM did then and Apple like Microsoft. So does that mean that Apple will someday be a bloated old company churning out substandard products? My guess is no, but this list [...]
There were a few notable books this year. In fiction, some of the heavy hitters came out with new stuff.
Phillip Roth's Exit Ghost finished off his primary alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman. The book sent me back to Roth's introduction of Zuckerman in The Ghost Writer, written in 1979, for [...]
Adam uses Google's Street View to illustrate a post on last night's fire in South Boston. (I lived for about a year in the building at 309 Emerson, after it was a hotel and before it became condos. It was there that I survived the blizzard of 78. [...]
Ty Burr doesn't think we should remain silent when faced with fuzzy, dim images in movie theaters.
...The state of the art of non-union projection in this city and country is at a pitiful low, but it'll never change unless the audience - that's you - demands it to. How [...]
On Sunday mornings, Storrow Drive may be closed to traffic under a proposal being considered. It's a good idea. Every Sunday will be the Fourth of July.
And as today is the first day in the post-Big Dig era, the proposed Esplanade enhancement will, at least one day [...]
Please, keep the scratchers out of Dunkin Doughnuts. I, for one, don't want to have to wait in line to get my morning fix while some guy ahead of me scratches away his paycheck.
[...]I've been wandering around southern Spain for the past week with little or no internet access trying to keep up with the Red Sox. It didn't look good in the middle of the week and there were no updates until I got back last night prepared for the bad news. [...]
... or how the Clinton campaign came to love Matt Drudge.
[...]There's a movement to have motorists pay by the mile for travel on state roads. I guess the same pay-per-usage rational could be made for fire and police service. You only pay if you have a fire or if you're the victim of a crime. If you pay a [...]
Notable in today's Globe: The return of Jane Swift, Joan Vennochi gets mad and boomers spice things up.
[...]There's an interesting article on the music industry in today's London Times. People are still spending money on music but the record companies aren't necessarily getting that money. Many bands are staying away from labels and promoting and distributing music on their own. New economic models are developing.
A [...]
Will Imus return to WTKK? Or even WRKO? Poor Howie.
[...]I met Nicholas Negroponte briefly a few years ago at a book signing and he came across as an arrogant jerk. Maybe he was having a bad day, I don't know, but that experience colored my opinion of his One Laptop per Child project which I tended to see [...]
Plane crashes are down 65% in the last ten years. But there's always bad news to go along with the good, and in this case, it has to do with luggage.
[...]A consensus is developing on Vista and it isn't good. Granted, it can't be easy to write a new operating system for the installed business and home base that Microsoft has. But with the daily frustrations of using Microsoft software I was hoping that Vista would be a bold step [...]
A consensus is developing on Vista and it isn't good. Granted, it can't be easy to write a new operating system for the installed business and home base that Microsoft has. But with the daily frustrations of using Microsoft software I was hoping that Vista would be a bold step [...]
Hillary Clinton refused to disavow MoveOn ad tactics last Sunday, but still, she generally doesn't seem to agree with much of what the hard left has to say. A smart approach? David Brooks writes:
The fact is, many Democratic politicians privately detest the netroots’ self-righteousness and bullying. They also know [...]
Hillary Clinton refused to disavow MoveOn ad tactics last Sunday, but still, she generally doesn't seem to agree with much of what the hard left has to say. A smart approach? David Brooks writes:
The fact is, many Democratic politicians privately detest the netroots’ self-righteousness and bullying. They also know [...]
John Hinderaker from Powerline writes about Romney's inability to connect with Republicans nationwide.
It seems to me that one of the sub-plots of this complicated Republican primary season has been Romney's failure to catch on with the party's rank and file. His numbers in national polls have really gone nowhere; [...]
John Hinderaker from Powerline writes about Romney's inability to connect with Republicans nationwide.
It seems to me that one of the sub-plots of this complicated Republican primary season has been Romney's failure to catch on with the party's rank and file. His numbers in national polls have really gone nowhere; [...]
The terrorists on 24 would most likely get their nuclear weapons from Russia where oversight and control are lax. This amazing Washington Post story gives us another source to worry about.
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