Mark Trapp

"The world maybe in meltdown but Beirut is booming. The country best known for wars, turmoil and instability has not just survived the global financial crisis, it seems to be thriving because of it. Deep down in the basement of Lebanon's Central bank treasury vaults are full. Cash has been flowing in like never before, Lebanese banks are posting record deposits and bankers say this is the best year in Lebanon's financial history. According to the country's chief banker all of this is because while the world was shocked when in September the banking giants began to wobble, Lebanon was prepared. "I saw the crisis coming and I told the commercial banks in 2007 to get out of all international investments related to the international markets", says Riad Salameh, the governor of Lebanon's Central Bank. There is a tradition of conservative regulation at the Central Bank in Lebanon, which kept the banks safe." - RAPatton via Bookmarklet

pretty good until around 50 - RAPatton

Bogart never says "Play it again, Sam" in Casablanca. - James Ferguson

"You played it for her, you can play it for me! If she can stand it, I can! Play it!" - Mark Trapp

There are some good ones into the 60s. But the #47 Ferris Bueller is not the best from that movie by far. Princess Bride needs to be in there, very quotable. - Logical Extremes

From the Daily News: "In one of the biggest heists in American history, the Daily News "stole" the $2 billion Empire State Building. And it wasn't that hard. The News swiped the 102-story Art Deco skyscraper by drawing up a batch of bogus documents, making a fake notary stamp and filing paperwork with the city to transfer the deed to the property. Some of the information was laughable: Original "King Kong" star Fay Wray is listed as a witness and the notary shared a name with bank robber Willie Sutton. The massive ripoff illustrates a gaping loophole in the city's system for recording deeds, mortgages and other transactions. The loophole: The system - run by the office of the city register - doesn't require clerks to verify the information." - Mark Trapp via Bookmarklet

I heard this story on NPR this morning. It's full of lulz. - ha3rvey

see, india is not the only third world country where this stuff happens ... (non-existent person got full id, ration card, passport, drivers license, etc) .. yay for the third world - Gregory Lent

From the Los Angeles Times: "They say misery loves company, but the same may be even more true of happiness. In a study published online today by the British Medical Journal, scientists from Harvard University and UC San Diego showed that happiness spreads readily through social networks of family members, friends and neighbors. Knowing someone who is happy makes you 15.3% more likely to be happy yourself, the study found. A happy friend of a friend increases your odds of happiness by 9.8%, and even your neighbor's sister's friend can give you a 5.6% boost." - Mark Trapp

:-D - Ladybug Heather

From BBC News: "Batman film The Dark Knight is to be re-released in US cinemas in January, upping its chances of its box-office takings crossing the $1 billion mark. According to the tracking website Box Office Mojo, its current worldwide takings stand at $996m (£678m). Meanwhile, the British star of the film has been commenting on its chances of winning Academy Awards next year. According to Christian Bale, the late Heath Ledger and director Christopher Nolan should be in contention." - Mark Trapp via Bookmarklet

"In hopes of slowing global warming and creating “green jobs,” Congress and the incoming administration may soon impose a mandate that the nation get 10 or 15 percent of its electricity from renewable sources within a few years. Yet the experience of states that have adopted similar goals suggests that passing that requirement could be a lot easier than achieving it. The record so far is decidedly mixed: some states appear to be on track to meet energy targets, but others have fallen behind on the aggressive goals they set several years ago." - RAPatton via Bookmarklet

" “I think we are really overselling how quick, how easy and how complete the transition can be,” said George Sterzinger, executive director of the Renewable Energy Policy Project, a Washington advocacy group. More than half the states have adopted formal green-energy goals. In many states the policies, known as renewable portfolio standards, are too new to be evaluated. But so far the number of successes and failures is “sort of a 50-50 kind of affair,” said Ryan Wiser, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and co-author of a recent report on the targets." - RAPatton

That photo is an amazing juxtaposition. - Ladybug Heather

"The genetic signatures of people in Spain and Portugal provide new and explicit evidence of the mass conversions of Sephardic Jews and Muslims to Catholicism in the 15th and 16th centuries after Christian armies wrested Spain back from Muslim control, a team of geneticists reports. Twenty percent of the population of the Iberian Peninsula has Sephardic Jewish ancestry and 11 percent have DNA reflecting Moorish ancestors, the geneticists have found. Historians have debated how many Jews converted and how many chose exile. “One wing grossly underestimates the number of conversions,” said Jane S. Gerber, an expert on Sephardic history at the City University of New York." - RAPatton

"Because most of the Y chromosome remains unchanged from father to son, the proportions of Sephardic and Moorish ancestry detected in the present population are probably the same as those just after the 1492 expulsions. A high proportion of people with Sephardic ancestry was to be expected, Dr. Ray said. “Jews formed a very large part of the urban population up until the great conversions,” he said." - RAPatton

"Families wanting an old-fashioned Christmas can now decorate their home with the world's oldest species of tree - dating back 200 million years. Wollemi Pines - which were only known from fossils until 1994 - are being sold as Christmas trees for the first time by a country estate in Cornwall. Nicknamed the 'Dinosaur Tree', the species was thought to be extinct until a handful of 100 trees were found living in an Australian valley in 1994. Seeds from the original trees were sent around the world by conservationists to ensure their survival and there are currently just 8,000 examples worldwide." - RAPatton via Bookmarklet

its confuzerizing - Georgia Otto

It's not passive, but you can view the context of items in the real time feed by clicking on them. The thread will appear so you can see what that person was replying to. - Mark Trapp

Mark - clicking is obviously insane amounts of effort for my lazy bum. Didn't you know? lol. - Georgia Otto

"Its peaty flavour and pipe-and-slippers image put many people off single malt whisky before they've taken a sip. But train your tastebuds and you could soon learn to love it." - RAPatton

wow..those bottles are just so beautiful :) I'm thirsty now..oh..making irish coffee for the walk tonight... - Anna Lynn M.

+1 @anika... i'll stick to being a tequila and craft beer snob. ftw! - .LAG

I liked both because the new design is much sleeker and refined than the old one. - Mattie Kenny

liek it, but it looks weird with Helvetireader now - and that was soooo nice... well, hope for a Helvetireader and Better GReader greasemonkey updates now. - Peter Efland

eh - Charlie Anzman

You can customize the interface, with great success, using Stylish/user styles. UserStyles.org has several examples: http://userstyles.org/styles/s... - Mark Trapp

mark - thanks that was helpful! now there's boxes around each message & its comments, that is a bit clearer :) - Georgia Otto

I can't wait until I can use stylish on Chrome. - Mattie Kenny

And thanks to GetSatisfaction, there's an answer for why this happens. Turns out special characters "count" as more than one character. I used the > character, which is stored as more than 1 character by Twitter. Updated the blog post for this information. - Hutch Carpenter

Isn't the 140 char limit driven by SMS -- whatever it allows/dictates should be what Twitter uses - Brian Sullivan

Brian: characters like < count as one character in SMS messages. The more-than-one-character thing is specifically a function of HTML escaping. - Mark Trapp

From io9: "We knew January's auction of Battlestar Galactica stuff was going to be huge, but we didn't realize quite how big. They're auctioning bloody outfits from late night Cylon torture sessions, President Roslin's crazy pills, just about everything that ever sat on Adama's desk, Cylon resurrection tubs and life-size Cylon raiders, priced at a mere $30,000 to $40,000. We've collected a gallery of the most amazing and bizarre set items." - Mark Trapp via Bookmarklet

wow. out of all those, I'd be most interested in the nuclear warhead, resurrection tank, and the raider. the biggest "do not want" is the ellen tigh seduction outfit ;) - Jason Kaneshiro

Two fitty!! - Bwana

From the Official Google Reader Blog: "On the Reader team, we know that the old adage "change is good" isn't always true. Sometimes, change is just change. In this case, we hope that these decisions both improve your Reader experience today, and pave the way for additional improvements down the line. So...what's changing, you ask? Google is all about speed, both under the hood as well as in the user experience. So, in order to make Reader act and feel more speedy and responsive, we've removed some visual clutter, simplified some features and given everything a bit more breathing room. Out with the old rounded corners, drop shadows and heavily saturated colors -- in with a softer palette, faster components and a fresh new look." - Mark Trapp via Bookmarklet

I don't like it. Bring back my rounded corners. I feel like I'm going to bump my head. - James Ferguson

Don't worry, you can download a soft helmet via Google Gears. - Mark Trapp

WhatTheFont has gotten us out of a few scrapes before. - Mark Trapp

I just noticed it yesterday. - Shannon Jiménez

no uglier than the ads that popup at the bottom...those are new to me - ♫ Rahsheen ™ ★

http://lifehacker.com/5101887/... - Victor Ryden

From Gizmodo: "Hurricanes, as we've seen, can wreak serious havoc when they strike populated areas. We've never had control over them before, but one researcher thinks they could be broken up with F-4 fighter jets. In theory, sending in a pair of the jets to do loops around the eye of the hurricane while it's still out over the ocean, creating sonic booms, would break it up before it hits the shore." - Mark Trapp via Bookmarklet

...And Mark steals my joke. - tehKenny

Or ... on the cheap, stir the ocean with 10,000 spoons (Some claim all you need is a knife, but that would be a false sense of irony) - Micah Wittman

"I believe a lot of the push-back against the use of spaces in tags comes from the technical difficulties involved in using them that aren’t apparent to the end user. Firstly, you can’t use spaces in URLs: they’re considered an end delimiter, so they have to be escaped to %20. Which means you get poor-looking tags that are hard to type or read like http://example.com/tags/three%... or ambiguous tags like http://example.com/tags/three-..., which seems fine, but what if my tag actually was “three-word-tags” without spaces? Beyond the URL, you have issues that are similar to why white space is largely ignored in coding syntax: is “three word tag” (one space between words) the same as “two word tag” (two spaces between words)? What about a tag list like “foo, bar”? Should the second tag be “bar” or should it be ” bar”? If it’s the former, what if I wanted to start my tag with a space? Why is that not acceptable, but a space in after is? It quickly gets into “how do we do..." - Mark Trapp

"Hutch, I think it’s a trade-off: with any way you interpret a loosely interpreted list, it’s not going to conform to some people’s intuitions. If your instructions say “use a comma separated list,” it’s correct to assume that the comma is the only thing that separates the terms, not “a comma and a space.” If you say “a comma and a space,” what about no spaces? What about two spaces? Then you start getting into long disclaimers and instructions that nobody’s going to write and nobody’s going to read. With no feedback, in most cases, on whether or not you did it right until you submit the tags, giving simple instructions that are hard to misinterpret wind up being the most usable, even if they are limiting. This could be changed if there were instantaneous feedback: Apple does it well, where it adds a bubble around tags when it hits its delimiter, letting you know right away that there’s no question the tag’s ended, but you still have to deal with the other potential usability issues..." - Mark Trapp

"The answer is not "Do what you did in the pilot, only bigger." Company-wide deployments are very different from departmental ones. It's like campaigning for the U.S. presidency: you're not really running one national campaign, you're running 50 state campaigns...or 5,000 regional campaigns. Each of those campaigns has its own local leadership, demographic profile, issues, and economics." - Hutch Carpenter

And IT is always the Palm Beach County, FL of the adoption campaign. They really should know better, but they always wind up spoiling it for everyone else. - Mark Trapp

Mark - LOL...the Palm Beach County of the adoption campaign. That's a good one. - Hutch Carpenter

I haven't really left this "room" to explore the rest of FF... - Nick Dawson

You could easily avoid that, especially given another community coming in. Yeah, it's not the same type of people that were around in February or March (or earlier), but it's not FriendFeed, the product, that's causing it. Because the user experience is dictated by who you subscribe to, you can limit who comes into your stream with people who are not, to use your term, smarmy. What's to stop a few dozen Powncers from subscribing to each other and utilizing FriendFeed outside the Meme-sphere? - Mark Trapp

Since what you see on Friendfeed is the posts, comments and likes of the people to whom you subscribe by choice, Andy, how is it, exactly, that you are not 100% responsible for what you see? - Mark VandenBerg

What a good looking couple :) - RAPatton

You both look great and happy :) *edit* and cold ;) - Michael W. May

awwww :) - Brandon