Category: Personal

And what about the $1 Billion in bonds?

Last year, before the bomb exploded on NASDAQ, Webvan issued $1B in bonds to finance construction of new regional warehouses as part of their attempt to beome a player in the grocery business. Now, however, auditor Deloitte & Touche sees Webvan nearing end of road. Would this be the biggest direct loss caused by a dotcom?

How books get made into movies, or not

Publishers Weekly has an excellent, though long, article on how the book into movie behind the scene process really works. There’s lots of money thrown around, but mostly everyone’s in fear for their jobs.

One week to BruceTV!

I can’t wait! Only six more days until Springsteen and the E Street Band rock the world on HBO–don’t miss it. While you’re waiting, check out this new interview Bruce gave the legendary critic Robert Hilburn.

Adult Stem Cells Growing Strong

In a development that may take a lot of the controversy out of stem cell research, Wired News reports on two new studies suggesting that adult stem cells may work just as well as fetal stem cells as a base for regenerating damaged organs. Currently, most research uses cells taken from embryos or a fetus and this runs into a brick wall with the anti-abortion crowd.

New Page: Star Trek News

Given that aggregation is a “next big thing” on the Net, I’ve decided to try my hand at it and the first effort is TrekToday – Star Trek Headlines. This page features the headlines (with short description) of the day’s news about and effecting Star Trek. Some of my other favorite Star Trek sites are PsiPhi, which has the best information on Star Trek novels, and TrekWeb, another excellent fan/news site.

Cute Joke: Husbands and headaches

A husband emerged from the bathroom naked and was climbing into bed when his wife complained, as usual, “I have a headache.” “Perfect” her husband said. “I was just in the bathroom powdering my penis with aspirin. You can take it orally or as a suppository,…it’s up to you!”

Going Offline?

Well, my DSL is provided by NorthPoint Communications, which is going out of business and will be shutting down it’s network. The article says the network was being shutdown today, so I’m not clear why I still have a connection; my ISP is working feverishly to switch us customers over to Rhythm or Covad, but I may be without DSL for two to six weeks. Well, this sure sucks.

Update: Well, it happened yesterday, the DSL went down and I on dial-up for the time being. And I’m supposed to get a call today with details but it has come yet.

Prozac by any other name

Eli Lilly must have some really smart scientists on the payroll. After all, they came up with a completely new disease that only women get (unless there is a man out there menstruating) and, by golly, their big (but soon to go off patent) money maker Prozac, under a new name, is just the ticket to fixing it.

This is fairly normal PharmCo practice, though: Zyban, for example, is just a more-expensive version of Wellbutrin from the good folks at GlaxoSmithKline.

Have a few sad laughs

Breakups, as most of us know, can be massively painful. But when a Psycho exgirlfriend won’t let go, it gets even worse. Laughter can often be found in another’s pain (think Wile E. Coyote), and the voicemails catalogue here go into that sad, twisted space.

Note: I tried to find an official Roadrunner/Wile E. Coyote page on the Looney Tunes/Warner Brothers site but apparently there is no current product and so no page.

U.S. Suffers ‘Epidemic of Sleepiness’

In a new study, researchers at the National Sleep Foundation said in a new study said that Americans are cutting back on sleep, leisure activities, and sex to work longer hours.

Tell me, do any of you get the prescribed eight hours of sleep per night on a regular basis?

Daddy, are the Bears leaving?

In Ten Reasons to Start Getting Bullish, TheStreet.com’s Barry Ritholtz reviews a list of indicators that compare today’s market state to historical measures and shows we’re almost certainly at, or within 20 days of, the market bottom. Get ready for a snapback. I wonder if the rise will be as fast and spectacular as the fall…

This explain a lot!

I guess I’m one of the SMILTs described in ‘We can’t believe our luck’: “Single men in their late thirties (SMILTs) have never had it so good: no responsibilities outside work, and a waiting list of twentysomething women who want to date them.”

Woo-hoo!

Need the biotech lowdown on Ebola?

Using the NCBI Sequence Viewer, you can look up all sorts of neat data on this fleash eating virus and even get it in XML.

What does NCBI do? Established in 1988 as a national resource for molecular biology information, NCBI creates public databases, conducts research in computational biology, develops software tools for analyzing genome data, and disseminates biomedical information – all for the better understanding of molecular processes affecting human health and disease.