I only have two requests.  Well, three.  First, keep adding more!  Then….

Give me a 10ft workable-from-the-TV interface.  I want this in MythTV or Windows Media Center or something.  Hmmmm….I wonder if it would work from the Wii web browser.

Finally, mash this up with my MP3 collection database.  I want to see corresponding music videos for the artists and songs in my music collection!  Happy browsing!

Basically an article on a newspaper website was somehow placed on it’s “latest business news” section.  Google’s automated news crawler detected that a new link was on that page, and so indexed the page.  The article in question was an undated article from 2002 detailing United Airlines’ bankruptcy filings.  Once Google had indexed the article, people who had Google Alerts set up for United Airlines started getting messages, and it started filtering throughout the internet.  The way I understand it is that people then started trading the stock, which eventually brough automated stock trading programs in on the action.  End result?  UAL dropped from $12.50 a share to $3 before trading was halted and real people started straightening things out.

I don’t know what it is, but I find this fascinating, horrible, and awesome.  Maybe it’s my intense hatred for the airline industry in general.  The thought that a freak oversight somewhere (and I think reports have started to say it was an error on the newspaper site that the original article was undated) can potentially drive a mega-corporation into the ground blows my mind.  It’s crazy to think about how the world has become so automated and interconnected that something like this would happend in the first place!

My work email, which I didn’t check!, 1730 unread messages when I got in this morning.  Granted, all but ~150 of those were from an automated process that errored out and spit the message back to me, so those were easily cleaned up.  But still, I had 150 messages to go through when I got in, trying to piece together what’s going on, where things are with projects and whatnot.  It’s a pain.

Then there’s the RSS feeds.  I can’t seem to find a specifc number on Google Reader (it only says 1000+), but my breakdown has 1000+ for the regular news sites, 1000+ in tech-related sites, and ~600 for misc blogs and websites.  These are all feeds that I usually read or at least skim in the reader each item.  All in all I’m left with literally thousands of stories that are unread, and no idea what has been going on in the world over roughly the past week and a half.  Am I really that much of a slave to the Internet?

I need something that summarizes the summaries for me!  I’m thinking now I’m just going to “mark all as read”, and figure that if it’s important I’ll find out about it eventually!

On a somewhat related note, I’ve been reading the first book of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time now for over a year.  I’ve have multiple coworkers recommend it, and friends rave about it, so I took the opportunity to waste a gift card on set of the first three books.  Lately, I’ve found myself on quite a few cross-country airplane trips, and spend much of the airtime reading.  But I just can’t get into it.  I have no idea why - I enjoy fantasy fiction, and have read many of that genre.  I’ve flown through the last few fiction books I’ve read.   But the Eye of the World just isn’t drawing me in.  Blasphemy, I know, but what the heck?  I’m going to finish it one way or another (maybe in the next year?), but I’m doubting I’ll check out the rest.  [shrug]

I’d contact their support, but apparently there’s no more email support , either.  What?!?  There’s a phone support option…but I don’t want to talk to someone on the phone.  First, it’s late.  Second, it’s not a big enough deal to deal with talking to someone right now.  But an email could be written tonight, answered sometime in the next day, and I’d have an answer at my leisure.  Gahhhh!

Now, though, “retiring” at the end of the season apparently means “taking the summer off”.  That’s not a damn retirement, it’s a summer vacation.  Am I retiring from my job when I take two weeks off for a trip?  What the hell is the world coming to?  The whole situation is a mess  - Favre, did you see what happened when Michael Jordan “retired”?

The End of American Beer?
The other big news lately is further proceedings in international brewing giant InBev’s desire to take over Anheuser-Busch.  Today’s report basically makes it sound like it’s as good as done.  I’m normally all for the free market and unfettered capitalism; hell, the whole globalization thing is currently biting me in the ass, that’s how it goes.  But come on - an arguable American icon is going to become yet another cog in the European machine?  How did this happen?  There should be some things that are off limits.  What has A-B been doing to allow something like this to happen?

What will the NASCAR fans think when they’re beloved Budweiser might as well be a Becks, St. Pauli Girl, or Labatt’s?