Marginal Revolution: GM fact of the day. Wow. Market cap 1/3 of bed bath and beyond. Worth 10% of apple’s cash. 96K employees but paying benefits for 1M people. Some of the numbers are a little misleading but still.

You disappoint me, America: $10,000 worth of iPhone farting apps sold (so far). We are off investing in high concept, deep science startups that have to do all kinds of heavy lifting to close sales. Sometimes I think we try too hard.

Mostly because it is not available yet:

• MAKE: Blog: 4 floor advanced engineering demolition toy set. This appears to be sold out, site is hammered. Way cool
• Kindle 2. Love my existing Kindle, still.
• Addonics NAS adapter. World’s smallest NAS. Probably has perf and reliability to match, but still cool.
• Sony VAIO CP1 picture frame – feature packed but hardly available and expensive.

* “Ender in Exile”:amazon by Orson Scott Card. It has been probably 20 years since I read Ender’s Game, and this new book does not stand alone. And so at first I was frustrated. But the characters remain appealing and the story deals with meaty post-war issues that are relevant to our times. * “The Reluctant Communist”:amazon by Charles Robert Jenkins with Jim Frederick. True story of a deserter who spent 40 years in North Korea. The insane self-imposed rigors of everyday life in North Korea are stunning.

• Songbird: Killer Add-ons Make Songbird So Much Better. pretty nice, love the plugin feature, seems to leverage mozilla work here
• Textflow -- eh, failed totally on first doc import
• Google Sketchup – don’t have much current use for but maybe for halloween planning…
• Aerosnap -- eh, just seems to die immediately

nanoHUB - Simulation, Education, and Community for Nanotechnology. - hub for nano educational materials and software. interested in learning more about nano TCAD, pointed to by this article

EA to release games on Valve’s Steam completely free of DRM. - Steam is increasingly impressive. shocked msft hasn’t purchased.

OK it was all cute and everything the first day and we got some nice pictures. But now I’ve had enough. A frozen pipe. A tree that failed under the weight of all the snow. An epic driving trip to the airport last night. Time to move on.

Oh and huge thanks to all those who didn’t take snow days and kept on keeping the world running. Our paper arrived every day. The mailman was always here. Our lights, heat, water, phone, TV, internet service all worked like champs. The roads were plowed. UPS showed up. Grocery always open. Starbucks usually open. And many many more – hats off to everyone.

“What Was Lost”:amazon by Catherine O’Flynn. One part Harriet the Spy, one part ghost story, one part 30-something angst. Kept my attention. The child character is appealing.

Eleven Warriors » Know the Enemy: Texas Newspapers & Blogs

As much as I like these LED bulbs – New LED Light Bulbs Can Replace 100W Incandescents » MetaEfficient Reviews. – they are probably going to have to evolve a lot further in physical design before I can adopt them – like these CFL bulbs that look like incandescents – the incandescent shape is going to stay with us forever, just too many fixtures and designs have evolved around it.

• “Vacuum Diagrams”:amazon by Stephen Baxter. A pastiche of short stories, many in classic pulp style, strung together with some connective narrative to make into a somewhat interesting whole.  Diverting but ultimately kind of hollow, the main character is pretty thin.
• “Meat Market”:amazon by Bruce Feldman. Nonfiction, Bruce sits inside the Mississippi team for a year following primarily their recruiting travails under (now former) head coach Ed Orgeron. Life on the margins of bigtime college football is tough for the players and the teams, gives me new appreciation for coaches that are able to lift programs up from the doldrums.
• “Nothing To Lose”:amazon by Lee Child.  Another Reacher tale, this one is one of the weaker in the series, or maybe I am just Reachered out.  This book starts to feel like it is heading toward Stephen King territory with Apocalyptic cults which seem to have possessed whole towns.
• “The Watchman”:amazon by Robert Crais.  A Joe Pike thriller, this one is far more satisfying than the Reacher tale above.  Characters are more human, and thus resolution of plot is far more satisfying.

CrunchGear » Archive » Rogue for iPhone: nerdgasm. Installed.

Late 1982, I am killing myself chasing two degrees at CMU. In the mornings I was at the business school, classmates all wearing power suits and reading the WSJ and the Financial Times during breaks. Afternoons spent in the EE department with classic geeks.

After midnight in some lab deep in the bowels of the EE department, debugging some realtime ASM code for speech processing, and this lank-haired guy next to me asks “Hey, do you know how to kill a 12th-level necromancer?”

That was my intro to Rogue.