OK, I have been following this as close as everyone else here. Most people fundamentally don’t like the idea of Yahoo as a Microsoft company including myself. But financially it does make sense for Microsoft as they would finally hold the top honors in at least one if not two online services. MSN Messenger and Yahoo messenger would reign supreme over AIM and GTalk. The combined user base of Hotmail and Yahoo mail would pretty much give Microsoft access to every person who uses the Internet.

The most interested play is what would happen to search. Google has held the top honors for well over 5 years and uses their search as the center piece of their Don’t-be-evil empire. By combining MSN search and Yahoo search, they would shake up the search world but still come in at a distant, but closer second. Maybe Microsoft will have what it takes to kick Yahoo into gear and finally wake them up from their Terry Semel-induced slumber. As much as you’d like to hate Ballmer and company, they have been at the software game a lot longer than Semel and Yang combined. With the talent inside Yahoo and the management abilities from Microsoft, they can really give Google a run for their money. It seems to be a classic ‘whole is greater than the sum of the parts’ situation.

As of Monday Yahoo has rejected the $44 Billion offer. The valuation is pretty much built into the YHOO price at around $30 a share. If Microsoft counters with a higher offer the stock should see another boost north. If Microsoft takes the offer off of the table it would certainly send YHOO in a short term free fall. You’ve got to have a pretty good stomach if you are willing to wager in this game right now. Some say Yahoo is against the ropes and should have taken the offer as it stands as they don’t have other offers to leverage. However I think that Microsoft also has no other alternatives when it comes to an acquisition target. Neither AOL or IAC have resource that go as deep as Yahoo nor will they necessarily be open to being acquired. Microsoft will need to acquire both if not more companies to even get close to the kinds of valuable assets hidden within Yahoo.

In a parallel universe somewhere outside of this Galaxy, Yahoo has rejected the Microsoft offer and built itself back up as the Internet giant it once was on its own. Here on our planet, I think the writing is on the wall. The wall of a Yahoo company bathroom. It says, “For a good time , call Bill Steve at 1-800-MICROSOFT”.

Click here to read about the photo from above. Reported also at Valleywag.

Journeyman is one of the new shows this last season that is facing that untimely death. I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that I will really miss not knowing where (when and who) Dan Vasser will be visiting in the non-existent future episodes. There has to be a place where good quality shows like this can live and be profitable. I don’t know if the Internet is the answer but certainly the SciFi network or some cable station should at least pick it up for us fans to continue to enjoy the show.

So please, NBC, give the writers what they want and bring back Journeyman!!!

I was just thinking the other day while driving on the freeway. If we could get a small percentage of the drivers to just follow the speed limit for a day, it would probably make a much bigger impact. Imagine 1 of every 20 cars on the freeway driving 55 mph. It would probably slow the entire flow of traffic down to a much more fuel efficient speed and create a noticeable drop in gas consumption. This effect wouldn’t just cause people to shift their gas purchases to another day but actually decrease the demand for the days surrounding it. As long as the assholes on the streets can manage their road rage for a day then we might have something worth thinking about…

Throughout the 43 minute show, the same 5 minute commercial played 5 times. That’s 25 minutes worth of commercials with 43 minutes of content where usually only 17 minutes would play on regular TV. The fact that you had to sit through the same 5 minutes 5 times is enough to make you want to pull that ethernet plug out of your computer. On top of that, they cut into the shows at random moments. If this is how they are going to deliver their content online, it is going to discourage a lot of viewers.

It is possible that the networks don’t really want hulu to be as successful as it promises to be due to the lucrative contract they have with satellite and cable providers. But that’s just not the way to launch a product that has so much promise just to be sabotaged by its creator.

It actually started out real well. People were calling and emailing almost immediately. I started weeding out the used car dealers trying to snatch up a good deal and got a handful or real interested buyers. Having to deal with people wanting to see it and drive it was enough to have to make time for but what really ticks me off is when people make empty promises sight unseen.

If you are going to make an offer on a vehicle sight unseen then you should follow through with it. It’s not like I wouldn’t expect you to want to test drive it. If someone says, “I’ll come by to check it out in an hour.” I wouldn’t hesitate but to happily oblige. But what do you do when someone calls and says. “I want it, who do I make the check out to? I will be down in an hour to pick it up with a driver.” My initial thought was, ‘He must knows what he’s looking for.’ I have the VIN on the listing as well as a number of current, detailed photos. I am assuming that the deal is done. I fended off all of the calls after making the promise to be there when he comes to pick it up. I literally Emailed and called people and told them the truck was sold only to have this guy and his son to come by 30 minutes late to kick tires for another 20 minutes. At the end of the ordeal, he was not the least bit apologetic and says with a straight face. “You know what, we are gonna pass.”

Now I have to call back all the people who I told that the truck was sold to say that someone passed. What are they gonna think? Why did the guy pass? Is something wrong with the truck? I suppose it was naive of me to believe that these guys who came by where honest people who will stand behind their words. They are actually owners of a local business in Santa Barbara, CA who deal with the general public everyday. You want to think that people are not gonna take advantage of you but in today’s world it is few and far in between.

Just in case any of you ever happen to do business with these guys I will let you know who I had to deal with. Their business is called Star Rug Cleaners. It was a father and son outfit that made me take two hours off of work on a Wednesday just so they can come around and kick some tires. Tony and his son Michael Jensen were their names.

Michael actually seem like a good enough guy who was courteous and personable when I met him. His dad Tony was the guy who made the false representation to me over the phone. After test driving the car around the block, Tony Jensen actually sat in the passenger seat with the doors shut and the AC on while talking on the phone while I waited for him outside with his son in the hot California Santa Ana winds. Clearly at this point he already knows he was going to pass. How big of an a-hole do you have to be to sit in another person’s car in front of their house with the engine running and AC on while they wait on you after you were half an hour late to the appointment? I hope to only meet a handful of douche bags like him in my life.

If you get an Email or a call saying that they are bringing down cash to take your used vehicle away, I’d suggest giving them a fake address. Good luck. It’s a jungle out there.

- If you lose a presidential election to George W. Bush, You must write a book about the environment

Because that’s exactly what former presidential candidate John Kerry did. Oh yeah, and don’t forget Al “I own the biggest house in Nashville” Gore. Why not. It worked well for Al. I have not read this book but is it just me or was Kerry not particularly known for his environmental views? I am sure he does care but this just reeks as a me too move by the Massachusetts senator. I suppose if he wants to make another run at this in 4 or 8 years, he’d better start now so he has enough time to start a speaking tour and maybe ink a Hollywood deal in time for 2012 (just in case people don’t buy into the Hilary/Obama ticket).

If I was John Kerry, I would make sure I’ve done everything I can to make sure the world’s biggest food company, which happens to be owned by his co-author/wife Teresa Heinz’s family, is as green as corporately possible…

Neither is my friend Rodrigo inviting me to a HUGE myspace party by linking to a fake myspace profile to request the address where the HREF actually points to an IP address in Hong Kong.

Are all these people’s accounts compromised? Is it the handy work of the Colorado spammer Richter (as discussed on RB #50) ? Whatever it is, its not looking pretty right now. If myspace doesn’t find a real (non-litigious) way of dealing with the spam issue, it is just another reason for people to stop using it and jump to the next best thing. Whatever that is.

Everyone hopefully knows that H2O can exist in all 3 states. Gas, liquid and solid. As it transforms from one state to another, it’s density changes because the molecules become closer or farther from each other. Some of you may also remember that when water is in the solid state the density is less than the same amount of water in liquid form. That is why ice floats in water. If you don’t believe me, just make some ice cubes if your ice cube tray in the freezer and see the surface rise as it changes from liquid to solid.

The other physical attribute of floating ice is, floating anything for that matter, is displaces the exact same volume as the weight of the ice cube when you replace that space with the surrounding water. That sounds absolutely confusing actually. Even to me. So let me try to explain with an example for those who didn’t catch that.

If you have a 1ft x 1ft x 1ft cube bucket that can hold that exact same amount of liquid H2O, its volume is 1 cubed. When it is frozen, the volume will be slightly larger than that. When you drop that block of ice into a tub of water without and wait for the water to become perfectly still again, you will note that the amount of ice above the surface of the water is the exact same amount it expanded when it changed from liquid to solid.

OK, if that makes sense to you, then you can imagine that block of ice will begin to melt. As the ice melts and the resulting liquid H2O merges with the surrounding water, you will not notice any amount of rise in the water level in the bucket. That is exactly like the polar ice caps as they begin to melt due to the temperature increase.

It is not physically possible to have rising sea levels that are due to the floating ice bergs melting at the poles.

There. I said it. If you want to argue about global warming I suggest you go to another blog. This post is just here to tell all the idiots who are crying about how the rising sea levels are going to kill us and how we will all be under water because of it one day. I will give you that there may be a lot of melting ice that is not merely floating and could potentially introduce a visible rise as it slides from land to sea. I do not know the exact ratios of how much of those kinds of ice there are versus the other at the poles. But at the very least, people need to stop running around thinking that when all the floating ice bergs melt we are going to be riding around in jetskis, growing gills on the sides of our necks and battling a gang of derelics refered to only as the ’smokers’.

(For 99.9% of the people in the world who didn’t watch the movie Waterworld, that last sentence was a not-so-clever attempt of taking a shot at Kevin Costner…)