Unseen World!

Smoke billows from a building after a small private plane crashed into the building in Austin, Texas Photo: AP

Joseph Stack left a six-page suicide note in which he railed against the Internal Revenue Service, the US federal tax agency.

He wrote: "I am finally ready to end this insanity. Well, Mr Big Brother IRS man let’s try something different. Take my pound of flesh and sleep well.

"There was a storm raging inside me. Desperate times call for desperate measures. We are brainwashed to believe there is freedom in this land."

In his suicide "manifesto," which he posted on his own website, Stack also railed against Wall Street bankers, the Catholic Church, President George W Bush and the health care system.

The software engineer detailed how he had spent $5,000 (£3,000) and 1,000 hours of his time writing to senators and congressman about taxes and how he lost his retirement savings for the second time in the 1990s.

Stack crashed the four-seater aircraft into a seven-storey building which housed 199 IRS employees in the state capital Austin.

It created a huge fireball and at least two people in the building were injured, with one unaccounted for.

An FBI office was located next door to the tax office and NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, scrambled two F-16 jets from Houston amid fears of a terrorist attack.

A little-known island continent of floating toxic plastic garbage, TWICE the size of Texas, is growing in the pacific between California and Hawaii. Officially known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, until it can be taxed, U.S. officials will continue to ignore it. I heard of it once many years ago, but it apparently has been growing tenfold each decade since the 1950’s, and now consists of 80% plastic. It has also been called Gilligan’s Island, from the trashy TV sitcom that won’t go away.

The enormous stew of trash – which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers – floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man’s land between San Francisco and Hawaii.

The patch has been growing, along with ocean debris worldwide, tenfold every decade since the 1950s, said Chris Parry, public education program manager with the California Coastal Commission in San Francisco.

I had no idea that there is a 3.5 million ton island of plastic and garbage floating in the Pacific ocean between Hawaii and San Francisco.  I found this out last night when I was marveling at the ridiculous petroleum-based packaging that housed my Oscar Meyer Center Cut Bacon. Not only was the plastic container over the top, but the shrink wrapped bacon inside was “freshness overkill.” I made the comment about just another example of our dependence on oil and petroleum products when my daughter asked me if I had heard about garbage island?

So I did some digging.  What I found is that “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” or the “Trash Vortex,” has been around since the 1950s. Circular wind and ocean currents in the North Pacific Gyre have collected trash that originates onshore and has made its way into the Pacific.  Greenpeace has a nice animation on how the gyre works.

The garbage island has been growing tenfold every decade and is now twice the size of Texas.  Plastic makes up 80% of the waste, the majority of which is non-recyclable and highly toxic Bisphenol A.  The world produces 7 billion pounds of Bisphenol A per year for hard, clear plastic called polycarbonate.

I’m pretty sure we can find better ways to save our collective bacon than continuing to use polycarbonates in our packaging, and to think twice about how we dispose of the non-recyclable plastics that are thrust into our lives.

Tautology club sounded like a new gym or way to get trim.  With Ash Wednesday dieting in mind, I decided to find out the definition of tautology to see if I qualified for a tautology club.  The definition of tautology may…or may not…surprise you.

I turned to old reliable, Merriam Webster, to find out the meaning of tautology:

tautology – a : needless repetition of an idea, statement, or word b : an instance of tautology
2 : a tautologous statement

As a mother and writer, I know I repeat myself a lot.  In fact, I often state I will make recordings of my speeches so I don’t have to engage in tautology.

It definitely sounds like I qualify for a tautology club.  Anyone want to start one?

Here is a YouTube video of the song Tautology (English dub):

Today HBO announced it will be making its movies and TV Shows available on the Web to subscribers through HBO Go,which up until now has been in private beta. HBO Go is part of the cable industry’s TV Everywhere strategy to make TV content available online to paying subscribers. It contains 600 hours of movies and TV shows which can be streamed live and even in HD. HBO Go is available first to Verizon FIOS subscribers. Since I am a Verizon FIOS customer, I logged into HBO Go this morning and checked it out. (Despite reports elsewhere that it won’t be available until Thursday, it is in fact now live). Below are my initial impressions and screenshots.

The videos play decently and you can watch in HD, but if I wasn’t already paying for HBO I certainly wouldn’t pay for access to this site. The choice of shows and movies is just not that great. You can watch every episode of The Wire, and the final season of The Sopranos, but not one episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. You get a lot more in your cable subscription, especially if you get multiple HBO channels. The on-demand option is great, but essentially HBO Go is competing with much broader array of choices on the TV which can also be made on-demand through a DVR. There are some movies like The Watchmen and Taken, which I think I’ve already seen three times each this month on TV, and a spattering of older archived movies like Canadian Bacon, but for the most part the selection is worse than what you get on Netflix via its streaming option. I’m not sure I want to see The Chumscrubber in HD.

The site itself is well-designed, image heavy with lots of entry points. You are greeted with a slideshow view of ten shows and movies on heavy rotation, including the movie Taken, HBO Series Big Love and The Wire, and a Dennis Miller special. If you have HBO, you can’t really avoid any of these shows, so nothing special there except that you can stream it anywhere on your laptop. Tabs across the top allow you to explore deeper into movies, series, comedy, sports, documentaries, and “late night” (aka, HBO’s hard-hitting sex documentary series like Real Sex). Everything is done in Flash, which makes it a beautiful experience, but it won’t be accessible on an iPad or iPhone without converting the site into an app

For each series, you can choose any episode for at least one season, but some shows are missing. You can also create a watchlist to watch shows later. When I was clicking through the site, the streaming quality was great, but when I tried to switch to another show or movie the audio to Canadian Bacon kept playing in the background (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing—I love that movie).

My main issue with HBO Go is not the fact that it is behind a paywall (after all, that is HBO’s business even on TV) or the site’s look and feel. The site’s navigation is clean, everything is easy to find, and the playback looks great. And moving part of its video library online is a smart move for HBO. My issue is with the selection. It’s not just that 600 hours of rotating shows and movies is just a fraction of what HBO shows on TV in any given month. Managing 600 hours of on-demand video is resource intensive, so HBO has to set some limit. HBO is not Web video company. But Hulu or even Verizon could manage a bigger catalog, and even keep the paywall.

TV is moving online, as this first step by HBO illustrates. But ultimately, I want all the channels I get through Verizon to be available for searching, managing, and video streaming on the Web. Verizon FIOS already lets me program my home DVR from the Web, but I can only watch those shows on my TV. There is still a disconnect between my computer and my TV, and that is frustrating. And yes, I want it all because I am already paying for it.

Is Hotmail not HOT anymore? A lot of Hotmail users as of now are dismayed due to the Complaints on hotmail Service Unavailable, Down and Not Working. For the details on why Hotmail is down as of the moment, not working and service unavailable as of February 16, 2010. Its actually now just hotmail who is down as of the moment, Windows Live Messenger Services and its websites, which includes hotmail is found to be down this Tuesday Afternoon. According to users, they get this message “Hotmail Service Unavailable”. Users are also saying that the messenger is not working because it is unable to access. Allow us to Diagnose this problem and wait for official announcements regarding this Hotmail Service Unavailable, Down and Not Working Updates.

This Hotmail Problem that they are experiencing is giving a lot of people frustrations, The outage is still being analyze to find out how long it would possibly take to fix these Hotmail Service Unavailable Down and Not Working issues. Yesterday, problems regarding the Xbox live Occurred, not Hotmail and the MSN messenger is being affect, what could this mean, its Microsoft loosing its touch? Updates as to when the fix will be establish will be shared here.

According to the Daily Inquirer, MSNBC issued the following statement from Microsoft about Hotmail problems and Hotmail not working on Tuesday:

“This morning, around 9:30am PST, the Windows Live ID sign-in service experienced a partial outage that caused some customers to not be able to sign into services using Windows Live ID for approximately one hour.  The service is now restored to normal. Microsoft apologizes for any inconvenience this has caused customers.”

After reading the “Professor Phil Jones” what would countries across the globe be thinking after they are currently succeeding in curbing carbon emissions. Guess about Honda who spends billions of Dollars on Hybrid Technology. Particularly the Chinese and Indians for growing their economies without increasing their carbon output.

Professor Phil Jones, “whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change . . ., said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.” 

“Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ’statistically significant’ warming.”

So, this means the last fifteen years of hysterical media stories about vanishing polar ice caps, imperiled Polar Bears, vanishing glaciers, heat waves and hurricanes blames on Global Warming, islands sinking into the sea, various years proclaimed "the hottest on record," "the Earth has a fever,".

I have stopped using plastic, tried to save fuel, water, electricity & raised my voice on global warming..now what should I start doing after reading this article? Does anyone have to say anything about this?

Global search giant Google, earlier this week, unveiled Buzz, a new social networking platform that lets users manage and engage in social activities, via Gmail, the company’s email program.

The platform has been described as a catch-all product by people who have used it.

With Buzz, users can share multimedia and update their status for friends to see. They can even share their location information to help connect with others in their area.

According to analysts, Google’s Buzz poses a direct challenge to both Twitter and Facebook.

I don’t think it will be able to catch up with Twitter anytime sooner. Till then I would suggest keep buuuzzzing..oops keep buzzing..