Woman killed by husband over Facebook marital status

Ah, those Brits and knives, and thanks to the Daily Mail.

A father stabbed his estranged wife to death in a ‘frenzied attack’ after discovering she had changed her Facebook status to ‘single’.

Edward Richardson, 41, was high on a cocktail of cocaine and alcohol when he smashed his way into her parents’ home and used a carving knife to kill 26-year-old Sarah Richardson as she lay in bed.

The carpenter stabbed his wife with such force he shattered her ribs. She also suffered puncture wounds to her liver and a slashed aorta.

Microsoft doesn’t need the extra H1-B’s after all

Microsoft to eliminate up to 5,000 employees

Meanwhile the head man predicts doom and gloom for his rival Apple and that all this mess will just pass:

“The price premiums that people pay for Macs versus PCs will be looked at much more critically in the next two quarters,” said Ballmer. “Neither the consumer nor business side is immune to the economic conditions.”

Though Ballmer called the current economic dislocation “unprecedented,” he called the recent downturn in the tech sector “just a pause.”

“Nothing will stop the forward march of our industry or Microsoft,” Ballmer said. “There will soon be renewed growth in the tech industry and certainly in Microsoft.”

Zimbabwean 100 trillion dollar bill

Can it get any more absurd, other than 2200 people dying of (the alleged) epidemic of cholera, a perfectly preventable and treatable disease? Unfortunately, I can’t locate a photo of it. The Z$100,000,000,000,000 bill is worth maybe US$33 on the street, as of when the referred posting was made. This currency converter says as of right now that US$1 is worth Z$16,574,420., surely an underestimate. BTW The libertarian Cato Institute estimates Zimbabwe’s inflation rate to be 89.7 sextillion percent. How many zeros is that? How long before the 10 sextillion dollar bill comes out?

Lessons in not being able to parody real life sometimes. I don’t think this image is of actual legal Zimbabwean tender, but it is from a parody posted in late 2007. Quaint nowadays. Now, this is really quaint. 

Meanwhile, dig this statement by the head of Zimbabwe’s Central Bank currently posted on the homepage of his website:

this Statement comes at a

time when the ugly heads of indiscipline,

corruption, fraudulent activities and underhand

manipulation of our money and capital markets

have reached epic proportions that are

threatening to wipe the face of our economy.

Is he talking about Zimbabwe or the US? Have to think for second. 

Further down the document dig this dollar amount:

Between the 10th and the 20th of November,

2008, total fraudulent cheques we intercepted in

the clearing system had risen to $60 hexillion

($60,000,000,000,000,000,000,000)…

COBOL in the Cloud

MicroFocus COBOL will be available on Amazon’s EC2 cloud platform.

Micro Focus® (LSE.MCRO.L), the leading provider of enterprise application management, development and modernization solutions, today announced that Micro Focus will enable enterprise applications to run on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Platform. As enterprises look to cloud computing as a modernization and cost savings strategy, Micro Focus provides a secure, reliable approach that requires zero rewriting of code, saving customers millions of dollars in comparison to alternative options.

RIP Nortel

Nortel has filed for bankruptcy. A blow for Canada. Shares fell almost 80 percent on the Toronto Stock Exchange before they recovered somewhat, if recovery is what you would call it.  Trading on the NYSE was halted with the stock frozen at 32 cents US.

One line blog post produces hundreds of comments

BBC post from one of its American correspondents.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer blogs about its own sale, possible demise

The Seattle P-I is up for sale, according to the Seattle P-I.

If no buyer comes forward within 60 days from last Friday, January 9, 2009, the paper with the spinning globe on top of its building will become completely defunct or go web only.

There’s an outside chance a family, company or organization could buy the P-I to increase its influence in Seattle or out of altruism, he said. That happened in San Francisco and Philadelphia. But the odds of that happening would be higher if the P-I were the only paper in town, …

Here’s a thought:

Tim Pilgrim, a journalism professor at Western Washington University, suggested that the P-I staff buy the paper and run it at a lesser profit than Hearst requires — perhaps assisted by a wealthy patron such as Bill Gates or Paul Allen.

“If this kind of profit-driven killing of legitimate news sources keeps happening, the online ‘news’ outlets that repackage P-I and other newspaper content will be out of news and only have opinion (blogging, etc.) to post,” Pilgrim wrote in an e-mail.

Like this post is doing right now.

Obamas keep WH chef

Despite the pleas of locavore foodies, the Obamas decided to keep the Bushes’ executive White House chef, Cristeta Comerford, who is also a prominent Filipino-American. Who said that Ms. Comerford was a prominent Filipino-American? Why, George W. Bush. While answering questions in the Oval Office with President Gloria Arroyo of the Philippines, Bush said

Madam President, it is a pleasure to welcome you back to the Oval Office. We have just had a very constructive dialogue. First, I want to tell you how proud I am to be the President of a nation that — in which there’s a lot of Philippine-Americans. They love America and they love their heritage. And I reminded the President that I am reminded of the great talent of the — of our Philippine-Americans when I eat dinner at the White House.

Warning sign your favorite restaurant is about to close

If your favorite restaurant starts offering breakfast, that restaurant is in trouble. Two restaurants within a mile or so from my house both started offering breakfast. After several months, they gave up the effort, as may be expecteed since relatively few people eat sit down (or even on the run) breakfasts unless its a bagel or something. And several months after those restaurants stopped serving breakfast, they both closed.

Fidelity uses antique topographic maps in a commercial

I saw a commercial for Fidelity Investments this morning during one of the networks’ Sunday morning yap shows. The commercial featured several antique topo maps as backdrop to its campaign for getting you to invest your money with them.