We finally have liftoff. Congratulations, NASA, sixth time's the charm.

Now we wait for the shuttle to catch up and dock with the International Space Station, which should happen around midday Friday. Here'a site that lets you follow the choreographed dance between the two vehicles in more-or-less real time:
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/tracking/

Once the two spacecraft are docked together for their 16-day rendezvous, they should make a spectacular sight from Earth.

I'll get back to the regularly scheduled My One Favorite Things soon enough, but right now I got a bone to pick with my cell phone company, T-Mobile.

I mostly have positive vibes toward T-Mobile as their customer service has been very helpful and their network seems to have continually improved in New York City, but I'm annoyed with the numerous 'surcharges' the company tacks on to my monthly bill.

The NYT reports that Google is planning the most direct challenge to Microsoft to date: an operating system.

The software, called the Google Chrome Operating System, is initially intended for use in the tiny, low-cost portable computers known as netbooks, which have been selling quickly even as demand for other PCs has plummeted. Google said it believed the software would also be able to power full-size PCs.

I don't actually know how the folks who manage Eve Online plan to deal with this, except that they've booted the virtual fraudster out of the game.

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/07/03/science-online-bank-heist.html

Is this incredibly lame or amazingly awesome? 

I've always sucked at making decisions. Leave where we're having lunch up to me and we'll likely be having dinner there.

If there's one thing about modern life I cannot stand, it's the plethora of options we have. Sure the freedoms we now enjoy are terrific, the new opportunities exciting, the potential adventures limitless, but instead I like to focus on all the bad choices we can now make.

You've seen a lot less of me on dagblog lately, and while I'd love to put all of the blame for my absence on my Beyonce and the wedding plans which have been set in hot and heavy motion (It's mostly painful, stressful stuff, but registering at Target was hella fun - come to Papa, Wii!!), but there is a much bigger badder beast than Mrs. All-Consuming Wedding at work here - and its name is PokerStars.

Late last year one of my predictions for 2009 was that Facebook would go public, sparking a mini-rally in the markets.

What a shock. A reporter (fearing for his own job, perhaps?) asked White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs if the potential imminent closure of the venerable Boston Globe calls for yet another government bailout, this time to save the flailing newspaper industry.

The hallmark of a fad is that it is decidely short-lived.  Perhaps the most famous example is the pet rock.  It's not surprising that it was the brain child of an ad man.  After all, advertising can create demand.  Can it sustain demand?  Not, apparently, for pet rocks.

First of all, let me just say how awesome dagblog has been of late. In the past few days, we've had fascinating posts and reader discussions about Sri Lanka, California healthcare, incipient deflation, Twitter's raison d'etre, NSA wiretapping, CIA torturing, etc. etc.

I often wish we had more bloggers, a larger audience and even more active commenters, but the folks we do have are so good I worry that if that were so all we'd end up with would be a disappointing dilution in the strength of our output and our community.

My One Favorite Thing this week is Scramble, an anagram word game on Facebook that is basically the online equivalent of the old board game Boggle.

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, the basic idea is you are given a bunch of letter tiles laid out on a square board and you must string adjacent letters together to form words of at least three letters long, racking up more points for longer words.

It's quite the simple premise ... and also dangerously addictive.

I AM DEADMAN. HEAR ME TWEET!

Big news today. Ashton Kutcher just attracted his one millionth follower on the microblogging service Twitter, a milestone which has generated a fair amount of fanfare, but it's only the beginning as cult leader Oprah is going to feature Twitter on her talk show today and send her first tweet over the air.

Oh, how wonderful.

Excuse me if I don't join in the celebration - if I'm not all, ahem, atwitter with the news - but I have very mixed feelings here.

This financial crisis is more than what it appears.

It is symptomatic of a society that at some point over the last 30 years lost its way by seeking not the road less traveled, but instead the quickest route.

It is the culmination of a mindset that increasingly became interested in pursuing immediate gratification at any cost.

Look around you. In every area of modern life, the shortcut has become the rule, not the exception.

Well, except for a couple of close final games (sorry A-man about the Illini loss), it was a pretty uneventful first day in the 2009 NCAA March Madness tourney (you know it can't have been too interesting when your girlfriend correctly selects every game but one - she feels your pain A-man!).

So I figured instead of discussing the actual games, I'd quickly mention an interesting side issue surrounding CBS Sports' online coverage of the tourney.

After much speculation on the matter, Diebold has issued its mea culpa:

Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold Election Systems) admitted in a state hearing Tuesday that the audit logs produced by its tabulation software miss significant events, including the act of someone deleting votes on election day.

The company acknowledged that the problem exists with every version of its tabulation software.

StumbleUpon is a search engine of sorts that works on the "let what you're looking for find you" principle. It takes Google's "I feel lucky" concept to new heights. Instead of typing in what you're searching for, you just click the big "Stumble" button, and the site serves up pages that it thinks you want to see.

From the Guardian:

In a breakthrough that could have huge implications, British and Canadian scientists have found a way of reprogramming skin cells taken from adults, effectively winding the clock back on the cells until they were in an embryonic form.

The work has been hailed as a major step forward by scientists and welcomed by pro-life organisations, who called on researchers to halt other experiments which use stem cells collected from embryos made at IVF clinics.

It doesn't take much for a bank to make me happy. Give me online access, a good interest rate, a bunch of branches, and I'm all good. Heck, lately I'm just thrilled when my chosen banking institutions don't implode and go boom.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how insufficient the typical yearly doctor physical seems for adequately diagnosing diseases, and how modern technology could be used so much more effectively. Interestingly enough, the latest Wired magazine cover story addresses this very issue with a specific focus on the battle against cancer. It's a fascinating read.