This iPhone Wordpress theme looks tasty from the thumbnail view. The up close and personal view from this test page…eh, not so good in my opinion. Though if you know your way around CSS then you could fix up the oddities here like the sidebar text formatting and the gray text on black background for lists.

WPThemesfree.com has some nice themes available, give them a shot.

So there I was, minding my own business, swinging by Musings of the Chatty DM this evening to see what’s happening in the RPG world and hear about his new Twitter feed.

Sidebar: This is not your run of the mill, vanilla flavored Twitter channel, folks. It’s a mini-RPG via tweets. As Chatty says ‘the mind explodes at the possibilities’. This is a great idea!

Back to the story - So I’m at Chattydm.net and low and behold, my eyes about popped when I saw what his GOOG advert banner was displaying under his blog’s title banner. Talk about inappropriate!

This would appear to be the new and improved, touchy feely Chatty, the one that is frilly and delicious like cotton candy? I guess if you peer closely enough it looks like the advert has two women in a hot tub, that’s somewhat redeeming I guess.

   (clicky)

But my faith in the old man was soon restored as I scrolled down and saw this scaly, disgusting dragon-like creature from the underworld that we probably would all love to have as a pet. Now this is what I’m looking for in an RPG site’s adverts! More like that Chatty!

  (clicky)

So I could make a claim that GOOG’s excellent analysis of his fine site has determined that the most appropriate adverts would be those that are pretty, fluffy and come from the Rainbow Brite world for little girls. Or is it dynamically updating the advert on a per user basis and is truly a reflection on me and what GOOG thinks of my personality and web searching & purchasing traits?

Hmmm. I’d like to think it’s Chatty, not me. Not that there’s anything wrong with that…

United Airlines lost more than 75% of its value yesterday, erasing $1.2 Billion. This was due to an error in Google’s automated news gathering process that mines the newspapers of the world for breaking news or interesting stories.

It turns out it picked up on a 6 year old story from the Florida Sun-Sentinel about UAL filing for bankruptcy, and in turn GOOG made the story available to Bloomberg financial news and from there the shit hit the fan on Wall Street. All the while no one actually read through the story to validate that it was new and relevant.

Sounds like a bug in the news aggregator and bunch of idiots pushing the ‘I Believe Button’ when they kept picking up on the news and circulating it as new news, trusting in GOOG’s ability. A lot of folks are at fault here and incidents like this are not excusable, especially by a service that is expected to have higher quality standards than this (referring to both Google and Bloomberg). I smell a lawsuit acoming in 3, 2, ….

Read the full story: "United’s share slide: A comedy of errors"

I guess now we know why GOOG’s stock dropped nearly 5.5% today for it’s lowest level since March and nearly 10% in value in just the last five days. Can you say "here come the lawyers"?

From the Wall Street Journal today:

The Justice Department has quietly hired one of the nation’s best-known litigators, former Walt Disney Co. vice chairman Sanford Litvack, for a possible antitrust challenge to Google Inc.’s growing power in advertising.

Mr. Litvack’s hiring is the strongest signal yet that the U.S. is preparing to take court action against Google and its search-advertising deal with Yahoo Inc. The two companies combined would account for more than 80% of U.S. online-search ads.

In other GOOG news:

- Big-money advertisers opposed to Google-Yahoo deal
- Google browser aided by Microsoft antitrust limits
- Google at 20: Top Five Predictions
- Happy 10 year googly anniversary!

I meant to post about this last week, but better late than never…

Kristin Armstrong of the USA won the Women’s Individual Time Trial in Road Cycling at the 2008 Olympics.

She did it in large part by preparing like everyone else, but unlike everyone else she traveled to the site in advance, went through the course one time while using her husband’s GPS. When she returned to her home in Utah, Kristin uploaded the lat/long results from the GPS unit to Google Maps and found a local route that was similar to the one to be used in the Olympics.

So she was able to practice, practice, practice on a road route that mimicked what she’d have to endure for the real thing?

Is it cheating? No!

But I guarantee you that next time either everyone will be doing this or the IOC will not announce the official route until the games are going to begin so that everyone has an opportunity to compete on an equal playing field.

Kudos to Kristin for using her noodle, not just her brawn, to win the race.