Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Fresno, CA Ranked #1 "Most Unemployed" City by U-Cubed

Eight California cities made the U-Cubed March Madness Unemployment brackets, but Fresno, CA ranked #1 "Most Unemployed" City with an unemployment rate of (17.2).

From the U-Cubed website:

As predicted, there were an estimated 28.4 million “upsets” in UCubed’s “Marching to Madness” unemployment bracket tournament. Out of the top 64 metropolitan areas, the city of Fresno, CA, recorded the highest unemployment rating with a whopping 17.2 percent! Las Vegas, NV, followed with 14.9 percent.

“It makes you wonder how policy makers can simply turn a blind eye,” said UCubed Executive Director Rick Sloan. “There are millions of Americans in need of full-time work, yet nothing has been done to create jobs. The pleas of the jobless have gone unanswered.

“Washington’s indifference in the midst of this historic national emergency is appalling.”

UCubed created the “Marching to Madness” unemployment brackets in an effort to draw attention to the national jobs crisis. For a complete look at how your city stacked up, click here.

Show your support for the unemployed by clicking “Like” on UCubed’s page on Facebook.

San Diego made it into the "Somber Sixteen" bracket. It was one of eight cities in the "Golden State" to rate the dubious distinction among the Nation's worst cities to find employment. Aside from San Diego (10.3) and Fresno, the other 6 California towns were: San Francisco (9.2), Sacramento (12.6), San Jose (10.8), Riverside (14.3), Los Angeles (13.1) and Bakersfield (12.2). [All but Bakersfield made the "Somber Sixteen" roster level] California is way above the national unemployment rate and you can see - many of the largest cities have unemployment rates soaring far above the current (12.7) UE rate for our state. In fact, among the 14 areas with jobless rates of at least 15% , 12 were located in California.

The U-Cubed bracket has many other eye opening unemployment facts that paint a grim picture for the "Jobless Recovery" our so called "Leaders" in Washington keep avoiding and refuse to address. Be sure and check out who placed in the: Irate Eight, Fed-Up Four and Terrible Two brackets.

Seems that the only economies and human suffering Washington cares enough about to do anything at all are in the middle east and NOT here in the USA.



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Monday, March 21, 2011

Dancing With The Stars Season 12: Kirstie Alley Over Hot Kendra Wilkinson

Kendra Wilkinson made her debut on Dancing With The Stars Season 12, but even with her great legs and moves, wasn't hot enough to earn the points needed to overcome her competitor, the rapper Romeo.

And while some wondered if 60 year old Kirstie Alley (in photo) was good enough to even dance on Dancing With The Stars, they're applauding now, because from all online accounts, she was terrific. Even hotter than any of Hugh Hefner's playmates, at least in dancing acumen.

Alley lit up Twitter:


chemicallycalm‎ I'm surprised, Kirstie Alley did a really good job.
Twitter - 1 minute ago

MikelsMindsEye‎ Kirstie Alley's 60??? I need to cut her a little slack...she looks great. #DWTS

ksblack‎ Still processing Wendy Williams' performance on DWTS. Kirstie Alley was HOT!
Twitter - seconds ago


Hef was in the audience, and alongside former Colts Wide Receiver and Kendra's husband, Hank Bassett, was cheering for Wilkinson. And it looked, for a while, as if she would light up the scoreboard as well as the television screen, but a few missteps with her partner Louis Van Amstel, led the judges to give them all sixes for a total of 18 points.

"Stars" judge Len Goodman had the sound bite of the show when he told Kendra, "You had my attention, if not always for the right reasons." The judges, Ann Inaba, Bruno Tonioli, and Goodman, all commented on Wilkinson's technical failings. In all it was enough to put her a point behind Romeo.

With his sexy partner Chelsie Hightower, who was back for the fifth time on "Dancing," Romeo Miller, aka Lil' Romeo, also the son of rapper Master P, burned up the floor, producing a dance that was part lovemaking, part romantic, and all fun. The two were so energetic they caused Tonioli to gush that he was "moving with" them all over, and leaned right into Goodman in the process. For their efforts, and minus some issues with footwork, they earned a 19.

But Kirstie Alley was the surprise. The actress, who said she "moved like a white girl" in the preview segment, showed she learned a thing to three, and with her partner Maksim Chmerkovskiy, scored a 23, just behind Ralph ("The Karate Kid") Macchio, who with his dancing mate Karina Smirnoff, turned in the evenings' best performance: a 24 out of 30.

All dancers survive - for now. The eliminations start March 29th.

A New Zennie62 Blog Under Construction

A new Zennie62 blog is under construction, and about 60 percent complete, but well enough along the way to show you and ask you to check it out.

It's called Zennie62Blog.com and you can see it here: http://zennie62blog.com . It reflects a switch from Blogger to Wordpress for this flagship blog of the 96 blogs in the network, and also a switch from "free" to a paid hosted server environment.

I had the idea for a while, but Executive Editor Nikky Raney, who prefers Blogger, was understandably resistant. But after Google focused more on "original content" as a factor in Google News submissions, and because we were producing original content, and Google wasn't favoring Blogger blogs for Google News (even though Zennie62.com was on it) I started to think about a switch.

Also, I'd taken the Zennie62.com blog as far as it could go in template changes on the Blogger platform. The simple fact is Google has not installed a full permalink system on Blogger, so what we get are URLs that don't have all of the words in a blog title, if the title is longer than four words. So you have to do a "workaround" just to deal with that problem.

It's a huge problem because it means that one word which may cause you to get more traffic because it's in your URL is left out of Blogger's permalink design.

That can translate into thousands of dollars of lost potential ad revenue. Moreover, Wordpress does not have that problem; I think its something Google does deliberately to counter the wave of massive impact millions of well-optimized Blogger blogs would have on the media climate today.

There's a reason even Matt Cutts, Google's Engineering "public face" switched from Blogger to Wordpress a few years ago. I should have taken Matt's cue and did it then, but I was stubbornly married to the idea that I could push my Blogger blogs to new levels of performance. I did that, but now and with what I've learned, I want to apply that to this new, even more powerful blog under development.

Making this switch is not easy, but it's worth it. I feel like I'm building the new Enterprise.

It means learning a new programming language, PhP, "on the go." It means locating a good hosting service, finding the appropriate design theme, then one-by-one, installing the files from that theme into the server. It means re-coding some files to meet certain needs, particularly in the area of Google AdSense ads. It means working on a strategy to transfer the remaining blogs posts, after already moving over 7,000 posts to the new blog.

And it means working on a system to transfer links and URLs to the new blog so that a search allows a reader to come to the new blog, rather than the old one.

The Zennie62 Blogger blog will be used as "Zennie2005.blogspot.com" and a place for YouTube video placement and for occasional blog posts pointing to activities at Zennie62Blog. Eventually, "Zennie62.com" will point at the new blog, and be the "go to URL" for it. But I prefer to keep "Zennie62Blog" for SEO purposes.

The process of making the new blog from scratch has been exciting; I love the challenge of building new platforms.

First, Wordpress just may be the most powerful blog platform on the planet today (which is old news to some of you). Second, Google seems to have deliberately avoided making a Blogger that completes with Wordpress in the area of SEO. Even before my focus on it, the Zennie62Blog.com platform started to be listed on Google and generate comments for existing blog posts! Third, the new Zennie62Blog.com is already Google News ready, as I have found plugins specifically for that purpose, and installed them.

Zennie62Blog.com will be positioned to compete with news blogs from PerezHilton.com to The Huffington Post and ProFootballTalk as well as Red State and the great liberal blogs at Banter Media. While that may seem like a tall order to some, let me inform you we have over 9,000 blog posts going back to 2005. We also have the 96 Blogger blogs to use to "point" at the new blog - those blogs will remain and with their own unique content.

We have the over 2,000 videos on what will be called the Zennie.tv video network. And we have our social media and broadcasting base, including what stands at almost 30,000 Twitter Followers, with an objective of 1 million. That's the perfect foundation from which to build this new blog and explains why I assert we're in a great place to catch those blogs.

Finally, as Old Media continues to prove it's not capable of succeeding in the digital space, this is the best time to attack. To strike while the iron is hot. Blogs will rule media in the 21st Century, and with over 70,000 blogs made each day as of this writing, that forecast is becoming all the more true each day.

Stay tuned.

AT&T Buys T-Mobile

Mashable.com reports that AT&T has bought T-Mobile for $39 billion.

PC Magazine

For T-Mobile customers (like myself) this could be a good thing, because AT&T has the iPhone as well as many other features that T-Mobile does not currently have. Many T-Mobile customers that have questions regarding this change, and it seems so strange that since T-Mobile is putting out commercials about 4G that it is about to be bought out by AT&T.

PC Magazine reports that this could be a huge in for AT&T - because AT&T would become the nation's largest carrier and get better coverage, 34 million more customers and an opponent is eliminated.

It also reports that T-Mobile's owner has been struggling and T-Mobile has been in the fourth place spot as a carrier.

This is unfortunate for T-Mobile employees who will be facing major lay offs.

The lack of choices will be unfortunate for the consumers because there will be less to choose from and not as much flexibility.

For those with questions read the PC Magazine post that answers questions for the specific consumers of T-Mobile and AT&T by clicking here.

Saturday, March 19, 2011

We Need Beer Money Song By 69 Degrees At Powell St. BART, San Francisco



Two men who were sitting on the floor in the lobby of the BART Powell Street Station and singing this really catchy tune called "We Need Beer Money," so I paid them and made this video.

Moreover, I will share a percentage of any money made from this video with the men who make up 69 Degrees. They deserve it!

They said that they were also going to play in front of AT&T Park before the SF Giants Baseball games this season, be on the look out for them.

The one problem is the Facebook page they mention is such that it's hard to identify who they are. But that should work itself out.

And on that idea train, BART should have some kind of program to help promote the street singers and performers who are very talented people just trying to make ends meet. They add to the color and culutre of the Bay Area Rapid Transit System.

Mac Book Pro And iPad 2 Line: A Day At Apple Store San Francisco

Mac Book Pro And iPad Line: A Day At Apple Store San Francisco. This started as a visit to check on an iPad 2 for my Mom (who still has to be talked into the idea of having on, but it will be good for her to use it). As I approached the Apple Store on Stockton in San Francisco's Union Square, I noticed (couldn't miss) a line of people who were sitting on lawn chairs. They were waiting to buy iPad 2 tablet computers...at 9 AM the next morning.

(That would be this Saturday morning at 9 AM.)

While at the Apple Store, I learned from an Apple representative (who didn't want their name used) that the people first in the line, all elderly and Asian, had waited since 12 noon that day (in the rain) and were buying the iPads for export and "do this regularly." That's the Apple person's statement.

(I went over to talk with them but they all said they couldn't speak English. Or they managed enough English to tell me they couldn't speak English. They were friendly enough, but also bundled, a little cold, and a lot tired.)

While looking at the iPad 2, I inquired if I could upgrade my MacBook I bought last fall after an emergency. After a good talk, and to my surprise, the Apple Store people helped me. I was able to upgrade my MacBook. That was really great because I was trapped in a situation where I had to buy the 2010 MacBook just before the upgrade. Thanks Apple! You guys rock!

Mac Book Pro And iPad 2 Line: A Day At Apple Store San Francisco



Mac Book Pro And iPad Line: A Day At Apple Store San Francisco? Yes. Read on...

This started as a simple visit to check on an iPad 2 for my Mom (who still has to be talked into the idea of having on, but it will be good for her to use it).

As I approached the Apple Store on Stockton in San Francisco's Union Square, I noticed (couldn't miss) a line of people who were sitting on lawn chairs. They were waiting to buy iPad 2 tablet computers...at 9 AM the next morning.

(That would be this Saturday morning at 9 AM.)

While at the Apple Store, I learned from an Apple representative (who didn't want their name used) that the people first in the line, all elderly and Asian, had waited since 12 noon that day (in the rain) and were buying the iPads for export and "do this regularly." That's the Apple person's statement.

(I went over to talk with them but they all said they couldn't speak English. Or they managed enough English to tell me they couldn't speak English. They were friendly enough, but also bundled, a little cold, and a lot tired.)

While looking at the iPad 2, I inquired if I could upgrade my MacBook I bought last fall after an emergency. After a good talk, and to my surprise, the Apple Store people helped me. I was able to upgrade my MacBook.

That was really great because I was trapped in a situation where I had to buy the 2010 MacBook just before the upgrade. Thanks Apple! You guys rock! Thanks to store manager Angela, and assistants Ricado and Nicholas, I now don't feel like I was caught at the hind in of Apple tech.

The new Mac Book Pro 13 is, by my estimation, one-third faster for video compression compared to my 2010 Mac Book Pro. This video made with my Flip Video Ultra HD Camcorder would normally take about 30 minutes to compress - this did it in 20 minutes.

Overall, it's faster to respond, the speakers are a bit louder when playing Come Together by The Beatles, and it has a few treasures, like Thunderbolt and the HD FaceTime Camera, I've yet to try.

Stay tuned.