Greg In The Desert

• KOB.com – HP to break ground on Rio Rancho center
• Intel feels pain from dropping revenue, WiMAX investment
  This morning, in advance of its official earnings announcement next week, the company released preliminary earnings figures that indicate the situation has gotten worse over the holiday season. It now looks like Intel's revenue came in another billion dollars below the November estimate, or nearly $2 billion below what the company was predicting in October. The $8.2 billion it expects to see represents a 20 percent drop from the prior quarter, and a full 23 percent year-over-year. The same factors that were blamed in the November announcement are fingered in the preliminary earnings report. Gross margins dropped to roughly 55 percent.
• Rio Rancho Police Launch Online Crime Alert And Mapping Service – Albuquerque News Story – KOAT Albuquerque
  The service provides mapped neighborhood crime data in near real-time and is available now.

  The service is free to the public and allows citizens to receive automatic daily, weekly or monthly e-mail alerts if and/or when a crime occurs near a location of their interest such as home, office, or school. Citizens can also review reported crime activity on a map for any location within Rio Rancho boundaries.

Apple sent this email today

We have already made many improvements to MobileMe, but we still have many more to make. To recognize our users’ patience, we are giving every MobileMe subscriber as of today a free 60 day extension. This is in addition to the one month extension most subscribers have already received. We are working very hard to make MobileMe a great service we can all be proud of. We know that MobileMe’s launch has not been our finest hour, and we truly appreciate your patience as we turn this around. Read this article for more details. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2826

The MobileMe Team

Sitemeter has received some unwanted attention this weekend when their tracking code was causing crashing on Internet Explorer 6 and 7. They have fixed the issues according to their weblog.

The problem was related to some work we were doing on the backend system for our upcoming website launch.

We’ve identified and resolved two separate but related issues -

1 – IE Users viewing pages – There was a problem with users who placed their SiteMeter tracking code outside of their HTML Body Tag. Because of the changes we made this created a failure for visitors viewing sites using Internet Explorer 7.

2 – Accessing SiteMeter and Stats – Individuals trying to access or view their SiteMeter stats by clicking on their SiteMeter logo/icons were unable to gain access. This again appears to have affected only individuals using IE7.

At this time both problems have been fixed and our services are fully operational.

For those who removed the SiteMeter code from your pages please be assured that the problem has been resolved and we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.

I also use Sitemeter code on my site but I stopped worrying about IE 6 working with my site a long time ago.

The best Friday iPhone 3G launch story comes from very-simple.com

about 30 seconds after I walked out of the store, I decided to take the iphone out of the box because it was buzzing (most likely with ‘welcome’ texts from AT&T), and the phone slipped out of the box and landed face down on the cobblestone sidewalk of central park south and the screen cracked into about a gazillion pieces. I thought I was going to have a heart attack.

That’s not the best part. Read the rest of the iPhone story at very-simple.com for the happy ending.

Nomen Nescio from RailHead Design. For when you absolutely need to keep your emails private.

What it is:

In short, Nomen Nescio is a simple and easy to use application that allows you to send anonymous email via anonymous Cypherpunk Type I remail servers. With the help of MacGPG, Nomen Nescio encrypts the email message you enter (into Nomen Nescio) with the PGP key of an anonymous remailer of your choice, then the encrypted data is passed to your default email client, ready to send.

Features include:

• Simple, clean, and clear interface.
• No more Terminal or command-line work necessary.
• The entire encryption process is handled within Nomen Nescio — all you have to do is enter your message, then click “Send” like any other email.
• Updates remailers and PGP keys at every launch.
• Displays remailer uptime and latency.
• Compose your message directly in Nomen Nescio.
• Built-in version checking.
• 100% FREE!

What it costs:

Nomen Nescio is 100% FREE!

It was a cold and rainy day in Albuquerque on Sunday. Las Cruces wasn’t much better. Having drove from Arizona the day before, i wasn’t in a mood for another drive. I eventually got my act together and made it to the event by 3 PM. It cost $6 to get in and about $80 in gas to drive there.

Don’t be fooled by the name of the Las Cruces International Airport. It’s a dinky little airport and they were able to completely close it down for this event. They had us park several miles down the highway at the fairgrounds and bussed us to the airport. The area was set up like a fair, with some dubious businesses in the tents. This makes me think this is for real and private space flight will happen for sure.

I missed Armadillo Areospace’s launch of their craft. Despite the 20 mph winds, they were able to launch and control the craft. However on landing it 2 of it’s 3 feet landed off the landing pad and it tipped over. It didn’t explode but was damaged. Carmack and crew were out in the crowd showing off bits and pieces of their rocket. It’s an impressive machine for sure, they are clearly thinking out of the box with their design.

I did get to see XCOR Aerospace fly their rocketplane, which I have on video. It’s a impressive little craft and was flown as if there was no wind. There was lots of wind, the fact that it was blowing parallel with the runway helped.

Starchaser showed off it’s rocked engine. I think it blew up after it was ignited since there was a big boom, but there was no announcement either way.

When I was leaving the event about 5, they only had 2X and 3X t-shirts. Have I mentioned the wind yet, the winds had picked up quite a bit by this time. There’s nothing like 50 mph blowing sand getting in every orifice of your body. I had a handful of sand in my pockets!

I have pictures of the event on Flickr, and will post a video at some point.

I drove by the New Mexico Space Port a few years ago, it was a sign with a dirt field behind it. Apparently they are going to launch their first rocket into space next year. I will have to check it out again.

The first launch from New Mexico’s Southwest Regional Spaceport is on — and set for March 27, according to Gov. Bill Richardson. Richardson’s office announced Tuesday that UP Aerospace, of Connecticut, will launch its SpaceLoft rocket on a sub-orbital flight from the New Mexico Spaceport on that date. The flight will carry seven experimental and commercial payloads for a variety of scholastic and business entities and, after traveling into space, the rocket and its payloads will land in the downrange area of the Spaceport, Richardson’s office announced.

Everyone expected the iTunes phone to be released today, but it looks like Apple isn’t going to play.

In the first five minutes of the event, Motorola%u2019s Ed Zander read a statement from Apple stating that the iTunes phones will not be unveiled today, but instead will be unveiled at a separate music event within the next 66 days, and shipped this quarter. %u201CWe%u2019re not going to launch the iTunes photo today,%u201D the statement read. %u201CSteve is not going to jump out of a cake.%u201D

66 days? What the heck does that mean? But I would like to see Steve Jobs jump out of a cake! Hey, at least Engadget has this picture.

I support a few PCs at work that are shared among many users. I came in yesterday and was told one of them didn’t work. Internet Exploder pops up lots of windows when launched and Outlook doesn’t launch properly. I knew what it was. I ran AdAware and found 5 different Spyware programs running on the system. Not to mention the gazillion of cookies, support files, folder and registry entries (something like 600 total). Only took and hour to run the scan.

Once all that was removed it all worked fine. What a pain in the arse.