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Figured as much, maybe after CA legalizes it…

Predicted yesterday, official today.

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As the entire world digests the news (with new sponsor Pepto Bismol’s help) that six-time champ Takeru Kobayashi may not participate in the 2010 Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest, we review a hot dog competition occurring in our very own neighborhood.  Outside of SoDo, the Pike/Pine Corridor appears to have the highest hot dog vendor density in Seattle.  We learned that this has created tensions among some.

Successful dog vendors on the Hill have been either late night stands and/or aspire to higher end, more gourmet status.  This weekend, there will be a day time hot dog cart operating at Cal Anderson called Hot Dogs in Seattle.  We spoke to Vladislav Broyzer, the owner of Hot Dogs in Seattle, who confirmed that he will begin selling the dogs this Saturday around lunch time.  Broyzner will sell New York sourced Sabrett dogs.  Vegetarians/vegans will have tofu and Boca dogs to choose from.  He worries more about whether the weather breaks 70 degrees in the Park, rather than competition from neighboring hot dog vendors.

Of all of the the purveyors that we spoke with, the greatest enmity exists between late night stand Comet Dogs and Monster Dogs.  Earlier this year, Comet Dogs began operating its own dog stand at the Northwest corner of 10th and Pike displacing Monster Dogs from a spot they had occupied for years.  In response, Shawna Morrison, Monster Dog's owner told CHS  that Monster doubled up (at the Northeast and Southwest corners) of 10th & Pike hoping to drive Comet Dogs out of business.  Though Comet Dogs adopted similar signage, Morrison insists that Monster's dogs are "bigger and better".

Javier Lara has not allowed a change in location to alter his optimism.  His hot dog stand was originally located in front of Neighbors.  He had been so successful at that location that he had hoped to open his own restaurant at Broadway and Harrison (the space that Crossroads recently expanded to).  You will now find him and his bling laden, LCD-menu displaying stand at the Shell Station on the Northwest corner of Pike and Broadway.  And, he continues to do well enough at the new location to have plans to open a restaurant one day.  

Rounding out the late night hot dog stands is the stand in front of Chop Suey at Madison and 14th .  This stand carries a limited selection of sausage, brats and links but is reputed to be the cleanest.  Set further apart from the Pike/Pine corridor than its competition and located on an incline, this stand continues to draw a crowd.

While relations between late night stands can be frosty at times, hot dog shops appear to have more congenial relations with each other.  Unicorn is the newest hot dog shop on the Hill, having just opened in January 2010 at 1118 East Pike.  It has specialized in the corn dog, since its debut.  CHS Sponsor Po Dog, brought the concept of high end hot dogs to Capitol Hill (topping out at $6.85 per dog) at 1009 East Union, and recently introduced a corn dog of its own at $5.25.  

We asked Adam Heimstadt, one of Unicorn's co-owners for a comment on Po Dog's move.  "it doesnt bother me at all , what we do I feel is very different from the rest of the other tube steak/street meat slingers".  Similarly, Laura Olsen, Po Dog's owner seemed unconcerned with the competition:  "As for additional hot dog purveyors? Who doesn't love a sausagefest! The wiener is America's meat and I say the more the merrier!" 

The most established hot dog shop on the Hill (arguably on First Hill) is Cyber-Dogs Internet Cafe.  Its name alone may signal its vintage, having been established in 2002 by laid off software engineer, Tatiana ’Tania’ Harrison.  Cyber-Dogs is nestled in a very unique location (in a former closet of the Washington State Convention Center) at 909 Pike Street and serves exclusively vegetarian/vegan dogs.  It draws its customers from a different pool than other hot dog vendors on the Hill, since she is located on the border between Downtown Seattle and Capitol Hill – and literally in the Convention Center.

 Hot Dog purveyors on the Hill seem to believe in friendly competition for the most part with the notable exception of the Hatfield/McCoy feud happening between Monster Dogs and Comet Dogs.  Unlike in boxing, going to their respective corners has failed to pacify the pugilists. 

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Continue reading Microsoft announces InstaLoad battery technology: never insert a battery the wrong way again

Microsoft announces InstaLoad battery technology: never insert a battery the wrong way again originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 01 Jul 2010 14:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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MOUNTAIN VIEW — Intel CTO Justin Rattner took the stage at Intel's annual Research Day to host what was something of a launch party for Intel's new Interaction and Experience Research Lab—essentially a place to put all of the anthropologists and ethnographers that the company has been hiring over the past decade, and also a very high-profile validation of the value that the chipmaker places on the work of these folks.

Rattner also took up the topic of Atom vs. Xeon for cloud computing in a later Q&A session, and his response to my question of what he thought about SeaMicro’s 512-Atom server might surprise you.

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Researchers work to replicate bacterial communication, add a bit of chaos to transmissions originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 01 Jul 2010 08:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Once such approach brought to my attention recently can be found on They Make Apps. Instead of the distorted text strings that typify most modern CAPTCHAs (above), the sign up form on They Make Apps uses a slider that asks people to: “show us your human side; slide the cursor to the end of the line to create your account.” Moving the slider to the right completely submits the form and triggers error validation just like a standard Submit button would.

I don't have any data that suggests this implementation impacts conversion rates (up or down). It doesn't seem to cover accessibility issues since it requires a mouse or drag gesture to work (no keyboard support). And at large scale, it won't keep spammers out effectively. CAPTCHA busting farms already employ human labor to crack distorted text CAPTCHAs at incredibly cheap rates (moving a slider would be even faster & easier) and it's likely trivial to develop a script that will adjust the slider automatically to submit the form. But it is still nice to see people exploring different approaches.

Tags: forms, guidelines, usability, UI components, innovative UIs

Shared by Corey

Nice though a dual sided glass container could do the same thing… seeing as how I don’t have either… Maybe I should consider this since I need to eat breakfast more often.

We are quite fond of our travel mugs; we carry our favorite ultra-tight sealed mug to the coffee shop, on day trips, and lots of other places. This Fresh Traveler container is built along similar lines, but it’s designed to carry your lunch or breakfast, not your coffee.

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The gel or thin film contains a peptide known as MSH, or melanocyte-stimulating hormone. Previous experiments, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that MSH encourages bone regeneration.

Bone and teeth are fairly similar, so the French scientists reasoned that if the MSH were applied to teeth, it should help healing as well.

To test their theory, the French scientists applied either a film or gel, both of which contained MSH, to cavity-filled mice teeth. After about one month, the cavities had disappeared, said Benkirane-Jessel.

Tags: medicine

It hasn’t gotten quite the attention of the iPhone 4′s antenna problems or its proximity sensor troubles, but iOS 4 has caused some heartbreak for corporate users who connect to Exchange servers — checking mail or syncing contact and calendars can stall out interminably, with no option but to restart and try again. We’ve definitely had this problem ourselves, but happily Apple’s right on the case with this one — iOS 4 users who need to get their Exchange on can download an updated configuration file that seems to make things better. The new settings don’t seem to do much other than increase iOS 4′s idle timeout, but if it works, it works — and in our limited testing things appear to be going swimmingly. Okay, that’s one — now let’s polish up the rest, shall we?

[Thanks, Paul]

Apple patches iOS 4 Exchange issue originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 30 Jun 2010 20:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mozilla has submitted an app called Firefox Home for approval. While it’s not the native Firefox web browser, it is an app that lets you easily move your Firefox browsing history, bookmarks, and open tabs to the iPhone. You can then either open these within the app or with mobile Safari.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: no way Apple accepts a Firefox app. But actually, I’m pretty sure they will.

Again, this app is not a new web browser, it’s just a tool for moving your data from your desktop to the phone. The browser that is built-in to the app is a WebKit-based one built with the tools Apple includes in the SDK. On its FAQ page, Mozilla says the following about Firefox for the iPhone:

Does this mean Firefox will be available on the iPhone?
No. We do not have plans to ship the Firefox browser for the iPhone. Due to constraints with the OS environment and distribution, we cannot provide users Firefox for the iPhone.

Apple did allow Opera to put its browser on the iPhone to the surprise of some. But there’s some talk that the only reason Apple did that as a way to quiet critics — because they knew the app wasn’t that great. After an initial surge in downloads, you don’t hear too much about it anymore. Mozilla, which is the world second most popular browser (well ahead of Safari), might be a different story. And Mozilla apparently knows it.

This app also isn’t Firefox Sync. Sync is a two way syncing of information between Firefox browsers on different machines. Firefox Home is a one-way push to the iPhone. “We only sync changes since the last update for bookmarks and open tabs. And history is limited to about 2000 items. And there is no auto-sync. The median disk space used by Sync users is about 2-3 MB total for all of their Sync data and Home only has a subset of that.,” Mozilla says.

Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler seems worried that Apple may not approve the app. But as long as it’s not using any undocumented APIs, I can’t see a reason why Apple would reject it — at least not without a lot of outrage, once again. And the app looks good, it should be very useful to users of Firefox.

Senate support for the far-reaching bill remained in flux, however. The Senate was forced to delay its vote to mid-July, denying President Barack Obama a victory before Independence Day. Democrats struggled to secure the votes of a handful of Republican senators even after meeting their demands and backing down on a $19 billion tax on big banks and hedge funds.

The legislation, swelling to more than 2,000 pages, would rewrite the nation’s regulatory books. Simple supermarket purchases and exotic derivatives trades would be subject to new laws. And the entire financial system would be placed on a risk watch in hopes of thwarting the next threat of a financial crisis.

Obama hailed the vote as “a victory for every American who has been affected by the recklessness and irresponsibility that led to the loss of millions of jobs and trillions in wealth.”

The 237-192 House tally broke largely along party lines but attracted more support than in December when no Republicans voted for the House version of the bill. The new legislation combines the House bill with one passed by the Senate last month.

“Today, I rise with a clear message that the party is over,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared. “No longer again will recklessness on Wall Street cause joblessness on Main Street. No longer will the risky behavior of the few threaten the financial stability of our families, our businesses and our economy as a whole.”

Republicans portrayed the bill as a vast overreach of government power that would do little to prevent future bailouts of failing financial institutions. They complained that it failed to place tighter restrictions on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage giants forced into huge federal bailouts after their questionable lending helped trigger the housing and economic meltdowns.

“This legislation is a clear attack on capital formation in America,” said Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, the second-ranking House Republican. “It purports to prevent the next financial crisis, but it does so by vastly expanding the power of the same regulators who failed to stop the last one.”

Only three Republicans voted for the bill: Joseph Cao of Louisiana, Mike Castle of Delaware and Walter Jones of North Carolina. Nineteen Democrats voted against it, eight fewer than in December.

As predictable as the House vote may have been, the Senate was a study in unpredictability.

House and Senate negotiators were forced to reconvene Tuesday to remove a $19 billion tax on large banks and hedge funds, hoping to overcome objections from Sens. Scott Brown, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, all Republicans who voted for the Senate version last month.

Democrats inserted the tax late last week as they assembled a combined House-Senate bill, catching big banks by surprise. Brown was the first to complain and threatened to vote against the bill if the tax remained in the final measure.

Desperate to hold at least 60 votes to beat back procedural hurdles, House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd and Obama administration officials scrambled to drop the tax and devise another means of financing the bill’s cost.

In the end, House and Senate negotiators, voting along party lines, agreed to pay for the bill with $11 billion generated by ending the unpopular Troubled Asset Relief Program – the $700 billion bank bailout created in the fall of 2008 at the height of the financial scare.

They also agreed to increase premium rates paid by commercial banks to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to insure bank deposits. The increase would not affect banks with assets under $10 billion.

On Wednesday, Collins issued a statement saying she was now inclined to vote for the bill.

But Brown remained uncommitted, saying he needed Congress’ weeklong July 4 recess to examine the details of the bill. He did credit Dodd for “thinking outside the box” in finding an alternative.

Snowe late Wednesday said she, too, wanted to review the bill, but said that the last-minute change put the bill “in a much better position.”

The American Bankers Association denounced the bill, and its president and CEO, Edward Yingling, vowed to continue to make the industry’s case to the Senate.

“Many small banks are telling us they will simply have to sell out to larger institutions that have the staff to deal with the massive volume of new reports and rules,” Yingling said in a statement.

The administration and House and Senate lawmakers have worked for more than a year to forge a bill. It has prompted a backlash from the financial industry and a populist cry from Congress to punish banks for the freewheeling practices that contributed to the 2008 meltdown.

The easy margin of victory in the House belied Frank's need to navigate the bill through the competing interests of New Yorkers, moderates and liberals. Frank, who will share the bill's official title with Dodd, credited Pelosi and the Democratic leadership for being "therapists, counselors, advisers – muscle when I needed it."

The legislation creates a new federal agency to police consumer lending, it sets up a warning system for financial risks, forces failing firms to liquidate and maps new rules for instruments that have been largely uncontrolled.

The legislation requires bank holding companies to spin off their derivatives business into self-funded subsidiaries. Banks would be allowed to keep less risky derivatives operations.

It sets new standards for what banks must keep in reserve to protect against losses, though lobbyists carved out a grandfather exception for banks with assets of less than $15 billion.

Commercial banks would not be permitted to trade in speculative investments, but they could invest no more than 3 percent of their capital in hedge funds and private equity funds.

At a consumer level, lenders would have to disclose more information and require proof that borrowers have the ability to pay off their mortgages. Even retail purchases would be affected – merchants could end up paying lower fees to banks for debit card purchases by their customers.

You didn’t think the folks at iFixit would simply teardown the iPhone 4 and call it a day, did you? They’ve now gone the extra mile and done a detailed teardown of the iPhone 4′s gyroscope with a little help from Chipworks. That’s of course a MEMS (or microelectromechanical system) gyroscope and, according to Chipworks, nearly identical to an off-the-shelf STMicroelectronics L3G4200D gyroscope, which is actually what they used for the teardown. What’s more, they also went even further and put another gyroscope (not used in the iPhone 4) under an electron microscope just to illustrate how incredibly complex and minute the structure of MEMS gyroscopes are. Head on past the break for a glimpse of that, and hit up the link below for the complete teardown.

Continue reading iFixit and Chipworks teardown the iPhone 4′s gyroscope

iFixit and Chipworks teardown the iPhone 4′s gyroscope originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 30 Jun 2010 11:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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As you may have noticed from the trickle of posts the past few weeks, my work life has me very busy right now. In the over ten years I have been running my computer consulting business, this has been the busiest summer ever. I’m certainly not going to complain because, when one works for themselves, busy is a good thing. It’s just very unusual because summer is usually my slowest time so I find myself wholly unprepared for it.

That said, when I find myself overwhelmed, I find that the most beneficial thing I can do to stay on top of things is to reduce my normal task system to one that has low barrier to action, less items, and tremendous focus. It also has to be portable without adding to my existing daily arsenal of items. Lately, three iPhone applications have been fitting that bill and helping me to achieve modest goals.

One Thing Today — This is the recently released iPhone version of a daily goal manager, the desktop version of which I have featured here before. Here, for each day, I put the one goal or project that has my attention. This is for more of a high level thing like “Writing” or “Capture and Clear”. Just something to boot my brain into the proper mode for the day ahead. It’s simple but I find it very effective.

Now Do This (iTunes Link) — This is where I put the three to five things I wish to accomplish for the day. Once listed, the app will display them in large type on the screen in the order listed one task at a time. Swipe a checkmark on the screen to mark the task complete or a circle to send it to the bottom of the list. This really helps me to stay on task and I find it best to just launch this app and keep it launched so I see what I should be doing next whenever I unlock the phone.

Tenplustwo — This is a simple timer built around the (10+2)*5 procrastination hack invented my Merlin Mann. The idea is to alternate 10 minutes of work with 2 minutes of play thus gaming yourself into getting 50 minutes of work done. When I need a little help getting through that list, this is how I do it.