DoomBook

Borders has been having trouble paying the bills lately but now it’s official. They’ve filed chapter 11.

Chapter 11 itself isn’t so bad. Skirting a bit of debt obligation has kept quite a few corps from becoming corpses in the past few years (yes, we’re looking at you GM).

But a big box book seller? Will restructuring their debt obligations allow them to regain profitability? Unless they seriously change and tighten up their sales effort around profitable lines of business, probably not.

Writing’s something that happens in the moment, based on your perspective and what you see around you. Stepping out of our hotel in Atlantic City and turning right changed my view of the area a bit.

Cutting just a bit over it was like wandering into a somewhat abandoned inner city. Where the commercial area is still holding up somewhat the real-estate downtown hasn’t. Example One: the area we had to go through to get over to the boardwalk on a trek out to find food.

We took a wrong turn on Atlantic Ave...

Apparently, you’re not supposed to ever leave the casino. And it’s possible the area’s had a hand in making sure you won’t want to.

Housing in the area, what’s left of it, looks like it’s been left-over from the city’s ramshackle beginnings. Functional brick houses that’re still half standing (think row houses with every second house knocked down) soldier on out at the end of the boardwalk.

Quite a bit of the old housing’s been flattened to make way for the next big thing that might never be coming. There’s a huge glass structure, mostly finished, that might never get its last bit of funding to come online. Rows of new-ish condo housing has gone up but still has the marks of being unfinished, solitary marble countertops standing like sentinels on a front lawn.

So what’s all this lead up to? No idea. It might be nothing, Atlantic City not exactly being a crossroads. A bit of a slump and the US populace not wanting to move as far for entertainment. Or it might be a sign of consolidation to more central areas in the future to come.

Not even a sign that asks you to keep out anymore

Finally Back on the Boardwalk

After reading about the impending demise of Atlantic City I’m mildly surprised to find myself there. The Boardwalk appears alive and well in spite of officials pronouncing it DOA on the radio.

Not being much of a gambler, ending up in a boardwalk devoted mostly to pumping coinage into slots is a bit of a surprise. Except they’re not coin slots anymore, but plastic debit card swipeys, which seems like a rather impersonal way to be parted from your cash. You don’t even get to hold it that one last time before the dealer carries it away.

So, Atlantic City… the place itself seems lively for a Saturday during the down season, if not overly full. Apparently people are coming out for some spend after a few years of spend-thrift behavior induced by higher credit limits and the impending doom of layoffs.

Maybe it’s not usually like this, but half the place seems to be overtaken by an IT frat. Slightly doofy looking young guys wandering around in an odd, clashing array of semi-formal looking dazzled took me by surprise. That’s something you don’t even see at the trades these days.

Probably just a coincidence.

It’s no New York. There’re a hell of a lot more ways to loose money; and, unless you’re a casino, not a whole lot of ways to make it. It’s an area of all tourists instead of just the obvious ones. Not a bad place to throw a convention, but I think I’ll be sticking to haunts up in Montreal for the perennial vacation.

Another layer of dust falling down on these old websites. Happy New Years all, hope everyone reading this is doing okay.

Since I’m posting today I figured I’d throw a plug in for Loretta’s photo studio in Avon, CT. She’s over on the Avon/Simsbury line at Frost Photography.

So if you’re looking for a portrait photographer, look no further!

So I was looking around for a quick and dirty utility to create a USB pendrive for me. Or maybe a pendrive with a few utilities onboard.

As it turns out, both needs are met pretty readily by Pen Drive Linux. It’s a slick little app that’ll format a pen drive for you then install any of a number of distributions or utility isos directly to the drive, taking the tedium out of creating your own USB utility drive.

If you’re using Windows and want to give it a whirl, check in over at pendrivelinux.

Usually when you’re looking to upgrade your software and you can’t get the update patch it’s due to outdated hardware of some sort. We accept this and move on.

But today from a Wired article I found the first instance in recent memory of an upgrade being denied for a phone because it was too functional.

From the article, “However, the phone is being ruled out because it has five buttons rather than the three buttons mandated for all Windows Phone 7 Series devices.” And that’s direct from MS’s PR flac department.

Read more on why you don’t want to pick up a Windows Mobile phone right here.

Because I really hate posting files in the WP format I’m tossing Villa-Straylight back online for it’s original purpose of posting literature. It should work nicely alongside Doombook.

You can find the first few posts over at http://villa-straylight.net.

Really. I was mildly surprised.

While looking over the latest release low-end laptops I kept running across “Celeron 900″ laptops. Apparently the Celeron 900 is a model designation and not simply a 900mhz Celeron.

Which is a more confusing distinction than one might at first assume. The 900mhz Celerons are still loitering around the marketplace in spots.

So check to make sure that what you’re looking at is this Celeron 900 and not the 900mhz Celeron.

Wow, so I get an e-mail from Webster Bank (local bank up here in Connecticut). They’re a larger outfit as local banks go. And the e-mail contains the following header: “We’ve got the hotest new look of teh summer.”

First I thought to myself, “self, this is a fishing e-mail with the ph the kids are so fond of”. But no, it’s legit. The e-mail and URL addresses check out.

The only way that they can redeem this is if someone typed it out on a blackberry.. but I’m assuming even that’s got a sane spellcheck these days.

So yea, customer e-mail to the entire client list without so much as a read for spelling. I hope anyway. Either that or hottest is now less a t and “teh” has entered the lexicon.