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Gail Rosenblum: Wanted: Front bumper, trunk gasket – and prayers

TYLERSTOY.COM

Tyler Shipman, an 18-year-old High School Senior in Frazee, Minnesota, had been diagnosed with Synovial Sarcoma, a very rare and aggressive form of cancer that primarily affects young adults. He can no longer walk.

By GAIL ROSENBLUM, Star Tribune

Last update: November 22, 2009 – 12:24 AM

Today in tiny Frazee, Minn., Tyler Shipman will do what lots of 18-year-olds love to do. He’ll test out his prized possession, a fully restored 1986 yellow-and-black Pontiac Fiero. He’ll likely wish he were in the driver’s seat, but the plan is for his dad, Jay, to have that honor. This simple drive will be a cause for celebration for people from Frazee to Iraq.

Tyler, “a total Fiero-head” and senior at Frazee High School, began experiencing severe back pain last summer. In early October, he was diagnosed with Synovial Sarcoma, a rare and aggressive form of cancer that primarily affects young adults. After receiving two rounds of chemotherapy in Fargo, N.D., Tyler is home now, on hospice, with his parents, Jay and Daneele, and siblings, 10-year-old brother Carter, and 8-year-old sister Cassidy. He also has a 21-year-old half-sister, Tiffany.

After receiving the diagnosis, Tyler panicked about burdening them with his car-restoration project. On Oct. 29, he posted a plea on the popular Pennock’s Fiero Forum website, under the heading “Got cancer now and looking for help.”

“Hey guys, I have an 86 Fiero GT that I’ve been slowly fixing up … and I’m just trying to find some way to get it restored before I pass. I love this car.”

The first person to respond was far from Frazee, population 1,300. He was Sgt. Andrew Weigle, of Pennsylvania, serving in Iraq with an assault helicopter battalion.

“Dude, I am sorry to hear about your situation. And I would have the same feeling about my Fiero … I am going to have some time off when I get back home from this place in January. I MIGHT be able to convince the wife for a road trip to help you out for a weekend … make a list of parts you need.”

Others jumped in, with money, parts and prayers. “I am an auto mechanic and own a Fiero, so I know my way around cars,” wrote one.

“I have a nice Alpine CDA-9851 unit (MP3, Motorized Tilt Face and whatnot) to put in …,” wrote another.

“I hope and pray for the best for you dude,” wrote a third.

A plan took shape. Fiero-heads in Minnesota, California, Florida and Texas would collect all the necessary parts, then gather in Frazee, 10 miles east of Detroit Lakes, from Friday to today and restore Tyler’s car to mint condition.

One of them was Chris Kliewer of Inver Grove Heights, who arrived Friday. Kliewer, 31, works in I.T. for 3M. Tyler’s story (www.tylerstoy.com) touched him deeply.

“I saw all these people willing to reach out and no one really knew how to do that,” Kliewer said. He volunteered to handle Paypal transactions, which are now close to $1,500. Kliewer also started making calls to local businesses. The Detroit Lakes Tires Plus offered to install performance brakes. Local motels slashed their prices. Dave and Karen Gray, owner of Frazee Auto Body and Glass, covered the cost of painting the formerly white car yellow with black accents. Tyler felt good enough recently to come to the shop and pick out the paint chips himself, Karen said.

“We’re parents, too,” Karen said. “If something like this were to happen to one of our children, we would find comfort in the well-wishes of people we didn’t know well. It hits home and it hits pretty hard.”

The car now sports new interior panels, a keyless entry, new leather seats, tinted windows and a rare original trunk gasket. “Somebody got their hands on the last two [gaskets] and is donating one,” Kliewer said. A “Fiero guy” from Iowa is bringing up two newly built headlight motors for reliability down the road, he added.

The “reveal” is scheduled for 9:30 this morning at the Frazee High School garage.

Mother Daneele, 38, said the effort has been “mind-boggling. None of these guys has ever met Tyler, except for online. As many bad things as you hear about the Internet, it’s also a really great way of having a bigger community than just what you live in physically.”

She laughs, admitting that she doesn’t know a thing about cars, but is glad the focus on rebuilding Tyler’s third Fiero is making her son happy. Her focus is to keep life as normal as possible for her family.

“We have good days and bad days, but every day we just have to keep stepping forward,” said Daneele, who works for a medical transcription company. “There’s no way for us to control what’s going on around us. We try to ignore cancer as much as we can.”

They eat supper together, watch TV, play video games, attend band concerts and wrestling meets, “all those normal things.” Last week, Tyler went with his dad to a gunsmith and sports store, using his walker. The outpouring has buoyed him. “I’ve been doing a lot more in the last week than in the last month before that,” Tyler said. “I’ve been feeling a little stronger. I can walk around a lot easier.”

Dad Jay, 40, who owns a tree service, is off-season now, allowing him to spend more time at home. He and Tyler, Daneele said, “are super close.”

Today, father and son are set to take a bittersweet spin. But Tyler feels only gratitude.

“A lot of great people out there are helping me, doing all sorts of stuff for me,” Tyler said. “It’s just awesome.”

Gail Rosenblum • 612-673-7350 • gail.rosenblum@startribune.com

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When Polar Bears Attack By Unknown Original Author Nov 20, 2009 – 1:22:32 AM

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Bear Attack in Churchill , Manitoba , Canada .

These are pictures of an actual polar bear attack.

The pictures were taken while people watched and could do nothing to stop the attack!

Reports from the local newspaper say that the victim will make a full recovery.

The photos are below.

Smile it does your heart good.

Received in an Email without acknowledgement of the identity of the Author. Posted by R.P. BenDedek www.kingscalendar.com Email rpbendedek@hotmail.com

© Copyright 2002-2009 by Magic City Morning Star

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11.19.09 By: Jennifer A. Brown

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Have you ever thought that your cat really is evil, and is actively manipulating you to do it’s bidding?

Science says that it is. Dr Karen McComb of the Centre for Mammal Vocal Communication Research at the University of Sussex has proof.

A BBC News report spoke to Dr. McComb, who stated that it appears that cats “learn to dramatically exaggerate it when it proves effective in generating a response from humans.” According to the same report, studies have found that a domestic cat’s cries are similar to that of human babies, and that’s a sound humans are highly sensitive to.

“The cry embedded within the purr” study was published in the journal Current Biology in July and claims that cats actually exploit humans into caring for them, especially when it comes to filling those food dishes. The abstract states that “even individuals with no experience of owning cats judged the ‘solicitation’ purrs to be more urgent. “

How long before someone synthesizes those sounds to control humans? I’d write more, but someone’s dish is empty, and I feel compelled to fill it.

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By Chris Walters, 5:00 PM on Thu Nov 19 2009, 14,953 views

Should you be required by law to pay a gratuity if you don’t think the restaurant’s service was worth it? The police in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania think so, and they arrested two college students for refusing to pay a $16.35 tip over what they claim was poor service.

“You can’t give us terrible, terrible service and expect a tip,” said Pope, a 22-year-old Moravian College senior who’s a Pottsville native, according to the Lehigh Valley Express-Times.

They had to find their own napkins and cutlery while their waitress caught a smoke, had to ask the bar for soda refills, and had to wait over an hour for salad and wings, they told NBC10.

The pub, which was very busy that night, took the $73, but then called the cops, who treated the matter as a theft.

“College students arrested for not paying tip” [Philly.com] (Thanks to WinShape!)
(Photo: BLW Photography)

By Meg Marco, 2:13 PM on Thu Nov 19 2009, 282 views

The Mortgage Bankers Association has announced that 9.64% of all mortgages are now delinquent, and this delinquency rate breaks the record set last quarter. The records are based on MBA data dating back to 1972.

The delinquency rate does NOT include loans that somewhere in the process of foreclosure. If you combine the current foreclosures with the delinquents, you get a whopping 14.41 percent.

The MBA didn’t pull any punches when assessing the situation (emphasis ours):

“The outlook is that delinquency rates and foreclosure rates will continue to worsen before they improve. First, it is unlikely the employment picture will get better until sometime next year and even then jobs will increase at a very slow pace.

Perhaps more importantly, there is no reason to expect that when the economy begins to add more jobs, those jobs will be in areas with the biggest excess housing inventory and the highest delinquency rates.

Second, the number of loans 90 days or more past due or in foreclosure is now a little over 4 million as compared with 3.9 million new and previously occupied homes currently for sale, although there is likely some overlap between the two numbers. The ultimate resolution of these seriously delinquent loans will put added pressure on the hardest hit sections of the country.”

Delinquencies Continue to Climb in Latest MBA National Delinquency Survey (Press Release) [MBA]
(Photo:Nick Bastian Tempe, AZ)

We’re here today in Mountain View, CA at the Googleplex for an event during which Google is promising to give a lot of details about Chrome OS. This includes a full product rundown and details about the formal launch, which is expected to occur early next year.

Sundar Pichai

, Google’s VP of Product Management and Matthew Papakipos

, Google’s Engineering Director for Google Chrome OS are speaking at the event. And there will be a Q&A session afterwards.

Below find our live notes (paraphrased):

SP: Welcome everyone. We’re here today to talk about Google Chrome OS. We aren’t launching it today and not beta today. But we’ve made progress. As of today the code will be completely open. We’re excited to announce this.

Google Chrome is foundation of everything we’re doing here. Why do Chrome. It’s been a year. We just announced we’re over 30 million users – and now we’re already over 40 million users. We focused on speed, simplicity, and security. It’s 40% faster in JS than IE8. “One is fast and one is slow.” The most common feed back we get is “Chrome is fast.”

In the last year we’ve updated Chrome about 40 times, but most users don’t even notice. And we’re really focused on HTML5. We really want to push the web forward.

Just this year there is tons of new stuff coming:

1) Chrome for Mac will be ready before the end of the year. Very close now.

2) Chrome for Linux is coming along very well. That’s the foundation of Chrome OS.

3) Extensions are coming. We’ve taken our time to do this right. We have more details coming about extensions with certain partners. These update automatically.

HTML5, we want the web to apps as well as they do natively. We’ve been working hard on this. We want web apps to be able to use system resources the same way. Graphics is one example, we need a way to access to the GPU. Audio/video playback is key. And we need apps to work offline. We’re working with the other major browser vendors to make sure HTML5 comes along.

The growth in netbooks is amazing. Growth is exploding despite the recession. Ultra thin, ultra light computers. The trend is clear that we’re moving to web applications – not desktop applications. It’s the most successful platform out there right now. We’re moving from laptops down to netbooks on the regular computer end. On the other side we’re going from phones to tablets – these are all computers. Laptops are becoming more like phones too – always on connectivity.

Is there a better model of personal computing? We believe so. That’s Chrome OS.

We focus on three things. Speed. Simplicity. Security.

We want Chrome OS to be blazingly fast, basically instant-on. Chrome (the browser) on Chrome OS is going to be much faster.

In Chrome OS every application is a web application. There are no native applications. That gives us simplicity. It’s just a browser with a few modifications. And all data is Chrome OS is in the cloud. This is key, we want all of personal computing to work this way. If you lose your machine, you just get a new one, and it works. With security, because everything is a web app, we can do different things. No system is ever fully secure. With Chrome OS no user install binaries, so we can see bad things easier. We run completely inside the browser security model.

——–DEMO———

It takes about 7 seconds to to go the log-in screen. And another 3 seconds to log in to your application. And we’re working to make that faster.

Should be no surprise that it looks like Chrome the browser. We are opening up the project a year ahead of release right now. A lot of the UI will change in that time. But many of the core concepts here will carry over into the final product.

It looks like Chrome but it has application tabs. (Just like the pictures we posted.) And there is an App Menu. The UI will change a bit, but we want to give you a way to find your favorite applications. Panels are pesistent lightweight windows that never move. Buddy lists and chat are great for this. Or a notepad. And media pops up in little windows.

Demo of a chess game being played within the browser. And you can allow it to take over the full screen so you don’t realize you’re in the browser.

And we want you to be able to read books in Chrome OS. And YouTube videos look great. And there is an all view mode (and the YouTube video is still playing. You can drag and drop tabs. “It just works.”

What happens if you plug in a camera? It simply opens a window with the camera’s files. I can pull any picture and open it in a new browser window.

Microsoft Office launched a killer-app for Chrome OS (laughs). So if you get an Excel doc, it will open in Office online.

People have many types of files with computers right? They need to get in them. Like PDFs, but these work instantly in the browser too.

———–Time for Matthew Papakipos

to go under the hood of Chrome OS—————–

MP: Excited about the tech under the hood. All the code is out in the open now, you can go check it out.

We want this to feel much more like a television than a computer. All Chrome OS devices will be based on solid-state storage.

One of the reasons computers boot so slowly today is that they’re still looking for things like floppy drives. Does anyone use those anymore? No. We cut out a lot of the startup processes. And we open the browser immediately. And we have something called Verified Boot – Chrome OS auto-updates itself with all the security patches. Everytime you boot we double check that you’re running what you should be running. If something fails the cryptographic system check, we reboot to get a clean image. Basically this is system recovery.

Current OSes allow apps to have the same power as you. They can modify files, etc. This means a rogue app can do bad things. In Chrome OS all the apps are web apps, with a different security model. All apps are treated as if they are hostile at a system level. A web app can change files on your hard disk, etc.

And we have security sandboxing – same thing we do in Chrome. Every tab run in Chrome OS is locked down and different from other tabs.

The File System: It’s always auto-updated. There are a few areas of the hard disk. The root partition is read-only. This is locked down, which is unusual in OSes today. User data is always encrypted. This is key for safety of your data. So important if you lose your machine.

All user data is synced with the cloud at all times. If you lose your machine, it’s not really gone.

———Back to Sundar Pichai

——-

This is all about offering a choice for users.

We’re not going to go into too much detail about going to market today. We’re working on the software right now, but we are also working with manufacturers on the hardware level. For example, we only support solid-state drives and certain types of WiFi cards.

You cannot download and install Chrome on any machine. You will have to buy a new one.

End of next year. Before the holiday season.

While netbooks are popular, but some have usability issues. We want to make slightly larger netbooks with full sized keyboards and big trackpads.

Again, the code is all open source now. The Linux kernal, Unbuntu, Moblin have all been important to what we’re doing now. We can’t wait to see what people do with our code now.

If you are a developer and have the right type of netbook (and a screwdriver) you can get Chrome OS running today.

————Video Demo Time———–

By Meg Marco, 12:26 PM on Thu Nov 19 2009, 176 views

When I was growing up we always put up our Christmas stuff the day after Thanksgiving. Nordstrom agrees. Once again, they are taking a stand against Christmas Creep.

Reader Jonathan says:

Saw this last night and figured since vendors get chastised for the Christmas creep, they should be recognized for not succumbing.

Despite revenue projections that are holding relatively firm, California faces a $21 billion state budget shortfall over the next year and half, according to sources who have been briefed on a projection from the Legislature’s budget analyst.

The shortfall will be detailed in a report due to be released today by Legislative Analyst Mac Taylor. Sources said the report will show that the state will fall short by $6.3 billion in the fiscal year that began July 1, due largely to failed projections in the spending plan lawmakers cobbled together in July.

Lawmakers and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger failed to reduce the corrections budget enough to balance the budget, underestimated school funding by $1 billion, overestimated savings in the massive Medi-Cal health program for the poor and counted $1 billion from the sale of the State Compensation Insurance Fund that will not occur. Moreover, courts have blocked some cuts in transit programs and the in-home care program.

Those faulty premises will be carried over in the fiscal year that begins next July, along with a $7 billion structural difference that budget writers had predicted all along.

On the bright side, sources reported, Taylor will project that the sour economy will lower state tax revenue projections by only about $500 million in the current year.

Still, the looming $21 billion hole is likely to force even deeper cuts in the $84.6 billion spending plan this fiscal year and more pain in the coming year.

Schwarzenegger and legislators agreed to cuts to education and social services, as well as temporary tax hikes, in two budget deals earlier this year. “We are not out of the woods yet,” Schwarzenegger acknowledged last week in a meeting with the Fresno Bee editorial board. “The key thing is, we have to go and still make cuts and still rein in the spending.”

Schwarzenegger has since said he would propose across-the-board cuts to erase some of the shortfall.

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Call Bee Capitol Bureau Chief Dan Smith, (916) 321-5249.