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Guide to Great Summer Beers!

6/29/2012

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            My back is killing me. My legs are burning like a So Cal wild fire. Every joint in my body is moving like a rusty old Erector set, yet I couldn't be happier. I am now the proud owner of a DIY brick patio. The perfect summer evening getaway of relaxing, grilling, and drinking tasty brew. Here's my guide to great beers you can enjoy on your patio, deck, or lawn.

            Often beer snobs get attacked, rightfully, for focusing solely on bold tasting beers(coffee stouts, black IPAs, smoked porters). These brews are fantastic works of art, but when the heat is up the general desire for them is down. Sadly, most take the cowards way out and choose to suck back on one of those beers so lite they put the calorie count in the name. You may as well just drink water at that point. For the rest of us I would recommend keeping cool with a Blonde...Ale.  Golden  or Blonde Ales are true to their name with a beautiful glowing color. While craft beers are almost never lite in calories or taste, you will certainly find it refreshing and perfect for a warm day. My favorites, if you can find them, are Half Acre's Gossamer Golden Ale, Summer Love Ale from Victory Brewing, and New Belgium's Somersault.

            There is this stigma in the craft community that fruit in a beer, as either a brewing element or a garnish, is an unthinkable sin. This likely stems from some sort of  push back against a few products put out by “Big Brewing” back in the late 2000's. These products were simply their lite swill  pumped with fake flavors (mainly lime). Oddly enough one those same companies put out an ad a few years prior that had Burt Reynolds (or someone just as macho) proclaiming that to “fruit the beer” was against some form of man code. In reality there are plenty of well respected craft breweries making beer with fruit and doing it right. The most popular vehicle for fruits seem to be wheat beers. Apricots are easily the preferred  option by brew artisans around the world. The one I really enjoy is Pyramid's Apricot Ale, but you really can't go wrong with any brew in this style. The other fruit beer that I love took me a lot of courage to even try. I hate watermelon. Hard to eat, full of seeds, and it simply doesn't taste great. Nonetheless, 21st Amendment's Hell or High Watermelon Wheat  is a MUST try. I know full well that many of you wont even give it a go. For the thrill seekers who take me up on the challenge you will find an interesting yet delightful experiment from the San Fran brewery. A perfect partner for that chips and salsa platter at your next picnic.    

            There are few things about summers that are guaranteed: the days will be long, work days will seem even longer, and you will end up playing a lot less golf than you had planned. Another stone cold lock is that summer nights are always better sipping a great beer, watching the sun fade, and enjoying every second. Cheers. 

 
Cheers.

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Summer Solstice Coincides With Eastern Heat Wave

6/20/2012

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By NED POTTER (@NedPotterABC) June 20, 2012

Hot enough for you? With a fearsome heat wave moving from the Midwest to the Eastern Seaboard, we hardly need a reminder that summer is upon us.

But we have one anyhow. The summer solstice -- the astronomical beginning of summer in the Northern Hemisphere -- takes place at 7:09 p.m. ET on June 20. That makes this the longest day of the year north of the equator. From now until December, the days gradually get shorter, though not immediately cooler.

We are already told the U.S. has had the warmest spring since record-keeping began in the 19th century. Today there are heat warnings for 13 states, with highs in the upper 90s in New York, Boston and Washington, D.C., and heat indexes higher than 100 for cities that include Philadelphia and Raleigh.

"You're talking about almost 15 degrees above normal," said Kristin Kline, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Mount Holly, N.J.

It is mere coincidence that this is happening on the day of the solstice. Generally, the sun's heat, trapped by the atmosphere, has a lagging effect, which is why August in the U.S. is usually hotter than April, even though the days are the same length.

A quick reminder of what's happening: Earth, turning on its axis as it circles the sun, is tilted at an angle of 23.5 degrees relative to its orbit. Whatever the season, the axis points the same way, with Polaris, the North Star, hovering over the North Pole.

This is the day that the axis, as seen from the north, points as much toward the sun as it will all year. So Chicago and New York, for instance, get more than 15 hours of sunlight today, compared with 9.1 hours on the winter solstice Dec. 21. And everything north of the Arctic Circle will get 24 hours of daylight today -- compared with round-the-clock darkness six months from now.

Public health officials tried to remind people, as always on such days, to stay in air-conditioned buildings if possible, drink plenty of water and avoid exertion, as ozone builds up in the air. New York City's schools remained open for 1.1 million students, though only 64 percent of its classrooms are reported to have air conditioning.

Utilities and transit systems are also under stress. With demand peaking, equipment is more likely to break down in the heat.

"While extreme temperatures can affect our equipment and infrastructure, we will do everything possible to avoid service disruptions," said Joseph Lhota, CEO of New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Forecasters say the current heat wave will break by the weekend. There's a cold front moving eastward, currently stretching from Michigan to the central plains. Beyond that, you can at least take comfort that with summer here, fall can't be far behind.

~http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/summer-solstice-longest-day-year-northern-hemisphere-begins/story?id=16606019
External links are provided for reference purposes. ABC News is not responsible for the content of external Internet sites. Copyright © 2012 ABC News Internet Ventures. Yahoo! - ABC News Network
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Facebook is a Fraud... an Opinion piece

6/4/2012

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Usually we like our post to be about costal and Beach Shirt related gear, however with all of the hype Facebook has brought in the past month and its' oh so hyped IPO I couldn't help but post this after I read it!  Enjoy!

By Rob Enderle
TechNewsWorld
05/28/12 5:00 AM PT
Facebook's CEO has apparently always thought that users were stupid -- not exactly the word he used. Just as apparently, he has translated that belief into a ton of cash, because we weren't able to figure out quickly enough there really wasn't a fire under all that smoke. I have a feeling that is changing, and that we'll soon find that Facebook knew it was selling fool's gold and not the real stuff.

I've been up to my armpits talking about Facebook (Nasdaq: FB) for most of this month, and maybe because I'm unusually dense, just realized that Facebook is a new kind of dot-com. By this I mean its revenue and profit are based on a series of false beliefs.

Unlike the first dot-coms, which failed, Facebook does have revenue and profit, but just like them it has been built on a stack of false assumptions that I think -- if they actually had thought through -- would have had advertisers and investors questioning whether Facebook was worth US$1 million let alone $100 billion.

I'll walk through why I think Facebook is a fraud, and I'll close with my product of the week: what may be the best cellphone deal on the planet.
Foundation of Fraud A fraud is a wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain. Now the "personal gain" part is a given; the initial Facebook investors, banking underwriters, and Mark Zuckerberg in particular made out like bandits -- maybe literally -- from the IPO.

Of course, the rank and file who massively bought Facebook stock at $42 and watched it crater over hours and days to $32 -- where it is as I write this -- didn't do quite as well. Losing money can be evidence of a fraud, because there needs to be a financial transfer between the folks who are allegedly committing the crime and the victims. For those who invested in Facebook, the "victim" title likely has a lot of resonance.

So out of the gate we have two elements we need to prove a fraud: Someone made a ton of money at the expense of someone else. But the third critical element is whether the buyers were misled. Let's get to that.

How Many Facebook Users Are There? The number that is
officially tossed out is 1 billion users, and there are 1 billion people who in some way come into contact with Facebook. But the implied assumption is that this 1 billion is connected to making a profit, and there lies the rub. However, the person being misled, which makes this interesting, isn't the investor -- it is the advertiser.

Stop for a moment. Name one ad you have ever seen on Facebook? Just one. Now if you can, and most I've spoken with can't, name one time you have actually bought something based on that ad. I've bought things after seeing Internet ads, TV ads, magazine ads -- but I'll bet even if you remember seeing a Facebook ad, you haven't ever bought anything based on it.

Now let's back up one more step. How often do you really go to Facebook as opposed to interface with it using a social networking application or aggregator on your smartphone, tablet or PC? If you are like me, this is almost never. I touch Facebook most of the time from my smartphone, Tweetdeck or Seesmic (a really great posting tool, by the way). So even if Facebook had full page ads that were 100 percent effective, I'd almost never see them.

The numbers I've seen suggest there are really only about 250 million people who actually go to Facebook and can see ads. The number of people who actually do see them is probably less than a tenth of that -- we've learned to tune ads out, and Facebook's are very subtle -- and of that fewer than 25 million, just a tiny number convert.

This suggests that advertisers are massively overpaying for Facebook advertising, and
General Motors is one of the few companies that have figured this out. In fact, there are some interesting things that come up when you search "Facebook ad fraud."

So, a tiny fraction of the 1 billion people Facebook talks about actually see advertising and use it, and I'll bet confirmation will emerge shortly that Facebook knows this. Given that GM caught on, I'll bet a large number of the existing investors, along with Mark Zuckerberg and Morgan Stanley, know this as well.

There was
a well-researched study last year that clearly indicated that Facebook was worth a fraction of the $100 billion the company was pushing. Apparently, too few of us read it -- but I'll bet Facebook folks did.

Insult to Injury Now, it isn't just that people aren't consuming the ads -- there is another false belief out there. It is that given Facebook knows a ton about you, it should be able to present ads you are interested in. I just posted pictures of my new car last night; I also post on tech things I'm writing about. Now let's look at the ads I'm getting.

Top of the list is a special from AT&T (NYSE: T) U-verse. Great -- that might work, except AT&T U-verse isn't offered in my area, and Facebook sure as heck has my address. This is followed by an offer for a crappy refurbed AT&T phone. Really, they think someone who reviews tech products would be in the market for a crappy refurbed phone?

Here are some of the others: There is a gout study for folks who have gout (I don't); there is a service to meet older women (think my wife would object to my using it); and a Men in Black ad that gives me a chance to get a sneak peek at The Amazing Spider-Man. Wait, what?

Not a single one is a car offer, and there is one tech ad (refurbished phones), but it isn't the kind of tech that I'd be likely to buy. In short, Faceboo isn't actually using any information that apparently everyone else sees to serve up more successful ads.

Is Facebook a Corporation? Facebook is marketed as a corporation, but it uses a unique format that lets Zuckerberg exclusively control the company. In short, it isn't really a corporation as we would think of it; it is more like a limited partnership in which the limited -- and virtually powerless -- investors are represented by a powerless board.

I would think a structure like that would need to be fully understood by investors, because they should fully understand the risks of having a 28-year-old-billionaire in charge without real oversight before investing.

We did get a warning when Zuckerberg used investor money to buy Instagram, a tiny company, for $1 billion, as if it were out of his own pocket -- no corporate oversight or board involvement.

Facebook is presented as a public corporation, but in structure the controls that are typically around a CEO don't seem to exist. That would suggest folks didn't invest in a well-managed company; they invested in a 28-year-old who makes
billion-dollar impulse buys.

Wrapping Up: Facebook Fraud The dot-com market was based largely on the fact that a ton of folks got excited about the Internet and believed, thanks largely to Netscape, that it was a gold mine. Turned out it was fool's gold, and even Netscape no longer exists.

Now, more than a decade later, Facebook has discovered and renamed that same mine -- but even though it has now convinced advertisers that this is real gold, it is no more real now than it was then. The ad value that founds this company's revenue simply isn't there. Yes, advertisers are paying money, but the value they think they are getting isn't there any more than it was in the dot-com years.

Facebook's CEO has
apparently always thought that users were stupid -- not exactly the word he used. Just as apparently, he has translated that belief into a ton of cash, because we weren't able to figure out quickly enough there really wasn't a fire under all that smoke. I have a feeling that is changing, and that we'll soon find that Facebook knew it was selling fool's gold and not the real stuff.

In the end, had investors made money, I doubt much of this would initially matter -- but Zuckerberg got too greedy, and he and his friends made all the money while other investors lost it. It looks like a fraud, it smells like a fraud, and we'll have a ton of folks now working to prove it was a fraud.

This is where Zuckerberg's control could come back to haunt him, because I expect these folks will use it to drill right through the corporate veil and nail his personal estate. Given what he seems to think of us, I can't help but think that will be poetic justice.

I'm reminded of the famous quotation from President George Bush
"Fool Me Once etc." We may not all be the brightest bulbs in the box, but that doesn't mean we are pushovers either. I think Zuckerberg's going to learn the Bernie Madoff lesson -- that taking advantage of trust has a very high cost at the CEO level.
http://www.technewsworld.com/rsstory/75212.html

 
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