Bloomberg.com: Bonds
Obama May Produce $1 Trillion Deficit, Gross Says Update3

By Candice Zachariahs

June 30 Bloomberg — Bill Gross, manager of the worlds biggest bond fund at Pacific Investment Management Co., said a Barack Obama administration may have no other choice than to produce the first $1 trillion U.S. budget deficit.

“You have inherited a mess, Gross, co-chief investment officer of Pimco, said in an open letter to Obama, the likely Democratic presidential nominee, published on the Newport Beach, California-based companys Web site today. “What do I think you should do as the new president to rectify this mess? All I know is that any solution will come with a high price tag.

…

Republicans “will blame you for years and label you `Trillion-Dollar Obama,”’ said Gross, in his analysis that assumes Obama will defeat his presumptive Republican adversary, John McCain. . “There is, in fact, not much that you or any other President can do.”

Yipes. Best of luck to either McCain or Obama! Talk about seeking a challenge…

Being in software, I see lots of poorly written error messages. Every company is an offender.

Here’s a recent one I personally saw:

“Your device is in MTP mode. It can only be updated in MSC mode. Please unplug your device and switch to MSC mode if you want to check for updates.”

What is MTP mode vs MSC mode? How does one switch to MSC mode?

Eventually I figured it out, but this was not particularly helpful.

Lately I’ve had a spite of junk calls on my cell phone. It looks like other people have been getting them too.

802-763-2141

Recording for auto warranty expiration–I’ve received similar calls from 4-5 different numbers, once per day, for the past 2-3 weeks.

617-479-8874

Seemed to be a recorded message with poor reception; referencing a warranty for my vehicle; offered options to press 1 for more info or 9 to terminate the call.  Pressed 9.

I actually take the time to report these to the FCC. Once, I got a letter from the FCC saying that they investigated my claim and found the person responsible. Neat!

Holy cow. I’ve been so busy lately that I forgot to note that yesterday was my 8th anniversary at Microsoft.

How time flies.

I was really surprised by the Hiller Aviation Museum in San Carlos. It has a lot of truly unique aircraft that you simply can’t find elsewhere - including the mysterious Boeing Condor and the Boeing SST (aka the American version of Concorde). It’s no National Air and Space Museum, but in some ways it’s even better because it is so undiscovered. This was definitely one of the best $8 I’ve spent in a while.

For some reason, this caught my attention:

onomatopee

Pretty clever!

(Found via http://animalnewyork.com/)

Omar, as usual, posted some good thoughts about Apple. I share a lot of them, except that I don’t have the chutzpah to post them.

My favorite snippet is this one:

shahine.com/omar/
Then there is stuff like “look, this company wrote this crazy cool application in 2 minutes! Our dev tools are so easy, you can lean Objective C and crank out an iPhone app and port your application in a few days”. This reminds me of when Apple had Adobe on stage and convinced the world that recompiling PhotoShop for Mac OS X took them only 2 weeks. It took them 2 years I think to actually ship.

Actually, it took 3-4 years because Photoshop 7 didn’t ship until 2002. Here’s a snippet that (of all people!) Jorg Brown wrote for Macintouch:

But Carbon allows Mac developers to do all this without having to work as hard. As an example, a VP at Adobe demo’d a version of Photoshop that had been re-written to work with Carbon; in a week and half of part-time work while Photoshop 5.0 was being finalized, he had made the necessary changes to Photoshop. It’s a far cry from the years of effort it would have taken to move to Rhapsody. Also, apps re-written for Carbon will also run on Mac OS 8!

The whole time the Mac community yelled at Adobe for dragging its feet, not understanding that in reality, it was incredibly difficult due to the moving target.

I also liked Omar’s quip about pricing.

Some eye opening stats. I’m guessing that the $150 OAK-JFK tickets I bought in 2002 won’t be happening again.

The Middle Seat - WSJ.com

Airlines don’t release profitability data about specific routes, but they do have to report lots of operational information to the government. JetBlue, for example, said in its government reports that its A320s burn an average of 771 gallons of fuel an hour, so the total fuel bill for a JFK-Long Beach round-trip comes to more than $35,000 at $4 a gallon for jet fuel, the price when oil is at about $135 a barrel. Spread that over the average load of passengers for JetBlue, and the fuel cost for each passenger comes to $292 round-trip. A JetBlue spokesman confirms that those numbers are close to the airline’s current results.

That’s plenty steep when you consider JetBlue’s average fare in the fourth quarter was $376 round-trip on the JFK-Long Beach route, not counting taxes and government fees. Fares today are higher, but the fuel bill per passenger is about $140 higher round-trip than last year, and fares haven’t gone up that much.

In the future, some day we’ll be talking about “Remember those days when we could fly to London?”