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Former Playboy Playmate Holly Madison poses with her pet pooches for the latest issue of FIDO Magazine. Holly’s dog Napolean was adorned with a $3.2 million diamond collar for the photoshoot with the dog lovers’ mag. The former Girl Next Door will appear in her own reality spinoff on E! later this year.

Can anyone think of a good caption for this pic?

Pizza is in on the weekly meal rotation in our house, but lately we’ve gotten into a rut of the same old crust, the same old sauce, and the same old toppings. Boring! It’s definitely time to shake things up. We scoured the web for some new recipes to get us excited again, and here’s what we found!

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Volkswagen’s North American division recently revealed that it has awarded SL America Corporation the contract to supply parts to its new plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The company was contracted to supply automatic shifter assemblies for both the new midsize sedan (NMS), set to begin production in 2011 in Chattanooga, as well as for production in Puebla. 

"This is a win-win situation for Volkswagen and SL America," said Thomas Loafman – Director of Purchasing for Volkswagen in C… (read more)

Reflecting on his Formula One return next season on his personal website, Michael Schumacher revealed that the 3-year period of time that he spent outside the racing world has only made him more hungry to further add to his impressive resume. He made it very clear that he wants to win at least another world title in F1 and, considering the team he signed with, there is no reason why he can’t be optimistic about it.

We have a clear aim – we want to win the championship. That is my personal sta… (read more)

Buyers are advised to find foreclosure homes in Inland Southern California where house prices continued to fall in December 2009 compared to price levels in 2008.

Investors can take advantage of lower prices before market recovery pushes prices up. According to Southern California economist John Husing, the housing market in the counties of San Bernardino and Riverside is recovering and that the median home sales price in the region has bottomed out. He added that there could be price fluctuations as lenders pursue their delayed pre foreclosures, but any price decline would not be as steep as in 2008 and 2009.

The median sales price in Riverside in December last year was $196,000, down by 6 percent from December 2008 while the price median in San Bernardino was $154,000, a 14.4-percent drop over a 12-month period. The sharpest price decreases in the two counties occurred in February last year when prices plunged in San Bernardino by 47 percent and by 42 percent in Riverside.

Esmael Adibi, an economist at Chapman University, said that counties in the Inland region of Southern California will experience a slower pace of housing market improvement because they suffered more severe foreclosure rates. But he added that as investors continue to find foreclosure homes and reduce Inland inventory, price levels would improve in the coming months.

In the four other counties in Southern California, the median sales price increased not because of increase in home values, but because of the rise in sales in upscale communities, according to a real estate research company. More homes were sold in December in the high-end neighborhoods of Santa Monica, Newport Beach and Beverly Hills, where the number of homes sold was insignificant in 2008.

Economist Adibi, however, contended that home prices will fall further in higher-cost neighborhoods in Southern California in 2010 as prices in lower income communities – which have already experienced volumes of sheriff sales and sharp price declines in 2008 – continue to level off. The percentage of houses priced more than $500,000 increased to 20 percent of all home sales in December, marking a jump from 16 percent in December 2008 and the highest percentage since August 2008, when 24 percent of total sales accounted for upscale homes.

Because of the still large number of bank-repossessed homes in the listings of real estate brokers in December, buyers can certainly find foreclosure homes at attractive prices in Inland Southern California.

Dame Helen Mirren is being courted to play a foul-mouthed monarch in an upcoming feature from director Quentin Tarantino.

The State of Play actress has been approached by Quentin Tarantino to play an aggressive medieval queen in his upcoming movie – which is expected to be filled with expletives, “bloody violence,” film industry insiders divulged to The Sun on Thursday.

Mirren won an Oscar for her role as the prim & proper Queen Elizabeth II in the 2006 movie The Queen, Tarantino is planning a darker role for her in a still-untitled feature set in the Middle Ages.

“It will feature his trademarks, bloody violence and foul language,” says a source. “Helen has never worked with Tarantino and is interested. If the film goes into production it’s likely she will play a part.”

The Universal Studio theme park in Singapore goes green with the completion of its photovoltaic system. Built and put to use by Sanyo Asia Ltd, the system was built using 2,397 pieces of HIT (Heterojunction with Intrinsic Thin layer) solar cells that will help power up the theme park located at Resorts World Sentosa using energy from the sun. These solar cells are the brainwave and innovation of Sanyo and claim to offer the world’s highest power generation. The system is highly efficient and can generate enough energy to power up 108 four room flats in Singapore. It will also help decrease the parks carbon footprint by reducing carbon emissions by up to 342 tons a year. This system by Sanyo that the Universal Studio theme park can now boast about is the largest of its type in Singapore with 500kWp.

[Akihabaranews]

Mark Muller is Swiss engineer and his ambition is to tour the world without emitting a single gram of CO2. He has built a special vehicle for this 40,000 Km trip. The vehicle will generate electricity from sun in the day while a wind generator will power its electric motor in the night. This is a first attempt at a journey this long in a solar and wind powered vehicle.

(more…)

Via: United Technologies Corp. LINK

Artie Lange, the Howard Stern sidekick who recently tried to commit suicide by stabbing himself multiple times, offered an eerie prediction to departing Tonight Show host Conan O’Brien more than a year before his move to the famous show 7 months ago.

“I think it’s a bad move,” Lange said during an appearance on Late Night With Conan O’Brien in 2008. “I would have rooted for that bobblehead Leno to stay longer.”

O’Brien is embroiled in a bitter dispute with NBC, which decided to move Jay Leno back to the 11:35 p.m. timeslot after pulling the plug on his primetime variety show. O’Brien — a former television writer who has been in business with the network for 16 years, decided to leave The Peacock rather than push his show back a half hour.

The New York Times has followed up on their initial coverage of the choice to go metered with a column by David Carr discussing the move. It’s worth reading, and though there are a lot of points he makes that I can’t really speak to, there’s one section that I think highlights the flaw in the plan:

“The decision announced Wednesday morning represents a hedge, an operating model that puts maximum flexibility in the hands of the leadership of the newspaper. As the digital czar Martin Nisenholtz said over and over in a meeting about the decision on Tuesday, “the idea is to maximize revenue” with an eye toward the cyclical state of the advertising business. With Times Select, The New York Times lost eyeballs at precisely the time when sheer tonnage of readers became the defining metric in advertising. By building a metered system, the executives have installed a dial on the huge, heaving content machine of The New York Times. Access can be gradually ramped up or down depending on macro trends in the market. Given the dynamic state of the advertising business and how quickly things change on the Web, not so dumb when you think about it.”

Sounds great, right? Except that where they see flexibility, I see conflict. They’ve saddled themselves with two opposing business models: the old one, where the audience is the product and the advertisers are the customers, and the new one, where news is the product and the audience is the customer. The “dial” is going to become a tug-of-war between an advertising team that wants more eyeballs to sell and a subscription team that wants more walled-up content to sell. It will be virtually impossible to make business decisions that are good for both sides, and by trying to have the best of both worlds they may end up with no growth for either.

One could argue that this conflict has always existed in news organizations, but it’s never been as charged as it’s about to become at the Times. In the past, readers were readers, and increasing circulation was always the number one goal. But a newspaper that sacrifices casual readers, challenges the loyalty of dedicated readers and reduces its value to advertisers, all in one fell swoop, and succeeds? I’ll believe it when I see it.

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Are you looking to see what’s new in the App Catalog? Well, then you’ve turned to the right place. While not all days in the App Catalog are filled with exciting apps, it’s still exciting to get new apps. And new apps we did get. So should we be excited? Well, we did say that new apps are exciting, so yeah, we suppose excitement is in order. Want to know what you ought be excited about? It’s all after the break (excitement not guaranteed).

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Designer Jonathan Janke came up with this innovative idea of and emergency lamp that powers itself up using a chemiluminescent power source. Known as the Sustainable Emergency Light (SEL), this emergency lamp can be used efficiently indoors in homes and offices as well as outdoors, for camping and emergencies. The SEL shuns the use of batteries and electricity and chooses a non-toxic a chemiluminescent power source. Chemiluminescence is basically the emission of light due to a chemical reaction and producing very limited heat. The SEL avoids unnecessary parts and emits no heat, can survive the wind and can be used safely around fiery fumes. The device can emit light for 24 hours and has return shipping information on the bottom that enables sending it back to the manufacturer for refilling, repacking and redistribution.

The customer can also choose to have the light delivered back to him if needed. It produces a green glow, sufficient enough to see things around you clearly.

[TheDesignBlog]

The economy may not be fully up and running, but some companies in the tech are now showing strong signs of recovery. After Google started the trend with better than expected revenue and profits in Q3 2009, eBay is now posting similar optimist results for Q4 and the entire year. Revenue was up 16 percent year-over-year in the final quarter of 2009… (read more)