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FOX News Channels' Alan Colmes is leaving Hannity & Colmes (H&C) at the end of this year. Well there goes my 9 o'clock nightly timeslot. What the heck am I going to watch now? Reality TV? Ack! Well, the good news is that not watching the at-times heated debates should be good for shaving off a few points off my blood pressure. So you're probably wondering if Sean Hannity finally got under Alan's skin, he got tired of debating Sean and he quit as a result. Well, according to the newswires, it was an amicable departure.

Alan Colmes said, "I approached Bill Shine (FNC's Senior Vice President of Programming) earlier this year about wanting to move on after 12 years to develop new and challenging ways to contribute to the growth of the network. Although it's bittersweet to leave one of the longest marriages on cable news, I'm proud that both Sean (Hannity) and I remained unharmed after sitting side by side, night after night for so many years."

Colmes will continue to have a presence on FNC as he will serve as a liberal commentator on a variety of FOX News programming, including Foxnews.com's The Strategy Room and continue hosting his radio program, The Alan Colmes Show on FOX Talk, a division of FOX News Radio. He will also begin developing a weekend program.

It's too bad Alan couldn't have the 9pm timeslot currently occupied by H&C, since then he'd be going against Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. It would be a lib-on-lib ratings deathmatch!

Shine said, "We're very sorry to see Alan reach this decision but we understand his desire to seek other creative challenges in his career. We value his incredible hard work in making Hannity & Colmes the most successful debate program on cable news and we're going to miss him on the show. Thankfully, he will begin developing a weekend pilot for us."

FOX News Chairman & Chief Executive Officer Roger Ailes added, "Alan is one of the key reasons why FOX News has been such a remarkable success. We're sad to see him leave the program but we look forward to his ongoing contributions to the network."

Hannity & Colmes is the only FNC program which has remained in the same timeslot for 12 years, catapulting to number one in 2003 and never relinquishing the top spot. The second highest-rated program in cable news behind only The O'Reilly Factor, Hannity & Colmes averaged 3.3 million viewers nightly for the Nielsen month of October and is poised to mark 60 consecutive months at number one at the end of November.

Hannity added, "Not only has Alan been a remarkable co-host, he's been a great friend which is rare in this industry -- I'll genuinely miss sparring with such a skillful debate partner."

Throughout his 12 year tenure on Hannity & Colmes, Colmes has interviewed numerous key political figures, including: President Elect Barack Obama, Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY), Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA), DNC Chairman Howard Dean and former Vice President Al Gore.

FOX News Channel (FNC) is a 24-hour general news service covering breaking news as well as political, entertainment and business news. For nearly seven years, FNC has been the most watched cable news channel in the nation. Owned by News Corp., FNC is available in more than 90 million homes.

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Texting (SMS) is certainly popular, especially amongst the younger crowd. In fact, one teenaged girl sends more than 600 text messages in a day -- almost double what an average American sends/receives in a month. A 29-year-old man travelled from San Francisco to Green Bay to meet a woman he met via text message. It was love at first texting.

We've all heard of the term "speed dating", which allows you to meet many people on several mini-dates usually lasting from 3 to 8 minutes. Well, how bout speed SMS dating, where you meet other texters with common interests simply using your mobile phone and Bouncephone. Bouncephone is free (standard carrier texting rates apply) and it's accessible entirely from your mobile phone.


Here's how it works.

I grew up reading PC Magazine and I looked forward each couple weeks to picking up my copy of PC Magazine at the local grocery store. But today, Ziff Davis has announced that the legendary PC Magazine print publication is shutting down its print publication and focusing exclusively on online content. This is truly a sad day... Hold on while I grab some tissues...

PC Magazine started the whole in-depth comparative reviews of PCs and Microsoft software. They expanded later to including gadgets, MP3 players, mobile phones, GPS, and other technology. PC Magazine offered insightful tech tips and great columnists like John C. Dvorak. Back in the 80s and 90s the print publication was 400-500 pages, making for hours of tech- reading pleasure. Today, it's down to 150 pages and soon to be 0 (January 2009).

Well, I guess it's "greener" that way. But I for one will miss my print copy of PC Magazine.

This is a call out to all bloggers out there - Rich Tehrani, my boss has extended an open invitation to bloggers interested in blogging for TMCnet.com, a leading communications/telecom site according to Alexa, Quantcast, and others.

Today, TMC launches its Blog Aid program to help people out of work stay in the public eye - in order to improve their hiring prospects in a tough economy. In the last few months, many good marketers, PR people, engineers and others who have been laid off. These potential Blog Aid bloggers have a good deal of quality commentary and information to share which could be very useful to the TMC community of online readers.

TMC is offering these new bloggers - especially those working in the communications and technology industries, a venue to voice their thoughts on the spaces where they have expertise so as to allow them access to the 2-3 million global visitors who come to TMCnet on a monthly basis.

So if you enjoy writing about communications, telecom, VoIP, wireless, unified communications, mobile, etc. and want a wide audience, go check out Rich's blog for more details.

p.s. The blogging platform is Movable Type 4.21.

Circuit City will close 155 stores and lay off 7,200 employees, or 17% of its workforce, as it continues to restructure its business. These closings represent more than 20% of U.S. stores and includes the exiting of 12 markets.

The store closings will shrink the number of locations the chain operates in the U.S. to 566. 

The chain also faces credit issues with its vendors. Circuit City said certain vendors have changed payment terms, including demanding cash for inventory before shipping merchandise, as the all-important holiday shopping season approaches. Vendors also have limited the credit available to the company for purchases, including in some cases not providing customary increases in credit lines for holiday purchases.

We just hope that Best Buy and other more general retailers (Target, Wal-Mart) will take up the slack. While we all love to shop and buy online, there's nothing quite like walking into a huge gadgets retailer and touching and feeling all of these gadgets before buying them. Don't you think?

More at the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

I was in Pearle Vision today looking to buy some new glasses with my new prescription, when I overheard two female customers asking about Sarah Palin's trendy eyewear. The lightweight, titanium, rimless rectangular frames were made for her by Home Optics, a retailer in Chugiak, Alaska. Sarah Palin's eyeglasses are custom made, but based on the Kawasaki 704 series and the color is 34 gray, if you're interested in owning your own pair.

I asked the Pearle Vision employee if they get a lot of requests for Sarah Palin glasses and she said, "Yes, quite a bit, but most aren't serious once they hear the sticker shock of $400."

Say what you will about Sarah Palin, but it appears Palinmania is live and well, even here in Connecticut, which is solid Blue Democrat territory. Of course, women buying the designer glasses could just as easily be huge SNL Tina Fey fans (anti-Palin comedian/impersonator) as well. So the trendy glasses could be a political statement for either side of the political fence. Or they could just be nice looking glasses is all -- and the customer could care less one way or the other the political leanings of Sarah Palin.

Amazon just announced that Amazon EC2 will soon run Windows Server and SQL Server. The announcement was made to Amazon Web Services developers this morning. This announcement may be partly in response to Microsoft who has been building a hosted development platform of their own. In fact, Microsoft is expected to announce the hosted platform officially at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles. Bob Muglia, Senior Vice President of Microsoft's Server and Tools Business, will keynote and is expected to unveil Microsoft's cloud computing solution.

According to an Amazon representative, starting later this Fall, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) will offer you the ability to run Microsoft Windows Server or Microsoft SQL Server. Today, you can choose from a variety of Unix-based operating systems, and soon you will be able to configure your instances to run the Windows Server operating system. In addition, you will be able to use SQL Server as another option within Amazon EC2 for running relational databases.

Amazon EC2 running Windows Server or SQL Server will allow you to deploy ASP.NET web sites, high performance computing clusters, and other Windows-based applications. Amazon said, "By choosing Amazon EC2 as the deployment environment for your Windows-based applications, you will be able to take advantage of Amazon's proven scalability and reliability, as well as the cost-effective, pay-as-you-go pricing model offered by Amazon Web Services."

They added, "Our goal is to support any and all of the programming models, operating systems and database servers that you need for building applications on our cloud computing platform. The ability to run a Windows environment within Amazon EC2 has been one of our most requested features, and we are excited to be able to provide this capability. We are currently operating a private beta of Amazon EC2 running Windows Server and SQL Server."

Check out http://aws.amazon.com/windows if you are interested in being notified later this Fall when the offering is released.

Just a break from your daily VoIP and gadgets news fix to announce my wife is pregnant with our second child.

And in case you were wondering what our first child looks like, here's a few photos of our 2.5 year old daughter Megan, who has perhaps the brightest bluest eyes I've seen in my life - not that I'm biased or anything...

In case you haven't heard, some hackers hacked into Governor Sarah Palin's Yahoo! email account. Some of the emails were posted to Wikileaks.org, a site that posts leaked information. Well, apparently the popularity of Sarah Palin must have brought down Wikileaks, since I can't get to their website.

I'm guessing all the media coverage and pointing to the Wikileaks site must have overwhelmed their website with too much traffic. The Palin Phenomenon continues! Whether you love or hate Sarah, there is no doubt that she has changed the political landscape for this election cycle and perhaps forever. It's quite apparent that conservative women can now also make the national spotlight previously held only by moderate to liberal women (aka Democrats).

here's the URL if you want to be a voyeur and read Sarah's emails. (when the site comes back up that is)

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Sarah_Palin_Yahoo_account_2008

Of course, if you're a conspiracy theorist then President George Bush, the CIA, or the FBI shut down Wikileaks.

Comcast is about to be punished for messing with its customers Internet traffic, including messing with P2P traffic and reportedly even VoIP traffic. Apparently, Comcast making nice nice with Vonage wasn't enough to appease the FCC. This news wire reports that "A majority of members of the Federal Communications Commission have cast votes in favor of punishing Comcast Corp. for blocking subscribers' Internet traffic, an agency official said".

Ouch! Looks like Comcast has finally got their comeuppance!