Saturday, May 12, 2012
La Mesa, Carlsbad, Oceanside and Rancho Bernardo workers among those getting 3% raises.
Kaiser Permanente and a coalition representing 100,000 employees in 28 different unions reached a new three-year contract at 3 a.m. Saturday, the health care organization and the unions announced. The deal calls for 3 percent annual pay hikes for the 76,000 affected employees in California, and 2 percent in states ranging from Hawaii to Maryland, according to announcements made by the SEIU and Kaiser officials. Kaiser operates clinics and hospitals throughout San Diego County, including locations in La Mesa, Carlsbad, Oceanside and Rancho Bernardo. A year ago, a 24-hour work stoppage hit Kaiser sites in San Diego and elsewhere in Southern California. The new contract covers the largest single bloc of Kaiser employees, and covers wages and …
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
CEO John Lynch says: “Miles to go before we sleep.” Club member confirms ‘final talks’ remark.
Updated at 5:25 p.m. May 9, 2012 U-T San Diego is in “final talks” to buy The Orange County Register and 24 community newspapers it owns, according to a witness to the announcement and a reported confirmation by the U-T publisher. John Lynch, CEO of U-T San Diego, reportedly told the Downtown San Diego Lions Club on Tuesday that his “multiplatform media” company is near finalizing purchase of the Pulitzer Prize-winning daily based in Santa Ana. Also in the deal would be Coast magazine and associated local newspapers in Orange County. At 1:10 p.m. Lynch told Patch via email: “No confirmation of anything other than we would like to expand and are looking at all other newspapers in Southern California. Miles to go before we sleep.” But a …
Monday, May 7, 2012
The center of our digital lives soon will no longer be the personal computer, but the personal cloud.
Is it possible for clouds to have a bandwagon? It sure seemed as if there were a lot of them jumping on a bandwagon over the last several days, and Google was driving it. The tech giant finally launched its Google Drive last week, after rumors for several years that it would be getting into the cloud-computing business. That had all kinds of cloud storage and application providers coming out with announcements of their own, not wanting to be lost in the fog. Microsoft even managed to make an announcement a day ahead of Google about "improvements" to its SkyDrive service that actually amounted to a cut in the amount of storage space offered free to new users, from 25 GB down to 7 GB—still more than Google's 5 GB, but a cut nonetheless. To …
Friday, May 4, 2012
The summer blockbuter with a $220 million budget opens Friday.
I have to admit it: I was never a fan of comic books growing up. In grade school, I was more interested in collecting baseball cards and Garbage Pail Kids, and catching snakes. In high school, I moved on to catching girls, and raining jumpers on the basketball court. So I didn’t come into the long-awaited and much-anticipated summer blockbuster The Avengers with the same fervor as many others in the audience did. But that said, it is finally here. Fan boys and comic book savants have been clamoring for its release ever since it was announced that self-professed geek God Joss Whedon was taking over as director. So what should we make of the ridiculously expensive (estimated $220 million budget) and overhyped collaboration of some Marvel’s …
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Federal report urges fixes, and utility president agrees—but deflects blame for the outage.
A federal report on the September 2011 blackout found “grid operators’ lack of adequate real-time situational awareness of conditions throughout the Western Interconnection.” Two agencies called for “more effective review and use of information.” SDG&E President Mike Niggli on Tuesday said his utility would expedite the recommended fixes in planning and coordination with other utilities but deflected blame—saying his company’s system “operated the way it was designed and should have.” Are you confident a massive outage won’t happen again?
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
The County Board of Supervisors approved the Capital Improvement Needs Assessment report.
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Tuesday, May 1
San Diego County has almost a half-billion dollars in unfunded or partially funded capital improvement projects, according to a report approved Tuesday by the Board of Supervisors. The Capital Improvement Needs Assessment through fiscal year 2017 ranked a new $100 million regional communications system as a top priority. Upgrades are scheduled to take place over the next two years. The report also called for a $37 million, 400-bed expansion of the East Mesa Detention Facility to house non-violent inmates as a result of Gov. Jerry Brown's realignment of prisons and jails; $25 million to create sports fields in the Tijuana River Valley; $23.8 million to develop a recreation center in the Otay Valley; $16.5 million to build a 350-seat …
Monday, April 30, 2012
DNS Changer and Flashback show just how computer viruses have changed. You may have one and not know it.
It used to be computer viruses were simple. Your PC (never a Mac) became infected and, depending on the virus, your computer would die, would run slowly, or possibly open up gazillions of web pages every time you started your web browser. You knew when your computer was infected. Now things are not so clear. Macs are no longer immune. Malware like Trojans or worms sneak in to a PC or Mac just by visiting a web page. Hundreds of thousands of infected computers, called botnets, are commanded to attack a web site in unison. Usernames and passwords are stolen. Domain Name System (DNS) is hijacked, so that what should be a perfectly safe web address a user types in is redirected to a sketchy web neighborhood. Two recent malware news stories …
Friday, April 27, 2012
Solana Beach becomes first city in the county to ban plastic grocery bags at stores, restaurants.
After Solana Beach became the first city in the county to ban single-use plastic grocery bags at retail outlets, Councilman Mike Nichols said: “I’m proud … that we’re doing this. I hope that we’re not the last.” In Lemon Grove, Patch columnist Corky Lang recently wrote: “I have to draw a line in the sand. This wasteful practice is killing our environment, and quite simply has to stop.” Will Solana Beach’s action lead to a ban-the-bags movement here or end up in the trash bin of local history?
Monday, April 23, 2012
The splintering of Android into so many different versions on so many different devices, known as fragmentation, is dragging everything down.
Android, with Apple's head start, originally was a primitive competitor for the Apple iOS platform that powers the iPhone and iPad. But finally, with the release of Android 4.0 in October, Google's mobile operating system is in the same league as iOS. It has a polished, feature-rich user interface. It's too bad that today, about six months later, only some 3 percent of Android devices run that version, also known as Ice Cream Sandwich, or ICS. The whopping majority, including most Android phones and the most popular Android tablets, run on Android 2.3, a considerably less sophisticated version, also known as Gingerbread. In part because of Gingerbread's missing polish, many device manufacturers gussied it up by putting their own user …
Saturday, April 14, 2012
Seven of 50 electronics outlets being shut are in California, Minnesota-based company says.
Updated at 9:10 a.m. April 14, 2012 Best Buy stores in San Diego County are safe from the latest closures, the company announced Saturday. “This morning, we have confirmed the remaining 42 store locations [out of 50] that will close,” Best Buy said in a news release (attached as PDF). … Employees of these 42 stores have been notified this morning.” About 15 Best Buys operate in San Diego County, including stores in stores in La Mesa, La Jolla, Carlsbad, Encinitas and Santee. But seven stores operated by the electronics retailer will close in California—in East Palo Alto, Westwood, Manteca, Moreno Valley, Ontario, Pittsburg and Tustin, said the company based in Richfield, MN. “This was not an easy decision to make,” Best Buy said. “We …
Princess Samantha Kennedy
3:48 pm on Sunday, May 13, 2012
My union provides me Kaiser insurance, they told me over $500.00 a month is paid to Kaiser for my insurance. Kaiser keeps cancelling my all my doctors' appointments after it takes a month to get them. more ›