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There's no love lost between Silicon Valley gossip rag ValleyWag and Mahalo's Jason Calacanis. Wherever possible, Valleywag does what it can to try and embarrass or misconstrue Jason's efforts, to undermine his goals, or generally, make him look aloof. And he's in good company. The publication does the same to Robert Scoble, Michael Arrington and others, in a typical fashion the hacks jealously going after those who have the limelight.

But Valleywag's recently taken a new twist in the Calacanis bashing, teasing him about his occasional posts on his own site featuring his two bulldogs, Taurus and Fondue. No, I didn't look those names up. We know them by heart in our household, as we're avid dog lovers, and bulldogs rank highly on my wife's list of favorites (though behind our beagle, of course).

Today, Valleywag tosses another stone with "Bulldog pup photo shortage rocks Silicon Valley", not their first volley, following Bulldog pups only cure for week of crazies and other bulldog references.

But you know what? We begged for bulldog pictures. The first time Jason showed Taurus and Fondue, I demanded more and wanted his Flickr URL. He came through. (See one collection here)

This morning, I woke my wife up with Veronica Belmont and Mahalo Daily. Why? Because Taurus and Fondue were featured of course! (See: MD023 - Dog Training) We wouldn't have been watching otherwise.

Whether Valleywag likes it our not, some of us tech geeks enjoy the bulldogs. We like dogs, period. That Jason gets to share them with us is all the better. We say, please, show us more!

I've been a very happy VMWare Fusion customer for a few months now. Getting into the world of dual operating systems on my MacBook Pro has been almost universally rewarding from day one - starting with ditching my old Dell laptop, and being able to use Microsoft Outlook, use Internet Explorer 7 and other applications unavailable to us Mac folks - but in a single virtual window, letting me use the Mac the other 95% of the time.

Yet, the other day, while working on e-mail or catching up on RSS feeds, I heard the familiar "Windows is shutting down" chimes, and confirmed it by looking at my VMWare Fusion application. In full text, Windows was informing me my settings were being saved, and indeed, the operating system was shutting down. And no, I didn't tell it to, and no, I don't have any idea why. I told a friend at work, who laughed and said, "Windows needs a reason to shut down?"


I caught Windows in the act of bailing on me this morning...
It happened again yesterday morning. Going to my VMWare Fusion application, I sent the Ctrl-Alt-Del command to the Windows virtual machine, and it didn't come up. I closed Fusion and reopened it. Still no dice. I went to my virtual machine library, selected Windows XP and hit "Run". Nothing. It actually took rebooting the Mac for the Windows virtual machine to launch correctly again!

So guess what... 10 minutes ago, I heard the chimes again. Windows is shutting down. Again. Without rhyme or reason. Again. Now, I have to see if I can trick it into relaunching without making me reboot my Mac. Again.

I'm happy I'm not using Windows as my primary operating system, but even this is annoying. How do people live with themselves day to day in this type of OS hell? Ridiculous.

In September of 1998, a lengthy investigative report from Ken Starr into the Clinton administration offered hundreds of pages of he said, she said salacious rumors that had very little to do with the president's job in office. The day it was released, I pored through it as if it were a work of scripture, and came away less than impressed, writing a friend that night on e-mail, "I also read the entire Starr report. It is pretty juicy, but I don't believe that there are any grounds for impeachment. It just looks like Starr is complaining that Clinton did not help investigate himself..."

Today, baseball had its "Starr Report" moment, as we eagerly awaited the much-anticipated release from George Mitchell's inquiry into the world of steroids and baseball. At 11 o'clock Pacific, a colleague and I called a meeting in a conference room and awaited the press conference. Minutes into Mitchell's speech, we had downloaded the 6.5 Megabyte PDF file from MLB.com and were quickly searching for team names and players we know, excitedly hoping to see players we didn't like, and alternately, fearing we would see some of our favorites smeared with allegations they had cheated.

While several dozen players were named in the report, only one current Oakland A, journeyman slugger Jack Cust, was said to have dabbled in steroids, and the report was second-hand hearsay from a former minor league teammate. I'll admit my gut wants to root for him anyway, in an illogical reaction that goes against how I reacted to many other names indicted on similar, scanty, evidence.

As with the Starr Report, the Mitchell report came up short in a lot of ways. It didn't fully name as many big stars as guilty as we had expected it would. It didn't step much further beyond the already released news reports we've seen on the matter in recent years. While it did snag some big names, like Miguel Tejada, Roger Clemens and Andy Pettite, most of the players are those already on the downsides of their careers, and ones where we'd already had suspicion. Earlier, unfounded, rumored lists of players made popular around the Web proved to be untrue altogether.

Like I did with the Starr Report, I expect I'll be reading the 300+ pages of the Mitchell report cover to cover. But it looks like after all the investigation is done, it tells us what we already knew, especially for those of us who read the well-reported Game of Shadows. Baseball has a huge problem, one that was happening right in front of us, as the players grew tremendously big and records fell faster than ever. The question is, can they find a way to eliminate the use of drugs like HGH and make the game one we really believe again?

Download the full Mitchell report here (6.5 MB)