Or at least ours is, along with a bunch of folks who are freaking out via Twitter. Is your Gmail suffering a Temporary Error (502) too?......

We just got this message after logging in to Scrabulous on Facebook: "Scrabulous is disabled for US and Canadian users until further notice. If you would like to stay informed about developments in this matter, please click here." To which we say: KHAAAAAAN! We've also just had to switch back to Firefox 2.0. Any page with Ajax was giving Firefox 3 fits--since we usually have at least three Ajax-heavy Google and Gmail pages open at......

When we were dissing Clearwire the other day, we had no idea a deal this big was in the works. In fact, plenty of people thought the writing was on the e-tablet for Clearwire after its WiMAX deal with Sprint fell through six months ago. But you can't count Craig McCaw out. The P-I reports:Intel, Comcast, Google, Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks have agreed to invest $3.2 billion in the company, which will......

Employee number 53, Charlie Ayers was hired in 1999 to run the lunchroom at Google. Before that, he'd been catering for musicians (including the Grateful Dead) around San Francisco. By the time he left six years later, still a hippie at heart, he had a staff of 150 and was feeding 4,000 googlers a day at 10 locations. ("Well, wouldn't you know it, some people got fat.") In a new cookbook, Food 2.0, Ayers wraps......

People searching for information on Blue Mountain Community College got an eyeful Monday, when the school's URL was hacked and redirected to a porn site. The community college, located in Pendelton, Ore., was changing its URL and undergoing website redesign when the XXX mistake occurred. The "error" only happened when someone searched for the community college through Google's search engine. The user would click on the now defunct Blue Mountain Community College link and......

No, Seattlest is not just a fan of alliteration and 80's slang, as the headline might suggest. Burying the beef, is the current plan of the Seattle Public School District to rid itself of 230 cases of possibly contaminated beef. The beef, provided to school districts through a USDA lunch program, came from a California slaughterhouse in the center of the largest beef recall in USDA history. Nearly two-thirds of the school districts in......

Downtown's Southern-esque restaurant Sazerac had the misfortune to open in 1997, which meant its decor ten years on -- velvet drapes and cushy banquettes -- looked as dated as a Google-cached snapshot of your homepage. In its review, the Stranger sharpened its claws on the surroundings: "There is some evidence in the tea-dark interior that the decorator was going for a New Orleans-inspired elegance, but somewhere along the way he or she got waylaid at......

Yahoo has denied Microsoft something it wants, and Microsoft is none too happy. Today Yahoo Corporation officially rejected Microsoft's 45 billion dollar unsolicited buy-out offer as insufficient. 45 Billion?!? Every time we heard the offer, we thought to ourselves, that reporter must have made a mistake - he must've meant 45 million. Guess not. Even that astronomical number, according to Yahoo "significantly undervalues [the company's] worth." Microsoft has issued a counter-statement saying (in a shady......

What with the Internetz, the Google and the digital camera, a new generation of wine touring guides is long overdue. Last April, there was a post over at Cornichon.org about a book called Touring the Wine Country of Washington, written by The Oldest Seattlest some 25 years ago. Everything you wanted to know about all 37 of the state's wineries, back in 1983. Now, with over 500 bonded premises in the state, with formal......

Economic downturn? Recession? Job losses? Really? Sure, Seattle's housing market finally cooled a bit, but listening to business news this morning you'd be excused for thinking all this talk about a bad economy is a crock of shit, at least here in Seattle. First there's Microsoft (via the PI):Microsoft Corp. announced a bid to buy Yahoo Inc. for nearly $45 billion on Friday, pursuing a blockbuster deal that could reshape the Internet industry by......

We're gonna start asking Seattlest Dan to pick our lottery numbers. A full year ago he looked into a cloudy future and typed:We predict next year will see even higher numbers at Metro Transit as job growth continues and "gas prices remain high." Ridership is going to skyrocket when either the Viaduct closes to traffic or light rail starts coming on line, but neither of those will likely happen in 2007.The bus people have dutifully......

Hey, Seattlest! I'd like to start a sex advice column, but there's a catch-22. I'm not a columnist yet, so no one's sent me any questions, but unless I answer questions I don't have a column. Can I just pick a question Dan Savage answered in "Savage Love" and answer it myself? If anyone asks, I'll claim I "solicited questions from friends." I read his column every week -- I must be a friend, right?......

Just in time for MLK Day, a friend emailed us this WTF? moment, brought to you by the automated internet. He's been researching old advertisements for slave auctions, and a Google search brought up this text ad for eBay: Negroes For Sale Looking for Negroes For Sale? Find exactly what you want today. www.eBay.comeBay, you may want to inspect that text ad-generating algorithm a little more closely. For balance on our internet reporting, here's Green......

The Craigslist ad reads:Do you want to earn extra cash blogging about your community? MyZip.net is building the first nationwide network of neighborhood blogs. We will pay you $50 per month for writing about your neighborhood on your own ZIP code site (example http://www.98122.net). We're in favor of this because neighborhood microblogs support our top-secret strategy of using RSS feeds and Google alerts to bring you news as if it happened to us. Also, MyZip.net......

787 Dreamliner, courtesy of Boeing Boeing's announced yet another delay in production of its Dreamliner jet. It's the third such delay, almost sure to push back completion and require late delivery penalty payments to customers. The problem, of course, is that building something like a jet requires hundreds of thousands of parts from dozens of different suppliers--some factory tech in China flips the wrong switch and you end up with 13,000,000 wire casings that are......

If you are anything like us, you frequently read glowing recommendations of fine little eateries on the outskirts of Seattle and think: I really should check that out sometime. But the truth is--urbanite that you are--you only vaguely know where places like Kent and Burien are (south?) and rarely take the time to actually venture out of your cozy little city. But as fine a city as Seattle is, it lacks some things that are......

The dispiriting weather forecast--below, via Google. Friggin' cold and friggin' rainy. On days like these, there is but one sure pick-me-up: soup. In a typically magnificent essay her classic How to Cook a Wolf, the food writer M.F.K. Fisher made an inarguable case that, if you can make tea, it's silly not to try and make soup.The natural progression from boiling water to boiling water with something in it can hardly be avoided, and in......

Realizing we’re in the midst of the “R” months, we had a sudden craving for happy hour oysters. But where? Recalling a recent review, we Googled “shucker's happy hour oysters” and quickly jumped on a bus after reading the first result: a June reprint of a 2006 rave in the Seattle Weekly about Shucker's fifty-cent oysters, two-dollar margaritas, and free parmesan crisps. We lost on almost all three accounts. Oysters had doubled to a dollar......

Running text ads on your blog never really struck us as the Get-Richest-Quickest path; we used to have Amazon ads on a book review blog and after a year or two and no checks, we decided we could better use the real estate and quit the program. A few months later we got our first and final check for...$6ish? But Seattle's Furious Seasons blog has just discovered firsthand the pain of algorithmic rejection. The email......

Over at Ballhype, Jason created a Google Maps mashup that shows the birthplace of every NBA player. Is Seattle represented? Yes, oh yes. Seven players are born in Seattle. That, ladies and gentleman, is more than any single city north of Los Angeles (14) or west of Dallas (9). San Francisco proper has as many NBAers (1--Jason Kidd) as Edmonds (Martell Webster). Ha! Eat our dust, Golden Gaters! Overall, 10 NBAers were born in Washington......

In this corner, we have the accused, Amanda Knox, Seattle's girl-next-door and alleged participant in the murder of one. Google News hits: about 1,811. In the other corner, Risperdal aka risperidone, one of the most widely used anti-psychotics in the world, approved for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and marketed off-label for the "irritability" associated with autism, Asperger's, ADHD, and being teen-aged or elderly, and related to the deaths of at least 1,000 people (according the......

Look out, Kate's: Mulleady's is a new contender for Seattlest's favorite Monday trivia quiz. And since we only came in second place, you know we actually like it. The host kicked off trivia with theme music, and we were immediately jealous. If we can figure out how to play Darth Vader's entrance theme next time we host at the Old Pequliar, we're totally ripping off that idea. The questions were a potpourri -- some......

Last year at the second night of Pyramid's "Get Snowed In Party" we had a great time. Matt Costa played. We didn't even know who that was, and though we didn't exactly rush out and buy his record, it was a good scene. This year on the second night of "Get Snowed In," we had a great time. This Seattlest contributor hails from Portland originally, and yet strangely has never seen The Dandy Warhols live.......

Seventeen teams showed up at the Old Pequliar last night to see if our voice would give out. We managed to get through the evening without having a Peter Brady moment, but we're grateful to those of you who were willing to step up to the mic at a moment's notice. We thought we'd produced a slightly more difficult quiz than usual, but we were proven wrong -- every team got 40 or more......

Tuesday night University of Washington biology professor Roger del Moral spoke at an uncrowded Town Hall about his findings in natural disaster-ology, covered in his new book (with co-author Lawrence Walker), Environmental Disasters, Natural Recovery and Human Responses. (On the plus side, we got in two questions during the Q&A, a first for us.) This will no doubt turn out to be the easiest Science Lecture to get a seat at: next week brings Harvard......

We're living in the town that Microsoft Office built, and all in all it's not too shabby. Every once in a while we're struck by something and think, "wow, someone paid upwards of $300 for a graphical representation of a talking paper clip and we used the money to build this..." But generally it's been a pretty good deal for Seattle. Time marches on, though, and what was once the raison d'etre for personal computers......

Londonist are starting to think their city is getting just a little bit too expensive, when even Christian Slater can't afford to go out there. And there's no escaping, as local singer Lily Allen discovered when she was barred entry to the US. The British mapping agency caused further bad karma, by blocking a 3-D representation of London in Google Earth. But the smiles returned to Londonist's faces as they interviewed Baroness von Reichardt,......

Um, we are not so sure this is a good idea.....but, Uber Tavern up on Aurora is hosting a "pub crawl by bike" this Sunday, August 12. Actually, hell yeah it is a good idea. Just WEAR A HELMET, please. If you can make 11 (all awesome) bars in 1 day on a bike, kudos. From Uber's email: Starting time? 1pm at Uber Tavern (we will open 2 hours early for the occasion) How......

At work the other day, Seattlest was talking to a coworker and friend who originally hails from Minnesota. Naturally, we talked of the bridge collapse. As one would expect these sorts of conversations to go, the conversation logically ended with us looking up the coordinates for the northernmost point in Maine. Just how did this happen? In the course of conversion, it came up that Minnesota, not Maine, is the northernmost contiguous United State. So......

Neither making the NFL Hall of Fame as a fourth-round pick or crushing Mike Harden could've prepared Seahawks legend Steve Largent for the opponent he faces now: Google. Largent, who's now president of a cell phone industry association, CTIA, has some strong words for the Bay Area know-it-alls who make it impossible for us to get a second date. In a letter to the FCC protesting Google's $4.6 billion offer to buy the 700 mhz......