Happy Friday, Seattle! Here's some news to get your day started. more ›

Apple Stores worldwide are shutting down for an hour (10-11 Pacific) today to watch a live stream of a memorial for Steve Jobs, the Apple co-founder, company-rescuer, and industry-revolutionizer who died two weeks ago. The memorial will take place at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California. more ›

Unions are striking, protesters are protesting, and yes--the rich are getting richer. All here in our very own Puget Sound. more ›

A super scientific poll, in which we decide who we'd pick--Paul or Bill. more ›

Proving that no good deed goes unpunished, Bill Gates' generosity is once again costing him the top spot atop Forbes' annual list of the world's richest people, being released Wednesday. more ›

William Whitteker makes up with confidence what he lacks in any coherent business strategy, saying: "Bill Gates is going to have to move down the line. He's not going to be top dog anymore." more ›

It's been almost a year since Kerry Sear closed Cascadia and returned to the hand-laundered and crisply-folded fold of the upscale Four Seasons hotel chain, taking along his patented miniburgers and a majority of the staff (notably chef de cuisine James Dimeling). The burgers are on the bar menu at ART, the hotel's restaurant, 3 for $5 between 5 and 7, $3 apiece from 2 to midnight, but the delightful miniburgers.com website is no more. more ›

• Add this to the traffic sucks--again--column. Eastlakers were fortunate enough to find out this morning that construction crews began work on the Boylston Avenue E street and sidewalk improvements. Work will continue daily (except weekends) till Friday, June 26.
• The Montlake home of Daphne Tomchak has been left in shambles--$18,000 worth of damages--after funding ran out mid-shoot for the Hollywood movie types who used and abused her home for the film.

Welp, it's either coincidence or the signs of a major midlife crisis. First, Bill Gates signed a pair of cowboy boots for charity. Now, according to the Cody (WY) Enterprise, Gates has purchased historic Irma Lake Lodge, a property once owned by Buffalo Bill Cody. Is the software king going cowboy on us? more ›

Our own Bill Gates signed a pair of cowboy boots for a silent auction Nebraska's Cattleman's Ball, an annual fundraiser for cancer research. Unfortunately, not much cancer research will get done with the amount Bill's boots are going for at the moment: a measly $1. more ›

You're not the only one without an iPhone; Bill Gates' kids aren't allowed to have Apple products. There's a little less Fresh Mex in your future, too. Chipotle won't be opening at the gargantuan Ballard Blocks after all. For lease signs and stacked tables suggest our beloved Fremont Baja Fresh is closing, and just down the street The Triangle is up for sale, according to Fremont Universe. Fortunately, West Seattle Blog has an uplifting tale of the wayward Alki falcon who lived to fly again. Is there an app for that? more ›

Alaska Airlines says they are independent and proud, thereby confirming everyone's suspicions that they are open to a merger. Olympia lawmakers are considering making marijuana a civil infraction, so you'd get a ticket for your weed. Of course, you'd also get the munchies. Good thing Gates is giving $48 million to help African farmers grow cocoa and cashews. more ›

Skeeters!! Unleashed on conference-goers by Bill Gates, who told 'em: "There is more money put into baldness drugs than into malaria." Of course, he's got a full head of hair. more ›

There may be a scary economic recession, but the Gates Foundation won't be slowing down on their philanthropy this year, according to Bill Gates' first annual nine-page letter to the Foundation supporters at large. "The goal of our foundation is to make investments whose payback to society is very high rather than to pay out the minimum to make the endowment last as long as possible," he writes.

I am impressed by individuals who continue to give generously even in these difficult times. I believe that the wealthy have a responsibility to invest in addressing inequity. This is especially true when the constraints on others are so great. Otherwise, we will come out of the economic downturn in a world that is even more unequal, with greater inequities in health and education, and fewer opportunities for people to improve their lives. There is no reason to accept that, when we know how to make huge gains over the long term.

Bill Gates! Mr. Gates turns 53 today. In honor of the once-richest man in the world, we suggest you use Internet Explorer in Windows to read Gates' 2007 Harvard University commencement speech ("I'm a bad influence") and this entirely apocryphal list of "Rules Kids Won't Learn In School," which Gates did not actually write or deliver. Ah, well. It's all in the nerd appreciation vein. When Seattlest was growing up in the Northwest, Gates was on legend status as an uber-tech-savvy, 7-11 coffee-drinking whiz kid who made good--and monopoly suit or no, that's still the first image that comes to mind for us. Happy 53rd! more ›

Microsoft is busy naming the next edition of their operating system. Done are the "aspirational monikers" like Vista and XP. (XP is aspirational? In what language?) The next operating platform to confound you and your PC? Windows 7. more ›

So much for that 15-year record, Bill. Less than a month ago, we were telling you that Bill Gates had once again topped Forbes' list of wealthiest Americans. As it turns out, a lot changes in a month--especially if you're a multi-billionaire heavily invested in stocks when there is this little thing called a global economic crisis occurring. more ›

Valleywag is reporting that the $300 million Microsoft ad campaign featuring Jerry Seinfeld has been canceled as the company seeks other ways to remind consumers that its products, like the characters in the ads, were totally cool in the Nineties, but now, not so much. As one commenter on Valleywag opined: "the Bill Gates ass wiggle still haunts me." more ›

• Rainier Valley Post warns: beware the Microsofties on I-90 today! The Microsoft annual meeting will be 11 a.m.-2 p.m. at Safeco Field today, and I-90 is sure to be a clusterfuck.
• Flu season is just around the corner and the B-Town Blog has a comprehensive list of south Sound sites for flu shots.
• Lights & Sirens reports on the oldest homicide suspect they've ever reported on.

For the 15th year in a row, Bill Gates has topped the list of wealthiest Americans. While the rest of us are worrying about our debit cards working at WaMu, the Microsoft founder, valued at $59 billion, can afford to pay Jerry Seinfeld to hang out with him. Warren Buffett, always the bridesmaid and never the bride, came in second again. We're pretty sure being worth $50 billion is consolation enough. more ›

What do you get when you combine $300 million, Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld? Apparently a string of unusual commercials in which Seinfeld plays himself and Gates plays a what we can only hope is a caricature of himself. All set in a mall. (A mall? Couldn't find a Stuckey's or Tower Records to shoot in?) more ›

It is the kind of event for which cliche sayings like "it's the end of an era" were made. Today is Bill Gates' last day as the chairman of Microsoft, the software company he created and made into an all-encompassing empire. While Gates will remain the non-executive chairman of Microsoft, his full-time job will be with the Gates Foundation, he and wife Melinda's international health non-profit. One of his first stops after bowing out of day-to-day decisions at MS will be to China, where the Gates Foundation is launching a slew of new health initiatives. more ›

When we read that the Seattle Times had a large feature on the top paid CEOs in the Pacific Northwest, we wondered what the point was. Everyone knows Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Jeff Bezos—all local CEOs—are richer than God. And it turns out everyone, this Seattlest included, is wrong. According to the Times piece, the best paid local CEO in 2007 was James Voelker, who runs Bellevue's InfoSpace—a company we've never heard of. Despite its public anonymity (outside of technology circles) Voelker was handsomely paid (okay, obscenely paid) for his work. In 2007, he raked in $38,143,383...a salary we would be pleased to have 1/64th of on our greediest days. more ›

Apparently we're not the only ones with hope for Microsoft! Wired Magazine published an interview this morning with Mary Jo Foley, author of the cutely-titled book Microsoft 2.0, about the future of the company as Bill Gates leaves the day-to-day ops in the hands of Steve "I walked away from Yahoo" Ballmer. more ›

Anyone want to start taking bets on how far Yahoo stocks will drop this morning? Double your winning by guessing the proper amount of time it takes for the descent to begin. more ›

Bill Gates doesn't have to wait for much of anything these days, even when it comes to Homeland Security altering laws based on his recommendations. Gates testified before Congress on March 12th of this year requesting the government to reconsider its stance on the length of time foreign non-immigrant students could remain and work in the US. Less than a month later, on April 4th, the Department of Homeland Security granted his request verbatim. more ›

Last night at Benaroya Hall, author Richard Powers read from a new short story called "Modulation." It was classic Powers; a dense, far-reaching, and meticulously vivid tale of a computer virus that infects music player devices via filesharing sites. He weaves the story around four different individuals: a Japanese hacker recently released from prison and now employed by the RIAA to huntdown filesharers, a Brazilian journalist researching soldiers in Iraq who blast ear-crunching music from their vehicles when they go out on missions, a forlorn music scholar on the eve of his retirement from a mid-western University, and a young laptop battler who agonizes over keeping track of the ever-multiplying sub-genres of electronic music and enthralls with his live performances of entirely computerized music that rely heavily on audio samples from early-80s video games. more ›

We guess Forbes went back to measuring rich folks. It was announced today, courtesy of Forbes' annual billionaires list, that Bill Gates is no longer the richest man in the world. The title now belongs to U.S. financier Warren Buffett, who had a very good year in 2007. He saw his wealth jump from an estimated $52 billion to $62 billion. A $10 billion year in the midst of a recession--wow. more ›

(For example to measure the sin of "wrath" the magazine used murder rates for cities.) more ›

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