According to what I've read, the reports are saying that domestic flights from USAirways are undergoing a bit of a makeover - they are having hardware removed so that they will no longer be able to show in-flight movies.

This makeover will allegedly save $10 million per year in fuel and "other costs". Now I get that there is a certain amount of money to be saved by taking out the box that plays the movie. But $10 million is a lot. Plus, don't they need it to play the safety film on the flight?

Just over a month ago, the current owners of Eastland Mall - Ohio-based Glimcher Realty Trust - decided that it wasn't even worth paying the mortgage any longer. That's probably not a good sign.

The trust owes some $42 million, and has had a "For Sale" sign out front for the last three years or so. So why walk away? Just like a standard homeowner, they found themselves in a property that was well underwater - worth far less than they owed - and feel that they are better served cutting their losses.

Thanks Microsoft! Another present. At least this one has an answer (of sorts) in the knowledge base. Unfortunately if you read that article, you might be more confused than when you started.

First, the problem will generally manifest with a more detailed message in the log like "The account specified for this service is different from the account specified for other services running in the same process." What that means in a nutshell is that the login credentials have a problem.

Have you been publishing something in Movable Type and received an error that included this message or one like it? Maybe instead of "styles", your message was "feed_recent" or "javascript". What in the world does it mean? Luckily, the answer is really simple, it's just a matter of figuring out where to find the answer.

The details are all in your error message. It will tell you what was being published: Usually a particular tag within a specific template. That's the template you need to go to, and in that template, you need to check for the missing value, to determine what you need to do next.

According to a study recently released by UNCC, Mecklenburg County has lost more than 100 acres daily to development from 1976 through 2006. That is roughly 75 football fields each day. Now I haven't read the study itself - only the summary in the paper - but it is disturbing, to say the least. By the year 2030, Mecklenburg County will have just 3% of green area left.

It mentions a comparison to New York City, and asks what the city would be like without Central Park. Now if you overlaid Central Park on Charlotte, the city would virtually disappear. At the same time, if you carved out green space from Charlotte in a similar ratio to Central Park in New York, it would have to be fairly large - and make a lot of people very mad. So the point is certainly well taken on that front.

If you receive this message, it means that the feed headers are being sent as one encoding, but the feed itself is likely declaring another one. This can be problematic for the contents of the feed.

Generally within an XML document you will see the first line read something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

This means that the feed is being declared as UTF-8. But if the headers of your feed don't match, then the contents might be scrambled when received on the other end. Luckily, this can be a simple fix.

Mecklenburg County Park and Recreation recently announced a new offering - Segway tours through the 1300 acre Latta Plantation Nature Preserve.

Tours are available much of the year, though hours vary, so you'll want to check the site. You do need to meet certain requirements - namely you need to fit on the Segway, be of a certain age and able to stand for a length of time (tours last for 3 hours). Refreshments included, though no word on what they are. Maybe trail mix and a bottle of water, so you may not want to get your hopes up. But it is definitely something new in the Charlotte area, thus if you're looking for something different, check it out.

I read recently where Republican John Warner wants to revive the 55 mph speed limit in an attempt to save gas. You read that right. Bring back the old double nickel. Maybe I should get on the horn to see if I can find Sammy Hagar in defense of not doing so.

But before I do, the first thing to look at would probably be to decide on whether or not such a move would actually be worthwhile - not that it matters to the government, but it does matter to yours truly. So let's see what we can find out.

The star receiver for the Carolina Panthers who is perpetually carrying a chip on his shoulder, Steve Smith, is in hot water again. This time for his fight with cornerback Ken Lucas.

No one really knows what exactly happened, but there is not exactly any love lost between the two, especially since they go up against one another regularly during practice. We just know that the war of words is now a war of fists. Or fist, at any rate - Smiths.

Over the last few weeks, I've had the distinct (dis)pleasure of working on not one, not two, but three NAS (networked attached storage) devices. One of these is my own Infrant ReadyNAS NV+, one is a similar device from a client and the third is a smaller device, a ReadyNAS Duo, for another client.

While there were certainly a variety of issues to be had, in the end the problems all arose from one factor: The firmware hadn't been updated since installation of the devices. And when I say issues, I really just mean that what we were trying to do was made much easier once the firmware was installed. It's not like the devices stopped working or anything.

If you're like most people, your blog has an RSS feed. Chances are, you don't even know what RSS stands for, but you likely have one (if you're wondering, it most often stands for really simple syndication, but that isn't important).

Unfortunately, you may have more than one, which means if you want to know how many subscribers you have to your feed, you have a problem. At best, you have to add up each of the subscriber counts and get a total. At worst, you have potential eyeballs who want to see your latest and greatest, but they're looking at outdated content. Isn't it time you fixed this?