Financial Crisis?

The stock market keeps dropping here in New York, and it isn't clear where it will stop. It is even having a big effect on daily life in the city: restaurants are less busy, and traffic is even less congested.

Is the financial crisis changing your life at all?

New Year, New Chat

Happy New Year everyone!

2009 has started with lots of work here at yappr! We removed our chat feature last December because it wasn't fast enough to support all the yapprs that were using it. It was responding slowly, and, worse, it slowed down the entire site.

Our engineers have been working diligently to improve yappr's performance and I hope you will notice that the pages return much more quickly.

And we finally introduced the newly re-engineered chat application. There will still be a few items to polish and fix, but chat should be faster, more reliable, and will not slow down the web pages at yappr any longer.

Please thank the engineers at yappr, many of whom slept overnight to get chat released to the web site!

Patrick

Happy Holidays!

With people from around the world living in New York, we don't say "Merry Christmas" very often any more. You can never know whether someone celebrates Christmas, Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa!

Nonetheless, even with the crisis this year, the streets of New York are full of holiday scenes: shopping (for smaller gifts), christmas trees (a bit shorter this year), and chorus groups signing on the street.

I wish you all happy holidays!

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is tomorrow. Which means:

Traffic!

I am driving to Boston, about 300km away. But Wednesday before Thanksgiving is one of the busiest driving days of the year. It could take 5 hours to get there!

Thanksgiving recalls the first harvest by the Pilgrams in North America. The native Indians had taught the Pilgrams how to survive the brutal winters and to thank them the organized a big feast at the end of the harvest season. 

According to legend, turkey was served. However, wild turkey is a very difficult bird to hunt and I read today that they more likely ate goose and duck.

Well, I'm not hunting so I hope there is turkey this year!

Happy Thanksgiving.

Game are available!

Games

If you have watched the development of yappr over the last few months, you might have noticed a link up top that said "games (coming soon)". It was there a LONG time! So long I eventually removed it.

We have finally launched games at yappr! Click on the "play" link and you can try your hand at Bank Robber and Twist List, and hopefully learn a few new words in the process.

I play a few times a day, so see whether you can beat my scores!

The Markets

Living here in New York there is a lot of focus on Wall Street. And these last few months have been quite scary!

The US government is facing a very difficult decision about whether to offer any support to the US  car manufacturers. If they don't, one or more of them will likely fail. If they do, US taxpayers will probably be forced to give money to these companies for many years, and they will likely fail anyway.

Today the US Congress told the car companies to prepare a better argument about why the US taxpayer should support them, and the stock market fell upon hearing that news.

I don't think the bad news is over!

Weaklings or walking?

Weaklings or walking?

Election Relief!

The Presidential election is finally finished!!

They have been campaigning for more than 2 years, so it is a great relief to have it over. Now we have 2 years without discussions about the next presidential election; then it will start over again.

People were driving around the streets of NY honking their horns as the results were announced. It sounded like the Yankees had won the World Series of baseball, or Italy had won the World Cup of soccer!

Now Obama has a lot of work ahead of him!

What did people say about the election in your country?

Patrick

(We have lots of clips of the election coverage at http://www.yappr.com!)