India, the new Italy

Rupees continue to fall like rain on Italy this month as Piaggio announced their plans for a Rs 1,000-cr turnover in India by 2005, mainly on the heels of their Quadracycle and other cargo vehicles. “Rs 1,000-cr” means “One thousand Crore Rupees,” or “1,000 10-million rupees,” which I think works out to ten billion rupees, or something like US$221 millon, if my math is right. Could they make that a little more confusing? Meanwhile, Italjet has licensed seven models to Kinetic to be produced in India. Italjet will cease domestic production of the models and Kinetic will manufacture, distribute and market them worldwide, using Italjet’s current distributors. All engines will be manufactured by Kinetic, unlike the Italian versions which used Piaggio and other outsourced motors.

We’re back

Thanks for your patience while we spent some quality bonding time with our wee bairn. I’m finally back to work and I’ll get back to posting regularly now. Things are still pretty Milenacentric around here, but I’ll try to keep up.

Konfabulator!

If you’re as behind as I am, you’re not using a newsreader to read 2sb. Mike Karr turned me onto Konfabulator, a utility for Mac OSX that features “widgets” for various tasks. The Kontent widget’s working great with 2SB news (use this link for the 2SB feed). Also very cool for those of us dorks that load album art into iTunes: the iTunes Companion.

Chad’s party

Cha-Cha‘s Los Corazones Negros Christmas party is tonight (Friday) at 3140 W. Lyndale, at 9pm. Waxon Seven is still playing as far as I know, though maybe without drums… it should be a hoot for those of you that aren’t having a baby this weekend.