The “Robert moves from Flickr to Picasa” countdown starts…now.

NEW YORK, Feb 1 (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. said on Friday that it had offered to acquire Yahoo Inc. in a proposed cash and stock deal valued at $44.6 billion.

Microsoft said that it had offered to buy Yahoo for $31 per share, which it said represented a 62 percent premium above the company’s closing stock price on Nasdaq on Thursday.

NY Times

UPDATE — crap, I forgot del.ico.us is a Yahoo property, too. Blar.

UPDATE 2 — Yahoo’s board rejected the offer, but Microsoft is determined. Google weighed in on the hypothetical deal. To be continued.

• OmniFocus: Marching slowly but surely towards beta (tags: productivity gtd geek mac program)
• Bash Shell Keyboard Shortcuts (tags: bash cli howto linux mac shell unix terminal)
• iPhotoToGoogleEarth iPhotoToGoogleEarth is a plugin for iPhoto 6 that will export photos for viewing in Google Earth. To make the most of iPhotoToGoogleEarth you’ll need to have GPS infomation stored in the Exif tags. (tags: geography mac maps iphoto photography osx exif gps googleearth plugin)

Partly it’s the stirring musical score; partly, the memorable footage of animals and plants in unfamiliar, dramatic shots.

Whatever the case, the trailer for the upcoming 11-part Planet Earth mini-series on the Discovery Channel gives me chills every time I see it.

More than five years in the making, PLANET EARTH redefines blue-chip natural history filmmaking and continues the Discovery Channel mission to provide the highest quality programming in the world. The 11-part series will amaze viewers with never-before-seen animal behaviors, startling views of locations captured by cameras for the first time, and unprecedented high-definition production techniques. Award-winning actress and conservationist Sigourney Weaver is the series’ narrator.

PLANET EARTH airs on consecutive Sundays from March 25 through April 22, 2007, on Discovery Channel and in high definition on Discovery HD Theater.

Even better, they’ve created a Google Earth tour with video clips from locations around the world their crews visited.

What took y’all so long? ;) Google Earth Blog reports on Baseball, 3D Stadiums, Videos, and Google Earth

What do these things have in common? As mentioned in September, Google has been quietly adding realistic high-quality 3D models of buildings to the Google 3DWarehouse. They have a number of the Major League Baseball stadiums available for Google Earth 4 (make sure you download the latest version of GE which was just released November 1st).

No Dodger Stadium as yet, but they do have a number of existing and older parks.

Why bother seeing the world for real? Join us as we go sightseeing around the globe with satellite images from Google Earth and Google Maps