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Archive: August 16, 2009
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Ole, not blogging :)Sorry about that - an unscheduled two-week blog holiday. Started with a long ride to Lake Casitas, revisiting 1984, an incredible week of work in which I assumed some new responsibilities (what was I thinking?), a long four-day weekend with friends at the beach, and another busy week of work, and culminated with a 200K yesterday. I hate blogging about blogging (yeah, that's what I'm doing right now, I know) so posting to say "I can't post right now" seemed rather lame, but in retrospect I should have; thank you for your concerned emails :) Anyway I'm back and I have nothing to do today except sit by my pool and blog, so stand by for an onlaught...
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The other day I remembered 1984, the 25th anniversary of the XXIII Olympiad (dum dum dum) held in Los Angeles, which to this day is held up as a shining example of what the Olympics should be, for the host city as well as the participating countries and the athletes. So I thought about that, and I had a beautiful day, and I felt like doing a longish ride, and so... I revisited 1984, in a manner of speaking.
I did a ride from Santa Paul through Ojai and out to Lake Casitas - scene of the Olympic rowing events and my strongest memory, as I was able to watch some of the competition there - and over to the coast at Ventura and looped back to Santa Paula again, about 52 miles. And I took pictures!
the route: Santa Paula / Ojai / Lake Casitas / Ventura / Santa Paula: 52 miles
at the overlook into the Ojai Valley
made it! - Welcome to Lake Casitas
... there it is ... beautiful open water ...
behind the shells, a poster for the LA84 foundation
1984 Rowing Venue, XXIII Olympiad
the starting line was here, but now just remains a memory
the way we were - what it looked like in 1984
It was a great ride, and a great way to revisit 1984. I had goose bumps standing there on a barren shore, looking out over empty water, remembering the pageantry and excitement and the noise and the vision of boats flying over the lake. I remember the finality, the feeling that the athletes had worked so hard for so long for this moment, and win or lose it would all be over for them in a few hours. History was written, lives were changed. Including mine. I hope can revisit 1984 again in another 25 years, stay tuned!
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Man, what a week! Feels like I didn't have a spare moment... bounced directly from one thing to the next to the next to the next...
blazing dawn: the way my week startedStarted with a demo for Congressman Darrell Issa, who represents the California's 49th district in which Aperio is located. He's an interesting and intelligent guy, quite impressive. After the demo he took a couple of questions, and in five minutes did a great summary of the current state of health care reform and the economy in general...
From there I had many meetings, a quick bike ride, dinner with Nicole and Chris...
And many more meetings, dawn to dusk, including a productive "coolseeking" session with our sales team, and a pleasant dinner over drinks with a friend...
And a midnight bike ride from Carlsbad to Torrey Pines under a full moon...
And many more meetings, dawn to dusk,at which critical decisions were made and strategy was set, and I took on more to do (sigh), followed by a quick ride and dinner with a colleague...
And then a day of work work work in which I caught up from days of meetings. And a nice dinner with my [extended] family...
And then we were off! On a wonderful long weekend, with friends in Montecito...
And meanwhile it was all happening:
 Weird photo of the day / week / year: Bill Clinton with North Korean Leader Kim Jong-Il. I'm a little confused, which Clinton is the Secretary of State, again? 
Jennifer Rubin asks How does a leftist govern America? I think we're starting to see, the answer is: "not well". He managed to convince a lot of us he was more centerist than he really is, but we're talking about the man with the most liberal voting record in the Senate, and leopards do not change their spots.
How you know the economy is in trouble: The Hot Waitress Index. Living in L.A. and working in S.D., I encounter so many hot waitresses that this indicator isn't particularly useful :) Still the principle is valid. [ via Kottke ]
Important work: Why most journalists are Democrats. "Unsurprisingly, self-selection plays an important role in choosing a job... Journalists self-select based on a desire to help others. Socialism, with its 'spread the wealth' mentality intended to help society’s underdogs, sounds ideal." And Democrats are Socialist. Apparently.
Wow, Scoble posted to his blog! You are SO unfollowed! On Twitter, he unfollowed 106,000 people. That is amazing. Consider that first he had to follow all of those people, and then he had to wade through all their meaningless blather. What an incredible waste of time and energy.
 Cracked: Five things they say give you cancer, and why they're wrong. #4: Artificial Sweetners: "As for the laboratory rats used in the study, those animals were introduced to amounts of Aspartame so massive they are worthy of song and legend. To put it in perspective, the rat with the smallest trace of cancer (we're talking like ONE cancer cell) was introduced to the human equivalent of 8 cans of diet soda a day. The most cancer-tastic rat had about 2,083 cans a day." I hope they're right; I drink 8 cans of diet soda a day, easy.
 Wow, check this out: Going Google. The gloves are off. You don't think this hasn't been seen in Redmond? Wow, a free online alternative to Microsoft Office. Yeah, maybe the functionality isn't as rich, but it is definitely a Christenenian "attack from below"...
 I wonder if I'll ever buy another copy of Office? I'm happy with 2003, have no desire to switch to 2007, and by the time I need to switch, Google Apps will be ready for me. Yeah, if I'm Microsoft, I'm worried.
Not a surprise: Dog Bites Man: Schmidt Resigns From Apple Board. In the wake of Apple's rejection of the Google Voice App, you could see this coming a mile away.
Wired: Adaptive Cruise Control goes Mainstream. "Engelman is driving, but just barely. The Taurus has a radar-based adaptive cruise-control system that lets him set a top speed and then simply steer while the car adjusts its velocity according to traffic. He's been weaving and changing lanes, doing between 45 and 70 mph—and hasn't touched a pedal in an hour." Yay! I've been waiting for this, and now I finally have it. Well, I could have it, although I don't - yet - in any of my cars... This isn't a bad article, but as usual the angle is safety, not efficiency. I grant you, adaptive cruise control is a nice safety feature, but that's not the reason to have it. A whole bunch of cars in a line using adaptive cruise control use a lot less gas.
 Have you seen the new Pre ads? TechCrunch wonders What is Palm thinking? Still, there is buzz; I do believe they are effective...
Ars Technica on why they aren't creepy :)
Related: MyTether turns Pres into hotspots. A useful app for the Pre! Albeit an unofficial one...
Just wondering: Why isn't there a Kindle reader for Windows? It would sometimes be nice to read a book on my laptop instead of carrying my Kindle around...
So I've noticed that Zillow now uses Bing instead of Live. I guess that means Live is dead?
It's kind of funny, but to Microsoft I bet it is no joke; they spent a fortune on the Live launch. I remember making fun of it, back in November 2005...
 This is massively cool: Fight Cancer, Win an Orbea Orca. Go ahead, you know you want to fight cancer, and you know you want to win an Orbea Orca. So you know what to do...
 This is pretty amazing: stainless-steel printing. I want, no I need one of these in my house. They you buy the plans on Amazon, and you download them into your printer, and poof, solid objects! Wow, what will they think of next?
Okay, how about this: a camera which contains a built-in projector? That is pretty cool, and the technology is even cooler; imagine cellphones with built-in projectors... you just know this is going to happen, right? It just makes too much sense...
 ... and then there's this: a bike which can be folded completely into the space of the wheels' 26" circumference. Wow, now that's cool. (Please click through and check out the video!) Not to mention useful, but I just wonder how well the bike rides. Probably not quite as nicely as an Orbea Orca :)
 And reminding us that the more things change, the more they stay the same, here are some pictures of the Xerox Star user interface, from 1981! I actually used a Xerox 850, which was a slight forerunner of the Star; the thing I remember most, aside from the awesome black and white graphics, was the round touchpad built into the keyboard which was used for "mouse" navigation. It was a dedicated word processor that stored files on 8" floppys (!) and printed using a daisy wheel printer (!), and it worked great...
 And finally, here we have the ZooBorn of the week: a baby Tenrec. What's a Tenrec, you ask? It's a kind of hedgehog, apparently, and a pretty cute one at that!
So be it - that was the week that was...
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midnight moon over Torrey PinesThe other night, after a long busy day and a long enjoyable dinner, I decided to take a little bike ride. Nothing unusual about that, although having had several glasses of Pinot I knew I'd be slow and tired. Just a few miles, from Carlsbad down the coast a little ways and back. The moon was full, and it was the nicest possible night; a slight cloud cover kept the heat from escaping, stirred by a little breeze wafting off the ocean.
Three hours later I'd covered 35 miles, including climbing up to the top of Torrey Pines Nature Reserve. I blame my iPod; it managed to pick the absolutely perfect selection of music, starting out mellow (Carlos Santana, Samba Pa Ti) and gradually working up to cranking just as I was climbing up Torrey Pines (Black Sabbath, Heaven and Hell, and of course on the way down, Supertramp, Take the Long Way Home :)
You get on a bike, you never know what will happen.
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relaxing at the Coral Casino beach clubWe took a long wonderful weekend off last weekend, Friday through Monday, stayed with friends in Montecito, hung out at the Coral Casino beach club, ate (a lot!), drank (a lot!), watched the sun set, and had a marvelous time. Every weekend should be so great.
... and meanwhile, the world kept spinning around us ...
Charles Krauthammer has A better plan for health care reform. "The administration’s defense is to accuse critics of being for the status quo. Nonsense. Candidate John McCain and a host of other Republicans since have offered alternatives. Let me offer mine: Strip away current inefficiencies before remaking one-sixth of the U.S. economy. The plan is so simple it doesn’t even have the requisite three parts. Just two: radical tort reform and radically severing the link between health insurance and employment." I could go for that; to me, tort reform and divorcing health insurance from employment is exactly the right solution.
 Gerard Vanderleun says it's time for a live demo. Remembering the 64th anniversary of Little Boy being dropped on Hiroshima. Wow, sixty four years ago. Incredible. "It has been 64 years since the incineration of a city in a second, and we've lost any sense of immediacy about exactly what it means." People sometimes think conservatives don't care about this. That's exactly wrong. Conservatives understand how important it is never to have this happen again. And are not confused about what it takes to prevent it.
 Did you know? Van Halen had a good reason to ban brown M&Ms in their concert rider. "The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was: 'There will be no brown M&Ms in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.' So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl... well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you're going to arrive at a technical error. They didn't read the contract." I love it! [ via Boing Boing ]
 The flying cat: Unbelievable, check this out; what you see here is a picture of Alinghi's new 90' x 90' catamaran, being transported from Lake Geneva to Genoa. While hung from a Russian Mi26 helicopter!
Did you know? Free parking costs a fortune. Who knew? Yet another reason why public transportation makes sense.
And meanwhile, we have the U.S. Government using tax dollars to pay people to buy new cars! I'm not making this up, but I wish I were. As Philip Greenspun notes, "Cash for Clunkers only makes sense if we believe that our #1 problem is that we don’t drive sufficiently fancy cars." I do believe this is the dumbest government program I've ever heard about, amid heavy competition.
I'm really rooting for Carol Bartz, Yahoo's new CEO; she seems cool and I've heard good things about her, and "we" need Yahoo to remain a viable competitor for Google. But she kind of lost me with this one: "Yahoo was never a search company". What?! C'mon Carol, some of us were alive back then, when Yahoo started, as the Internet directory, the way to search for stuff online...
PS John Battelle calls bullshit.
 Anil Dash on Google's Wave: the Web Way vs the Wave Way. Great as an exposition of "the Web Way" in addition to explaining more about Wave than I'd seen elsewhere; somehow it defies explanation, which is a bad leading indicator for future adoption.
 A classic picture from Jason Burns, a 1961 casting call for The Black Cat. I love that they're all on leashes, you know how much they love that...
A very strange but cogent argument: How the Apple Tablet could ruin computing. Basically it isn't the Tablet per se, it is the fact that a Tablet might use a cellular provider for Internet access (instead of, say, WiFi). It is true, you can do a lot more with your computer than you can with your smartphone, and that's often because of your cellular provider, not the maker of the handset. Exhibit A would be Apple's recent decision not to support Google Voice.
Marco Arment takes on Jason Calacanis, in the wake of his Case Against Apple. "This, unfortunately, is the fate of Calacanis’ piece: he has some good points, but they’re buried in so much off-base ranting and misplaced frustration that it’s difficult to take any of it seriously." It does make for great theater, however; I found Jason's article entertaining, and Marco's critique equally so :)
 I have two competitors for photo of the weekend, both involving airborne vehicles; first up, at right, please find a great picture of the Blue Angels in formation, courtesy of Scott Loftesness.
 And second up, at left, please find an amazing picture of a helicopter landing in dust in Afghanistan from Michael Yon, via LGF. I'm not voting between these two, they're both excellent.
Perfect for a long weekend of eating and drinking, with strictly incidental amounts of exercise, Scott "Dilbert" Adams notes Exercise is Useless for Weight Loss. I think there's a real point here, exercize alone doesn't cause you to lose much weight... there are plenty of overweight cyclists, for example, some of whom put in quite a few miles. I do think the same mindset that causes you to start exercizing also causes you to watch what you eat; once you care, you care about everything. Except Epoisses and Pinot, of course :)
 Finally, our ZooBorn of the weekend: A Silvery Langur. Most excellently they are born bright orange, and then turn, um, silvery as they grow up :)
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The more things change, the more things stay the same, 1934 edition:
The cartoons of that era where a bit more sophisticated, reflecting their likely readership,
but the folly of spending your way into success was as apparent then as it is today.
Sigh.
(I especially like the "young pinkies" from Columbia and Harvard :)
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 Last Monday we all went shopping on State Street in Santa Barbara - school is coming up for the girls, and I actually *like* shopping (believe it or not), and it is a lunch and hangout opportunity, and in the middle of this with all my girls spread around five different stores, while I was standing out on the sidewalk, I encountered a beggar in a wheelchair.
Actually first I observed the beggar; he solicited money from some German tourists, rather aggressively, and they didn't know what to make of him, and finally gave him some money. It left me rather ill disposed toward the beggar; here are these tourists, and this is the impression they get of America?
So next he approached me, and asked if I could spare any change, and I said "no", curtly. And then rather unnecessarily I added "guilt doesn't work on me". I wasn't in a bad mood, I really don't know why I was so rude, but, well... I was. He looked at me for a moment, and started to roll away, but then he spun around and said: "You know, I didn't used to be this way. You think I want to be in a wheelchair? I just hope you never know what it's like to be me." And then he rolled away.
Wham.
Was that a mind bomb. I spent the next hour thinking about what he said, what it would be like to be him. I felt terrible, first because I'd treated him so badly, and second because he was right; I had not looked past the begging and the wheelchair and seen a person. I thought about this as my kids were buying nice clothes in nice boutiques, and we were all smiling and happy. I'm sure he felt bad too; it is one thing to have to beg, and another to hear "no" after "no", but I'd guess not too many people are downright rude about it.
So we're walking back to our car, and I see the beggar, and he's sitting in a doorway. And we all walk past him, and I know he's seen me too... and I'm thinking... and suddenly I walked back to him. "I thought about what you said, you were right", I blurted, "Thanks for what you said. You made me think." And I handed him a twenty. He didn't take it right away. But then he did, and he said "cool man, thanks." And I said, "I just hope you never know what it's like to be me." Meaning, what it's like to be an asshole. And he smiled, and I smiled.
It might have been the best part of a great weekend. I went from feeling like crap to feeling great in about 30 seconds. And it wasn't the $20, it was the connection. I learned something about myself. From the beggar next door.
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The world's busiest week, bar none. I went directly from vacation, hanging out, relaxing, to back-to-back days filled with back-to-back meetings. Barely rode. Didn't blog. Barely ate. Drank. A little.
 Koyaanisqatsi - Life out of Balance. My work / life proportion, always skewed, has finally become a problem, on both sides. I must think about this. When... I... have time. But first I must blog!
Ron Hart: Obama discovers that heath care reform is a hard sell. "If Obama has his way, his health care plan will be funded by his Treasury chief who did not pay his taxes, overseen by his Surgeon General who is obese, signed by a president who smokes and financed by a country that is just about broke. What possibly could go wrong?" It would be funnier if it wasn't so true.
Powerline: Back in the USPS. The postal service is a poster child for a government agency that can't compete with private enterprise. Imagine if we couldn't have FedEx and UPS? Weird that Obama uses this analogy, but fails to drawn the obvious conclusion from it.
 Gerard Vanderleun: Never, Ever, Feed the Plant. "Confused about health care, stimulus, bailouts, and the coming tsunami of taxes and regulations? One simple answer: Never, ever, give governments more money or power." I fully agree. This is the simplest explanation of why I am [have become] a conservative.
Ha! Ann Althouse wonders is Hillary Clinton Secretary of State or First Lady? It is quite clear that her decision to accept nomination as Secretary of State was a mistake; she's been hidden and ineffective, overshadowed not only by President Obama but ex-President Clinton on the world stage. Pretty different to Condoleezza Rice, for example. (She should have run for President!)
An old post from Robert Scoble (just popped into my RSS for some reason), he wonders: Real time systems hurting long term knowledge? "Whew, OK, now that I’m off of FriendFeed and Twitter I can start talking about what I learned while I was addicted to those systems." He learned a lot about those "systems", but I'm going to say, not much from them.
A new study says Twitter is [at least] 40% pointless. "Pear Analytics tried to categorize 2,000 tweets, and found that 40.55 percent of them fell into the 'pointless babble' bucket." Worse than that, of the 60% that were not pointless babble, most were links pointing to pointless babble. The actual content level on Twitter is desperately low.
 Related: I'm a little worried that my slice of the blogosphere is an echo chamber. A new study comes out about Twitter, and everyone I read links to it. That isn't very useful, I'd much prefer that everyone I read links to different things, to get the maximum "fan in". I might have to look for more sources. Huh.
Related: Facebook acquires Friend Feed. (For a lot less than many might have thought.) So be it; this will not affect me one whit. Scoble says FriendFeed will be Facebook's R&D department.
Dave Winer is worried: Scoble, your blog still loves you. "It's time to use the web again to store our ideas, and instead of relying on Silicon Valley companies to link our stuff together, let's just use the Internet." That's exactly what I'm doing right here, and you're a part of it!
Uh, oh. Windows XP SP3 runs browsers 14% faster than Windows 7 RTM. Crap. I was really hoping Win7 would be at least as fast as XP. Guess not.
Technology Review: An Operating System for the Cloud. The business strategy behind Google OS. Fascinating. [ via Slashdot ]
 Photography that is out of this world. And... amazingly beautiful. Shown at left is the Elephant Trunk nebula... doesn't it look like a scene from a science fiction film, with an alien being walking towards us?
 This is massively cool: a tutorial that shows how a differential gear works, from the 1930s... long tail content at its finest. BTW I knew how these things worked, sort of, but this explanation helps make it clear :)
Cycling news: Michael Rasmussen hopes to ride the Vuelta. Yay, the chicken is back! Let's hope anyway, stay tuned...
Also in the news: Alexander Vinokourov won his first race since coming back from his two-year doping suspension. He, too, is hoping to ride in the Vuelta. I have a special fondness for Alexander; besides being an exciting rider to watch, always on the attack, he featured prominently in my perfectly incredible day watching a stage on the Vuelta in September 2006, in Granada. He didn't win that stage - Tom Danielson did - but he took over the lead and went on to win that Tour. I actually ended up shaking his hand :)
 Yay, good news - IPO registrations are returning from the valley of death. These are registrations, not actual IPOs, but it is a sign that the market is gradually recovering.
 Wired notes the fifth anniversary of Adam Curry's Daily Source Code, the first really popular podcast. Yeah back in 2004 podcasting was all the rage, but it never really took off (although it does hold down a solid niche). Remember when iTunes first included podcasts, how "mainstream" that made it feel? I wonder how we'll remember Twitter and Facebook in five years?
Dave Winer, a pioneer behind podcasting (originally enabled by RSS attachments), remembers Netscape and RSS. "Then I did one of the smartest things I ever did. I surrendered unconditionally." Another smart thing Dave did was freeze RSS, let innovation build on top of it rather than in it. I disagreed with him at the time, but he was right.
Classic confusion of correlation with causality: texting makes kids dumber. (Could it be, dumber kids text more often? Yes, it could...) This happens so often in the mainstream media, I should post about this... :)
 A wonderful photo essay: supermodels without makeup. To my eye they are more beautiful this way, more like real people you could sit and talk with... Fascinating. [ via Boing Boing ]
Wow, this is too bad: Guitar legend Les Paul dead at 94. Alex has a Gibson Les Paul, it's beautiful, and she makes it sound just like AC/DC :)
 This is excellent: the photo-crashing squirrel. "My husband and I were exploring Lake Minnewanka in Banff National Park-Canada when we stopped for a timed picture of the two of us. We had our camera set up on some rocks and were getting ready to take the picture when this curious little ground squirrel appeared, became intrigued with the sound of the focusing camera and popped right into our shot!" [ via Boing Boing ]
Unnatural Selection alert: World population projected to reach 7B by 2011. "A staggering 97 percent of global growth over the next 40 years will happen in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, according to the Population Reference Bureau's 2009 World Population Data Sheet." What do you suppose will be the average IQ of the new arrivals? Higher or lower than the current population? Yeah, that's what I think, too.
 Weather alert! Scientists spot massive methane rainstorm over Titan. "Indeed, the longer researchers stare at Titan, the more Earth-like its processes appear – processes playing out right before their telescopes' and spacecraft's sensors." You know I'm going to say it, and so I am: I cannot wait to go there myself.
Whether you're going to Titan or just to the beach this weekend, this New Yorker article will help you choose the right sunscreen :)
 Wow, this is interesting: Indian Casinos. The article is more sympathetic towards them than I am - the whole idea that there are separate laws for different "nations" within the United States is ridiculous - but there is a lot of good information here. I had no idea that reservations were formed via negotiation, for example; I figured it was some kind of restitution for land which was taken away. What's sad is that these casinos are the antithesis of everything we admire about American Indian Culture; the quiet solitude and appreciation of nature, for example. At this point I think we can all agree (Native Americans too) that American Indians would have been better off without reservations at all. [ via Kottke ]
 Important information: Time-Traveling for Dummies. "The notion that one version of time travel is more accurate than another might seem ridiculous on its surface, but physicists actually have rather a lot to say about how time travel should work. Some, in their more fanciful moments, have even devised ways to exploit Einstein's theory of general relativity to come up with 'practical' models of time machines." I love the notion that IF time travel could exist, there would be iteration between past and present which would eventually result in a configuration where time travel acts to erase itself. This may already have happened :)
 ZooBorn of the week: a baby elephant playing with a big blue ball. If that doesn't bring a smile to your face, nothing will :) [ via ZooBorns ]
I sincerely hope next week isn't quite as busy, but it looks bad right now. Please stay tuned!
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may it please the court
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my blogitorium
Note the essentials: laptop, wheat thins, diet coke.
The adirondack chairs, umbrella, pool, and golf course create the necessary ambiance.
I have now been posting for six hours, some kind of record.
If you've been able to read it all, congratulations.
Oh, and stay tuned, I'm not done yet...
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Wrapping up a maniacal couple of weeks, yesterday I rode the Cool Breeze Double Metric Century (200K). It was a super ride with great SAG, plenty of climbing (the DM had 8,542’), some nice descents, and amazing scenery.
the route: Ventura / Ojai / Montecito / Goleta / Santa Barbara / Carpinteria / Ventura
128 miles, 8,542 feet
Adding to the fun, I rode with a group from my club, the Conejo Valley Cyclists. It's always more fun to ride with other people, especially nice people you know :) I've posted a gallery of pictures here:
Cool Breeze 200K
And here's a sampling for your viewing pleasure:
CVC paceline heads West from Ojai
the view from the top of Casitas Pass is stunning
lots of up and down in the hills behind Santa Barbara
Hope Ranch is one of my favorite places anywhere
I 'hope' to be able to live here someday...
still smiling - love riding in this area, and the weather was perfect
my next house :)
Rincon Beach - what a great place for a rest stop
The trip through Hope Ranch was worth the ride all by itself – what an amazing area – and then you had the Ojai Valley, Lake Casitas, Montecito, Santa Barbara, and a beautiful ride down the beach to finish it off. Thank you to the Channel Islands Bicycle Club for organizing such a nice event.
another super century, and another sticker for the top tube :)
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Wrapping up my all-day-blogothon, some notes from this weekend. We're in the home stretch! Whew.
 As James Surowiecki notes, we are Not Home Yet. The foreclosure situation is still precarious. Yeah, there's a recovery in some senses, but the core asset for most people is their home, and that value has not yet recovered.
I love this story about Bob Dillon: NY Police want to see some ID. "'What is your name, sir?' the officer asked. 'Bob Dylan,' Dylan said. 'OK, what are you doing here?' the officer asked. 'I'm on tour,' the singer replied." Sounds like a scene from one of Dylan's songs, doesn't it? Too bad it didn't happen on Highway 61.
 Trizilla porn - the big trimaran under way. (Click thumbnails to enbiggen.) Wow, this has to be one of the most beautiful craft under way... I can't wait to sail it :) perhaps you're getting tired of seeing these shots, I know I post 'em a lot, but I must tell you I can't getenough... James Spithill says 'we've flirted with 50 knots'.
 I also can't get enough of looking at Moths going to weather on their hydrofoils, how cool is that? And unlike Trizilla, these are [somewhat] affordable; I could actually imagine having one. Sailing has definitely gone high tech since I was a kid!
The Business Insider reports on the ten most expensive iPhone apps. A $180 digital pathology viewer from Interpath was #9 on the list! - and Aperio's server software got an honorable mention.
TomTom has released a navigation app for the iPhone, and it is getting a lot of attention. But weirdly, because the iPhone cannot multitask, you can't use it while you're using your iPhone as a phone. This kind of limitation is not found on the Pre, for example. The press really gives the iPhone a pass on this sort of stuff; single-tasking in 2009 is truly a ridiculous limitation.
 NextAuto drives the Bugatti Grand Sport convertible. "Many delineate wealth simply as The Haves and The Have Nots. For those who have had enjoyed any sum of money, you know that classifying wealth is not nearly so simple. There are The Have Nothings, The Have Less Than I Do, The Have More Than I Do, The Have More Than I Ever Will, and The Have More Than I Can Ever Imagine. The 2009 Bugatti Grand Sport is the ultimate car for those in the last group." I may be kidding myself, but I think I can imagine having this much money :)
 Powerline: 20th Century London, in photos. The one at right shows a 1939 meeting of the Union of British Fascists. Wow. Although the word "Fascist" has now been discredited, the political philosophy has not; for example it is embodied to a large extent in the Obama Administration's vision for government control over services like health care.
 ZooBorn of the weekend: a newly-hatched Meller's Duck. I have to say it: I'm a sucker for cute chicks :)
And so ends the blogo-marathon. Onward into the week!
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