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Happy winter solstice to you, as the shortest day comes and winter descends upon us... gray skies and rain out here, and snow pretty much everywhere else... but I have a sunny mood for some reason. Must be all the great food I've been eating :)
Today was an awesome day for football - did you catch the Chargers come from behind victory against Tampa Bay? (Note: I am nominally a San Diego fan since L.A. still doesn't have a pro team.) Or the Redskins nail-biter against Philadelphia? Great great games. I can't wait for the Carolina / Giants game tonight, that one should be great too... 
[ Update: it was better than great. Extremely well played between two of the best teams in the league, and came down to a 50-yard field goal at the buzzer - missed! - which sent the game into overtime. Excellent.
Bonus points to the music director at the Meadowlands, who played Black Sabbath, Van Halen, Scorpions, and then with the game on the line for the final field goal, selected Europe's The Final Countdown. ]
Lately I've been getting a lot more LinkedIn, Facebook, Plaxo, etc requests from old friends and colleagues; everyone seems to be gardening their networks, either because they've lost their job or possibly might lose it in future. Or [more positive spin] maybe everyone is refocusing on friends instead of work. Anyway it's really nice, I've had several email correspondences and a nice lunch come out of it so far...
 Gerard Vanderleun: the Solstice as seen from Newgrange. "Deep inside the world's oldest known building, every year, for only as much as 17 minutes, the sun -- at the exact moment of the winter solstice -- shines directly down a long corridor of stone and illuminates the inner chamber at Newgrange. Newgrange was built 1,000 years before Stonehenge and also predates the pyramids by more than 500 years." Now that is cool...
Here's a nice tip for you: make files with no extension text files. More useful than you might think, you can just type notes to yourself and leave them on your desktop. In Windows Explorer, select Tools | Folder Options | File Types. Select New, then click Advanced, and associate a blank extension with Text Document. That's it! You're welcome...
 One minute you're blasting along at 61 knots, and then... you're wet...
Cool: TTAC reports Obama will adopt 14 month old child from Israel. About him and his advisor's monitoring the progress of Better Place, the electric car company / system you're read about here many times now. I don't know how real they are, but they've certainly attracted attention!
Ted Dziuba: There will be no Web 3.0. Whew.
 An oldie but goodie from Rogers Cadenhead: World's Oldest Person Dies (Again). "The world's oldest person has a high mortality rate (tough job), and every time AP covers the story using the same formula: who kicked the bucket, how old was she down to the day, what was her secret for longevity, and who's now the oldest person." A weird concept, and he's right, there will always be such a person. In fact "when the oldest person expires, it moves the living memory of the world past a certain number of historic events, a concept I've dubbed the Line of Oblivion. Although it's a grim notion, I check Wikipedia to see what crosses the line each time the oldest person croaks."
 Kid of the day :)
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In cycling this is now just called "stage 17". You might remember, the previous day on stage 16 of the 2006 tour - another tortuous mountain stage - Floyd had bonked, giving up eight minutes and the yellow jersey and seemingly putting himself out of contention. Then on stage 17, the most difficult of that tour, he broke away on the first climb and in an incredible performance stayed out in front all day, finishing over five minutes ahead of the desperately chasing peloton.
