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 Wow, rain rain rain. They tell me we still have a drought, but somehow I doubt it; check out the table of California lake water levels at right. (Click to enbiggen.) Getting it all at once like this is going to cause problems though...
Some pretty large lakes are up a lot - Shasta 20+ feet! - but the one that caught my eye was Tahoe up one foot ... that is a lot of water.
Thanks Peter Simons for the chart. Bonus observation: Newsweek still exists?
 Fascinating: How Elon Musk's satellites have saved Ukraine and changed warfare. 
Am just rereading Red October for the hundredth time and struck again about the importance of communications in war.
NYTimes: The Party's over for us. Where do we go now? Conservatives debate the future of the Republican party. I keep hoping there will be a place for conservative thinking in the Democratic party ... maybe I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.
 I just rewatched The Big Short. What an excellent movie. (Based on an excellent book, which it pretty faithfully follows.) The tragic economic crash of 2008-09 already seems like ancient history, right? But so many echos of that in the current crypto bubble.
When it became obvious (to a few) that mortgage-backed securities like CDOs were going to crash, there was no way to short them; they had to create credit default swaps so they had a way to do it. It's now obvious (to a few) that crypto tokens are such a house of cards; is there any way to short them? Do we have to create one?
I was reading old posts and came across this one from 2020: Tim Bray: I don't believe in Bitcoin. He noted the lack of adoption by geeks as a red flag. He was and is right. The next killer app on the blockchain will be the first one.
Bonus note: back then I was blogging at Buck's in Palo Alto. Just after InTouch was acquired by Teladoc, and just before the Covid pandemic hit. Wow. Only three years ago but ... wow.
 Charlie Munger on remote work: Those people are never going back. Nope.
 My iTunes Match subscription is up for renewal. I hardly ever use iTunes anymore. I listen to music via Spotify or LiveOne (formerly LiveXLive, formerly Slacker; it came with my Tesla, I started using it, and still do...) I'm wondering if I still need it? And what will happen if I cancel? LMK if you have a thought...
Marc Andreessen: Pure, absolute, indescribable magic. It kind of is, right?
In 2015 I linked Brad Feld: Hollywood's massive miss on strong AI. At that time (and maybe still) Minority Report was thought to be the best attempt to represent "strong AI" in a movie. Now we have ChatGPT, which is pretty strong. Will there be a movie made? Yes. Will it be a good one? Um...
 Okay. I read Hail Mary, the new book by Andy Weir, author of The Martian, and thought it was excellent. And inevitably, it will be made into a movie. But starring Emma Stone as Rocky? Um what? Rocky is a 5-legged alien spider made of rocks. He "speaks" with musical sounds. I get the desire to pair her with Ryan Gosling but I do not get this casting. I'm most curious to see.
 This flying electric boat wants to be the Tesla of the sea. So be it.
While I was in Monaco last October - competing in a regatta, yes, that's a story I must tell - I noted that virtually all of the tenders for those huge yachts berthed there were electric. The wave of the future.
Wow, happy 20th birthday to Safari! Seriously that makes me feel old. I so remember when it came out, a real "who ordered that" moment. At that time the competition was IE (!), and Firefox (remember them? :)
If you are determined to mine Bitcoin, here's a good solution for you: a Bitcoin mining space heater. I'm pretty sure Satoshi et al never anticipated electricity cost to be a limiting factor on adoption, but here we are.
 The WSJ: CES 2023: All the Cool, Crazy and Cute Tech We Found in Las Vegas. In case you missed it, you didn't miss much. This list is notable for what is not on it - anything groundbreaking. Maybe the tech for 3D without glasses, I'll put my marker down for that.
 Did you know? The WSJ is by far the largest circulation newspaper in the world. Visual Capitalist: The top 25 newspapers by circulation. I didn't find this surprising, but I was kind of amazed that the circulation was only 697K. How the mighty have fallen. The LA Times is 6th on the list, at 142K.
Well onward into the day ... lots of rain, no sailing, no cycling (except Zwifting later), hence, coding!
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Yesterday I voyaged up to Santa Barbara to check on my boat, and the Yacht Club; you've maybe read about the storms last week, and the washing away of the beach, and the silting of the harbor mouth. It's quite a thing; last time there was a storm like this was 1983.
The bad news is that sailboat racing has been suspended until they can dredge the harbor mouth. The picture at left was taken last week; that's the end of the breakwater, and the harbor mouth is now so shallow that people are surfing over it!
So I did my first Zwift group ride, in Neokyo on the Makuri Islands. (No, don't bother looking this up on Google Earth, these are made up islands and Neokyo is inspired by Tokyo but doesn't exit.) It was pretty cool, with many of the same elements found in any group ride.
