One of the biggest things that happened during my blog break was Lance Armstrong winning his 6th consecutive Tour de France.  Unbelievable.  It was truly over when Lance won the time trial up L'Alpe d'Huez.  A vertical ascent of 3,800', with an average grade of 8%, Lance covered the 9.6 miles in under 40 minutes.  That's just awesome. 

Did you watch the Tour?  I upgraded my cable package just so I could get OLN, just so I could watch the tour.  Great Tivo material :)

It is baseball's second season, and watching the games I'm reminded of how much "inside jargon" is used in this sport.  More than any other?  Maybe not, consider this report of a cricket match, which might as well be written in another language. 

Here's a story from 2009, published in 2002: How Google beat Amazon and eBay to the Semantic Web.  This is so true.  Reminds me of the difference between emergent and explicit properties. 

Remember my caravans idea?  Well, it's slowly becoming a reality.  The Economist reports on "adaptive cruise control", which is marketed as a safety features but may have positive side effects for traffic flow too.  Excellent! 

Yesterday I noted Netscape's 10th anniversary, and I meant to link Eric Sink's fascinating article Memoirs from the Browser Wars.  "The original Internet Explorer team was just five or six people.  By the time Silverberg and others decided to rewrite the browser almost completely for version 3.0, released in 1996, the team had grown to 100. By 1999, it was more than 1,000."  Interestingly, Firefox really seems to be gaining traction, and it has been developed by a pretty small team... 

Ottmar rants: "But if a Texan has to take off his cowboy hat at security, why should a Sikh not have to lift his turban or an Islamic woman have to lift her veil?"  Of course. 

This is just too cool - the slab sink.  "Watch the water challenge the laws of nature as it caresses the stone on it's way toward the drain."  Just when you think you've seen it all, you realize you haven't. 

Today's cool utility - space.  Really great for visually managing all the files on your hard drive.  You might not be as into disk cleanliness as I am, but I think space is downright spiffy. 

Hey, did you know Lemmings do not commit suicide?  Me neither.  Apparently the whole thing was cooked up by Disney , for the 1958 movie White Wilderness.  "According to a 1983 investigation by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation producer Brian Vallee, the lemming scenes were faked.  The lemmings supposedly committing mass suicide by leaping into the ocean were actually thrown off a cliff by the Disney filmmakers."  Man, you learn something new every day.