I began today in nerd mode, spent most of the day in Dad mode, and ended it in fan mode.  Well okay since I'm posting maybe I ended in nerd mode, too...

The day began with a 5-way Skype call including a participant on a cell phone in India.  I am not making this up.  The call wasn't perfect - sound was a bit fuzzy, especially for those on analog phones, and there was a bit of delay, and the line dropped a couple of times, but it worked.  And it wasn't in the "bear dancing" category, either; not only was it cool, but it was useful.  As a result of this 45 minute call, we're planning to hire a summer intern presently located in India.  I love it. 

The remainder of the day was spent at Malibu beach with my daughters and their friends.  Perfect day - sunny, with a bit of fog, wonderful breeze off the ocean...  I'm reading Market Forces, by Richard Morgan, the author of Broken Angels and Altered Carbon.  Great so far.

Upon my return I watched the Dodgers lose two straight games to the Angels (on Tivo).  Sigh.  Just when I thought maybe we had a team this year...  Strangely, this Dodger team can hit, but our starting pitching is suspect.

Do you visit Day by Day, every day?  You should.  (And yes, Chris Muir should have an RSS feed.  And permalinks.  Anyway.) 

Gerald Vanderleun bemoans The Unremitting Stupidity of 21st Century "Civilized" Man.  "These stunted souls seem determined to wallow in the banal and the trivial, asserting that only these tiny concerns have any meaning.  It is the zero-sum 'philosophy' of moral relativism branded into actual lives."  Reminds me a great deal of Bill Whittle's recent masterpiece, Sanctuary... 

It is exactly this kind of stupidity that has Keith Thompson Leaving the Left.  "I have come to believe, and gladly join with others who have discovered for themselves, that the single most important thing a genuinely liberal person can do now is walk away from the house the left has built."  Interesting, eloquent, and dead on, IMHO.  And published in SFGate, too - I wonder what the majority of its left-leaning liberal readers thought of it? 

Yesterday I noted I'd seen Return of the Sith in a theater, and that I liked it.  This was the day after I'd downloaded it from the web.  Does this make sense?  Yes.  So what's with this story:  MPAA Blames BitTorrent for Star Wars distribution?  Do they make any sense?  No. 

Like many guys, I'm in the market for more inches.  In my home entertainment screen, of course.  And Samsung now has a 40-inch OLED.  Oh my.  1280x1024, and 5000:1 contrast ratio.  I know, if you have to ask, you can't afford it.  I remember a while back John Dvorak wrote, "the PC you want is always $5,000".  Which used to be true.  Now it is hard to spend that much on a PC.  But now it seems "the display you want is always $10,000".  I wonder if that will change, too? 

Andrew Grummet: Tales from the duct.  He has been bitten by the scourge of all sailors, “store-bought duct tape”.  REAL duct tape, of the kind used by contractors when assembling ducts, bears no resemblance to the gray tape sold at Home Depot as “duct tape”.  The contractor grade tape is made from real cloth, is stronger than steel, and is the stickiest substance known to man (even when soaking wet).  I’ve heard it said that when duct tape sticks to itself the bond is stronger than the tape, and this might even be true. 

P.S. Once I was in a gas station and I happened to have a roll of tape sitting on the front seat, and a guy walking by saw it and said “hey, do you race motorcycles?”  So I guess it is used in other sports besides sailing :)

Tim O'Reilly notes there will be podcast support in the next version of iTunes.  Cool!  But not surprising.  Also note when you read it Steve Jobs' comments on video... 

Ever wonder what Photoshop would look like with a 3D interface?  Wonder no more.  Looks pretty darn cool.  [ via Tom Coates ]  { The coolest was editing the thumbnail at right in a 2D version of Photoshop... } 

Here we have a robot controlled by a cockroach.  No, I am not making this up.  "The system uses a living Madagascan hissing cockroach atop a modified trackball to control the three-wheeled robot.  Infrared sensors also provide navigation feedback to create a semi-intelligent system, with the cockroach as the CPU."  Unbelievable.  This is one device that cannot be debugged :)