I'm back!  After two hectic and wonderful days of watching the Tour of California...  Friday I was at the Solvang Time Trial (check out that pic, yeah, that's me applauding Levi Leipheimer on TV), and today I rode to Balcom Canyon to watch the Peleton blow up that unbelievable 18% climb.  Levi came through at the Solvang TT, and now has a solid lead overall.  Nothing is better than a nice ride up a beautiful canyon, then sitting there with thousands of other fans watching a pro peleton demolish the same canyon.  Anyway it was really fun.  Now, back to work!

The Macbook Air is getting a lot of well-deserved "air time" for its amazing design, but Tom's Hardware wonders Has Lenovo created the "perfect" laptop?  "In many ways, the X300 is a much more practical version of a new category of notebook computer we saw launched with the visually aggressive and less compromising Macbook Air and the idea Lenovo has come up with suggests that a new 'Perfect' notebook for our time is approaching quickly and turning into a moving target."  So be it, but great design wins every time... 

Speaking of great design, check out the winners of the "what is graphic design" competition, on Veerle's Blog.  They really are awesome!  [ via Daring Fireball ]  My own favorite entry is shown at left. 

This is pretty cool: ScienceDaily reports New Electron Microscope Identifies Individual Color-coded Atoms.  "A new electron microscope recently installed in Cornell's Duffield Hall is enabling scientists for the first time to form images that uniquely identify individual atoms in a crystal and see how those atoms bond to one another. And in living color."  The pic at right shows four different edges in an artificially layered material, with the atoms' colors showing the characteristics of their bonds. 

I'm going to guess that the scientists at Cornell who are using this device are not overly concerned with the moral implications of doing so :)