Had a nice quiet day today; mostly reading and coding.  And eating (!) - I am still recovering from yesterday's century, evidently I didn't eat or drink enough, because I've been hungry and thirsty all day.

Actually I was able to delight two daughters with new phones, Alexis (14) has a new one to replace her old one, which died, and Megan (10++) has a new one for the first time, as a pre-birthday present.  An important rite of passage, getting your first phone!  Anyway she is one happy kid.

The weather here was great all weekend, how was yours?  (Nice and sunny, with a fairly stiff breeze.)  Anyway I hope you weren't in Ohio, because the weather there was incredibly awful; can you believe 20 inches of snow? 

Wow this is cool: Satellite shows Saturn moon might have rings.  "The international Cassini spacecraft detected what appeared to be a large debris disk around the 950-mile-wide moon Rhea during a flyby in 2005. Scientists proposed that the halo likely contained particles ranging from the size of grains to boulders."  How great is it that we can launch robots into space to learn these things?  What a great time to be alive... 

This is really cool: Electronic medical records in a virtual hospital.  "The Ann Myers Medical Center is a hospital in Second Life, the virtual world where we organize medical exercises and simulations. John Norris is more than interested in medical informatics and the opportunities provided by Second Life in medical education. That’s all you should know before reading the next interview with John Norris about his recent experiments to implement electronic medical records into the virtual hospital."  I've contacted John about including digital pathology into the electronic medical records - now that would be cool. 

Dave Winer pounds the nail through the wood: Hot products make successful startups.  "When I think about the people who had runaway successes that made them fortunes the ones that had great products and were admired by many were the ones that really hit it out of the park. I can't think of anyone who had a great product and failed because they didn't watch every penny."  Absolutely.  This is what was missing in the great debate about hiring people and watching your pennies... 

Piling on in the vein of pissed off in Peoria, the NYTimes reports They criticized Vista.  And they should know.  "One year after the birth of Windows Vista, why do so many Windows XP users still decline to 'upgrade'?  Microsoft says high prices have been the deterrent...  An alternative theory, however, is that Vista's reputation precedes it. XP users have heard too many chilling stories from relatives and friends about Vista upgrades that have gone badly... Can someone tell me again, why is switching XP for Vista an 'upgrade'?"  I can tell you it definitely is not. 

I really wonder what is going to happen here...  Can Microsoft possibly save Vista, with Windows Seven?  Or was XP the last good version of Windows?  One thing's for sure, if Microsoft doesn't bag the .NET CLR, they're toast.  Can you even imagine Office written in .NET?

Mark Pilgrim: Draconian error handling: still the worst idea ever.  As usual with Mark, what he says is interesting, but how he says it is better.  "My therapist says I shouldn't rely so much on external validation."  I love it.