Blogging late on a Friday night...  it has been a weird and wonderful week away from home, following another one, separated by an unplugged weekend.  I'm back to normal now, back in my own little office, working away (and now... blogging).  Whew.

Meanwhile, it's all happening...

And boy does he deserve it: "Today, Rep. Sue Myrick called on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to revoke former President Jimmy Carter’s passport."  I don't know Rep Myrick, but I like her already.  Carter has single-handedly invented the role of idiot ex-President.  [ via Instapundit ] 

Are you bitter?  Then perhaps you should visit bitteramericans.com.  "Do you agree with Barack Obama that many Americans are 'bitter' over what has transpired these past nearly eight years? If so, then add your voice to those who proudly proclaim 'Damn right I’m bitter.'"  Me, I'm not bitter.  I'm confident :) 

On the other hand, watch I Love the World from Discovery Channel and you cannot be bitter.  Not even a little bit.  [ via Kottke ]  Boom de ya, boom de ya... 

Microsoft does some amazing things, this isn't one of them.  An internal promotional video for Vista that is so bad it hurts.  Even if this were designed as a spoof, it would be lame.  And it wasn't. 
(They'll say "Vista, gotta get me some"?) 

The endgame of disruptive innovation: Encyclopedia Britannica now free for bloggers.  For those of you who don't know Encyclopedia Britannica, it was the Google of its day, the paper-based source of all knowledge.  Google it to learn more :) 

So is Ning worth $500M?  No.  Marc Cantor nails it: "What can Ning do with $44M?  Now what can they do with another $60M?  Well since they're not profitable - let's see - they could lose $10M a year for 10 years and still sell the company for $100M."  Borderline disgusting; reminds me a little of Marimba, another startup with no business model and a cute CEO... 

You know how I'm a sucker for news from Titan?  The Daily Galaxy ("news from Planet Earth") asks Saturn's Titan: A Mirror Image of Earth Before Life Evolved?  "The Cassini spacecraft observations of Saturn's largest moon, the orange-colored Titan, have given scientists a glimpse of what Earth might have been like before life evolved. They now believe Titan possesses many parallels to Earth, including lakes, rivers, channels, dunes, rain, snow, clouds, mountains and possibly volcanoes."  Sounds like a great place to visit!  (BTW I am delighted to see that my post from 2004 remains Google's top hit for "visiting Titan", as it should be.) 

MSDN Magazine has a nice interview with Bjarne Stroustrup, author of C++.  He speaks the sooth, the whole sooth, and nothing but the sooth.  You can imagine that he is not a fan of .NET :) 

This looks way cool: Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky introduce stackoverflow.com.  "We're starting to build a programming Q&A site that's free. Free to ask questions, free to answer questions, free to read, free to index, built with plain old HTML, no fake rot13 text on the home page, no scammy google-cloaking tactics, no salespeople, no JavaScript windows dropping down in front of the answer asking for $12.95 to go away."  Excellent, I can't wait...