I am starting to worry about my bruised rib a little.  It didn't seem that bad at the time, and doesn't seem that bad now, either, but it isn't getting better very fast.  Actually it isn't getting better, period.  Shirley says this is because I'm masking the pain with Motrin, and hence constantly re-injuring it.  Does that make medical sense?  No idea.

Today a colleague and I visited one of Aperio's partners; a great company with great products, but one that runs at a decidedly different clock speed than Aperio.  It was so apparent that while we want to get going immediately on any possible joint project, they need to study it, analyze it, think about it, and generally let time pass before they get around to it.  I could never work for a company like that.  Wow.

So really, what would happen?  Ralph Peters asks the question...  "To date, not one 'mainstream media' journalist has pressed the leading advocates of unconditional surrender to describe in detail what might happen after we 'bring the troops home now'."  Like I noted the other day, it is easy to be anti-war, but not so easy to say what you would do instead. 

Jeff Atwood considers a subject I've often thought about myself: Designing for Evil.  It is one thing to build something useful for benevolent users, quite another to build something that can withstand malevolent users, too.  It ends up being a classic arms race, you try something, they try something, and each side responds to the other.  With the benevolent users who are the service's actual customers caught in the middle. 

Awesome!  Jens Voight powers away from the Giro d'Italia peloton for a stage win, as Alberto Contador solidifies his grasp on the maglia rosa.  I love Jens. 

Doc Searles with what he thinks is a little good news: gas prices drop below $127/barrel.  Whether you think lower oil prices are good news depends entirely on your point of view.  Higher oil prices will reduce consumption, reduce American dependence on foreign supply, and stimulate demand for alternative sources of entropy, which are all good things.  Yay, $200/barrel! 

Dude, where's my recession?  Yeah, seems to be missing; as James Pethokoukis notes, "What do you call a recession where the economy keeps going up and up, even if a bit sluggishly? Well, my friends, you call that an expansion. And that is what we seem to have right now, despite all the economic doomsaying about a recession or even a Great Depression 2.0."  The MSM is distorting economic news is just as badly as news from Iraq.  Somehow convincing the American public that the Bush administration is failing is more important than the truth. 

I notice this most dramatically when I speak with people who don't read blogs, like my Mom, or my mountain biking friends.  Their impression of what's happening in the world is qualitatively different to mine.

The other day I noted Microsoft's rather weird "five misunderstood features in Vista".  What I didn't realize is that this was version 2.0 of this document; John Gruber links Steven Poole's fisking of the original.  Bizarre.  Microsoft have really lost their way, huh?