Woo hoo, September!  And...  Labor Day.  I labored at doing nothing today, did a little coding, a little football watching, a little hanging out.  Today is traditionally our last day of heating the pool for the summer, after this, the weather cools down, the kids are in school, and no swimming takes place.  I'm heading into a busy week with a lot going on and travel to Boston and New York at the end of it, so I rested up.

My server continues to labor, yesterday I mentioned I served over 4,800 pages (ended up over 5,000), today, over 2,400 so far...  and a ton of hits, too, mostly images (thar be hotlinkin' goin' on out thar).  So be it...  I don't have the energy or inclination to figure out what's going on, but I like it.  Welcome!

So it's curtains for Gustav, and now we await Hanna, Ike, and Josephine.  Welcome to the hurricane season, whew.  Not to trivialize the damage caused along the Gulf Coast, but the longest-lasting impact of Gustav was that it kept George Bush from speaking at the GOP convention in Minneapolis.  As noted in the New Yorker cartoon I just posted, he remains McCain's biggest liability, and although it would have been weird not to have the sitting President speak, it was fine that [because of Gustav] he didn't.  The GOP can now resume the convention with speakers like Giulani... 

The big news today was Google's Chrome, a new browser.  Or a new Web Operating System, if you prefer.  The idea that Google would do something like this has a pretty long history, as noted by Jason Kottke, why do it now, when Firefox has taken off so nicely?  Looking through comic book in which Google explains the plan, it seems the main reason is to have an architecture with separate processes for each tab / window, in order to get more parallelism for background tasks.  I guess that makes sense.  In conjunction with various client-side web applications (written in JavaScript), over time this could end up being a major threat to Windows.  We'll have to see how it plays out... 

Check out these amazing nested Klein bottles...  3D equivalents to the 2D Mobius strip (Klein bottles have only one surface, Mobius strips have only one edge).  Beautiful, on two levels. 

This is cool: Yacht Club prepares children for sailing, an article about the Westlake Yacht Club's summer sailing academy.  My kids are all happy graduates :) 

As a veteran C++ programmer, I look over into the Objective-C world with curiosity and confusion.  Although superficially similar, they aren't really, and the difference is illustrated by the new blocks feature being added to Objective-C.  It is clearly more "dynamic" than statically compiled C++... 

A great rant from ex-uncov-er Ted Dzuiba: OpenID is why I hate the Internet.  The real subject is "why I dislike OpenID", and the observations are accurate and compelling.  There is no way this is going to succeed, he's right.