A nice lazy Sunday... the last for a while, as my life prepares to become more complicated!  I did enjoy hanging out at home, cleaned out some stuff in the garage, did some testing before turning some last minute changes in, and watched football (!) - really feels like fall now.  Especially Pittsburgh playing Cleveland, with the rain falling and the wind blowing; it definitely isn't summer anymore.

Did you see the USC game yesterday?  I watched it late last night...  wow.  When you root for a team, and they win, you celebrate.  And when your friend roots for the other team, and they lose, you gloat.  But when your team completely demolishes your friend's team, what can you do?  I have a close friend who is a big Ohio State fan.  What do I say tomorrow?  I hate to bring it up. 

Wow, Ike really did a number on Galveston...  check out this Coast Guard overflight of the flooded areas...  horrible.  Every one of those houses is a story, people displaced, lives uprooted, memories drowned.  As with Katrina, I fear the recovery will take years. 

The news of the train collision in Chatsworth was tough to hear, but even worse, today I found out Paul Long, one of my daughter's teachers died in the disaster.  He was on his way home from his mother's funeral.  That's just unbearably tragic.  And apparently the whole thing was human error...  seems so weird that there isn't some kind of fail-safe mechanism to prevent this type of disaster. 

If you're a regular reader, you might remember my Second Gear essay?  It chronicles a bike ride up the Santa Susana pass... which happens to be just next to the tracks on which the collision occurred.  I'll never be able to ride that again without thinking of this tragedy... 

Chris Muir's Day-by-Day continues to be excellent; I particularly liked this one today, with the classic Monty Python reference... 

Voltaic roof shingles!  I want them, we all do; except they are really expensive, and don't really pay for themselves, even with government subsidies.  That's the big problems with alternative entropy sources, they're alternative for a reason (they aren't competitive with conventional sources). 

Eric Raymond: Timing the Entitlements Crash.  "The fundamental problem is that income-transfer programs (and the interest service on the debt purchased to keep them running) are spending wealth in higher volumes than the economy can actually generate, and demand for that spending is rising faster than the economy is growing. Thus, raising tax rates is no longer a way out, if it ever was."  [ via Glenn Reynolds, who comments: "if something can't go on forever, then it won't." ]  

These panoramic photos by Brian Maine are amazing!  Wow, you have to click through to see them full size.  Beautiful and awe-inspiring...