Well this is it, huh?  After all that time and money, tomorrow we pick a new President.  All the indications are that it will be Barack Obama, not my choice, but so be it.  (On the other hand, could Mac be back?)  No matter who wins, he'll definitely be walking into a buzz saw, the new President is going to have plenty of challenges.  Good luck to him!  And no, I don't think we're going to be up all night waiting on the results...  If all works according to plan I will be blogging the Big Day tomorrow, as I did four years ago...

I had a busy day today, still collating feedback and making / modifying plans after our Pathology Visions conference last week.  I did this while setting up a new VM for testing, and can I just say one more time Windows paging sucks.  My computer was dog slow all day because it was paging, and no, the working set was not that big.  Crud.

In other news, I rode Malibu CC again today, set my best time ever, 1:55:05.  At this point I can say I have fully recovered from my lung infection, whew.  And I managed to time things perfectly; I was just cresting Mulholland when the sun set, giving me a beautiful "Solitude" shot (at right, please click to enlarge).

Arthur Laffer in the WSJ: The Age of Prosperity Is Over.  "Twenty-five years down the line, what this administration and Congress have done will be viewed in much the same light as what Herbert Hoover did in the years 1929 through 1932. Whenever people make decisions when they are panicked, the consequences are rarely pretty. We are now witnessing the end of prosperity."  Ah man, can't we be a little optimistic?  No?  So many observers see these huge systemic problems that will take years to fix.  Where were they four months ago? 

So you know how I like my little Dash Express, right?  Well, the product is great, but the company, not so great.  Ars Technica reports Dash Express woes highlight Silicon Valley challenges.  "Automotive GPS startup Dash Express announced today that it's getting out of the hardware business, cutting its workforce, and repositioning itself as a software-only company."  Not clear what the implication is for me and my little Dash... 

Amazon announces frustration-free packaging.  Yay!  What a great idea... 

Everything you knew about warming up is wrong: Stretching the Truth.  "Researchers now believe that some of the more entrenched elements of many athletes’ warm-up regimens are not only a waste of time but actually bad for you. The old presumption that holding a stretch for 20 to 30 seconds - known as static stretching - primes muscles for a workout is dead wrong. It actually weakens them."  Huh.  Who knew? 

John Gruber considers iPhone-likeness.  "I’ll put forth one central, overriding guideline for iPhone UI design:  Figure out the absolute least you need to do to implement the idea, do just that, and then polish the hell out of the experience."  Not a bad guideline for designing anything, if you think about it... 

Maybe this is why people think Steve Jobs is just being awkward?  (Do you really need copy-and-paste?)

Here's a pet peeve: I hate it when people misuse the word "blog".  A blog is a website, not a particular page, and not an individual post.  Get the jargon right or don't use it. 

23andMe is Time's "invention of the year".  So be it.  I have not had my genes tested yet, have you?  Somehow maybe I don't want to know... 

Have you noticed that Google's spell check is way better than Word's?  Many times while composing an email, I mistype a word, right click on the red squiggly line, and Word uselessly suggests a bunch of words which are not the word I want.  Meanwhile if I do a Google search, poof! it comes right back with Did You Mean: and it is always right! 

Here we have the GenderAnalyzer - give it a website, and it tells you the likely gender of the author.  Cool, it got me right :)