I'm still basking in the glow of my perfect day yesterday.  Today wasn't perfect, but I still felt great feeding off the momentum.  My fun with gravity this morning didn't hurt either :)

One cool thing I did today was setup a new server in a datacenter, from the comfort of my chair in my office.  Thank you Rackspace.  Armed only with a web browser and a credit card, I was able to contract for a spiffy new 2x2 Opteron with 1GB RAM and 256GB of disk, running Win03.  Two hours later I was RDPed into the box, and four hours later I had a new test system up and running.  I love it. 

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It was not always so; I can remember in a previous life setting up my own datacenter, complete with raised floor, Halon fire protection, backup generator, network hardware, peering relationships with several network providers, and of course a bunch of servers which had to be babysat 24x7.  This is better :)
}

Curious about Windows 7?  Here's a guided tour of the Win7 taskbar from Microsoft... 

[ Update: This post was half-posted up to this point for a couple days while I flew to Brazil.  The full version and several other posts were trapped in the amber of my blogging tool, Citydesk.  All is now well :) ]

Here we have the five most scientifically plausible sci-fi movies...  2001 Space Odyssey heads the list (as it should!) 

Everybody has linked this but it is too cool not to mention; real-life Photoshop.  How excellent is that?  Very. 

NewScientist reports Plucky Mars rovers on the move again.  "The arrival of spring in southern Mars is reviving NASA's two venerable Mars rovers as deepening autumn in the arctic north slowly freezes the Phoenix lander.  After hibernating for the winter on the northern edge of a plateau called Home Plate, the Spirit rover moved uphill in October to collect more sunlight.  On the other side of the planet, the Opportunity rover, which climbed out of a large crater called Victoria at the end of August, has completed the first month of a 12-kilometre trek towards an even bigger crater called Endeavour. That journey is expected to take more than two years."  How excellent, those robots are the Energizer bunnies of space exploration. 

From Wired: AV Receiver porn, the new Denon AVR-889.  "Denon delivers a lot to love at an excellent price. For well under a grand, you get features that just a few years ago were available only in flagship models. That includes 1080p upscaling from analog sources, Neural Surround for XM-HD radio, and Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD. And don't think Denon tacked on fancy formats at the expense of power: At 100 watts per channel, it manages to be Nascar-loud yet ballet-beautiful."  Fortunately they had the decency not to show the back panel :) 

Wrapping up, I must note along with Scot Tempesta that the ACC boats are back!  There are of course the American's Cup Class boats in which the last America's Cup was sailed; the way things are going, it really will be the last one (the next one appears tied up in court) and it really doesn't appear that the ACC boats will ever be used in it again, whatever happens.  In the meantime they're gorgeous expensive awesome incredible machines, and it is nice to see them back on the water racing in the Trofeo Desafío Español.