Took a long dark ride tonight, in the cold and damp, and have a cough to show for it.  I know, I know, being cold doesn't cause you to catch a cold.  Except, well, it does.  Hopefully the Mahi Mahi and Chardonnay I had for dinner will defeat the virus.  Oh, and getting some sleep would be good, but

in the meantime, it's all happening...

My colleague Nick returned to work today, and was greeted by our awesome balloon stack of his office.  800 balloons can make quite a mess, amazingly.  We will have balloons in the hallways for weeks :) 

TechCrunch asks Will Meg Whitman be the next governor of California?  Huh.  Why not?  BTW it is interesting that the TechCrunch note positions eBay as a failure.  Yeah, they're not growing, but they're not shrinking and they are printing money.  Remember?  In 2009 cash will be king. 

More from the Economist's World in 2009 survey: A year of astronomy.  "No discovery in science could be more dramatic than finding life elsewhere in the universe. If it were intelligent life that would be even better but evidence of even the simplest forms of life on a planet circling a distant sun would be the find of the century. That discovery can’t be promised for 2009 but we will see a giant leap in our capability to find Earth-like planets that could provide good homes for life."  On the planned Kepler telescope; but the trend I like for 2009 is that private companies are moving into space. 

Meanwhile, from Cassini, spectacular new images showcase Saturn's rings.  Wow.  I never get tired of looking at Saturn and its moons.  I can't wait to visit Titan :) 

Cory Doctorow notes Atheist bus ads in London.  "There's probably no god.  now stop worrying and enjoy your life."  So be it! 

Glenn Reynolds: "They told me that if we toppled Saddam Hussein, gas would be cheaper than it was in 2001.  And they were right!" 

An interesting article from last April, emailed from Marc: Pearls before Breakfast.  "It was the most astonishing thing I've ever seen in Washington...  Joshua Bell was standing there playing at rush hour, and people were not stopping, and not even looking, and some were flipping quarters at him!"  Context defines quality in so many ways, eh? 

This article's title reminds me of ZZTop's Pearl Necklace, one of my favorites.  Joshua Bell probably would not approve :)

Chris Anderson notes the best selling MP3 album of 2008 was free.  That would be NIN's Ghosts I-IV, release on Amazon.  I don't have it, but maybe I should! 

Perhaps the most interesting announcement from today's rather uninteresting Apple keynote at Macworld (not given by Steve Jobs, as you know): all tracks in the iTunes store are now DRM-free.  And for $.30/track, you can convert/upgrade your existing tracks.  WOW. 

Here we have a half-ton Rube Goldberg corkscrew.  Excellent!  (Although I must tell you a simple waiter's corkscrew is my preference for actually, you know, opening a bottle :)