Had a nice quiet day, my girls are all gone (shopping in Santa Barbara!) and had some friends over to watch football.  We were rooting for the Cardinals, who won (yay), and for the Ravens, who didn't (boo).  Both good games.  The Super Bowl will be pretty interesting, a study in contrasts.  The key will be whether Arizona's offense can move the ball against Pittsburgh's defense.  My heart says yes, but my head says no :)

One of the important issues we discussed today while consuming vast quantities of chips, dip, and beer, was whether the Pro Bowl shouldn't be played right after the conference championships, the week before the Super Bowl.  We decided yes (please tell the league office).  Of course that means nobody playing the Super Bowl would play in the Pro Bowl, but that's okay; having a game to watch in that "dead" weekend would be good.  Right now everyone cares about who is selected for the Pro Bowl, but nobody cares about the game or watches it.

The rehabilitation of George Bush is well under way, as people realize 1) Obama is going to have to do many of the same things Bush did, for many of the same reasons, and 2) people realize that blaming everything on Bush didn't work.  Sisu nails it: To trash Bush was to belong.  I'm not a huge fan of Bush but I thought he wasn't nearly as bad nor nearly as guilty as many people did, particularly in the mainstream media. 

Sully Sullenberger is [justifiably] a hero (he was the captain of flight 1549 who piloted the plane into the Hudson River after it encountered a flock of birds just after takeoff), but FuturePundit points out he's also a genius.  "Innate intellectual ability matters a great deal. A dumber society will be a more accident-prone and less safe society."  Exactly why I'm so worried about Unnatural Selection... 

Incidentally, since deciding that this year I have to focus myself on my book, I've told a number of people about it, and have condensed "what is it about" to this: the world is getting dumber.  When people ask why, I answer because dumb people have more kids than smart ones.  That isn't the whole story but it resonates; people "get it" right away. 

I saw a billboard yesterday with the caption "do you leak urine?"  Now c'mon, do we have to see that?  Eew.  How do you explain that to a kid?  There are like five people who care about that problem, and zero of them are going to call an 800 number because of some billboard.  [ ...here it is... ] 

So I wired my blog posts into Twitter, and that was good, and I wired Twitter into Facebook, and that was better; and now I've wired Twitter into Plaxo.  Can't hurt, right?  I'm beginning to realize just how non-universal use of RSS really is.  A lot of people like being notified about new posts this way... 

You all know how I think Floyd Landis was innocent, right?  (He won the 2007 Tour de France, then was found guilty of "doping" on stage 17 because the ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone in his bloodstream was too high.)  Well you can take my word for it, or not, but you also might like to read Floyd Landis and the Magic Water Bottle, Part I, Part II, and Part III, posted by Oliver Starr, a former professional bike racer.  Dead on, IMHO. 

The other day I rediscovered the utility of "hard links" in NTFS.  You do know about hard links, right?  No?  Well then you can read Jameser's Tech Tips and learn all about it, like I did... 

Finally, want to know how to build a great UI?  Avoid annoying the user.  That's it.  Easier said than done, unfortunately, users annoy easily...