Today was a bad day.  Sometimes you have to do things you don't want to do, and you put them off, and then you finally do them and it is just as bad as you thought but you also feel a sense of relief afterward.  And so it was.  And will be...

It was also a day of living dangerously; I spent most of the day working offline while installing SQLServer Express SP3, .NET CLR 3.5, and Visual Studio 2008.  Fortunately Microsoft makes it possible to run VS2008 in parallel with VS2005, unfortunately the solution and project files are incompatible, so there's a merry dance trying to use both with the same projects.  Nonetheless I am determined to press on; I find VS2005 so hideously slow that I must switch to VS2008 (which I'm told is significantly faster) as soon as possible.  Stay tuned for more...  probably, much more...

This picture is worth two trillion dollars: the Bush deficit vs the Obama deficit.  What can we say. 

Alex Castellanos: things I learned Tuesday night from President Obama's press conference.  "Obama and congressional Democrats are angry that greedy Wall Street executives took $165 million in bonuses that the president and congressional Democrats gave them."  It would be funnier if it weren't so sad. 

Liberia's Blackboard Blogger.
  Now that's cool. 

Clive Thompson: Troll taming at whitehouse.gov.  "Mr. President, bring on the trolls. The commentosphere is ready for them."  And may the best bot win... 

Not-the-Onion headline of the day: U.S. bill seeks to rescue faltering newspapers.  Seriously, first we bail out the car companies who make cars nobody wants to drive, and now we bail out the media companies who sell papers nobody wants to read?  Whatever happened to "let the market decide"? 

ArsTechnica: Lancing the f**king boil: how digital killed Big Music.  A review of Steve Knopper's new book, Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age.  Sounds humorous and informative. 

Dave Winer: Me, Amazon, Scoble.  "So this insight led me to wonder if Amazon, being the smart, ambitious, rich company that it is, has already figured this out and is lying in wait to pounce on Facebook, or maybe buy them if the price gets attractive.  I can't imagine that they're not on top of this."  The essential insight: recommendations from your friend network are worth more than generic recommendations, which are valuable when buying... makes sense... 

ZooBorn of the day, and maybe the year:
Clouded Leopard kitten.