Hi blog readers, what's up?  I hope you had a nice day...  I did, was able to finish some stuff, and that always feels good... and got in a nice hard ride, "Malibu CC" in 1:58, so that felt good (more Wildflower prep), and had a rather startling revelation about myself which was scary but now that I've had time to absorb, good.  More on that when I'm less scared :)

Okay, onward, make a filter pass we shall, eh?

So, about Tweetdeck.  First, it's a nice app.  Although the fact that it is written in Air makes it a resource pig, it performs just fine (of course, it isn't exactly compute bound).  I must tell you, using a desktop app for Twittering doesn't make the tweets any more interesting.  Maybe I'm just following the wrong group, but the signal to noise remains perilously close to zero.  However there was a weird and unexpected silver lining: Tweetdeck is a great Facebook client! 

Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror): "I hate meta-discussion so much. Podcasts about podcasts. Blogging about blogging. Stack Overflow posts about Stack Overflow. KILL ME NOW"

Me (@OleEichhorn): "Not to mention tweets about meta-discussions"

Today I had to send a fax - a 53 page fax - and it was weird... I have a phone line wired into my docking station (from 100 years ago) and so I selected Fax as my printer, and poof it "just worked", but the whole experience was like watching a black and white movie.  Listening to the phone ring, and the modems little beeping and whistling, man, it was like something from my childhood :)  And then of course it took over an hour to send.  But it did work, whew, so I guess I shouldn't complain... 

My daughter Meg is practicing a dance for school based on Michael Jackson's Thriller, which of course meant I listened to it again, and I must tell you it doesn't really hold up for me.  Not like CCR's Cosmo's Factory, which is older and cornier and yet somehow fresher still.  Or maybe less tied to a time; Thriller seems so "disco" and that seems so "80s".  I still like Billie Jean, always my favorite from that album, but I can't say overall it's one of my favorites... 

From Kottke: RIP, Geocities.  Man, I remember Geocities, in fact I had a Geocities page at one time.  Wow, what a blast from the past.  Interesting to be reminded that Yahoo paid $3.5B for Geocities in 1999; hard to say they got their money's worth, eh? 

I see where some are saying Facebook supplanted Geocities, but that's not right, and even MySpace was pretty different.  I think blogging supplanted personal websites, and so Blogger and Typepad and Wordpress and LiveJournal are the real successors...

Apropos: here we have the top 15 web properties of 1999.  AOL was #1, with Microsoft and Yahoo at #2 and #3, so that's not a surprise.  But some of the names are history, like Go, and Excite, and Lycos, and AltaVista, and Snap, and Xoom, and ... Geocities ...

According to Fred Wilson A second market is emerging.  This is a market for private equity, lying somewhere between an acquisition and an IPO as a potential exit for startup founders and early investors.  Huh, interesting.  I don't know enough to have an opinion about whether he's right, but it would be cool... 

Here we have a giant windmill.  I know, I know, you're thinking it's big, but check it out, it is BIG. 

Not a ZooBorn, but baby of the day: a [frozen] baby mammoth!  WOW.  And that is not photoshopped, that is a Nenets boy petting the little guy.  Presumably it was woollier when it was alive.  

I must say " baby Mammoth" reminds me of George Carlin and "jumbo shrimp" :)