And so today was Megan's birthday and also Shirley's Mom's birthday (she turned 80!); we had an interesting dinner with family, friends, and family of friends...  Megan’s heart’s desire for her birthday was a drum set (!); fortunately electronic kits now exist which are small(er) and quiet(er).  So be it, my little drummer girl :)  ... and meanwhile it is all [somewhat] happening ...

I can tell what kind of day I've had by the tools I use.  On my best days I use Word (thinking and expressing) or Visual Studio (coding, with C++ or PHP being better than VB or JavaScript).  On my worst days I use Outlook (getting and responding to email) or Excel (modeling, budgeting).  In between there is PowerPoint (creating presentations).  Photoshop is also good (diagrams pictures) as is Citydesk (blogging :) 

Can I just say, I love Capresso.  (I guess I can, this is my blog after all :)  We have a Capresso coffeemaker, it gets daily not to say twice-daily use, and it works, and we love it, but more than that the company is so easy to deal with, on several occasions I've called customer service (yeah for a $200 coffee maker they have real people who answer the 'phone!) and they actually know what you're asking and give you good answers.  Highly recommended. 

Yay, we have another roller, the WSJ's Daily Startup reports OpenTable is joining SolarWinds to test the IPO waters...  let's keep fXf for them, we need this market back open... 

This intrigues me - Dell are now shipping systems with the Tesla processor, Nvidia's coprocessor which turns a GPU into a general-purpose parallel-processing machine (aka "personal supercomputer").  It is a solution looking for a problem, seems like it would be great for image analysis of large pathology images :) 

Microsoft integrates Photosynth with Visual Earth.  Excellent.  A cool combination of two cool things (and possibly a great use for a Tesla processor :)  I don't think Photosynth is a dancing bear, that is, I believe it is useful, but I have yet to figure out what it is useful for...  a solution looking for a problem, even as it is the solution for another problem :) 

ZooBorn of the day: a baby Manatee. 
Proving that all babies are cute...