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Sunday,  06/28/09  10:24 PM

Well today I did ... nothing.  Very little, anyway; nothing worth reporting.  The high point was sitting by the pool, drinking Cuco, and finishing Spook Country (I have become quite the William Gibson fan).  I am still sore and tired from yesterday, and it was good to stay away from the computer, too... well except for editing pictures and blogging I guess.  Speaking of which, it is all happening...

According to Auren Hoffman, engineers are the best deal, so stock up on them!  Apparently software engineering techniques have allowed software engineers to become twice as productive as ten years ago.  I still don't understand why that would lead you to want as many as you could get.  Seems like that means you only need half as many?  You read the article and see if you can follow the logic :) 

Jason Kottke links an appreciation of the SR-71 Blackbird, the most remarkable plane of the 20th century.  Really when you consider it first flew in 1964, it seems unbelievable. 

Here's an interesting article which asks is Twitter is a fad?  I wouldn't go that far, but it did cause me to remember another phenomenon like Twitter... do you remember ICQ?  Back in 1997 it was the biggest thing since sliced bread - peer-to-peer communications, between people!  Everyone had to have an ICQ account, the number of downloads per day was breathlessly reported, and we even had celebrity adoption of ICQ in the news.  AOL bought ICQ in 1998 for $280M, at that time a massive amount for a company with no source of income.  (I know what you're thinking, who would pay that much for a company with no income even now, but check out the Google acquisition of YouTube :)  ICQ still exists today, but it is barely a footnote in Internet life.  That's my prediction for the trajectory which Twitter will follow - they'll be bought for a huge amount, adoption will plateau, monitization will corrupt the user experience, and it will fade into a footnote.  We'll see... 

A fascinating observation: Major League Baseball uses an outdated camera angle from centerfield.  (Basically for historical reasons, the camera is off center, distorting the angles of the pitch crossing the plate.)  When you see the comparisons, you realize there really is no comparison.  Dead center makes a huge difference. 

Cool picture of the day: approaching Jupiter.  Please click through and watch, you will not be sorry.  I only hope someday I'll see it on the main screen of a spaceship control deck :) 

Awesome news: the Palm Pre's WebOS SDK has been "leaked" into the Internet.  Known as Mojo, this enables developers to use proprietary interfaces to the WebOS API from within JavaScript.  I can't wait to play with it... 

I'll just say parenthetically, I wonder to what extent this was unplanned.  Seems like by leaking the API Palm can get more apps developed and have an extended beta period, and if anything goes wrong they can claim they weren't ready...

Check this out: maxi-trimaran Banque Populaire arrives in New York.  Awesome.  They're trying for a new North Atlantic crossing record. 

ZooBorn of the day: a Sea Lion pup.  Awww...