A filter pass made while flying from Houston back to L.A...  (offline, will be posted when I land :)  It has been a great trip so far, with my annual visit to RSNA, and a great meeting with an impressive customer this morning (wow! was it only this morning?)  And now on to L.A, a late dinner in Encinitas, and then... my birthday!  The big Five-one, which does not feel big at all; and I've switched to hex anyway so it is 33 :)

Dinner report: Sepia, in Chicago was amazing...  pictured at left, flat iron steak, bone marrow beignets, braised greens, w Callejo Ribera del Duero and of course my trusty Kindle, serving up Nine Dragons.  It doesn't get better. 

So Monday was "Cyber Monday" - did you do any shopping online?  I didn't, but I think maybe I was the only one; I heard that 96M people bought something, 4% from smartphones.  Cool. 

Apparently Amazon "won", with a 44% year-over-year increase.

This is clever; The Sun celebrate their 40th anniversary with iPhone-like ads.  When you look at it this way, a newspaper really does have some advantages.  I particularly liked the emphasis on speed; once you have on in hand, there is literally no waiting for content. 

Stephen Baker, blogger at Blogspotting for BusinessWeek, is moving to TheNumerati.  Adjust your bookmarks.  I guess having bloggers was an interesting experiment for BW, but they found there is no money in blogging.  Sorry :)  It is fun though! 

Square looks really cool; a new payment services which uses a small [square] peripheral to read credit cards and converts their contents into sound, which can be used by any device with an audio input jack.  Clever.  I'm not sure credit cards will be with us long term - phones themselves will probably replace them - but for now, this is a good way to replace cash with debit cards. 

From Slate: Slap on a pink ribbon, call it a day.  "That little loop seems to have replaced real feminism, which is why women's health priorities are so screwed up."  I will say, having just attended RSNA, that awareness of breast cancer is at an all-time high.  Which might be more important than "real feminism". 

Amazing photos of Dubai in decline.  Wow, that bubble has burst at last.  [ via kottke ] 

The biggest story of 2009?  The rise of the virtual newsroom.  I'm not even sure it's really a 2009 story, but definitely it has become apparent this year that the virtual army of amateurs is out-executing the mainstream media.  I think going into the tank for Obama  in 2007-08 was really the MSM's shark jump... 

I like this, from David Pescovitz: "Beschizza's Law: 'Any sufficiently advanced reality is indistinguishable from Photoshop.'"  Just wait 'till we have augmented reality, then the line will really blur. 

Related; I like Paul Spinrad's idea for an opening title sequence:  The following titles fade in and are crossed out one by one: 

• A True Story
• Based On A True Story
• Inspired By A True Story
• Inspired By Real Events
• Inspired By Reality
• Partially Inspired By Reality

This could totally describe my blog!

Picture of the day, this amazing sunset from Jason Weisberger.  In me it inspires a feeling of serene peace.  Please enjoy!