And so a maximally busy week gets off to a rather weird start...  drove down to Vista this morning, took 4½ hours!  Yes it is raining - heavily - and in L.A. that means people have no clue what to do; I swear I saw people get out of their cars to take pictures.  Also must have been five different accidents.  And so then I got to play rock star (!) as we are making a fun video for an upcoming sales meeting; I don't think I've worn zebra-striped tights before, nor a mesh shirt, and definitely not with a Gene Simmons wig (stay tuned, maybe I'll have some video for you).  Then a four hour product roadmap meeting, after which I was ready to drink an entire bottle of Sanford Pinot Noir... so I did. 

And now I am blogging.  (hic)

Cool news of the day, or of any other day: Google Goggles, aka searching with pictures.  You could totally see this coming, and if you're a regular reader you know we've discussed this many times.  Small glasses-mounted cameras feeding this search, with a heads' up display, and poof! augmented reality becomes real and useful. 

A report from the Copenhagen Climate Summit: 1,200 limos, 140 private planes, and caviar wedges.  Possibly the most pretentious sanctimonious and hypocritical political gathering of all time, amid strong competition.  Blech. 

TechCrunch: getting it right and wrong with the new media.  It's a good post, plus anything accompanied by clippy automatically gets style points :) 

This is cool: Google is using 2D barcodes to link businesses to online information, a kind of assisted augmented reality. 

Well you know this was going to happen: the iPhone orchestra.  Right now it is more of a dancing bear than anything real, but given time you could see smartphones gradually displacing other instruments; after all, they can sound like anything given modern sampling techniques... 

Check out this cool BBC science vignette about winged vine seeds which float hundreds of yards through rainforest from a football-sized pod.  Nature is radical. 

Excellent news!  Cancer rates continue to fall in the U.S.  Deaths continue to fall, too, as the number of types of cancer which can be fought keeps going up.  The war continues but the battles are going well... 

Cool!  Virgin Galactic announces Space Ship Two!  We're getting ever closer to private space travel.  Of course it is still *expensive* and there is still nowhere to go.  (Titan, anyone?)  But those things will change! 

Wow was this a blast from the past: Boing Boing posts about blacklight posters.  There was a time I was heavily into these; I can probably close my eyes and picture them in my room, when I was fourteen...  definitely the Age of Aquarius.  The post is about a book called Ultraviolet which is printed with fluorescent ink. Whoa. 

How excellent is this?  Twenty of the world's most beautiful libraries.  I love my Kindle and digital is the future, but books are beautiful and libraries are excellent.  I wonder how long they'll last?  (BTW it is very cool that Rem Koolhaas' Seattle Public Library made the list; not only have I been in it, but it is way cool :) 

Liron Shapira has left Slide and started Quixey.  "For the last month I've been working full-time as a co-founder at a small startup called Quixey...  Quixey's mission is to enable you to discover apps."  Excellent, good luck! 

ZooBorn of the day: A rare Amur Leopard cub. 

I must confess I'm not sure when I'll be back; tomorrow is maximally busy, Wednesday even more so, and Thursday, well, is hideous.  Please stay tuned!