Well I had the busiest week ever, whew; last Sunday I flew to New York and spent a whirlwind week meeting with customers.  Squeezed in between were some great dinners and a visit to the NY Metropolitan Museum of Art, which unexpectedly featured some amazing pieces by Auguste Rodin (link is to some of my pics.)  After a delayed return flight which turned into a red-eye last Friday, I rode the Solvang Century yesterday in 6:43, after 0:00 sleep (more on that to come).

... in the meantime it's all happening ... here's a filter pass ...

Happy π day!  3/14, get it? 

Puppy!  In which Joel Spolsky announces his retirement from blogging.  I'm going to miss Joel - assuming he's really retiring, which only time will tell - he certainly wrote some great stuff over the years.  I do find it rather funny the way people have to declare transitions like this.  Why not just stop writing, and leave the door open to start writing again later on?  That's what I've done, and so far at least I've always come back. 

This is so true: In the land of Twitter, blogging is king.  "Perhaps the smartest thing that Twitter did was to enable easy linking from tweets."  Perhaps. 

The Secret Origin of Windows.  A great insight into the early days of Microsoft...  "Windows needed to be finished, not further tweaked in any way that jeopardized getting it out that summer without further embarrassment."  Wow, what a cool picture, would you buy an operating system from those guys? 

iPad Pre-Orders: For Idiots Only.  And so we have confirmed what we already knew, there are a lot of idiots out there.  Count me among them; my iPad is safely ordered.  WiFi-only model, minimum configuration.  Stay tuned (delivery 4/3)! 

Dave Winer ordered one in a moment of insanity. 

Here's a question: Does HTML5 really beat Flash?  The answer, "no".  Of course in the case of iDevices and Apple's support for Flash, it isn't a performance issue at all, it's a business issue.  Flash could be way faster and it wouldn't matter. 

Google Apps Marketplace makes its debut, surprising noone.  The smartphone competition is a war between platforms, not devices or applications.  How interesting !? 

Cool!  Google Maps gets bike lanes / directions.  I tried it out in Thousand Oaks, and it found the bike lanes, yay!  One quibble, really they should have called it "cycling", not "bicycling". 

Congratulations to Sandra Bullock, who won Best Actress last weekend for her performance in The Blink Side.  Finally an actress I could root for...  check out her reaction to winning a Razzie for the same performance. 

How Did A Film No One Saw Win An Oscar?  I was wondering the same thing.  The Hurt Locker?  Never heard of it before, and certainly didn't see it.  That's what happens sometimes in these popularity contests... 

Ars Technica: How ad blockers hurt revenue.  Well, duh.  But this is a Prisoner's Dilemma, and I doubt too many people will inconvenience themselves with crappy ads if they don't have to.  Cue the violins. 

As you know, our "healthcare reform" is really "insurance reform"; we aren't changing healthcare so much as the way we pay for it.  President Obama understands this, but his public statements are pure hyperbole as he confuses Cause and Effect.  "Any company will - and should - raise the prices of its goods or services until they reach the point where they are constrained by competition. Our government has followed a perverse policy with regard to health care, by limiting the extent to which health insurers can compete against each other and thereby constrain each others' prices. The obvious solution, if we want to rein in health insurance costs, is to 1) broaden competition in the industry to the maximum amount possible, and 2) repeal all mandates that require insurance companies to charge for coverages that many people don't want."  Exactly, but neither of these two steps are part of the plan. 

Nancy Pelosi on healthcare: "We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it."  Uh, that makes sense, yeah, by all means let's vote it in before we've seen what's in it.  Yikes! 

OMG, Tron Legacy looks amazing.  I echo Kottke; F**k yes.  BTW I just happened to be listing to Falco's One Night in Bangkok while watching this.  Worked perfectly :) 

Mike Taylor wonders Whatever happened to programming?  "I want to make things, not just glue things together."  Same.  C++ spoken here :) 

In tectonic news, the massive mag 8.8 earthquake which shook Chile moved the city of Conception at least 10' to the West.  That's ten feet.  Whoa. 

Adding insult to injury, a 7.2 aftershock hit in the middle of inaugural ceremonies for present-elect Sebastián Piñera.

Three minutes of Moths hydrofoiling.  Yay!  And absolutely does not violate "the inverted pyramid for video" dictum; it gets going right off the bat.  Awesome! 

Who needs a tuxedo: all-back Penguin discovered.  He might be a non-conformist, but I think he looks rather sharp :) 

Some cycling news: Alberto Contador wraps up Paris-Nice.  It was in this race in 2007 that he first showed world-class form, winning that last stage up to Eze in an impressive blast up the hill. 

And here we have Magical Street Graffiti.  Wow, these *are* amazing, and all the more so for being viewable from multiple angles. 

And finally, ZooBorn of the Week, a baby dolphin!