Any day spent in an all-day meeting is bad, unless the meeting is great, in which case the net is good; and so it was today.  Ended with a brisk ride along the coast from Carlsbad to Del Mar, and then a great dinner at the Third Corner in Encinitas; rapidly becoming a favorite because they serve good food late.

{ BTW thanks for your emails regarding my Midway checkup.  It's the kind of thing you post with fXf, hoping it isn't too weird, and I guess it wasn't.  At least not for those of you who emailed :)  stay tuned... }

Important work: xkcd's color survey results.  Please click through and read it all, but especially check out this chart from the doghouse diaries... 

Cult of Mac notes a difference of opinion on pens and tablets.  Bill Gates: "We think that work with the pen that Microsoft pioneered will become a mainstream for students."  Steve Jobs: "If you see a stylus, they blew it."  So, I actually think Mr. Bill is right; pens are better than fingers for many tasks.  As keyboards are better than touchscreens for text entry. 

Strange doesn't even describe this: Fastest gun in the world.  Check out especially when he shoots two targets in one draw.  [ via Boing Boing ] 

Google Voice for the iPhone and Palm Pre.  All HTML web development.  As John Gruber notes, "no app store in sight".  And this is a voice-over-IP app; not trivial. 

So there's a new beta version of Google's Chrome browser, and it's supposed to be really fast, and so the Google people made a video (about making a video): faster than a speeding potato.  Amazing.  [ via Daring Fireball ] 

Kottke on The Science of Avatar.  "'We tried to make it not completely fanciful, if it was too outlandish, there would be a believability gap.' So while Pandora features floating mountains, that might not be so far-fetched.  Of course, the reality-based scenario did have its limits. 'We figured that to actually lift mountains, the magnetic field would have to be strong enough to rip the hemoglobin out of your blood'."  While watching it I found Avatar entirely convincing, although of course the science doesn't really work.  The biggest disconnect is actually the root premise of the movie, that a being could control another [alien] being remotely. 

TechCrunch celebrates Gadgets of Days Gone By.  My favorite is the Palm III, a breakthrough device that changed the world.