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bowled over

Monday,  02/07/11  11:19 PM

Just another manic Monday, coming off a great dusk mountain bike ride in Sycamore Canyon, in which I review yesterday's Super Bowl and make a filter pass...

Some chest-beating; from the Dark Report: More Clinical Laboratories are Purchasing Digital Pathology Systems

Congratulations to the Green Bay Packers.  In a not-horrible game the worse team played better, and won, delighting fans like me who would rather root for the underdogs, especially when they're led by someone easy to like, than the prohibitive favorites, especially when they're led by someone difficult to like.  

In related news Christina Aguilera did a great job on the Star Spangled Banner (seriously, despite missing a few lyrics), and the Black Eyed Peas were ... boring ... sorry but I had a feeling they were going to be great, and they weren't, especially compared to recent Super Bowl headliners like Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty.  I felt Usher stole what was left of the show, perhaps he should have headlined.

I'm going to say Shirley's tamales and chili stole the show *again* this year, that was the superest bowl.

The best and worst Super Bowl ads.  In our group of friends Volkswagon's "kid-as-Darth-Vadar" ad won easily.  Most of the ads were boring, and quite a few were awful; the Doritos "finder sucking" ad was horrible, as was Groupon's "free Tibet".  Chrysler's "Detroit" ad featuring Eminem was pretty cool, but knowing you and I paid for it made it less cool. 

I am now using TwitterFeed to tweet blog posts.  Crucially, they let you designate a specific URL-shortener; and so I made my own.  Seems to work, no muss, no fuss, and I can even use it to post to Facebook.  Although I tend to do those "manually" as links, so I can pick the right thumbnail :)  What's interesting about TwitterFeed is that it exists, and I knew it would; there had to be a way to post RSS items to Twitter and Facebook automatically.  But what is the business model for such services?  To get popular and get bought, I guess. 

I am experimenting with using Google Chrome v9 as my default browser.  I like Firefox but Chrome seems faster, especially with a bunch of windows open, and it definitely uses less memory.  Now that it has extensions I can have IETab and Adblock, and can browse happily with it.  

[Update: fell back to Firefox again.  I forgot the reason I can't use Chrome as my default browser, it only opens external links as a tab.  I want them opened in a new window.]

[Update2: I found a solution, there is a registry hack which makes Chrome open external links in a new window.  I have switched!]

Asana looks interesting: a serious attempt at online collaboration software.  I don't know whether they're going to succeed where many have failed - Aperio are using Sharepoint, and I'm going to count that as a fail - but it is an important problem.  Good luck to them! 

The Oatmeal: six crappiest interview questions.  "Where do you see yourself in five years?Anywhere but here!  Too bad we aren't allowed to give people IQ tests and be done with it.  Someone please explain, just exactly who are we protecting by preventing employers from doing this?  

So AOL are buying the Huffington Post, for $315M.  Man, I don't get it.  But there's a lot about AOL I don't get... they seem dead already, don't they? 

Nick Denton: "Is this a fearsome Internet conglomerate or simply a roach motel for once lively websites?"  The latter; a lot of the air goes out of the balloon after an exit.

This is incredible: Man runs 365 marathons in 365 days.  Just when you think you've seen it all... 

ZooBorn of the day: a Palm Cockatoo chick

Hey guess what?  Wednesday is HP's "Think Beyond" event, at which they're going to announce new Palm phones and a Palm tablet.  Stay tuned...