It's a lazy Saturday around here ... I'm home alone with my Shih-Tsus (that's Bijou at right), it's cold and gray outside, and I'm sitting in my office working away.  Actually though the day is lazy, I am not; I have been cranking on a new project which has me most excited and interested.  Perhaps I can share it with you soon.  In the meantime I have tried to keep my enthusiasm for other stuff during the week, so my priorities stay straight, but on a Saturday I can do what I want :)

I must make some time for riding; next weekend I'm riding a double [century], my first in quite a while, and my condition riding a mere century last weekend was not excellent.  So be it.

But I will interrupt my busy self for a bit of blogging, here goes...

You might have seen this already; an amateur video taken by a local resident in a northern Japanese town as the 20' tsunami rolls in.  Unbelievable.  This really brings home the enormity of the disaster.  Here's some hard data on the quake itself; five minutes at 9.0.  Wow.  They're saying it is the fourth largest in recorded history. 

Scott "Dilbert" Adams has an interesting account of the disaster; he was in Hawaii on vacation.  "There are many ways to begin a relaxing vacation, but none of them involves a wall of water heading your way at 600 miles per hour."  For many people they will always remember exactly where they were on March 13, 2011. 

One more on the disaster; of course a big worry is the nuclear power plant.  But this puts it in perspective: "A 41-year old reactor gets hit with a 9 magnitude earthquake, then slammed with a 20 ft. tall swell, followed by an explosion due to the buildup of hydrogen gas that blows off the roof of the building, and the core is intact and contained.  And you are telling me that nuclear power isn't safe?" 

Did you enjoy my little series on musher DeeDee Jonrowe?  If so, you might like this article in the Fairbanks Daily News, which talks about the races within the races on the last night of the Iditarod.  After nine days places 9-12 came down to a matter of minutes.  Wow.  I can't wait 'till next year.  (Go DeeDee!) 

BTW I found a picture of DeeDee and me (right), taken right after her marvelous talk to Aperio.

This morning I installed Win 7 x64 in a VM for some testing.  So that's not so weird, but here's the thing: I used my laptop's DVD drive, for the first time in ... months!  I know this because I have our Christmas card sitting on my desk in a spot where it blocks access to the drive.  So it has been at least mid-December since I used it, and possibly much longer ago than that.  Wow, so be it! 

Back to Scott Adams: the awesomeness of convenience.  Exactly exactly.  If you make something sufficiently easy, people will pay for the convenience.  That's the whole key to iTunes and the Apple ecosystem.  And a big part of the thinking behind my new project :) 

This is such a tragedy: The car from Atlas Shrugged motors, aka the Chevy Volt.  "'Sales are anemic: 326 in December, 321 in January, and 281 in February.' GM has announced a production run of 100,000 in the first two years, so 'Who is going to buy all these cars?'"  You and I paid to bail out GM, we paid to develop the Volt, we paid to subsidize the marketing of the Volt, and now, apparently, we are going to pay to buy the Volt.  All because we're trying to save some jobs?  Blech. 

ZooBorns of the weekend: the world's smallest monkeys, pygmy Marmosets.  How many do you suppose it would take to fill a barrel? 

Good advice: the secret to getting your way.  Run it by everyone and get buy-in ahead of time. 

Onward, back to my lazy Saturday... have a great weekend yourself!