Hey y'all; celebrating my last summer weekend, yeah I know the equinox isn't 'till September 23, but next weekend I go back to work (!) after twelve weeks off (!!) so this *feels* like my last summer weekend.  So far I've celebrated by watching a movie last night with Shirley (The Help, excellent), riding (of course, report to follow), and reading out by the pool enjoying the sun and breeze which felt most summery.  On tap tomorrow is more riding (of course) and more hanging out, and Monday I'm going sailing.  It has been a *great* summer and a long one too, but I am looking forward to getting back to work.  And in the meantime there is always blogging...

Remarkable: Giant airship hanger transformed into tropical island resort.  How cool is that?  (Well okay, maybe "cool" is the wrong word :)  You could have summer forever in there! 

Robert X Cringley: the mortgage reality distortion field.  "This is all you need to know to understand the stalled U.S. housing market: it is stalled because a class of investors has found a way for their investments to not only live on after the housing bubble popped, they are actually making more - in some cases a lot more - than they were on that money when the loans were originated."  Yikes. 

Awesome!  The Mars rover Opportunity begins study of Martian crater.  "We have a very senior rover in good health for having already worked 30 times longer than planned...  However, at any time, we could lose a critical component on an essential rover system, and the mission would be over. Or, we might still be using this rover's capabilities beneficially for years. There are miles of exciting geology to explore at Endeavor crater." 

A couple from MG Siegler: the iPad as a PC replacement, and the Amazon Kindle revealed (Android based).  I agree tablets are rapidly becoming a new category which replaces PCs for many people; mostly those who don't have to type a lot. 

Wow, this is a big deal: HTML5 video player.  Free and open source, works on all browsers (including - ta da - IE9), and has full screen mode.  I suspect the key is that video has to be encoded in the right way on the server, but so be it; the YouTube's of the world will figure that out.  I am so tried of embedding Flash (with nested EMBED/OBJECT tags), and of course that doesn't even work on most mobile devices. 

Great demo movie, too - I love watching birds fish :)

I love this: HP's 12c calculator hits middle age, celebrates with 30th anniversary edition.  I still have a [working] HP 16c, which is great for hexadecimal calculations.  I don't use hex all the time, but when I do, I prefer HP's 16c :) 

Apropos: I also have a still-working HP-25, the original programmable calculator.  I don't use it anymore, but it turns on :)

Picture of the day: Yellowstone Bison, from Xeni Jardin, taken with her iPhone.  Please click through to enbiggen for maximum effect. 

Good to know: Exercise tells stem cells to become bone, not fat.  I'm telling them as much as I can :)