Had a great day today; spent time with my friends and colleagues at DoubleBeam, and did a little video shoot with friends and colleagues from eyesFinder.  In between I spent time coding and thinking.  Zero politics.  Wonderful.

Last night I saw The Hobbit / Desolation of Smaug (midnight showing), and it was great.  Better than Unexpected Journey and closer in spirit to the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  It tracked the book pretty well although there was some new stuff thrown in, but it was good stuff.  And the dwarves-in-barrels-going-down-river-while-fighting-orcs scene alone makes the whole thing worth it.  Smaug is pretty good too...  Going to see it again tonight :) 

As an Eichhorn, I loved this: Ten Germans try to say the word 'squirrel'. 

This looks excellent: Renovated Paris train station will house 1,000 start ups.  I've always loved the Musee d'Orsay, itself a renovated train station. 

The challenge will be finding 1,000 Parisian startups; for some reason the startup culture just hasn't taken hold there.  Fear of failure?

LEGO Star Wars: the complete saga is now on IOS.  Wow.  What an excellent new way to waste spend time! 

Maybe Big Data is the killer app for Google's cloud.  Yep. 

Excellent: 3D printing pen lets surgeons draw cells on damaged bones.  What a time to be alive, eh? 

Correlation vs Causality confusion of the day: Readers who own Kindles spend $1,233/year on Amazon, those who don't spend $790.  Alternate headline: Readers who spend more on Amazon more likely to own a Kindle. 

This is amazing: Stone Plane Crash tribute emerges from Desert.  It's horrible that this terrorist attack happened, but given that it did, this is an amazing way to memorialize it. 

Super cool: Browing the web on a 27-year-old Mac Plus.  I happen to have a Mac SE 30 which still boots, and I need to see if I can get it back online.  At one time it had a SCSI-to-Ethernet thingie but that was ... wait for it ... thinnet!  Yep, pre-10BaseT.  And yep, I am that old. 

Have you heard of Medium?  Yeah, me too.  This latest creation from Ev Willians (Blogger, Odeo, Twitter) is "YouTube for longform", where by 'longform' they mean longerish stories.  Interesting.  With each of Ev's previous startups I didn't get it, until I did.  And I don't yet get this one :)