A nice and productive day today; spent the first half of it cycling, acting as an invited tour guide for the CorpsCamp, the second half of it happily coding and spelunking around in IOS, and the third half of it drinking Pinot with the people I rode with this morning.  Yay.  In the meantime, it's all happening...

Just blogged about the Amgen Tour of California coming back to ride Rockstore; here's a picture I took today from the overlook at the top, looking back down the climb...  (click to enbiggen)

This looks excellent: the Woman Who Stopped Traffic.  Self-published on Amazon.  Added to the to-read list! 

Interesting how a "book" like this one still needs a cover.  Kind of like the way an "album" published on iTunes still needs one too, or a "movie" published on YouTube.  I guess we need that icon which stands for the thing, even when the thing itself has changed form.

You may have heard, under Marissa Mayer Yahoo are making a major push back into search.  I hadn't realized, but in order to do so they must slip through a Microsoft loophole.  Perhaps Visual Search will be key for them in doing so! 

Too awesome: brass instrument phone amp.  Yes of course I want one. 

iTunes critic Jamie Zaworski reports on the great recoding.  "I just had to re-encode ~700 music videos that ITunes 11 has decided it won't play. That was about 14% of them, 20GB. So that was annoying."  After a bit of digging he automated the process, and tells us all how.  "Perhaps if I build an airplane tail section of out palm fronds, the cargo will return."  This is the annoying thing about Apple, they do this stuff... 

Seth Godin riffs on genes and memes.  "Consider the growth of guacamole as an idea. In less than a generation, it went from an unknown delicacy to something commonplace."  The successful meme replicates rapidly with good fidelity, and does not kill the host :) 

Oh how I love this: Put a propeller on it, the golden age of tinkering.  You are looking at a picture of a "railplane", from 1930.  Yes that was a real thing, in Glasgow, Scotland.  The other pictures in this post are equally great, you must click through to read it. 

John Gruber links Benedict Evans on WhatsApp.  "In the pre-mobile world, you did stuff with photos hours or even days after you took them. Today, you do stuff with them moments after taking them."  Hmmm... 

This seems ridiculous: Islamic leaders ruled that a Mars journey would be akin to suicide.  Seriously.  The 1,500-year-old religion needs to make it into the 21st century, right?  (Yes that's right, Islam is much newer than Christianity, which of course is much newer than Judaism.) 

Interesting: Alibaba-backed Quixey enlists mobile developers to take on Google.  Quixey have been trying to solve a real problem - discovery of mobile apps.  The Apple, Google, and Amazon app stores have not done this for us, and there may be an opportunity for Quixey to do it for them.  The real problem is enabling deep linking, and seems like someone will crack this code. 

So that's all about IOS and Android, but what about Windows Mobile?  There are fewer apps so perhaps discovering them would be easier.  Meanwhile Microsoft is wrapping mobile websites and calling them apps, complicating the process. 

Looks like Jeff Atwood would like this capability, as an antidote for the App-pocalpse.  "...apparently the web is dead, and mobile apps are the future. I'm doing my best to resist a sudden uncontrollable urge to use my Ledge Finder app to find the nearest ledge to jump from right now."  Hehe. 

And as usual, xkcd nails it :) 

Today's ZooBorn: A Sichuan Takin.  Kind of like a goat-antelope.  Cute when little...