Columnist Dan Gillmor: Why I Might Vote for Schwarzenegger.  Apparently there are rumors that if elected Arnold is considering overturning Proposition 13.  That would be great!  This deserves a separate post, stay tuned...

before blackout	after blackout
(click for larger pics)

There are some amazing pictures up on the net from "the great blackout"; here's 20 hours before (normal lighting pattern), and 7 hours after (blackout in effect).  Pretty darn cool.

CamWorld is a nice site which has lots of pictures of the blackout, taken at somewhat closer range...

India will send a mission to the moon by 2008, according to Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.  So be it.

Ever heard of an induction range?  I never had, either.  Apparently it uses a magnetic field to cook food without heat.  According to this article in EPRI, it looks like a very "cool" technology.  Coming to a range top near you...  [ via John Robb ]

A little while ago some friends and I were trying to figure out what great personal electronics would be developed in the next ten years (the last ten years featured cell phones, PDAs, MP3 players, etc.).  I suggested perhaps a personal medical monitor.  Computerworld reports this is closer than I thought; a company called CardioNet has developed a handheld wireless heart monitor.  Excellent!

Dann Sheridan says bye bye VCR.  "We finally retired our VCR today.  We haven't used it in months.  It has been replaced by our DVD player and Tivo."  Same story in our house.  We still have a bunch of old Disney movies on VHS, but as the kids grow older they'll be used less and less...

Scoble reports Jeffrey Randow is writing down his wishes for Longhorn.  I thought about this for while, if I had three wishes for the next version of Windows, what would they be?

1. Don't reinvent the wheel and change "everything".  I have a feeling based on what I've read that I won't get this one.
2. Networking that works.  Why is it so much harder to hook PCs together than Macs?  Or than Unix boxes?  It shouldn't be...  The whole domain master thing needs to go.
3. Paging that works.  Why can Unix boxes and (to a lessor extent) Macs easily run working sets larger than physical memory, whereas on a PC as soon as you start paging, the machine turns to crap?

Let's keep track of these and see how they do...

Happy Birthday to Gizmodo!  They're the online equivalent of Fry's, my toy store...