Man, I ate and drank too much tonight (Osso Buco paired with Ampelos Pinot Noir, if you must know; I am beginning to think all Pinots from Santa Rita Hills are fantastic!), and feel bone lazy as a result.  I guess I could just go to sleep.  But wait, first, it's all happening...

Actually before launching into a pass on the blogosphere, I should tell you that my ongoing disaster with hard drives in my laptop has come to a head.  You may remember I was desperately seeking sympathy when my new 250GB drive failed, and I have been running on my old 100GB ever since, putting off the inevitable recovery session.  Every time I boot Windows wants to check my hard drive because something is screwed up, and today whatever that is has escalated into badness.  So tomorrow I get to reattempt the recovery and move back to my 250GB drive.  Oh, goody.  Definitely not something to try late at night, especially if you are feeling bone lazy :)

Wired: Hawking: Unintelligent life is likely on other planets.  "Famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has been thinking a lot about the cosmic question, 'Are we alone?' The answer is probably not, he says."  However the probability of intelligent life is low, "'Primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare,' he then quickly added: 'Some would say it has yet to occur on earth.'"  And some would say there was intelligent life on Earth, but it is becoming increasingly rare...

From Tim Oren: Go as a Business Metaphor.  "The whole board is the available market. The stones played down are investment and expense to go after the market. A space surrounded is the net margin achieved by a product or company (the group). Too little space, and you're squeezed out of the market. Too much margin, and you are inviting competition to jump into your space."  I've never played Go, but I can appreciate the metaphor.  It is interesting to contemplate as we watch Microsoft try to buy Yahoo, and Google, and Apple...  what is their strategy?

You won't believe this, but there is a TV show I care about - the Sarah Connor Chronicles.  I thought this show was pretty excellent.  Apparently it will come back for a second season.  Yay.  You might say it was not terminated :)

Having you been following this?  Amateur Hour over at Twitter.  The back story is that Twitter has been down lately, or almost down, or half down, or something like that, and the techno-cognoscenti who use it are up in arms.  The CTO has left (quit or pushed, who knows) and the VP/Engineering has left, and things are unsettled.  Underlying all this is the unappreciated root cause; Twitter is written in Ruby, which is slow and doesn't scale.  As Twitter has grown, this has become a problem.  There is a rewrite in their future if they want to stay alive...

This is pretty cool: Cat 5 wedding rings.  ("to help nerds couple".)  Just when you think you've seen it all, you realize that "it all" is so much more than you thought...