Just another Manic Monday (wish it was Sunday)...  actually it wasn't that manic, although the market behavior certainly was, rising more in one day than ever before, after having lost more last week than ever before in a week; whew!  Glad I'm playing the tides, not the waves...  meanwhile there be fires, near fires, browning the sky and dumping ash in my pool, and making cycling for a guy recovering from a lung infection unwise - crud.

Oh crud, the Dodgers lost again, 7-5, in a well fought battle.  I guess this just means the NLCS will go seven :)

Chris Anderson on the vanishing point theory of bad economic news.  I have to admit this is true; economic news is always worse for everyone else.  Exhibit A are the U.S. car companies, which insist that 1) their industry is in huge trouble and 2) they themselves are not.  Riight.

What do you do in a financial meltdown?  If you're TTAC, you review the latest Lamborghini Gallardo.  "We never approached the car’s limits, but even at (maybe) 6/10 we constantly giggled. The rest of the time was spent shaking our heads in skeptical disbelief. Why? Because when diving into 45 mph turns at more than 90 mph you realize you could be doing 120 mph."  I've never been a fan of Lamborghini styling, but they make impressive machinery.  Wow.

P.S. I wonder how a Gallardo would fare against an MC12 at Nürburgring?

Quicken Online is finally free.  So be it.  In 1999 I worked on a project at Intuit called WebQuicken, which was not free, but which should have been; they could have gotten where they are now nine years earlier :)  And now they have Mint and a host of other Web 2.0 competitors...  fortunately for Intuit, they can ride out the financial storm and perhaps their startup competitors cannot.

NewScientist wonders if Google's Chrome has peaked already.  Well I can see why they would ask the question, but the answer is "no"; Google are in this for the long haul.  In the end the multiprocess architecture of Chrome will be important.  As soon as they support plug-ins like Adblock, I will switch.  Of course Firefox could rearchitect from multithread to multiprocess also, and then there would be competition...

So Windows 7 is going to be named...  Windows 7.  This is encouraging, it means marketing has not taken over the release.  Seriously.

Related, Robert Scoble is NOT going to Microsoft's PDC (professional developer's conference).  Me neither, in fact I never really considered it.  I sent Robert a note:

I’m not going to the PDC either, it just doesn’t seem that important.  How the mighty have fallen.  I totally remember the excitement around the PDC in ’03 when Vista was just coming out.  All the new stuff in Vista seemed so cool and so important; XAML / Aero, WinFS, Indigo, etc.  What a fizzle.  In the intervening five years, Microsoft has become far less relevant.  Sure, my company still develops code for Windows, but the new technologies in Windows just don’t seem important.  What could I possibly learn at the PDC that I can’t learn by reading blogs?

From the pages of history, four years ago John Gruber argued that video was not going to be a big deal.  Well, we can't always be right...  but that is a classic bad call.  Between YouTube, the videoPods, the AppleTV, etc., video has become huge.