Whew, a  l o n g  day yesterday, up early, drive to Vista, meetings... and then a cool bike ride from Dana Point down to the Camp Pendleton and back before dinner with a friend (thanks Mark!) and heading home...

I have a riding breakthrough to report - you will think this is ridiculous, but I must tell you; so I do quite a bit of riding at night, and it can be cold... and riding kit is, well, not warm.  Mostly my fingers and my face do not like it.  I have definitely spent time riding while freezing.  So I bought some riding gloves with fingers (fingers! who knew?) and a cotton hat for my head (cycling helmets have a bunch of holes designed to keep your head cool, not warm).  In combination these keep me nice and toasty.  Last night it was in the low 50s along the beach, and I was really comfortable.  How excellent is that!

Project Q: 0 cycles.

Today my daughter Alexis is getting her learner's driving permit.  Yikes!  Man do they grow up fast, eh?

Tomorrow I have an unusual riding program: I'm competing in the Mulholland Challenge, a long hard century featuring 12,000' of climbing (!)... and then tomorrow night at midnight I'm riding in the Midnight Express, a 50 mile ride with 6,300' more of climbing.  Whew...  but I must tell you I am looking forward to it.  As usual stay tuned for a full report :)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, offers ten ways to avoid black swans...  good stuff.  I especially agree with #1 which is pertinent to software systems' design: "What is fragile should break early while it is still small."

Wow, Facebook has 200M users.  That's pretty incredible...  you can argue about whether it has value, but obviously a lot of people have checked it out; there is a there there.  Time will tell whether it has legs. 

I guess it did all its breaking when it was small, because it seems to stay up now; impressive scalability.  (Especially compared to Twitter, which is far less complicated and far more fragile.)

Evan Williams, founder of Blogger, Odeo, and Twitter, gives his startup advice: Do Something Awesome.  It is great advice - I'm hoping Project Q will be awesome (!) - but interestingly neither Blogger nor Odeo nor Twitter are particularly awesome.  Their adoption and usage were awesome, much to Evan's and his teams' credit, but the products themselves were dead simple.  And that is good underlying advice - for Project Q :)

One more related note: Twitter's the new driving menace.  So be it...

Mike Arrington on the CrunchPad Tablet.  I can't believe this is real, but it looks ... real.  What a coup if they are really able to get this thing built and launched.  Wow.  To be clear, my skepticism is around the price, I have no doubt they can built it, but $250 is a tough price point.

So, the next America's Cup is going to take place on February 8, 2010.  Mark your calendars...  "The obvious question now is to see where the match will take place. Ernesto Bertarelli has stated various times that his intention is to hold it in Valencia while on the other hand the city's and region's authorities will do whatever they can to convince Alinghi's owner. In any case, one thing is for sure, BMW Oracle's monster trimaran will come to Valencia this summer. Tom Ehman, GGYC's spokesman, had stated last December the 90ft trimaran would come to Valencia if his team won the legal case, something he confirmed again today when we contacted him."  Yay, we're going to see Trizilla in action!

ZooBorns of the day - and they are amazingly cute - Hoglets!