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Monday, May 04, 2009 11:37 PM >>>


Sunday,  05/03/09  09:49 PM

Had a nice quiet day, thanks for asking...  took it easy, I'm still pretty thrashed after battling Breathless Agony yesterday.  It was a gorgeous day and we celebrated by going for a nice walk in the morning, and having a wonderful lakeside brunch.  Every Sunday should be like this.  Oh, and I did some intense coding... in PowerPoint.  And made no time for Project Q.  Again.

My Caltech class of '79 is about to have - ta da - our 30th reunion.  Wow.  I've been in contact with some of my classmates, and it seems many are going.  I went to our 20th reunion, and that was fun, -ish, but this seems funner.  Somehow at 50+ I think we're more relaxed than we were at 40+, the pressure is off.  I'm thinking about this quite a lot, stay tuned... 

Completely rational: Catholics attack Dan Brown film Angels and Demons.  Aka the thought police, apparently.  I am reading the book now, preparatory to watching the movie; so far I like it a lot (and yes, it reminds one of the Da Vinci Code quite a lot). 

Good question: Why is it so difficult to fire bad teachers?  The first answer is "unions", and that pretty much tells you all you need to know.  (Note: this is the answer to another good question: why did U.S. carmakers become uncompetitive?) 

This is a total classic, the NewTek Video Toaster, from 1990... wow how cool was that?  I remember it well... 

Here we have an extensive collection of strange and wonderful timepieces.  Some of them are really quite wonderful. 

SearchEngineLand reviews the Wolfram Alpha "fact engine"...  it looks really cool, but I'm hard pressed to say whether it is useful...  I suspect it is something you use once, then like, then start using more often.  Right now I haven't used it :) 

The WSJ's Daily Startup wonders: Is that an IPO we see?  SolarWinds Inc. is apparently going to test the waters, which would make then only the second IPO in the last twelve months (Rackspace is the other one).  Wow, let's all wish them luck! 

More of these please: a cool bridge just for bikes

Dave Winer starts out loving his new iPhone, but then "I'm reminded how shitty the keyboard is on the iPhone, and think it's a paradox that Apple's COO says netbooks have 'cramped' keyboards.  The iPod has the worst keyboard.  Even if I type something correctly, there's a pretty good chance it'll change it to something ridiculous."  Personally I'll take a Palm any day, and I cannot wait for the Pre... 

The killer tip of the day, how to prevent websites from resizing or moving your Firefox windows.  This is major, I totally hate it when sites do that (and why do they do this, nobody knows...)  Anyway here you go... you're welcome! 

And finally to kick your week off on the right note, my ZooBorn of the day, a little white lion cub.  

Have a great week!