Ah... back from vacation, still recovering from wrecking my car, still glowing from buying a Mini for Alex, and back in the real world of work (which I never really left !)...  it has all left me contemplative, unsettled.  I am running about five threads in parallel, trying to sort it all out, and some of the conclusions are a little scary.  Too much thinking!

... meanwhile, it's all happening ...

The Maltese Falcon...  279' long, wow.  Click to view slide show.  You might be impressed by the yacht, but I'm impressed by the amount of time it must have taken to design this yacht; all the myriad details of this huge beautiful complicated thing.  And I ask myself, how did the owner (Tom Perkins) make time for this?  The whole idea of leisure time - whether spent doing nothing, or spent doing something like designing one's yacht - is strange, alien.  I must master this but I have not [even] so far... 

Meanwhile: study finds that busy people are happy people.  Aha, I knew it!  I am happy! 

Elon Musk is one of the busiest people ever - try running SpaceX and Tesla at the same time - and he wants to retire to Mars.  So be it.  I'm sure he is happy too :) 

So: why does the past always seem so far away?  "In part, because we so often see it in black and white."  Huh.  I don't think that's it... I think the past is receding ever faster, as the pace of change accelerates.  Marshall McLuhan is right. 

That said, you must click through to the slide show; the color photos from the early 1940s are amazing.  That was not so long ago - for many of us, our parents lived in that time, or for others their grandparents - and look at the immense change which has taken place in the meantime.

And my friends and colleagues can verify this: San Diego has a record cool July.  The marine layer has settled in permanently, or so it would seem... and would-be beachgoers are not happy about it. 

There is a sobering reality to this, behind the humor: best chart ever. 

I'm linking this just for the gratuitous slippers-with-flashlights reference: Groupon was almost a slippers with flashlights company.  Almost... and how great would that have been :) 

Don't laugh: L.A. pushing to become nation's mass transit leader.  Well okay, laugh, because it will never happen; the city is too spread out for mass transit. 

Tim Bray on mobile devices: The Great Game.  "This is the big league; bigger today than the computer industry ever was, and growing fast. This is as fierce a concentration of R&D heat and manufacturing virtuosity and distribution wizardry and marketing mojo as humanity has ever seen."  Indeed.  The one thing Tim misses is HP's acquisition of Palm.  We'll see whether that ends up mattering, but HP is the leader in consumer computers, and they have a lot at stake. 

And so my contemplation continues...  I will try to stay busy while I figure it all out!