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April lion

Saturday,  04/02/11  04:13 PM

April came in like a lion for me; was in Boston where I enjoyed an April Fools storm.  Came back last night and here I am, in warm and sunny Los Angeles, blogging away...  Yay.

Quick notes:

  • Flew back on Virgin America, on a brand new plane.  First commercial flight.  The pilots celebrated by gunning it down the runway, it fairly jumped off the ground.  That was fun.  Plane has airbags, iPod holders, and nicer headrests, all enhancing the already enhanced Virgin America experience.
  • While in Boston rented a Ford Fusion.  Not a bad little car, nice looking, comfortable, drove well.  I am so rooting for Ford, unlike GM they are NOT Atlas Shrugged motors.
  • The GPS in my Palm Pre is infinitely better than any in-car unit, and 100% competitive with any handheld unit.  Even down to having realtime traffic.  Love it.
  • My "new" Kindle 1 arrived.  Perfect condition, I love it.  eBay sellers' customer service is awesome.  (Thanks!)
  • While I was out, got a giant shipment of light bulbs from bulbs.com, and some batteries from batteries.com.  Honestly how did we do this before the Internet?
  • Also while I was out, received new memory for my laptop (from memory.com), am now running 8GB.  Perfect for several concurrent VMs.  It was, like, $200.  Amazing.

Okay, enough of that, how about some of this:

Here we have the coolest tidal bore on the planet, at Bruno Santos, Indonesia.  Yes you must watch this, 20 perfect sets rolling in for a mile.  Looks computer generated it is so perfect.  Wow. 

Huh, aeronautical engineer Burt Rutan is retiring.  What a legend.  Wonder if Scaled Composites is going to make it without him? 

So the final tally is in for my for a teen: iPad vs Macbook survey; Macbook won in a landslide, 80% to 12%.  So be it.  Still most of you voters are already computer users, while iPads are the computer for the rest of us :) 

Apropos: How Apple made the world safe for the future of keyboards.  I don't know; for serious typing there's nothing like an actual keyboard.  In fact the old metal clicky ones are the best! 

Check out Google Page Speed Online.  Critical Section gets an 82 / 100.  So be it. 

Way too funny: the Macalope's Fools of the Year.  I especially like the iPad success-deniers.  At this point they have been overtaken by history. 

Scott "Dilbert" Adams: The importance of new ideas (even bad ones).  One of the reasons I like blogging :) 

Excellent: It's no joke, IPOs are back.  Just in time! 

True colors: bathing mobile in an entirely new light.  We'll see about that; I think this is advanced kool-aid drinking.  There doesn't seem to be a there there. 

Speaking of missing theres, Dave Winer has remerged his linkblog with his realblog, ending an experiment with Twitter.  I find the number of ex-Twitter users among my friends is growing. 

Well of course: Google plans facial recognition app that can pull up personal data.  You know this will happen (we've talked about it); the only question is how soon.  And of course when can we have it built into our shades? 

Amazingly and surprisingly, I realized I have no idea who is in the Final Four, and was only dimly aware it takes place this weekend.  Wow and in years past I was all over this.  No #1 seeds!  No #2s either, one #3 and #4!  Wow.  UConn, Kentucky, Butler, and Virginia Commonwealth (!) ... I guess I'm going to root for Kentucky.  Just because. 

BTW: ESPN's website sucks.  Too much glizty crap and auto-video.  Almost impossible to find the bracket!

The real big sporting event is tomorrow's Tour of Flanders.  Can't wait!  Onward, have a nice weekend...