Well I'm moved.  And I now have FIOS!  And I like it; it's seriously faster than the DSL I had before.  And after two days of unboxing and messing around and running cables and configuring routers and ... whew, my servers are back up, and the bits you are reading right now came from deep inside a closet of my new house.  Yay.

my new blogstation

Also yay: the Tivo HD is up and online via FIOS without any problems.  And the AppleTV is up and running too, with HD movies now streaming in realtime.  All good.

I shall have more to say "soon" - assuming I ever get back to blogging, that is - please stay tuned...

Hi there!  I'm still in my self-imposed exile from blogging, but I thought I'd poke my head out for a second and say "hi"...  I haven't forgotten you.  My deeply nested yak shaving as I reconfigure my blogging regime continues, and I must tell you many other things have interfered with my recovery.  Not least of which, is: I'm moving!  This is the last post I will ever make from my old house, in which I have lived for ten years.  It's kind of sad, and kind of exciting, and kind of a lot of work.

Ah, the life at sea ... actually it's just a little lake.  But I'm looking forward to living on it :)

I live in Westlake Village, and there is a Westlake Lake, and it has an island, and as of tomorrow I will be living on it.  Among all the things I'm moving is my 11-year-old-PC-turned-into-a-webserver, on which this blog is hosted.  So there will be a disruption in the force, and if all goes well I'll be back on the air in a day or two.  Stay tuned, I will keep you posted, assuming I make it there :)

Hey y'all it's been a couple of weeks since I posted about "stuff"; just wanted you to know I am engaged in some extreme yak shaving.  (Also, I had the slight interruption of riding the Furnace Creek 508 :)

I've been loving my iPhone for a while, and more recently have begun loving my iPad too.  Although it wasn't immediately apparent why anyone with a smartphone and a laptop would want a tablet, I've slowly begun realizing the tablet form factor makes it nice for "occasional" computing in alternative locations, like my backyard, my bathroom, and ... my bed.  I can read just about anything on the iPad; emails, web pages, RSS feeds, etc., and can compose email, send messages (with IOS 5 and iMessage), and do some light editing.  But I can't blog :(

The problem isn't fundamental; it's perfectly possible to blog from an iPad.  But when *I* blog I do it in a certain way, and that way involves tools that are only usable from within Windows: SharpReader to read feeds, Photoshop to edit pictures, and Citydesk to update the blog.  This mechanism dates back eight+ years to when I started blogging, and in the intervening time I've thought about overhauling the whole thing a few times.  Now I'm biting the bullet.  My plan is to do it all from email, so I can blog from anywhere, on any device, at any time.  Of course this requires a bit of work (!) with several nested levels of things to build, and so in the meantime I'm not blogging at all. 

Except to report that I am engaged in some Extreme yak shaving.  Please stand by :)

Well, I didn't make it.  No shame, but I am disappointed.

Sunday night at 9:30, having left Baker and on the road to Kelso, I stopped riding and got in the van.  After having born pain in my feet for two days, it suddenly became unbearable.  I wasn't so much as decision as an acknowledgement; I was again unable to finish the Furnace Creek 508.

This picture was taken Saturday midnight in Stovepipe Wells, icing my feet as I had about ten times during the day.  Wondering if I was going to make it.

If you're a friend or frequent reader you know, I rode this race in 2009 and made it 300 miles. This year I made it 400 miles. That feels like progress, but in one sense this the race is binary; you either go 508 miles and finish or you don't.  And I didn't finish then and I didn't finish now. The reasons were very different but the high-level result is the same. And yet it doesn't feel the same at all.

Here's a profile of the race course; the red lines are the time stations which delimit the race stages, the blue arrow shows how far I made it in 2009, and the green arrow shows how far I made it this year.

In 2009 I got off to a flying start and cruised into Death Valley four hours ahead of schedule.  Then the winds started to howl and my head blew up and I just couldn't take it.  After resting for a bit in Furnace Creek I struggled in the dark for a while before abandoning in Badwater.  Almost immediately I wished I'd kept trying, and in the two years since I've promised myself there would be a next time, and when there was I wouldn't stop. 

This year I got off to a terrible start, lost my GPS unit and fifteen minutes searching for it three miles into the ride, and had my feet start hurting almost immediately.  By California City I was in serious pain, and switched bikes, pedals, shoes, and everything else to deal with it.  Icing my feet in a cooler seemed to be the only thing that worked, and that only for short periods of time.  I made it Randsburg, iced, made it to Trona, iced, made it through Panamint Valley, iced, and then vowed to summit Townes Pass.  I climbed it - in fine style, if I may say - and then descended down into Death Valley.  Yay; after more ice and a longish rest, onward into day two! 

But day two brought more pain, lots more ice, and lots of lost time while icing.  By the time I reached Shoshone I was running out of time and wearing down.  I vowed to reach Baker, and did.  From there I had 10 hours left to ride, with 120 miles and 7,000' of climbing.  Just barely doable.  I took off for Kelso, and suddenly I couldn't do it anymore.  The exhaustion and strain brought down my threshold of pain to the point where I couldn't continue.  Boo.

I will make a longer post with many of the great pictures which were taken but I must not end this one without thanking my amazing crew, Mitch Albo, Mark Elliot, and Gene Smith.  I also have to tell you about my new bike which was incredible, and about the van, which worked out perfectly, and so many other things ... please stay tuned!

I'm off!  Tomorrow I head out to Valencia for the start of the Furnace Creek 508, a 508-mile race from Santa Clarita up into and through Death Valley, and thence out into the Mojave Desert before finishing in 29 Palms, climbing 35,000' along the way.  The race starts at 7:00AM Saturday morning, and I will finish sometime Sunday night / Monday morning; the deadline is 7:00AM on Monday.  Here's an overview of the course, please click to enbiggen for more detail:

I will have a crew of three in a camper van behind me all the way; you can follow our progress on our Facebook page or via our Twitter feed.  Every competitor has an animal "totem"; mine is Rocky the Flying Squirrel :)  Please stay tuned and wish us luck!

In the home stretch heading into the 508 this weekend... trying to take it easy, eat, drink, sleep... and blog a little.

Still thrown by the news of Steve Jobs passing.  Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation.  "The vast and radical innovations of the mid-20th century took place in a world that, in retrospect, looks insanely dangerous and unstable."  An interesting rant by a great thinker. 

So yesterday Apple announced the iPhone 4S - Tim Cook's first product announcement since taking over as CEO - and I gather it went well.  IOS 5, faster processor, spiffy new camera, and (yay!) dual-band support, now supported by Sprint.  The last is the most important to me; I've loved my iPhone, but I haven't loved Verizon, and I'm *so* ready to switch back to Sprint.  I'm hoping to get out of my two-year contract based on the consistently poor reception I've experienced at my house; fXf!  With all the rumors swirling, it was good to get the concrete announcement, whew. 

Here's a review of the announcement ... in 90 seconds.  Great job of editing it down :)

This looks cool: Researchers transform iPhone into microscope.  And that was the old 5Mp iPhone 4, imagine what could be done with the new 8Mp iPhone 4S?  They've already disrupted low-end cameras, maybe they'll disrupt low-end microscopes too.

Science: Women who make more decisions have less sex.  Not sure about the causality here, could it be that women who have less sex [have to] make more decisions? 

Saw and enjoyed Moneyball.  A great movie made from a great book.  It couldn't have been easy to boil down the entire book into one movie which captured the essence, but that's what they did; similar in fact to what Michael Lewis does when he writes in the first place. 

New York Magazine: It's good to be Michael Lewis.

Tesla Model S prototypes are out and being shown, and apparently there will be a sportier version of the all-electric sedan, too.  Wow I can't wait.  This could be our next car.  We have a 10-year old Jaguar sedan which is mostly used for tooling around town... 

With the advent of the new Kindles (including the Fire) I've been ruminating on ebooks.  What's interesting is that ebooks are potentially a disruptive technology; could be the "publishers" who are successful in ebooks will be different from those who were in pbooks. That's what is happening with music.  Perhaps there will be a Pandora-like service to find us new books? 

Wired ran a great flashback article: 10/3/47, Birth of Palomar's 'Giant Eye'.  The 200 inch mirror took 10 years to polish - by hand!  I've visited the observatory and seen the telescope itself, quite amazing, especially when you consider the technology available when it was built. 

Fran Tarkenton imagines the NFL run like our public schools: "Each player’s salary is based on how long he’s been in the league. It’s about tenure, not talent. The same scale is used for every player, no matter whether he’s an All-Pro quarterback or the last man on the roster."  Communism never works. 

Related: The Jobs Agenda.  "I don’t know what Steve Jobs’s politics were, I don’t much care, and in any case they are beside the point. The late Mr. Jobs stood for something considerably better than politics. He stood for the model of the world that works...  Once you figure out why your cell phone gets better and cheaper every year but your public schools get more expensive and less effective, you can apply that model to answer a great many questions about public policy."  Indeed.  Highlight is mine. 

ZooBorn of the day: a baby Langur.  Apparently they are born bright orange, and turn black within six months.  How excellent.  Interesting to wonder about this adaptation; is this so their parents can easily find them when they're lost? 

And so tomorrow is the Big Game.  Yeah, you know ... Westlake vs Oaks Christian.  Go Lions! 

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Check out this photo essay: ISS' breathtaking views of Earth.  Here's one of the ISS itself:

Looks like something from a science fiction movie, huh? 

I think my favorite shot was this one, of Hurricane Earl:

Anyway click through and check 'em out; pretty awesome!

Wow

I am so saddened, truly, this is the passing of a hero
he has left behind an immense legacy
not least of which is teaching us to Think Different

He will be missed

Wow, end of September, end of Q3, end of ... summer.  And now onward into fall and the holidays and so on, all the stuff that happens in Q4.  Next weekend I have the Furnace Creek 508, which I've been thinking about all summer, and so that feels like the real end of Q3, but here we are.  Today was quite a day; started out driving down to Vista for a planning meeting, then drove up to the Valley for another meeting (and yes, it rained, and yes, I had mega traffic), and finally made it home in time for a nice dinner :)  Yay.  Meanwhile, it's all happening...

Don Draper pitches the Facebook Timeline.  This is great, but I'm not a big fan of the timeline.  Actually I don't mind the timeline, I mind that my News Feed isn't in chronological order anymore.  Anyway. 

John Gruber's take on Amazon's New Kindles is much the same as mine.  "It’s all about the content, though. That’s the difference that other tablet makers missed. Motorola, Samsung, RIM - they seem to be chasing the iPad on specs, building the best tablet they can manage at the same starting price of around $500. But they have no clear message telling people what you can do with them." 

Apparently Amazon are considering bringing Silk to Windows, Mac, and Android.  Not surprising.

Meanwhile: Finally, the tablet to make HP and RIM feel better.  "On NBC's 'The Office,' the fictional Dunder Mifflin team was forced to sell a triangle-shaped tablet, dubbed the Pyramid."  Hey you never know, with the right content...

This is just fantastic: Life of George melds Lego bricks with IOS for 'digital-to-physical' gameplay.  Apparently you build stuff with the Legos, then take a picture to get credit inside the iPhone App.  A whole new category. 

Mike Arrington takes a look back one year to AOL's acquisition of TechCrunch, which blew up spectacularly in recent weeks, leading to Mike's departure.  Too bad because there has been so much interesting tech news of late, and news about news isn't so interesting. 

Check this out: $40M Solar Sailboat for Eco-Conscious Yachtsman.  Does it actually sail?  Well yeah, apparently.  And it's so pretty! 

I can *so* relate to this:  My non-linear work stream.  "In the era before Blackberrys, iPhones, instant messaging, social networks, and blogs, I had a predictable day."  Eliminating all the interrupts and focusing is hard. 

I'm gonna wrap with a couple of most excellent pictures, first, here we have one from a surf-city surf dog competition held in Huntington Beach: 

And here's my picture of the day quarter, a bunch of Giant Panda cubs, all taking a nap: 

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Whew, what a long eventful week, and it isn't over yet; heading back down to Vista tomorrow for a meeting there, and have a meeting back in the Valley in the afternoon.  But I also have a backlog of things to blog about...

Oh, and I have a most happy daughter; Meg is taking a video editing class, and we got her a new video camera.  (Yay, that such classes exist!)  Actually we got her a new camera, period; a Canon T3, which is an awesome 35mm digital camera and a cool video camera, all in one.  (Yay, that such devices exist!)

Have you ever wondered at your brain's ability to remember music?  It is truly incredible how many songs you know, how many songs you can recognize within just a few notes, and how much of the song you can remember.  Just today I was driving listening to Classic Rewind on XM and the Moody Blues' Music to the Story in Your Eyes came on.  I haven't heard that song for 100 years but I recognized it instantly, and was able sing along without any problem.  (Well, I can't sing, but I can try :)  Amazing. 

Who would have thought?  Record-low SAT scores a wake up call.  "SAT reading scores for the high school class of 2011 were the lowest on record, and combined reading and math scores fell to their lowest point since 1995."  While everyone struggles to rationalize these data points, we should accept them for what they are; evidence of Unnatural Selection. 

Interesting: Do users change their settings?  No.  The power of defaults is strong and must be respected. 

A fascinating article in the New Yorker: Laboratory Conditions, in which architects re-imagine the science laboratory environment.  It turns out extraordinary work environments can yield extraordinary results. 

This is way cool: Augmented Reality's Disruptive Potential.  "One of the most interesting apps that someone produced was a virtual tee-shirt shop. It was placed in the 20 most expensive shopping streets in the world, selling tee-shirts. Stop and think about that for a minute. He built a virtual shop where a real one already existed."  Excellent! 

In thinking about Ray Kurzweil's talk about how things develop exponentially when you expect them to develop linearly, augmented reality is a good candidate for a technology which is set to explode.

Another candidate: Rapid Ramp in full-genome sequencing: 30,000 in 2011.  Ray actually mentioned this one; the day is nearly at hand when everyone's DNA will be sequenced.  

This is excellent: Wooden desk hides a pipe organ and fluidic computer.  Don't you just love non-electric mechanical devices?  Me, too.  I don't know why, but this is ever so much cooler than a desk which accomplishes the same things with electronics. 

Duplicating blogger Jason Kottke with software: Robottke.  You can imagine that while it isn't quite as good now, it could get better, and eventually maybe even better than Kottke himself.  This is sort of a weird Turing Test, huh? 

I'm not buying this: Neutrinos clocked faster than light.  Anything faster than light would violate causality, and that is logically impossible.  The interpretation of the experimental results must be wrong. 

Tap tap, crash: "'We don't allow faster than light neutrinos in here' said the bartender.  A neutrino walks into a bar."  :)

Man, I shouldn't have done this but I did; I ignored the world cycling championships!  Congratulations to Tony Martin for upsetting Fabian Cancellara and winning the world time trial championship, and congratulations to Mark Cavendish for outsprinting the field and winning the world road racing championship.  (I must say, I think the organizers of the worlds should always have a course which breaks up the field and doesn't result in a field sprint, but what do I know...) 

Dirk Schmidt: Visualizing the Steve Jobs era.  "From a value creation point of view, it’s hard to think of a better performance from anyone, ever."  And related, hard to think of anyone who will have left a bigger impact on the world of technology and business. 

This is pretty amazing: Volkswagon's New Beetle page, "just scroll".  HTML5 gone amuck!  Definitely not your father's web page, celebrating a car which is not your father's beetle.  BTW works in IE 9 (yay), but not under IOS (boo). 

Stuck for a Halloween costume?  You could always be an Angry Bird.  I love it :) 

Finally, celebrating Rosh Hashana, Google brings the Dead Sea Scrolls online.  L'Shana Tova! 

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So, today Amazon announced four new Kindles, including the Kindle Fire, an Android-based 7" color tablet for $199.  This is not a mere iPad wanna-be, in fact I don't think it is positioned against the iPad much at all.  I think this is much more Amazon competing with Wal-Mart than it is Amazon competing with Apple.  For the full story, please see Jeff Bezos' keynote:

In front of a slide showing logos for Amazon's web services, Amazon.com, Amazon Kindle, Amazon video, Amazon MP3, and Amazon Appstore, Jeff said "we asked ourselves, can we leverage all of these businesses to create a compelling new product that customers will enjoy?  The answer is Kindle Fire."  You can see from this positioning, Kindle Fire is a portal to Amazon's services, it is *not* a general purpose tablet.  And that's why it can cost $199, and that's why it is more of a threat to Wal-Mart than Apple.  Overall I agree with this: it's not Amazon vs Apple, it's Amazon and Apple vs everyone else.

BTW I must say I was most impressed with Bezos' speech.  He wasn't Steve Jobs, but he wasn't trying to be; he gave a clean crisp presentation of the new products and the logic behind them in a compelling way.  He presented only the most important details and arguments, in a calm relaxed manner.  Very strong.

The Silk "split browser" that Amazon is using on the Fire is most interesting.  In this architecture all page requests are passed from the Kindle clients to Amazon's servers, from where each page is assembled and excerpted from its component parts before being returned to the device.  In theory this will make surfing much faster, delivering a better user experience, but there are business implications for Amazon as well.  Chris Espinosa's take is compelling: "Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they're being offered there."  Look for this architecture to be copied by others... (maybe even using Amazon's own infrastructure :)

Overall I was most impressed by Amazon; instead of building a device and hoping people will figure out why they want one, they've created a content delivery service, with the device as an endpoint.  It will be interesting to monitor their traction.  Stay tuned!

A few weeks ago I attended the College of American Pathologists' annual convention, and was privileged to see Ray Kurzweil as the keynote speaker for the main session.  Ray is a fascinating and accomplished guy; perfect to address the leading Pathologists in the world on the subject of innovation.  He actually has history with this field, too; his Kurzweil Speech Systems (now Nuance) developed the text-to-speech algorithms used by many pathologists for dictating diagnoses.

Ray is nothing if not an optimist; to him, technology grows in price/performance at an exponential rate, regardless of the underlying dynamics of societies and economies, and this ultimately results in dramatic improvements in the overall standard of living, as well as health.  He pointed out that life expectancy is following this trend, and if we can only live long enough we'll live to see a day when people live much longer.

He talked about the way we're using advances in genomics and "reprogramming the software of the body", with dramatic results.  The implications for medical care are only just know being felt, but will be significant.  Imagine a world in which everyone's DNA sequence is known.  Imagine a world in which changing any gene can be done easily.  This world is closer than we think.  The vast improvements in information processing are also causing big changes; for example, Watson, IBM's computer which defeated world champions at Jeopardy, is now being used to digest and analyze medical diagnoses, with the intent of using it to give doctors advice.

The most interesting implications to me were for business strategy; in his view, technology improves exponentially, but companies can only foresee and plan linearly.  Therefore there will be inevitable disconnects between what we think will happen and what will actually happen.  The most successful companies aren't the ones who can see ahead the furthest, but rather those who can react to unpredictable events the most effectively.  This biases business success toward smaller nimbler companies, and those large companies which are sufficiently distributed to behave like multiple smaller ones.

It was a great talk and will provide me much food for thought.  Already I am asking myself "what things could happen in the next five years much sooner than I expect", and what will be the implications...

"15 years ago, vs today"

(actually it is more like 15 years ago vs 5 years ago; today is another column with iPhones)

Yesterday I survived the Knoxville Double, all 202 miles and 12,600' of it, riding a giant figure eight through and around Napa Valley and its beautiful and isolated environs, like Lake Berryessa.  This was my last long ride before the Furnace Creek 508 in two weeks, and my best chance to concentrate on eating and drinking all through the ride.  That worked well - I finished hungry and thirsty, but not famished and dehydrated.  Unfortunately I also suffered from "hotfoot", a common cyclist ailment wherein the pads of your feet hurt right where they press on the pedals.  It was bad, and I'm going to have to find a solution or it will be a real problem in the 508.

This is an interesting ride because it doesn't have too many defined "climbs", but instead just goes up and down all day, so that you can't believe you've climbed over 12,000' at the end of it.  I found myself loving the 34x28 granny on my borrowed bike, same as I'll have on my new bike; even when not in the granny, having it caused me to dial back and spin instead of powering along.  Maybe a bit slower, but certainly a lot faster over the course of 200 miles.  I finished in 13:53 which is pretty respectable for a hilly double, especially considering I went into it determined to "take it easy".

Here are some pictures:

the route: 202 miles, 12,600', in a big figure eight in and around Napa Valley

sunrise over Peña Adobe Park in Vacaville

the metropolis of Green Valley

self-portrait riding through the vines

Silverado Trail: beautiful wineries yield beautiful wines

one of my favorites: the Oakville Grocery; didn't stop for cheese but wanted to :)

CIA headquarters (Culinary Institute of America); Greystone Mansion

climbing Deer Park looking back into Napa Valley

descending to Pope Valley - whoosh!

how awesome is this?  a 360panorama of Lake Berryessa shot from my iPhone with 360panorama
(yes, you MUST click to see in all its panoramic glory)

Knoxville-Berryessa Road, the backbone of this ride goes on forever...

cruising along, didn't see many other humans all day, not even many other riders

not too many big climbs but lots of rollers like this one
was very happy to have a 24x28 granny gear

Walker Cove, Lake Berryessa

the Monticello Dam which created Lake Berryessa
apparently there was once a town called Monticello now deep under the lake

don't know the name of this river, but it's beautiful :)

final checkpoint, the turn home

riding through Pleasants Valley in the dusk

back to Peña Adobe Park, was it only fourteen hours ago that I left?

post-ridedinner at Bardessono in Yountville was spectacular

A highlight of this ride is the California Triple Crown awards breakfast the next day (this morning). And a highlight of the breakfast is the part where cyclists who have completed 50 or more double centuries are inducted into the hall of fame. 50 doubles! that's unbelievable. I loved hearing their stories, and thinking about all those years and all the miles they've ridden. Wow.

Mr. California Tripe Crown Chuck Bramwell emcees the awards breakfast

A great story was told about the first winner of Paris-Brest-Paris, a famous 1200km brevet; when asked "how can you ride so far?" he answered, "if a pedal comes up, I just push the bastard down, and then if the other pedal comes up, I push it down too." I love it.

"cyclistes, 1947"

(awesome poster on the wall of Megan's French teacher's classroom :)

Blogging from Vacaville, CA, where I find myself to ride in the Knoxville Double Century tomorrow, after a nice dinner at The Mustard Grill in Davis (I *love* Davis, BTW, what a great little college town).  Anyway.

So last week was my first week back, and this week was my first "real" week back, with projects and assignments and deadlines and deliverables, and interactions with colleagues and partners and customers.  It was weird to be back, and great.  I suspect the weirdness will wear off and I hope the greatness doesn't :)

I have lots to blog about, and while I have to sleep I'm not sleepy, so here goes...

How excellent is this?  Public solves protein structure.  "Players of an online game that allows users to adjust how proteins are folded have solved a decade-long protein structure mystery."  Turn anything into a game and you can harness a lot of human energy; remember SETI@home?  Wow. 

Good advice: avoid boolean "traps" in an API.  Don't you love it when you're reading code and see: doSomething(false); and you're like, is this going to do it or not?  Much better to use an enum so you have doSomething(faster); 

An interesting take on the perils of automated memory management, from my colleague Ed.  "The moral here is; you can't just assume that resource use is not an issue you will have to tackle in a managed application."  Amen.  I'm glad to see the younger generation (*cough*) doesn't necessarily buy into the whole managed code story.  I look forward to great things from Ed, not only is he an excellent engineer, he's off to a great start as a blogger :) 

Reading this prompted me to head back into my Archive to find: managed memory leaks, a most excellent foaming rant from three years ago.

I can confirm Ready Player One is a fantastic book.  I'm reading it now - on my iPhone using the Kindle App - and can hardly put it down.  I'm not even an 80's video game fanatic, but I love all the references anyway.  Check it out! 

BTW this is a great book to read on an iPhone with the Kindle App, because I could readily Wikipedia any obscure references I didn't know.  Added a lot of texture to be able to see all the mech warrior robots, for example :)

Some people look at something like webvi and ask why?, I look at it and say awesome! 

Back in the day when I did lots of *ix programming (AIX if you must know) I used vi a lot, and I came to dislike it a lot, and I actually wrote my own editor called ice, full-screen on dumb terminals.  I don't use ice anymore, but somehow I still find myself using vi ... to edit ksh scripts :)  If you are reading this, there's a script somewhere which still works because of it.

I'm loving IOS 5 but hating a bug which causes me to "lose" pictures I take directly after double-clicking the iPhone's home button.  Don't know whether I can trust it - such as when doing a long ride.  Blech.  Tried this advice to fix iPhone Camera Roll corruption but didn't help entirely.  Tried reloading the whole thing; stay tuned to see if that helped.  If you have any suggestions I'm open to them (TIA). 

BTW, do you recognize TIA?  It's a TLA I use often...

Way cool!  IBM's Watson to offer medical advice to doctors.  "IBM has inked a deal with health insurer WellPoint that will let the latter use the technology behind "Jeopardy"-playing computer Watson to suggest patient diagnoses and treatments.  WellPoint hopes the technology will help improve the quality of patient care and help reduce costs."  Even more useful than playing chess or jeopardy! 

Remember how 3D was going to take over the world?  What happened?  Here are four theories.  Personally I think the technology is amazing, but you *still* need a good story.  Paging Pixar :) 

Joel Spolsky answers the tough questions: Should you launch at a conference?  (his answer: yes) 

Did you see Netflix' interesting news?  They're splitting off their historical DVD rental business into a separate company called Qwixster, and concentrating on the online video rental business.  Seems like a great move, albeit communicated a bit ineffectively.  MG Siegler's thinks this is a lesson for Microsoft.  Huh. 

So Windows 8 has been announced - I actually have it running in a VM right now (!) - and Axel Raushmayer reviews the keynote at which it was announced, so you don't have to.  A great overview.  I'm struck by the dual nature of the OS; it feels like Windows 7 with the "Metro" UI glued on the front.  And Metro Apps look and feel nothing whatever like Windows Apps.  I get what they're trying to do, but I wonder if it makes sense.  Maybe having a 100% Metro OS (only) for mobile devices would be better... 

In case you're wondering, no, I don't like the new Facebook changes. What was wrong with displaying my friends' updates in chronological order? That made so much sense. Now I have to pick around more to make sure I didn't miss anything. I get that there are people with 1,000 "friends" who each post 100 status updates every hour, and who need this kind of filtering, but I'm not one of them.  Blech. 

Wow this could be big: Google Wallet, confirmed.  Everyone wants to use their phone as a credit card, but this isn't as groundbreaking as you might think; notice the Mastercard logo, because this payment system still uses the same infrastructure as credit cards.  Will be most interesting to see how much traction this gets among merchants. 

Funniest analogies: "Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever." 

And finally this:  "An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first one tells the bartender he wants a beer. The second one says he wants half a beer. The third one says he wants a fourth of a beer. The bartender puts two beers on the bar and says 'You guys need to learn your limits'." ∞ 

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How was your weekend?  Mine was pretty good, thanks; long tough ride yesterday, and then hanging out, watched an old chick flick (Beaches!), and today did a short ride and raced in the Westlake Yacht Club's Blue Gavel regatta, and then watched a new chick flick (How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days).  In between saw each of my daughters coming and going, and even worked a little on some project proposals.  I know, I know, too much information ... onward:

Oh and I managed to install the Win 8 developer preview, which was a minor exercise in yak shaving as it involved upgrading to VMWare 8 :)  I'll have more to say about it soon.

Important work: The semiotics of professor e-mail signatures.  Highly recommended - O.  [ via Z :) ] 

Speaking of email signatures, the other day I noted "Email signatures should be contact information, not sayings".  Prompting William to email "I couldn't agree more"; his email signature was ... "Email signatures should be contact information, not sayings" - Ole Eichhorn.  How great is that? 

Rereading an old post, I encountered some excellent correlation vs causality confusion.  "The alternative headline, 'why kids with lower IQs need to be spanked', was apparently not considered, despite the fact that IQ is demonstratively harder to change than needing-to-be-spanked."  Fire on 'em! 

From Time Magazine, May 1955: Death of a Genius, an epitaph for Albert Einstein.  "Einstein's only instruments were a pencil and scratchpad; his laboratory was under his cap. Yet he saw farther than a telescope, deeper than a microscope. Einstein traveled in lonely splendor to the crossroads of the visible and the invisible, expressing each in terms of the other."  A reminder not only of the former greatness of Professor Einstein, but of Time Magazine. 

So, Sprint says they can handle the iPhone traffic.  Good to hear.  I love my iPhone, but I do not love having a crappy Verizon signal at my house.  Sprint was great. 

BTW I have a Verizon "network extender", a mini cell tower attached to my network, but the voice quality through the extender is variable and often iffy.

Awesome: The most amazing space pictures of 2011.  (so far :)  My pick is the volcanic aurora at left, over the Eyjafjallajökull volcano.  (Yes of course that's the correct spelling.) 

Clive Thompson gets asked How did you find my site?  A good question, and I'd like to ask you how you found mine :) 

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