Today was windy, whew, and hot too.  Weird weather, fire weather I guess...  a quiet day of coding, emailing, and [now] baseball watching, punctuated by a good ride (Rockstore, first time since I got sick) and a nice dinner with my kids.

If you're a student of this Presidential election, you can only conclude the pollsters have thrown up their hands and given up.  Here we have an AP poll showing a dead heat, while here we have a Fox poll showing a 9 point lead for Obama.  Take your pick.  Or don't, since the polls are wrong this year, very wrong.  Instapundit has links to more discussion. 

Regardless, the relentless media bias on display has been nothing short of disgusting; LGF sums up "this is the year the media died".  In this vein, a new study shows Coverage of McCain Much More Negative Than That of Obama.  It will certainly be a long while before they're trusted again, if ever...

Here's some bad political thinking by Matt Haughey, who should know better; he wants broadband everywhere, and universal healthcare.  Sure, and while we're at it, let's have universal cars - why should only some people have them - and universal houses - why should some people be homeless?  There's a word for this, and it starts with a C...  [hint: it is not capitalism].

BTW did you know?  "Socialist" is the new black.  Incredible.  [ via LGF ]

The 2009 Tour de France route has been announced, and it looks excellent; the opening stage is in Monaco, and it passes through Spain, Andorra, Switzerland and Italy, including a 15km team time trial as prologue, and a hilltop finish on Mont Ventoux on the penultimate day.  Should be great fun. 

Not to mention, in addition to Lance Armstrong being back in the peloton, we'll have Ivan Basso back, and maybe even Vinokourov.  Maybe even Tyler Hamilton.  Maybe even Floyd Landis.  Maybe even - dare I hope - Michael Rasmussen?

Ted Dziuba thinks maybe Yahoo shouldn't have bought all this shit.  D'ya think?  "Yahoo is firing a bunch of people to cut $400 million from its budget.  That sucks for the people who work there, but the entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who hustled Yahoo out of more than $2.5 billion in the last 4 years probably aren't terribly concerned.  In the typical American fashion, Yahoo bought a bunch of shit it didn't need with money it didn't have. That, of course, was no problem at the time because the stock market always goes up..."  Except when it doesn't.  As Ted would say (but didn't): FAIL. 

Wired wonders will the economy kill 'free' on the Internet?  I don't think so; this is what everyone wondered after the dot-com bubble burst in 2001, and yet 'free' took off.

This is really cool: the Multicolor Search Lab finds Flickr photos by one or more colors.  Way cool.  This would be even cooler as a front-end to Google's image database, but perhaps that will come...  [ via kottke ]