Getting caught up after a few days...  after my week-long funk I did have a nice weekend...  Friday we had dinner in Marina Del Rey with our friends from Ottawa, and that was fun, and Saturday I got my good old bike back, yay it’s all repaired and everything, and that made me pretty happy.  And Saturday night I took Alex to her school’s father/daughter dance, and that made me really happy.  And today I did a long ride and thought about stuff and reflected on my little world.  (And took a picture of the sunset from Mulholland :)  I keep wondering just how conservative I should be, how careful.  So far I haven’t done anything, I’m just watching the world turn to crap.  Should I be selling everything and moving to a cave in Montana?  No idea.

So I've been blogging for a while now, and one of the things I like about it is being able to see what I was up to a year ago.  And guess where I was?  Eating bison in Denver, getting ready to go skiing with friends while attending a conference.  Wow, was that really a year ago?  I have not yet implemented the ability to see what I will be doing a year from now :)  I can't even guess.

Powerline surveys liberal reaction to the Obama budget: that was then, this is now. 

Philip Greenspun notes the stimulus bill is already creating jobs.  "As long as we think that we can grow GDP by having an ever-larger proportion of our best citizens working as full-time lobbyists, it would seem that the stimulus bill is working as advertised."  In all seriousness, boardrooms all over the country are asking what should be done to position for getting stimulus bill money.  It is a strange time.

At least the budget is strong in science funding.  The sums are other-worldly, but I guess this is investment I could support.  If I believed it was the government's job to finance science, which I don't...

BTW here is an interesting interactive chart showing FDA application approvals from 2000-2008.  Investing in more resources for the FDA would be a good thing to do, that might really make a difference. 

One of the all-time worst practices in implementing websites is emailing passwords back to users after they've signed up.  Today I signed up for TechRadar - a site you would think would know better - and they did this.  Not good. 

The Panda's Thumb notes a brief moment in the magnificent history of mankind.  "It’s an ancient footprint in some lumpy rocks in Kenya…but it is 1½ million years old. It comes from the Koobi Fora formation, familiar to anyone who follows human evolution, and is probably from Homo ergaster."  That's one small step for man... 

Scott Adams ("Dilbert"), on Marriage and Economies: "My hypothesis is that places where marriage happens early, by custom or religion, will also be the places with the slowest rate of development. In such places there might be fewer entrepreneurs and everyone would take fewer risks."  Make sense.  In cycling it is said of a timid rider: "he descends like a married man" :) 

So Levi Leipheimer is married, but he doesn't ride like it; in fact it turns out he broke a bone during stage 3 of the AToC, and rode that way for the next five days, winning anyway.  "Leipheimer said that he had been 'wondering why the pain wouldn't go away.'"  Now that's tough. 

And here we have a collection of cool showerheads.  I must confess, I am a shower-lover, and hence a showerhead-lover too.