Notice the odd wind direction?  It's the Santa Ana wind, high deserts' middlefinger to Pacific Ocean.  A simply amazing sight.  I am so glad I don't live in LA.  There must be armies of firefighters down there.  I hope all of them live through this hell.  Did I mention that my older brother is a Fire Chief?

From NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

If the landscape is unfamiliar to you, Mexican border is about at the middle of the picture and Santa Barbara is about one-third down from the top.  You can also see the Monterey Bay near the top.

Here are links to some of the latest Longhorn screenshots.  So far, I am not impressed.  Filterable Explorer views, categories to complement folders (I think that is what I saw in the screenshots), desktops as windows, and merged window title and menubar are not exactly worth the upgrade.  Scoble, give us a screenshot that will pop my eyeballs, something that justifies all the hype.  Spill the beans or else!;-p

Yesterday, I went to bed at 6AM and woke up at 9:30AM to hike with my family at Huddart Park alongside my son's boy scout group.  It was supposed to be an hour hike but we ended up hiking for 3 hours.  Everyone got dog tired from crawling all over the mountain and then getting lost.  I wasn't physically prepared to climb mountains with my flatfoot so when we got back, I ended up with a really nasty muscle cramp that just wouldn't go away until my wife gave me a massage.  My kind of enjoyable hikes are strolling in Zen gardens, not climbing mountains and being smothered in million acres of trees in zombie mode.

After taking a short nap to recover, our dinner guests arrived and it was party time til 10PM.  Waking up to an avalanche of muscle aches and a bad hangover this morning brought back memories of Lake Tahoe ski trips from my younger days.  Ouch.

A wild thought out of the blue: if you had to decide between the survival of the last family of Bushmen or the last wild herd of elephants in Africa, which would you choose?

Read this:

So imagine a flat X-Y plane – any floor will do – that's a map of topics in two space.

To illustrate a little, let's stand on the map at 'environmentalism'. Somewhere near we can see 'Lomborg', 'ANWR' and 'Kyoto'. A little further off in the direction of the latter two is 'fuel cell' and in the mid-distance behind is 'Saudi Arabia.' 'Anime' and 'Reality TV' are lost in the haze, in an unknown direction.

Now, up off the ground, and let's add a Z (vertical) axis. This axis is attention.

Let's give every reader / viewer in the audience for our medium 100 poker chips, and ask them to put the chips on the map areas representing how they would ideally like to spend some time and attention this month, available content permitting.

Cue the special effects, and pour in the water.

Now let that water represent the fixed costs of entry in the print medium, restated as the amount of attention you need to monetize to survive. You'll notice most of the landscape is now underwater. So are the business models of those on the small peaks.

Now, back to the blogscape again. Drain most of the water – fixed costs are way down. Even many of the smaller hills are dry – making money – if only indirectly as a form of virtual advertising. The diarists are still underwater, but the snorkel is pretty cheap. There's also a lot of life on the lower slopes of the big peaks, more microclimates and ecologies to exploit.

No, it's not me talking but Tim Oren ranting on the naivety of the Power Law (warning: over-simplified).  He is doing a Don Park as in Don't Park and Think but Drive Right Into The Damn Picture thing.  I really enjoyed this post, particularly the pouring and draining of water.  Tim forgot to add the part about zooming way out to reveal the map as the skin on a drum on which the Hands of Time beats on constantly.  Heh.

Digital camera and photo editing software encourage lazy photography.  Before, it was more like hunting, carefully planning and working for the perfect shot.  Now, its like drive-by shooting to collect images for further work.  Reading digital camera reviews reveals that considerable number of people buy high-resolution digital cameras just so they can use just parts of images.  This is sad in a way.

Update #1 – 11:34PM PST

Wow.  I like this kind of photography (warning: very wide picture).  I wonder how one takes pictures like that.

I like the idea behind the Verifiable ID venture by Steven Brill (news, press release, website).  It is an echo of my Trusted E-mail Network (TEN) idea: workable alternative for the needy.  But I don't see why security has anything to do with the ID when the real problem is the long line.  Having the ID doesn't excuse you from being searched before boarding.  It also doesn't offer any value beyond what passport provides.  Also, international travellers will get only half of the questionable benefit.

It will be a lot simpler and more effective to just sell private line passes for a frequent travellers.  It works just like those privately-operated freeways.  Companies can partner with airports and transport authorities to install and operate private lines wherever there are long lines.  With private and voluntary membership, they can be much through without ACLU screaming at them.

Besides, wouldn't you pay a little extra to get frisked by a sexy bombshell carrying an Uzi?

Nothing much to post about except that I am busy.  Here are some pictures of persimmons and tomatos we harvested recently.  While tomatos are gone now, persimmons are starting to ripe.

Squirrels ate parts of the left one.  Ever seen constipated squirrels?

I love eating tomatos with salt.  Yummy!

Via Dave, I ran into a recent accusation of anti-Semitism against Gregg Easterbrook by Roger L Simon that resulted in Gregg getting fired by ESPN.  Here is the paragraph from Gregg's post to his blog that caused all this:

Set aside what it says about Hollywood that today even Disney thinks what the public needs is ever-more-graphic depictions of killing the innocent as cool amusement. Disney's CEO, Michael Eisner, is Jewish; the chief of Miramax, Harvey Weinstein, is Jewish. Yes, there are plenty of Christian and other Hollywood executives who worship money above all else, promoting for profit the adulation of violence. Does that make it right for Jewish executives to worship money above all else, by promoting for profit the adulation of violence? Recent European history alone ought to cause Jewish executives to experience second thoughts about glorifying the killing of the helpless as a fun lifestyle choice. But history is hardly the only concern. Films made in Hollywood are now shown all over the world, to audiences that may not understand the dialogue or even look at the subtitles, but can't possibly miss the message–now Disney's message–that hearing the screams of the innocent is a really fun way to express yourself. – Gregg Easterbrook

In response, Roger L. Simon posted this:

Thanks (but no thanks) to Meryl Yourish and Instapundit for pointing out the astonishing and hugely depressing example of anti-Semitism by Gregg Easterbrook in The New Republic (of all places). Mr. Easterbrook holds two Jewish movie executives, Michael Eisner of Disney and Harvey Weinstein of Miramax, responsible for the violent oeuvre of Quentin Tarantino, singling them out as Jews and making reference to the Holocaust in the defense of his argument. – Roger L. Simon

What I don't quite understand is exactly what constitutes anti-Semitism?  Does it work like Jihad in that any Jewish person can accuse someone of anti-Semitism?  Or does it work like the N word which can be used liberally by black people but not by anyone else?

In a way, I feel jealous because Semitism seems to have a very powerful forcefield that protects it where most other minorities don't.  I mean accusations of anti-Kimchee or anti-Korean just doesn't have the oomph anti-Semitism have.  Even worse, anti-Islamic sentiments are seemingly cheered on rather than frowned upon in America today.

Anyway, I would appreciate more education on this subject.

Firebird 0.7 is out.  While I prefer IE over Mozilla, I have taken a liking to Firebird because it is fast, easy to use (tab heaven), easy to install handy extensions, and has superior FTP and i18n support.  I am seriously considering switching to Firebird as my main browser now.  As a developer, I'll still be using IE to test my web pages, but Firebird is too useful to ignore any more although there are still some odd kinks that needs to be fixed.  I sure hope Firebird development continues on.