Light posting tonight - I'm on negative time trying to get a project delivered.  I'm too tired now to make much progress on the project, so I might as well blog :)  Judge this post accordingly...

Did you watch Stage 7 of the Amgen Tour of California?  What a great race; the perfect ending to a perfect week.  Big George wins from a 90 mile break in the pouring rain.  That guy is a beast, and the worse the weather gets, the stronger he gets.  And what can you say about Levi, and Astana?  What a great performance.  I loved watching it live on my computer, too; they finally have the Flash front-ends for these events to the point were they really work.

Picture of the day: the ISS hangs in suspended in space, with Earth as a backdrop.  Awesome.  (Click pic to enlarge)  Looks like a scene from a movie!

Dog bites man: Castro rejects idea of political change.  Who would have predicted that?

Wired: Free - why $0.00 is the future of business.  "The rise of 'freeconomics' is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web. Just as Moore's law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero."  Go ahead, click through; you can read it for nothing :)

Cory Doctorow characterizes Free as the "divide by zero" problem.  "The market for digital goods isn't a market for goods at all: since the potential customers can choose to get all digital goods for free on the darknet, the digital goods market is actually a digital services market."  Right.

Here we have wiperless windshields, courtesy of that morally repellent nanotech.  There's plenty of room at the bottom.

I am totally perplexed by Twitter, or what's good about it, or why anyone would use it.  But Russell Beattie has a clue: Nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls.  Huh.  Great insight.  (Weird how I completely disagree with Russell on many things, but love reading his opinions anyway.)

Have you been reading about how Google Docs are the latest big threat to Microsoft Office?  Well here's a nice dose of reality: Google Docs is chock full of fail.  The points are well taken.  I'm not switching from desktop apps to web apps for my daily work anytime soon - if ever.

Meanwhile, Internet Explorer 8 is entering beta.  Oh goodie, another incompatible browser to support.  Who ordered that?

Well we had the picture of the day already, so can these be the pictures of the year?  Photos taken of a line squall in Kansas; I swear they do not look real.  WOW.