In Vista today, and it is cold...  did a ride tonight on my mountain bike (you'll remember my road bike is being repaired in the wake of my weird disaster) and basically froze the whole way.  Spent most of the day coding in PowerPoint :)  You can get it to do almost anything, but some things are easier than others...

Well, let's make a filter pass, shall we?

Tonight I was listening to Santana, selected by my philosopher iPod, and it reminded me of riding in the Netherlands back in May.  It was much warmer then, but I was riding a clunky cruiser I'd rented there, and riding my mountain bike on the street brought back the memories.  One nice thing about clunky bikes is you have a built in excuse to take it easy, so you can cruise without pushing yourself.  The Dutch sign at left notes "he who rides quietly sees much".  I'm still one of their kind...

Supercool: An HD tour of the International Space Station, conducted by Commander Mike Fincke.  This is not a movie, this is real (although it looks like a movie :).  Amazing.  And how nice is it that we can have this sort of tour without military censorship or anything like that; fifteen nations are involved in the ISS, and people from everywhere can view these videos.  [ via Slashdot ]

Wired ran a great timeline picture: 25 years of the Mac.  (click to enbiggen amazingly.)  Of all the stuff in that picture, all the great products etc., the thing that stands out the most is the [original] iMac.  That turned the company around, and everything since is history.

I love Wired, but I noticed this too: Wired's February issue is three millimeters thin.  A sign of the times, I'm afraid.  Noticed the same thing about the latest issue of Sports Illustrated; despite the upcoming Superbowl it is a slim vestige of its former self, due to the dearth of ads of course.  I hope Wired and Sports Illustrated make it; they're both examples of things print media can do that online cannot.

As an aficionado of giant images, I had to note this: Gigapan Imager used to craft 1,474 megapixel image of Obama's inauguration.  Very cool.

Eric Raymond: The Sound of Empire Falling.  "Microsoft’s valuable Windows franchise appears vulnerable after two decades of dominance.  Revenue for the company’s Windows operating system fell for the first time in history in the last quarter of 2008.  The popularity of Linux, a free operating system installed on many netbooks instead of Windows, forced Microsoft to lower the prices on its operating system to compete."  A classic Christensonian attack from below?

Related: David Hornik pleads Enterprise Software is not Dead Yet.  While reports of its death may be exaggerated, that "yet" in David's title tells you he knows how the story ends.