DanBailey.net

Testing my ability to photoblog via iPhone.

Seth Godin’s got a good piece on two easy-to-start web businesses. If I ever need to start freelancing on the side again, I’ll probably do one or the other.

Need a good Tour de France fix? Cyclingnews should be your first stop.

ABCNews, in its commitment to journalist excellence, provides us with the Animal Kingdom’s Odd Couples. Okay, so it’s not earth-shattering news, but it’s good for a serious “awwwwww” response.

And here’s a great piece on Sign-Up Form Design from the folks at Smashing Magazine.

A short while ago, John Scalzi had a post in his blog about the book Mirrored Heavens, in which there was much bantering by readers about regarding the ability of Russia to regain “superpower” status. While that was all entertaining, I felt it missed the point, and asked about whether it made sense to militarize space in a case where we’ve moved on to Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW). The author of the book, David Williams, responded to that question (poorly worded as it was) in his blog. And now I feel the need to respond here. Read the rest of this entry »

So I’m shilling for Firefox. I think it’s a great piece of software, and it’s my browser of choice regardless of platform (except my iPod Touch, where I’m stuck with Safari…*gag*). That, and I think the badge is really cute. They ought to make a slightly modified version of this as an icon for the app.

Last night, as we were falling asleep, Kate admonished me for not updating here since last week. I retorted by rubbing my stubbly legs on her and then admitting that it had been awhile. So here’s what’s up:

Writing. Not much time for it these days. But I did have two cool ideas for books yesterday. The first is a non-fiction work, and the second is a sci-fi re-telling of a modern history story. Both would be a lot of fun to write.

Cycling. If I don’t have to work at the shop tomorrow, I’m going to get the Surly out for a shakedown cruise. Work the kinks out, so I can make with the commuting. Johnny Surprise and I are going to try to get out and hammer this weekend, too. Haven’t seen the dude in a dog’s age.

Fonts. Also stalled. Need to get re-focused on getting the e-commerce engine running, converting some of my old fonts to OpenType and getting them back online for sale. I can always use more money.

Social Life. Picking up a bit. Going to have Jenni and the Cashbox, and some other peeps over for poker night this coming Wednesday. Liz is back in town for, like, a week or something before she heads off to her medical residency in Buffalo, NY, so there’s some drinking, maybe some biking, and some Rock Band in the immediate future.

Moblog. I’m working on a version of this blog for the iPhone/iPod Touch — one that will fill the screen nicely so you don’t have to zoom around like mad to make things quasi-readable. I’ll probably release the Wordpress theme as a free download, too.

Videoblog. I’m working on the first videoblog, and it’s coming along. Hopefully finished this weekend. I need ideas from you guys for topics on upcoming blogs — what sorts of stuff do you want to see?

Photo by Tomoyoshi. Licensed under the Creative Commons

I’ve got a thing for good product design. What can I say? It’s what keeps me attracted to Apple’s line of products, it influences my choices on the bike (we can have the Shimano Dura-Ace vs. SRAM Red debate another time), and so on.

There’s just something about the Nissan GT-R (the “Skyline”) that just does it for me.

Every sports car has a look that says, “Get out of my way.” A large majority of them are like the totally hot chick in high school that you had a huge crush on, even though she was a total air-head. She’d giggle and ask you to move, and you’d comply. Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and so on fall into this category.

Some sports cars are more the refined European aristrocrat. Imagine an Oxford accent, with them holding a little cup of tea, pinky extended. “I say, good chap, would you mind clearing the way? That’s a good man.” This is your Mercedes or Jaguar.

American muscle cars are the jock in high school that used to stuff you into your locker.

The GT-R is in a class all it’s own. This is a car that says, very quietly, “Get out of my way or I’m going to stab you in the face. Repeatedly.”

Honestly, I think this might be Japan’s first true muscle car, and damn if it isn’t the hottest thing on the planet.

Hey Nissan, any interest in giving an advocate a 2009 GT-R Premium with the all-weather tires and Super Silver paint?

Yeah, I didn’t think so. We’ll talk after I win the lottery on Saturday night.

Over at Roughly Drafted, Daniel Dillinger muses on why Apple would buy out PA Semi. It’s an interesting line of thinking and it raises some awesome questions. Foremost among them is, why is Apple buying out a chip design group that specialized in varieties of the PowerPC architecture? This is an important point to ruminate on, as Apple just invested heavily in making the switch to Intel’s x86-based Core chips for their hardware.

Mr. Dillinger goes on to speculate on Apple’s reasoning behind this — and eliminates the concept of a PWRficient chip in desktop macs, as well as in mobile applications (notebooks, iPhones, etc.). He then moves on to speculate that Apple will put chipsets in its boxes for the purposes of hardware acceleration, which seems the most likely line of reasoning.

But the question becomes: why? Read the rest of this entry »

So I got asked the following questions by Christopher Hawley:

1) Your take on the Olympics, the venue, and whether bicycling is adequately represented in the official events

2) optimism/realism/cynicism/pessimism: where do you see yourself on this spectrum? Is there another position which you would prefer to find yourself?

3) perversity of the universe, and why it tends to a maximal value (possibly one of Niven’s Laws, but ICBA to check): any personal anecdotes or insights?

[Here’s a starting topic: Why are people who are most hard of hearing the most likely to unplug the phone ‘because its ringing would disturb my sleep’?]

Well, let’s go through these one at a time.

First, the Olympics and cycling’s place in it. The venue? I’m fine with the games being hosted in China. Sure, they’ve got some human rights issues that they need to work out, but as a whole, I’m fine with the games being hosted there. That said, however, I feel bad for any endurance athlete that has to compete in Beijing’s air pollution. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the things I love about Wordpress is that it’s relatively easy to upgrade. Download file. Unzip file. Upload resultant files to server while not touching the wp-content folder.

Last night, I also embedded the Last.FM thing in the sidebar, and finally sat down and did a 404 page that blends quantum physics and haiku.

Looking forward to moving to Wordpress 2.5. I’m hoping that that process goes as smoothly as this transition did.