The 99lb "Black Widow" competitive eater

Word on the web this Thanksgiving is that this petite woman won a turkey eating contest. I googled her and she turns out to be a champion competitive eater. Seeing her mixing it up with these giant guys is a riot.

The Name Voyager

This Baby Name Wizard: NameVoyager app deserves a place in an Edmund Tufte book on effective visualization of data. Where was this when we were picking names??

Elephant

Elephant
Originally uploaded by phoebe4queen.

Wow, check out these photos that phoebe4queen from Flickr took in Zambia! Looks like an intriguing place to visit. I love the shots of the room, bathroom, shower, and of course the animal shots are fantastic.

In SF: 3 Dysons - Freeman , Esther, George - speak Wed 5 Oct.

Alas, I must boycott this as they did not invite Emily.

Wednesday night in San Francisco, a crowd of very fortunate people will gather to hear three great minds speak in public together -- for the first time ever.

Freeman Dyson, Esther Dyson, and George Dyson (shown above, L-R) will be the guests of The Long Now Foundation, in a talk called "The Difficulty of Looking Far Ahead."

Actually it is sold out, otherwise I would have loved to go.
(via Boing Boing)

Give up your Browser or your Applications? (by Jeremy Zawodny)

Jeremy Zawodny perpetuates Jonathon Schwartz's mistake by echoing this:

...ask the audience which they'd rather give up - their browser, or all the rest of their desktop apps. (Unanimously, they'd all give up the latter without a blink.)

The mistake is thinking that the value users derive comes from the software, when it actually comes from the information. The web's power comes from simple connection to relevant information, from wherever you are. The web browser is mistakenly being credited for that, when in fact it is merely the primary tool, today, for providing access to the information. But don't be fooled, the value is in the information, and as that can be located locally in a private store as much as publicly on the Internet the web browser is not the final answer. Web 2.0 is about making the information seamlessly available to any application, browser or other, in order to maximally unlock its value. Web 2.0 is about software getting out of the way of information.

Give me applications that let me navigate the information I want, seamlessly, wherever that information is stored. Message to Yahoo/Google/MSN/...: I don't want my information services to work well only when I allow a single service provider to host all my personal data, yet that's the direction you guys are evolving.

BillG Goes To College

Bill Gates and Napoleon Dynamite in this video for the 2005 PDC (click image for WMV video):



My favorite part is the slap fight in this scene which appears near the end. Napolean landed a good one right at the end!

Tour de France telemetry

CyclingNews.com has a nice writeup on the telemetry used in this year's TdF:
F1-style telemetry comes to the roads of France

"To achieve this, the "little black bag" under the saddle of one such 'wired' rider, like Servais Knaven, contained a GPRS modem, pumping out data such as his heart rate, power, cadence (pedaling speed), road speed and time."

flying cat

DSC_4619
Originally uploaded by junku.

Oh man this cat cracks me up.

Lighthouse Field State Beach

Lighthouse Field State Beach
Originally uploaded by aefitzhugh.

The Santa Cruz Surfing Museum is in the Mark Abbott Memorial Lighthouse at Lighthouse Point on West Cliff Drive. Overlooking internationally renowned surfing hotspot Steamer Lane, this museum has photographs, surfboards, and other interesting items tracing over 100 years of surfing history in Santa Cruz.

Santa Cruz Boardwalk

Santa Cruz Boardwalk
Originally uploaded by aefitzhugh.

I was struck by the lightning bolt of the roofline and the roller coaster arcing into the sky. I was having a surprisingly good bowl of Shanghai noodles from the Board Wok fast food place sitting under that roof.

Breaching gray whale

Breaching gray whale
Originally uploaded by aefitzhugh.

The whale(s) breached over a dozen times! Sometimes just a side flipper or a tail, but many times it was the entire body way up in the air. Without much of a zoom my camera was hopeless, and the viewfinder was too dark to see anything before the big splash. Here is a way-zoomed-in crop of a splashdown. That sailboat was treated to an amazing display.

Pigeon Point lighthouse

Pigeon Point lighthouse
Originally uploaded by aefitzhugh.

On the way home on Sunday we stopped by the Pigeon Point lighthouse. The ocean view was incredibly clear, and upon arriving be were greeted by a spectacular display of breaching gray whales just off the shore.

Rays of sunlight illuminate campfire smoke, the third morning

Rays of sunlight illuminate campfire smoke, the third morning
Originally uploaded by aefitzhugh.

Last weekend we had to cancel a long awaited camping trip to D.L. Bliss State Park, right on Lake Tahoe near Emerald Bay, because of uncharacteristically wintery weather. Major bummer! We salvaged the weekend by going to Memorial Park near Pescadero and had a great weekend.

Palace of Fine Arts

CRW_1575
Originally uploaded by aefitzhugh.

Pillar Point

PillarPointPano
Originally uploaded by aefitzhugh.

Weather was spectacular today after far too much rain and cold the past couple of weeks. Played hooky, and headed over to the Half Moon Bay Brewing Co. for lunch, and we followed that up with a walk along Pillar Point Bluff.

Now have to finish up some work at home tonight, but I have no regrets!

Air boat

Air boat
Originally uploaded by aefitzhugh.

I don't know what Menlo Park is doing with an Everglades-style air boat, but it's pretty cool!

Pericles the donkey

Handlebar snack
Originally uploaded by aefitzhugh.

Pericles, AKA Perry, is the miniature donkey in the background. Miner Forty Niner is the bigger one eating my mountain bike.

These two live in the pasture behind the VA hospital in the Barron Park neighborhood of Palo Alto. Perry happens to be a star -- he was the model for the Donkey character in Shrek!

Max's first bike ride without training wheels

Following our friend Scott's suggestion, we started by removing the pedals and lowering the seat, turning the bike into a sort of scooter. Max had not problem at all with this as he flies around on his Razor all the time (and even does stunts now). The key in this scooter phase was to run alongside and push him as it's hard for a kid to get much speed just paddling the feet.

After about 10-15 minutes of that, we put the pedals on and away he went! It took almost no time at all, pretty remarkable considering what we had to go through as kids. I think the tiny bikes they have today, and the kids' earlier exposure to bikes, scooter, etc. all make it easier.

Anyhow, click the link below to see Max riding less than an hour after taking off the training wheels (Windows Media video, 826 KB):

Max's first ride

fredshouse.net: move over Ma Bell, here comes Ma Bezos

Gene says I need to get an outside blog, but technically he means I should actually *use* my outside blog :-).

fredshouse.net: move over Ma Bell, here comes Ma Bezos