Electric Josh

The skiing at Mad River was at least as good as the new pictures at left indicate. Around here we're just beginning to come to grips with the idea that a guy in his mid-thirties can't hit the moguls quite as hard as he did fifteen years ago and expect to feel okay at the end of the day. If the head pounding of a long mogul field doesn't get you then the overwhelming and total exhaustion will. Oddly, my back is totally fine.
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Turns out that lunar eclipse photography is pretty hard. Who knew?
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The Atlantic on how America's suburbs might turn to slums (like in France). Natural consequence of people wanting to live in cities, not being scared, I suppose. To discover whether your house is about to be surrounded by charred husks of what once weren't crack houses, you might check out walkscore.com and type in your street address. Good luck getting inside the town gates!
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Wii remote hacking: very cool stuff. The family went to Florida for the week, so this space will soldier on through by doing some similar hacking: once I start soldering I suppose I'll have no excuse not to then write some image recognition code. It will be useful to no one, but it will be fun, so I don't care.
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This space is seriously celebrating the fact that a major American political figure has said the following: "President Bush tells the American people that he has nothing to offer but fear, and I’m afraid that his fear-mongering of this bill is not constructive," says the Speaker of the House. Without getting into whether the bill itself should become law, I'm just glad that someone has finally noticed that being afraid is a really stupid reaction to the perceived threat of terrorism. This space will now continue to stop talking about politics.
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Damnit, those Nokia people already had my idea: using commuters' cell phones as tracers for traffic monitoring. Sounds pretty cool, even if it should have been done years ago.
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So why do they say that "candidate x won state y" when they know perfectly well that delegates are assigned according to varying and arcane formulae? Drives one crazy. At least the Times has realized that the web is a far, far better medium for communicating large numbers of statistics than television is, and has given a fantastic, deep presentation of election returns. (They seem to have Dr. Tufte looking over their shoulders, eh?)
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The older kid can now stop and turn on a reasonably steep (intermediate) ski slope, and with a big grin on her face. This space is totally unable to express the extent of its glee at this.
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So watching the Super Bowl was unbearably painful. At least New England didn't completely give it away; it was actually a mostly well-played game. Oh well. Mostly I just wish these games were on in the early afternoon so I had a chance to cool off before going to bed. As it is, the game ends at bedtime, and win or lose, I'm always way too revved up to actually sleep. Argh. Maybe next year this space will live up to its annual pledge to stop watching the NFL entirely and get out of the house more.
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