I finally hopped on the bike for the first time in months (apart from biking to work from my parking spot). Well, my chain's been slipping a lot lately, no matter how I adjust the position of the chain; I'll have to inspect it for damage on either the sprocket or stretching of the chain. When you weight twice as much as other bicyclers who consider themselves fat, you tend to put more strain on your components.

Anyhow, between the slipping chain, the winds (15MPH WNW, gusting to 23MPH), and not using bike shorts (in my mind I thought it was about half as far away), it was a pretty uncomfortable ride on an otherwise absolutely beautiful day.

So where was I going, you ask? I was riding from my home to The Map Centre, in Kearny Mesa (Clairemont Mesa Blvd), hoping to find some good maps of Argentina for when Tina and I visit this December -- specifically, hoping to find a map for what will likely be our base of operations in Mendoza:

View Larger Map Decent mapping data is hard to come by for Argentina. Of the four big-time mapping websites:

1. Only Mapquest has street-level data for Mendoza
2. Google Maps doesn't even show the highways in Argentina; compare to their coverage of Chile
3. Alas, despite being Argentina's 3rd largest city, Mendoza doesn't show on Mapquest at all until you zoom down to at least "Regional" level.
4. Despite having better streets of the area, everyone except Google Maps still sucks, so that's what I embedded above

Well anyhow, when I get there, I find this note on the door: What a bummer. It's so sad to see such an iconic business die -- it makes me wish I'd bought more of the maps I'd always wanted. Well at least I was able to get a country-level map from Barnes and Noble.

Debates are so unfulfilling. Candidates dance around issues, and never have the time to fully respond to attacks. Well, I'd propose 2 changes:

1) Give everyone in the room a button that they can use to decide if you answered the question. If you don't get at least 50% saying yes, you don't get to answer the next question - your opponent gets a clean shot. The incentive, obviously, would be to give a clear and direct answer to the question.

2) Don't limit the time per question. Give each candidate 45 minutes to talk - total - for the entire debate. That lets them make sure that they fully explore whatever issues are most important to them. It's up to them to make sure they don't run out of time before their opponent.

Of course, most campaigns would never agree to these rules.

I've tolerated a lot of annoying ads, as have we all. The seizure inducing ads that flashed between opposite colors; the "congratulations, you are customer #100000" popups; the Netflicks pop-click ads; And those frickin' Lower My Bills ads with the dancing people, and the witches, and especially the striking cobra just about drove me nuts.

Well I've been pushed over the edge, this time, by those Skype ads. Seriously, how do any news websites expect you to read an article about apiculture in Argentina with someone making annoying faces at you in crisp, high resolution video?

Advertisers, you've lost me -- I will never again use a web browser without ad blocking software installed. I'm installing Safari AdBlock as I type. Cerf willing, I will never see another ad (except on Daily Kos and similar sites, where I've enabled ads to support their revenue stream).

When reading specifications, numbers have a tendency to drift into irrelevancy, unless you can tie them to something more concrete.

This week, we dropped our cable TV altogether, and increased the speed of our internet connection. We're now getting 15Mbps (with a short-term burst rate of 22Mbps) downstream -- almost 2 megs a second!

Well, whenever I try to visualize transfer rates, I always imagine it in floppies per second. So when I'm downloading a movie or something, I imagine this huge stack of floppy disks. At 2 megs a second, I'd be swapping out a floppy every 2/3rds of a second. And since it takes like a minute to copy a floppy, I imagine this huge array of floppy drives, so I'd go down the line swapping them out, practically as quickly as I can.

Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. "She asked the library how she could go about banning books," he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. "The librarian was aghast." That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn't be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving "full support" to the mayor.

Don't mess with librarians.