Every morning I reach for my iPhone to get the latest news from Bloomberg. (I'd probably go to the NY Times first, but their app is still far too unstable and slow to be of much use.) This morning, one headline jumped out at me:

Twitter Shuns Venture-Capital Money as Startup Values Plunge

Well I had to read that article. And it seems to hint at the piercing of the Silicon Valley Bubble -- not a floating bubble leading to a crash, but rather the isolation bubble, like Bubble Boy. What? Silicon Valley is Bubble Boy?

Evan Williams raised $22 million in funding for Twitter Inc., a Web site used by everyone from Britney Spears to Starbucks Corp. to Barack Obama. Sales? Those could come later -- that was, until the economy tanked.

Twitter may charge companies for access to its users so it doesn't have to ask venture capitalists for more cash, said Williams, the company's chief executive officer. As the value of Internet companies plunges this year, investors are asking for a bigger chunk of the startups they invest in.

"The VCs have the money, but they'll just negotiate harder," said Williams, who sold his previous venture, Blogger, to Google Inc. in 2003. "I want to manage things so I don't have to raise money in 2009."

In the rest of the tech world, and in the business world in general, making money is the first goal. No matter what else you are trying to achieve with your business, you need to make money so you can do the other things you want to do.

Which brings me to the Bubble. Silicon Valley has been this odd duck in the business world: An entire metropolitan region driven largely by R&D. In the Silicon Valley Bubble, the demands upon most businesses regarding sales revenues are largely removed from the environment. The dominant business model? Raise capital, then burn that capital in development of the FooBar Widget (as an imaginary example), hoping you get bought by Google or Microsoft before you run out of money. The real product is not the FooBar Widget, it's the company itself, and the targeted buyer is a new media or tech corporation with deep pockets and a hunger for new ideas.

It's a wonderful sub-economy, this Bubble, if you think about it. And necessary to cultivate many kinds of innovation.

Matt Marshall is blunt:

Last time, circa 2001, the entire VC industry got a “get-out-jail-free card” after the Internet bubble burst. That’s because the scores of new firms created in the late 1990s argued they should be forgiven for any poor performance — it was the bubble’s fault, and everyone was affected. Their investors — chief among them, the elite university endowments –agreed, and gave the VC firms more money to invest again. With most VC funds lasting for ten years, this ensured the VCs a very long life indeed.

He predicts that half the VCs will go under in the current economic turndown.

Barak Rabinowitz has an interesting post on how this paradigm shift is happening in the face of an un-tapped market.

There’s an elephant in the room of online advertising. An elephant in the shape of 400 million social networkers creating and consuming content, clustering around shared interests and activities — all who have yet to be tapped in any major way by web marketers.

Determining how to best reach these people is an ongoing struggle, one complicated by the soaring rate of user-generated content. For the first time, advertisers accustomed to the leading edge are now running to catch up. The conversation is no longer about display ads vs. text ads. Rather, the burning question has become: Who is going to profit from the opportunity presented by social networks, and how are they going to do it?

Some people will perhaps disagree, but my sense is that there hasn't been nearly enough thought put into this aspect as there might of been had the venture-backed Valley economy not been so comfortable in its Bubble. (Call it my reality-based bias as an entrepreneur whose company and clients always need to look to the bottom line.)

The challenge now, Barak points out, is that the end-users of these social network ventures aren't likely to take kindly to big changes to their user experiences, especially when those changes are motivated by revenue generation strategies. What's more:

The bad news for all social networking sites — video portals especially — is that users generally don’t have the mentality to view and click on ads when they are on these platforms. This is why search continues to be the most lucrative advertising strategy. Users are specifically seeking information in that arena. On social networks, people are primarily concerned with communicating with their friends, not looking to buy items or services.

Now with the Bubble deflating under the pressure of the bursting of that bubble of another kind, the investment banking bubble, maybe we'll start to see more innovation in ways to monetize social networks.

The case of Twitter is a good example of that challenge. Whither Twitter now?

[Cross-posted from BlogHer.]

As I convalesced this weekend from Day 9 of a terrible cold that just won't let go, the Thin Air Summit took place in Denver. Thanks to Twitter, I almost feel like I was there. I was tweet-reading in real-time. But you don't need to be there in the moment. A quick search for #tas08 on Twitter and you find a ton of posts. Tweets on sessions, tweets on insights, tweets on new acquaintances....

Last week I learned about the in-fighting (and quite often misogynistic) attacks from conservatives on Sarah Palin. #Palin was a trending topic after the election.

When Al Gore got onto Twitter, I saw it first on Twitter. [Update: Twitter has just changed @al_gore to @algore.]

Protests against California's Prop 8 I heard of first on Twitter.

And I found out that other people did not find True Blood tonight as much of a downer as I did. (Yeah, so it's a vampire show. Can't I have at least a little human kindness? Just a little?) When Tina Fey was going to be appearing on Saturday Night Live, I heard it first on Twitter and was able to set TiVo.

Now I'm sure that anybody reading this who hasn't actually tried Twitter probably has no idea what the heck I'm talking about. There are plenty of explanations of what Twitter is, but what strikes me as being important is less of what Twitter is and more of how Twitter is used.

Because you can follow whomever you want, you can listen just to tweets by people who interest you. Of course, as they tweet with others (using their Twitter handles) you can stumble across other people who also are interesting. Soon you have a metaphorical tree of Twitterers tweeting up a storm of miscellany that quite frequently can surprise you, astonish you, and inform you.

Twitter is as the Twitterer does

Some people seem to live on Twitter. For professional bloggers, Twitter becomes a way of building their online presence, connecting with others, sharing links, and picking up on things happening.

Me, I can't spend that kind of time Twittering the day away. But I don't consider Twitter to be simply a distraction. I learn too much from it. And I catch wind of things friends and acquaintances are doing elsewhere.

Heck, it's gotten to the point where people don't have names any more, they have Twitter handles!

Amber Rhea posts regular updates on what she's tweeted.

Earlier, in these pages, Beth Kanter (or @kanter) wrote about the importance of Twitter.

When I'm asked questions that I don't know the answer to, I admit it and use it as opportunity to demonstrate the value of the social brain or having a good network on Twitter. Unfortunately, I did not have my laptop accessible in that moment.

In reflection, I've been thinking about how much richer it is being social - how you don't have to know all the answers when you have a good network (and a decent Internet connection.) It made me think about another digital divide - for those who don't have the Internet connection or haven't yet engaged on Twitter - the knowledge divide.

Heck, in this age when, according to Wired, blogging is somehow no longer something to do, bloggers like Kristen Lowe are blogging about what they're seeing on Twitter.

Paal Hivand asked a question on Twitter this week, which had me thinking about a recent conversation on ... eh ... Twitter. Thing is, Paal said (in Norwegian) that he was contemplating an article about how knowledge used to be individual, but now is social. I'm not going to go into that statement, just offer this anectdotal evidence for how knowledge in some respects is easier available than ever before (click on the image for a readable version):

She then pastes a screenshot of a Twitter exchange....

I'd just jumped into a conversation between Adriana and Freecloud here - which started with the Albigensian crusade and ended with the Twitterian crusade - and it's also worth keeping in mind that we probably wouldn't be having this conversation if it wasn't for Twitter...

Amy Gahran's post a couple weeks ago illustrates how Twitter can even facilitate conversations among disparate people who may not know each other and likely don't even have each other's email address.

The Twitter Insurgency

The adoption of Twitter has been evolving over the weeks and months. Last spring, you would have been hard pressed to find dominant tweet topics outside of tech geekery, or the personal experiences of tech geeks. But by the time the general election was in full swing, politics had come into its own, with Sarah Palin (or #palin) frequently rising up in the topics. (The Next Women report that Barack Obama is the first presidential candidate -- and presidential elect -- to use Twitter.) Now you see a wider variety of topics, including sports, television and news events spreading across the tweetscape.

From the way things look now, it's only inevitable that the trend will continue. Unless you yourself are watching something happen right in front of you (or on live tv), odds are that the news will hit Twitter far sooner than it can get noticed, digested and spat out by the mainstream media.

In fact, the mainstream media have started to adopt Twitter as an important outlet. (And they haven't always been the smoothest about it. Witness the eruption over the Rocky Mountain News' live-Twitter coverage of a funeral.)

My favorite part of Twitter is still what I first got into it for last year: interesting insights:

@agahran. People don't know they care about the quality of writing, they just stop reading poorly written things. #tas08
#

"Wasilla's all i saw" - a Palin-drome
#

My 10-weeks-into-Twitter-world review: it feels... I don't know, *kinder*, than blog world. Less incentive for trolls, stalkers, etc.
#

Friendster informs me that they now have faster slide shows. I can save even more time by continuing to not log in there.
#

Of course, there are other views on Twitter....

“Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences,” according to the report.

“Twitter is already used by some members to post and/or support extremist ideologies and perspectives,” the Army report said.

So if you do venture onto Twitter, watch out for those vegetarians.

So it's Halloween time. People don costumes and mock scariness in the face of a world full of scary things.

I should be blogging more. I should be publicizing more. I should be marketing more.

Time, alas, is a limiter. And my energy. I've had a flu shot. I eat not enough enough vegetables. I will on occasion have more than 1.5 glasses of red wine. I eat red meat and watch, now and then, R-rated movies. I don't exercise enough. Cherry pie is my downfall.

Am I scared? So?

Change is coming. In fact, if you look over the past 15 years it's already here: the Internet. What it is now, with blogs and social networks, software-as-a-service and 'net-enabled applications, bears scant resemblance to what it was like in 1995. Think about how much it has changed just since you got on the net. No question: the Internet is evolving faster and faster. Do we know what it will look like in 15 years? Ten years? A year from now?

No. The Internet is changing too fast too fast.

Why Net Neutrality is important

The phrase "Net Neutrality" itself is unfortunate because, alliteration aside, it doesn't really have punch, but it's very important. Liza Sabater describes it as "digital civil rights." It's a clear concept when you talk about governmental control of the Internet. China, with the collaboration of its state-run ISPs and American search engine companies, has already demonstrated that control and censorship of the Internet is already possible.

Alistair Croll points out that ISPs have increasing capability to control what users can access:

There are a lot of bad things on the Internet: spam, child porn, malware, phishing and so on. Until recently, it’s been up to people to protect themselves, using security software or web site blocking. Lately, however, governments and legislators have been calling for service providers to limit where users can go, both to stop criminal activity and to protect naïve surfers from straying onto malicious sites. Recent advances in DNS may soon let carriers comply with such regulations.

In June, three major carriers agreed to purge child pornography hosted on servers their customers operate in their data centers. Having signed New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s Internet code of conduct, every major U.S. ISP has also agreed to eliminate access to certain newsgroups. It’s not just in the U.S., either: Australia’s hotly debated Plan for Cyber Safety blocks content that isn’t child-friendly. Subscribers can opt out, but they’ll still be blocked from content the government deems illegal.

What about in cases of control and censorship of Internet content by corporations for non-government-manded reasons?

Claire, of the Hawaii LRB Library, gives a thumbnail:

Network neutrality is generally the concept of ensuring "unfettered access to the Internet" by regulating owners of Internet networks. CRS notes that the two most common discriminatory actions against net neutrality are "the network providers’ ability to control access to and the pricing of broadband facilities, and the incentive to favor network-owned content, thereby placing unaffiliated content providers at a competitive disadvantage."

It's this latter part -- "incentive to favor network-owned content, thereby placing unaffiliated content providers at a competitive disadvantage" -- that explains the concern of every website owner who does not control a piece of the Internet backbone.

Alice Marshall puts it in the context of the tech economy:

I am very concerned that the whole Web 2.0 crowd and the entire tech community are way too complacent about net neutrality. It is true that articles about net neutrality are regularly featured on Slashdot's front page and tech publications have done some great reporting on this, but I think too many people take the point-to-point architecture of the Web for granted and don't realize the entire basis of their business model could be destroyed.

QU writes:

Just what would be left if in fact corporations were left to create the content we see every day? They may edit and put their own spin on items in order to create a more favorable view for certain topics. When *we* create the Internet, we are able to put our own opinion on things, yes but people are also allowed to create their own opinions after reading multiple ideas from multiple people.

This isn't just about being able to hear political statements by Pearl Jam.

In a post about how "Verizon Wireless plans to tack on an extra 3-cent charge for every SMS message sent by Web information services to any of its mobile subscribers," Erick Shonfeld points out that Net Neutrality is not just about politics' effect on business, but also business' effect on politics:

The other way this could backfire for Verizon is that it could raise some serious Net neutrality issues. If it does not apply this charge evenly across the board, or starts carving out exceptions to do biz dev deals (and Verizon made some indications to Silicon Valley startups it was moving in this direction prior to the rate hike announcement), then it will be giving preferential treatment to one source of information over the other.

What if Verizon were charging the Obama campaign 3 cents per SMS message right now, but cut a deal with the McCain campaign to charge one cent per SMS? That is just a stark example, but you see where this can go. What if it charges the New York Times one rate, and the Wall Street Journal another? It becomes a freedom of speech issue.

The candidates' stances

Recently Slashdot pointed up the issue:

"For all their incessant bickering in the first two presidential debates over conflicts of interest and government regulation, PopMech columnist Glenn Derene is puzzled that the candidates have yet to be challenged on a vital issue directly related to both those topics: Net neutrality. John McCain and Barack Obama have stated elsewhere their opposing views on the issue, with McCain being opposed to Net neutrality and favoring light regulation of the Internet, while Obama is in favor of neutrality and seeks Government involvement. In any case, since there is no standard accepted definition of 'network neutrality,' until the candidates elaborate on their positions (which they both declined to do for this piece, nor anywhere else so far, for that matter), 'both sides can make a credible case that they're the ones defending freedom of innovation and open communication.'"

Here's Barack Obama speaking on Net Neutrality:

I think it's fair to say that John McCain unequivocably opposes Net Neutrality. John McCain has a tech plan, for which Susan Crawford offers up some perspective:

First, here’s the fact: We don’t have a functioning “free market” in online access. John McCain thinks we do. That kind of magical thinking takes real practice.

Instead, we’ve got four or so enormous companies that control most of the country’s access, and they’re probably delighted that McCain is promising not to regulate them.

The “net neutrality” movement is not about “regulating the internet.” That’s twisted.

You can think of the internet as a conversation being had by more than a billion people walking along a sidewalk. Big sidewalk. Net neutrality would require that the sidewalk keep out of the conversation - not limit it, shape it, charge it based on how interesting it is, or butt in. Right now, our sidewalks are in the business of deciding what kinds of conversations can happen, and they’re no longer required by law to just lie down and act like sidewalks. That’s a problem. We’d like the sidewalks, those basic transport elements, to be separate from the conversation.

Just as the power companies can’t dictate what kinds of purposes people use electricity for, the providers of basic general-purpose communications transport shouldn’t be able to dictate how we communicate.

Danny Weizner notes

McCain’s record in promoting innovation on the Internet and in the large information and communications marketplace is terrible. Mostly, he can claim credit for supporting incumbents over innovators and for failing, in his time as Chair of the Senate Commerce Committee to do anything at all to support the innovative and socially beneficial aspects of the Internet.

What about the running mates? leahpeah says:

Biden’s support is ambiguous and I’ll be watching to see how that plays out.

In Wired, Sarah Lai Stirland writes of Biden:

Biden's most-recent reputation in D.C. on telecom issues is more ambiguous, particularly when it comes to net neutrality. Though he ostensibly supported the concept as a presidential candidate during this election cycle, in hearings on Capitol Hill he's been a hesitant supporter for pro net-neutrality legislation.

I don't know if Sarah Palin has said anything about Net Neutrality.

A non-partisan (or bi-partisan) issue?

You might ask why protecting freedom of speech on the Internet has become a partisan issue. Says Techory:

I don’t like to get political on here, but I don’t really see that this is really a political issue, or at least it shouldn’t be one. It really shouldn’t matter what political party you follow, it’s more about getting the most out of the Internet, and not being beholden to your service provider for a certain type of content. This image is an obvious exaggeration, but shows what I mean. This might not matter if there were true competition for internet services, but in many instances there are maybe one or two high speed options in an area (usually phone or cable). If they both happen to do what they please with your traffic, you’re out of luck.

And it's not just about Republicans' opposing Net Neutrality. Democratic New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has been pushing through an aggressive government program that threatens Net Neutrality:

Obviously, stopping child porn is a good goal, but Cuomo's approach actually makes the problem worse and sets a dangerous precedent....

...[A] recent look at the details of Cuomo's highly publicized campaign found that Cuomo clearly exaggerated the extent of the problem for political benefit, forcing ISPs to block all of Usenet, despite 99.9997% of the 3.7 billion available Usenet articles being perfectly legitimate content. But that's not stopping Cuomo. In fact, he's going even further.

He's been sending ISPs a presentation from a company called Brilliant Digital that's offering a "deep packet inspection" system that could scan every file sent across an ISP's network and try to determine if it was child porn. Yes, Cuomo is suggesting that ISPs spy on every single file sent over their network now, 4th Amendment be damned....

...Last week, we wrote about Paul Ohm's suggestion that we should create a stronger privacy law that outlawed deep packet inspection, as that would pretty much stop any attempt to break net neutrality without requiring special net neutrality laws. It's worth noting that such a law would also have the added benefit of making it doubly clear to Cuomo that such a program is quite illegal.

I don't know about you, but all of this sounds a bit scary to me.

It's a public policy issue, and we all should get involved

Do we want corporations, or our governments, restricting what we can get to on the Internet? That seems rather Orwellian ... or perhaps more like cable tv. I certainly do not want my access to the Internet be controlled like the cable companies control what shows are available on tv.

But that's me. Maybe most people really want the net to be more like tv?

Stacey Higgnbotham encourages dialogue:

I am curious to hear what the Pew survey says consumers think of the cloud. I would have guessed they don’t think much about it all, unless it’s bringing rain. I’m also curious as to what Google thinks regulators should focus on when it comes to running pools of virtualized servers. Bandwidth improvements and ensuring Network Neutrality are one obvious issue for cloud purveyors, other regulation that should be talked about is how laws and regulations govern the physical location of certain data. Indeed, one interesting side note to Google’s patent for running data centers on the high seas is the lack of jurisdiction in international waters.

On the consumer side, a fair issue to consider is how consumer content stored in such clouds can be used. Witness the kerfuffle over Google’s terms of service regarding Chrome, which tried to claim the right to use any content uploaded or displayed via the browser. But when storing files and data in a cloud, ownership and usage rights are essential, as are clear policies that lay out how such content might be accessed, tracked and monitored. Another issue is whether or not such data could ever truly be deleted from clouds, as former Facebook users had discovered. Not all of these issues require regulation, but it’s worth educating lawmakers about them in advance of more services being offered via the cloud.

No matter where you stand on this, the question seems to be not only where the candidates stand on Net Neutrality, but how the policies and laws enacted over the coming months and years might end up affecting, or even controlling, our conversations on politics.

Who controls the information pipelines? Will you be able to get to this website a year from now?

This post is cross-posted on BlogHer.

MacJournal gets all kinds of raves from the various software reviewing sites, but I have to wonder why.

The raves were enough to get me to overlook the very "web 1.0" style of Mariner Software's website. The MobileMe sync feature was enough to get me to pony up $34.95 instead of going for Journler, which is cheaper now and has a very nice feature set itself. I wanted this app to serve as my new business journaling software. The sync ability is important to me because I often do my best thinking at home, away from the daily hubbub at the office.

Once installed, MacJournal worked fine.

But then I tried to sync it across two computers. Every time the MobileMe sync ran, it wanted to delete several entries.

Right now, after a series of updates, my MacJournal journal has been whittled back down to the first entry I made. Good thing I had saved the rest as one-off backups, because I saw the problem coming thanks to MobileMe's warning about massive changes due to sync.

In the Mariner Software email receipt, it says:

* Have a question or comment? Join the Mariner Software Discussion Forum.

http://www.marinersoftware.com/forum/

Like most forums, you have to register to post. However, once I registered, I was informed:

Before you can login and start using the forum, your request will be reviewed and approved. When this happens, you will receive another email from this address.

Lovely. Nothing like the warm welcome of customer support! Mariner offers no support email, so this is it: A discussion forum jailed off from the real world.

–Not that I expect much from the forums. The existing threads have very stale content, much of it about problems syncing, with no clear resolution. One poster even goes so far to advise everyone to skip MobileMe sync for MacJournal altogether, and use a direct syncing application to pass the database back and forth.

That's not what I wanted!

So MacJournal is turning out to be a major dud software purchase and likely a waste of $35. Maybe I will just stick with Bare Bones' Yojimbo, which I use for note-taking, and expand my use of it to include journaling. The problem there, though, is there's no way to export Yojimbo except one entry at a time, which again is pretty frustrating for an application in 2008.

*sigh*

Update September 16th:

Not one to just rant and quite, once my user account was manually approved today, I posted this issue in the Mariner forums. So far, the only response is from someone else experiencing the same problems. Alas.

Update September 19th:

No other responses. I would say this does not bode well for expecting any kind of support. Mariner MacJournal is not at all recommended by me.

With the Hadron Collider going live, now's the time to share this lovely entertainment. Hliarious! (And the science is accurate, apparently.)

[Hat tip to Lidarman]

Labor Day weekend was simply gorgeous in Boulder. Lots of sun, not too hot, blue skies. It was a perfect weekend for getting to know my new Rans Stratus XP.

Earlier in the week, I picked up a Thule rack and a RockyMounts R4 rack that could handle the 65" wheelbase of my Rans.

The bike fit perfectly. I took off the seat for the drive from Ft. Collins to avoid catching a bunch of bugs in the mesh.

Assembly

All I had to do was put on the front wheel and the seat. Within a few minutes, I had it all together.

There was a bit of trickiness when it came to the wireless odometer computer. I just couldn't get it to pair up! Turns out, I had failed to properly reset the thing. It works fine now.

The First Ride

I had no trouble riding from the start. That's why I chose the Rans Stratus XP over the various short wheelbase and other long wheelbase recumbents. But I was still a little wobbly at lower speeds. It was nothing too bad, but it did take me a couple of rides to get truly comfortable at lower speeds.

I started conservatively, doing a little 2-mile loop around my neighborhood. But that was too easy! So I did another larger loop, and ended up with a 6-mile ride.

I marveled at how comfortable the entire ride was. I don't know about you, but when I ride a regular bike, I get saddle sore. My wrists get sore. My fingertips go a little numb. And my back gets stiff. Maybe it's age. Once upon a time, I used to ride and ride and ride without these problems.

But the Rans changed all that.

The Rans Stratus XP is the Harley of bicycles.

No, it's not loud. It's comfortable.

It's a cruiser.

You sit mostly upright, feet in front of you.

If I were to encounter someone coming the other way on a Rans, I'd wave low, left hand by my hip, like the Harley folks do with each other.

Okay, maybe I'm being silly.

But the thing is that the only limit is fatigue from exertion, without the fatigue from having to be in an awkward, unnatural position like you are on a regular bike.

That counts when you have had the chance to vote for more than three people for president.

Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon

For my second-day ride, on a whim I rode down Jay Road, and turned towards the airport. There's a really mean hill there, and I almost didn't make it. I kept telling myself to go just a little bit more, and I would rest at the top of the hill.

But when I got to the top, I found I was able to rest while still riding. I just pedaled lightly and cruised while I caught my breath.

This was great!

I meandered a bit around the Boulder bikeway system, which, if you're not familiar, is like its own freeway system that goes around and under the streets. In fact, from a car you hardly notice the bike paths. You can't even see most of them. But they are there.

I cruised along Goose Creek trail and then cut across an industrial neighborhood to pick up another trail that took me down past Arapahoe.

That's when I paused and, in a moment of second-wind clarity, realized that maybe all I had to do was reset the odometer to get it working. And it worked!

I rode back, mostly the same way, and registered just over 11 miles when I got home. I was sweaty but definitely not exhausted. Wonderful!

Monday Morning

This time I struck out in a new direction, and wandered around the neighborhood that surrounds the golf club. Beautiful suburban houses old enough to lose that new tract smell. Old growth trees -- or at least old enough to make the ride mostly shady.

Interesting fact: I did not see one for sale sign in that entire neighborhood. You can't say that for the rest of Boulder!

Then I headed north and found what seems to be a trail to Niwot. It's pretty new, apparently, with fine gravel, well groomed.

I had no problems on the trail. The bike handled beautifully.

I took the trail all the way until it was about to lead down a hill, across a road, and right into a tract in the south end of Niwot. I would have gone on, but did not want to overdo it.

But I was tempted.

While I rode back, I pondered how, back in high school and college days, I would ride my bike everywhere. In Chicago, I rode up and down the path along Lake Shore Drive, and up into Evanston and north. I lost that rhythm at some point. In New York, I did not ride. New York is a walking town. And LA, well, let's just say that cycling in LA did not appeal.

And now, on this third day on my Rans, I was starting to relive that euphoric feeling that comes from a good aerobic workout via bicycling. I had ridden longer rides last year on my mountain bike, but never had this feeling -- maybe because I was in too much pain and worrying about my numb fingers. But now, riding back on that Niwot trail, I was really looking forward to riding longer rides. I still am. It's a real joy to just cruise along, letting the mind wander, taking in the sights, and arriving home with a good sweat.

And riding in the open space outside of Boulder is much nicer than the streets of the Chicago suburbs!

I have gotten really lazy over the years. And my job keeps me sitting in front of a computer most of the time. No wonder my jeans have gotten a bit tight!

I will be riding more, and taking pictures, and sharing some thoughts here.

@KathySierra tweeted a link to this, and it's just too good not to share:

Liz Danzico shares some simple but insightful thoughts on usability and how to think with regards to redesign....

How Not To Get Noticed
View SlideShare presentation

When I would talk or write about the semantic web, microformats, RDF and all that, people would often ask, "Why? Who cares?" or shudder with a "That's creepy!" Images of Big Brother tracking every move, to be indexed, measured and evaluated for Ungood behavior, or something like that. At best, people could see a kind of abstract benefit from making information more digestable by machines, you know, in the interest of having a sense of general order in the Interwebs or something.

But what about when the semantic web yields dividends back to the human experience?

It's just a little thing out of what's possible – a mere smidge of cobbled together APIs – but Mozilla Labs Ubiquity (a Firefox plug-in) is really something to see, for it gives you a peek into the kinds of things that will be possible (and now already area) with an Internet that has semantic meaning.

Check out this video, that's very much to the point:

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Oh my!

Without even finishing the video, I used it to Twitter about it.

It's like having the entire web available one click away.

Today, finally, after saving many nickels and dimes, I bought a Rans Stratus XP. I don't actually have it in hand as it is being configured with a rack, fenders, a small mirror and some different tires. I'll pick it up next Saturday, assuming I can get a roof rack for my car and an appropriately long bike rack for the roof by then.

I was going to get it back in the Spring, but, well, that didn't quite work out. I test rode a lot of recumbents up in Ft. Collins at Spring Creek Recumbents (which is pretty much the only recumbent bicycle shop in the entire [much] greater Denver area) back then and, honestly, did not much care for the short-wheelbase 'bents that are so popular in the Boulder area. I didn't like the high-bracket position of the pedals, and the steering felt twitchy to me. Maybe I could have gotten used to that, but the whole cycling position did not feel comfortable for me – nothing like the Rans, anyway.

Now I can hardly wait to pick it up. This recumbent will be a weekend enjoyment for me, and once I'm back into shape, a commuting bike as well. And maybe I'll finally lose some weight.

Following up on my previous post on trying to remove StickyWindows, it apparently did not work. Upon rebooting, the f***ing application was there again in the preferences panel.

I am really hating StickyWindows. What kind of application embeds itself permanently into your computer? Malware, spyware, rootkits... WTF!

Donelleschi, you have worn out your welcome.

Do not install StickyWindows unless you know for sure that you will never ever want to uninstall it, because you won't be able to.

When I have time, I'm going to do some deeper digging to remove this stinger from my computer. But I have work to do.

I saw this thing flying outside of my office window. I swear it was at least 3 inches long. Look at the size of that stinger! I would not want that thing coming after me, I can tell you!

Arrrghhhh!

StickyWindows is an app I thought I would like, but after nabbing and grabbing windows and generally distracting me from my work, I decided to uninstall it....

...except that I couldn't. Searching through the Applications folder yielded nothing. Searching through Applications Support in the Library yielded nothing.

The app was there in the Preferences Pane, so what I did was find the file in the Preferences folder and delete that. I'm not sure if there are other pieces lurking around my hard drive still, but I found that experience supremely annoying.

Bad on you, Donelleschi!