Well, that's one way to save weight

After several jugs of Chianti, the MV Agusta engineers may have come up with a winner...or not!

There's no business like Snow Business

Portland is really beautiful in the snow. The down side is that Portlanders FREAK OUT when we get 1/2" of it! Everybody stays home, the MAX commuter trains get delayed by 30 minutes (how can THAT happen? are they stopping the trains to PUT ON CHAINS????), and the city grinds to a halt.

Canadians would be laughing at us...if they weren't so polite.

Pictured: the view today looking over the Park Blocks, 1 block south of TheBigDay.

Wanna buy a hat? Only $75 million and it's yours

Hat Island, that is...also known as Vatu Vara Island, in Fiji.

Boy, if only I hadn't spent so much this year on Christmas lights... :-)

Thanks to Aruna, our resident Fiji native and honeymoon expert, for spotting this.

More details in this story from Forbes.com. There's a slide show there too, but be warned: the Forbes.com site is HORRIBLY slow--and put your safety goggles on, cause they're going to hammer you with an avalanche of ads.

Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs

My friend Cliff turned me on to compact fluorescent (CF) light bulbs--they save a substantial amount of energy (see Seth Godin's blog posting entitled How many bloggers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?). I'm using them in a few places in my house--places where the lights tend to stay on a lot, like the driveway light that stays on all night...some hallways...etc.

I tried using them in the lights outside our front door (which are controlled automatically by an X10 home automation system), but somehow that's like Crossing the Streams, and the bulbs just fry in a day or two. So I gave up on using them for the X10-controlled lights.