Today I bought a season pass to Kirkwood, a new snowboard with boots and bindings, and ice tires for my Subaru.

Now I'm just missing one thing...

(If you're in my area and want to go up to Tahoe, I'm all yours. Just share the gas money and we'll get 'er done.)

Now that Chrome is public, I've installed it on my machines at home and have been using it full time everywhere. It's nice! There's definitely still some websites that don't quite work with it, but it's so much faster than IE7, and so much more stable than Firefox, that I'm hooked.

If you were waiting for a reason to switch, here's one: When using GMail, it is actually impossible to send a message containing text in the font "Comic Sans".

You can format comic sans text, but as soon as you click send it converts the text to a more readable font. Only Chrome does this, you can't get it with any other browser, not even Safari.

(The Gmail engineers tell me that this is a bug and that they plan to fix it, but I personally think it's a service to man-kind and that they should leave it be.)

From the You Need To Also Be Enjoying This Department, I am reminded that I have not commanded you to watch Zero Punctuation, which is a video game review site which you're likely to enjoy even if you've never played the game he's talking about.

The guy has recorded bazillions of reviews, you should watch one! The style is relatively unique, and always funny. I'm told that normal hyoomans think he talks too fast, but that's part of the charm.

(This, like all modern things, has an RSS feed. So if you'd like Google Reader to tell you when there are new ones, this is the ticket.)

Ideally I would have liked to learn to do all the software tuning myself, but I like having an engine that's not on fire, so it seemed prudent to take my new toy to a professional instead.

It turns out the guy who wrote the tuning manual for this kit lives in Livermore, so I paid a very expensive visit to his dyno. And I'm glad I did; he was very patient and created a very nice, smooth part-throttle map for me.

Not to mention that he got an additional 30 horsepower out of the car, for a total of 187whp (wheel horsepower.) 187! Out of a 1.6L!

So, how fast is it? Well, remember that power measured at the wheels by a dyno is a lower number than the power numbers that they print in the brochures, because there is a 20-30% loss between the crank and the wheels from the inertia of all the spinning drivetrain parts. So for reference, the Subaru is putting down about 195-200whp. The miata is now putting down almost that much, but it weighs about 35% less.

So it's, you know, pretty fast.

(This thing has actually created a rather embarrassing problem, which is that the gearing is far too short. The stock gear ratios have a very low top speed, because the engineers knew that it wouldn't get over 110mph unless you pushed it off a cliff. But I can now get to redline in 5th gear in just a few seconds, which means that at Thunderhill next weekend I'm going to be waving a lot of people by on the front straight when I top out, and then promptly munching them in the next corner. Thus, my hand is forced to buy a tall-ratio torsen diff. Woe is me.)

Last weekend was the end of my 6 week install of a turbo kit onto my ancient miata. It's a pretty tense moment to turn that key for the first time after having rerouted coolant, drilled holes in the oil system, cut and rewired fuel injectors, replaced the computer entirely, and flashed in mystery software to control it all.

I'm a pessimist, and this is the kind of situation where that really pays off--- To my shock and school-girl-like jumping-up-and-down-clapping-hands glee, it started up and ran, first try. I guess I have good beginner's luck!

Get your rides now, before it explodes.

(The noise this thing now makes is ridiculously satisfying. I actually cackle maniacally every time I press on the accelerator--- which is all the time. I just can't help it.)

As I came home from grocery shopping and stepped out of my car, I noticed an old woman in the driveway. She was speaking to me, although I couldn't quite hear her at first. I took a step closer, and then realized that I could hear her just fine, but I didn't understand because she was speaking Russian.

"You help me," she said. Not a question. I said "okay?", my arms full of bags. "You help me," she said again. I said, "let me put these things down, one moment," and I ran and dumped the bags in my house.

When I returned, she had drifted vaguely back toward the open door of the house belonging to Alexei, my Russian neighbor. A relative, I guess. "How can I help?" I asked.

"I don't speak english," she said, which was in retrospect the one thing that required no explanation. She then started speaking to me, slowly and clearly, in Russian.

When she had finished, I politely said, "I don't understand?" She nodded, cleared her throat, and then said the same words again, more slowly, and also slightly louder. After an awkward pause, she pointed at her head, and then at the ceiling, and then said something different.

Then she rang the doorbell.

I stared at the doorbell, hoping for some clue as to what she was getting at, and then shook my head. Realizing my confusion, she rang the doorbell again, a bit more firmly this time, explaining again what she wanted, in Russian.

I took out my cell phone, pointed at it, and said, "Maybe you should call Alexei?" She shook her head in negative. "Alexie," she began. Then: "My son, Alexie," she clarified. "Yes?" I said.

"My son," she continued, and then a relatively long stream of Russian words, during which she pointed hesitantly off to her left.

"I'm so sorry, I just don't understand what you're saying," I said, and then started to back away slowly. She nodded and said "thank you", ringing the doorbell a final time.

"No problem," I replied.

I just realized that I've never gushed about Brook Gladstone's and Bob Garfield's excellent show On The Media, which has to be some of the best news reporting* you can hear on NPR.

The interviews are nuanced, hard-hitting, and fair. They get people who are interesting to hear from, they ask pretty straight-forward questions, and they don't stop until they get their answers. They also don't suffer posturing or sidestepping, and both of the main interviewers have a rich history of calling bullshit on the crazy crap that their guests sometimes spew. I love it.

The topics are always media-related, but they interpret their topic broadly enough to keep the stories from being esoteric; in addition to the obvious first-amendment topics, they frequently touch on privacy, government, law, war, and economics. Even when I don't feel like hearing depressing news at 1:59pm on a Sunday, I'm always glad I listened by 3:01pm.

Today's show, for example, was a pretty good discussion of several privacy issues with YouTube and Google, and they finished up by discussing an extremely interesting obscenity lawsuit that potentially set precedent for judicial action on Orwellian "thought crimes." When was the last time the BBC had a discussion about thought crime?

That's what I thought.

(* - I still think that This American Life is the best thing on the radio, but since it's not always news I can safely hold up OTM along side it.)

My dad and I spent last week in Canada, touring the Banff and Jasper national parks up there. It's beautiful country, and I got lots of pictures!

We saw lots of scenery, lots of bear cubs doing cute things, and lots of momma bears threatening to eat us for getting too close to their cubs. Delightful.