My boss, who is AWESOME, got us a VIP tour of NASA's Houston facility, including their pool training lab, their mockup collection, and even the moon rocks. Check it out! Sometimes it's cool to have your boss be an astronaut.

You know that annoying clunking sound my rear dampers used to make? Well that is fixed now.

These may have fixed some other problems, too, like my car's inability to pulverize transported objects such as eggs and glass.

My rate of toy ordering did not slow down while I was on vacation, so by the time I got back to work this week, this is what my desk looked like.

I took my board to Kirkwood this weekend. It was really cold and windy and there's not much snow yet, but the dawn was gorgeous. When do I ever get to see dawn, really.

Installed any software on Windows recently?

The experience of keeping your computer secure is now so incoherent that products from huge companies like Hewlett-Packard must beg you to defend them from the behaviors of products from other huge companies like Microsoft and Symantec.

You guys all understand that users don't read dialog boxes, right? They're not making the decisions about security and privacy that you've delegated to them. They're just playing a little mini game to click the rectangles until they're all gone.

Edit: I sold my car! It's going to a college student, bought for him by his dad. Maybe he'll even want to keep my rather embarrassing personalized plates.

I lol'd at this captcha test from craigslist. This is probably why other captcha implementations stick to nonsense words instead of using real words.

(Also, I tried the audio captcha. Those things are hard! It played a clip from a staticky movie soundtrack, and asked me to type the 20 word phrase the guy had said, which included the proper names of characters in the movie which I couldn't spell. I guess I'm not a person!)

• Yes, your data is sent encrypted.
• Yes, we use an anonymous key to link your account to your device and/or utility.
• No we don't have your credit card number, your name, your address, your utility account number, or anything else identifying about you.
• No, we don't want to sell your data.
• No, we don't give any Google account information to anyone else. Devices and utilities can't figure out which Google account is yours even if they wanted to.
• No, we don't correlate your energy usage with your search behavior or your use of any other Google product. Not only is that illegal in Europe, it's also a damned pain in the ass.

I got a new car last month. I've been avoiding mention of it because it is, frankly, ridiculous.

It's another Subaru, except faster than my old one. It's also a great deal uglier than my old one, if such a thing is possible. Here are some pictures of it from its best angles.

Anyone want to buy my old Subaru? It's well-loved.

At the new California Academy of Sciences building in San Francisco, their aquarium has a pair of electric eels.

To the right of the tank is this fun, educational display that helps kids understand how electric eels hunt.

(The little "touch here" hand icon is even small, specially designed for a child's hand.)