Try and find video of Usain Bolt's 100m astonishing world-record run this summer from Beijing. I remember happening to catch it in the kitchen in Westhaven. It was spectacular.

But you can't find it online.

NBC owns it, and their stuff is only avaiable via their own (shitty) website and using a (shitty) proprietary Microsoft plugin-requiring format.

I was going to make a post using that video an analogizing w/the presidential race -- as the McCain tailspin tightens and the backstabbing begins -- but I can't. Because the Olympics are the intellectual property of NBC Sports, and they're a massive gang of wankers.

And speaking of a massive gang of wankers:

The little blond girl making monkey gestures at the beginning really gives me a twisty feeling in my stomach. Drawing out the toxins, this election is.

Things have been busy to the extreme but thankfully its the good kind of busy that brings a sense of purpose and joy to life.

I've been struggling in my meditative moments -- mostly on mass transit -- with the cyclical trap of self-awareness. Third-person camera vision; thinking about telling a story about a girl to another girl and asking advice about life, and knowing this is on some level a maneuver, and that killing the whole appeal.

Thinking about how this condition of cynical self-consciousness prevents interesting things from happening, prevents simple happiness and authentic experience from emerging, creates an unattractive air of uncertainty, hesitation and pessimism.

And I look across the BART isle and there's a middle aged man, kids-off-to-college age, assembling a book of Magic the Gathering cards, which I remember from high school, and he's got a look of pure and unadulterated joy on his face, putting his new cards into their little plastic holders, arranging them just so. Totally unconscious to whatever else and just loving it in whatever personal world he inhabits. It was a poignant moment for me.

To use a theatrical phrase, sometimes we have to suspend our disbelief in our own lives, perhaps as a precursor to Really Actually Believing again.

Quick meta-notes: my prestigious google ranking for the keyphrase "authentic experience" is not long for this world, methinks. Couldn't be eclipsed by nicer folk though. ;)

I did some good work today on the Drupal for Firebug project, which my colleague Matt has been rocking. It's interesting getting into new technological territory in terms of writing extensions for Firefox. Still following reliable trailblazer John Reisig, one of the real shining lights of the internet. Big ups and terrorist fist-jabs for him.

It's got me thinking about how much I'm over this old Dirtstyle website. Coming into the Autumn, I feel the need to start living the dream a bit more, even if that means experimenting around the margins of what the dream might entail. Fortune favors the bold, and I think it might be fun to work on my own website as a project. My entrepreneurial activities of the past two years have sucked a lot of the joy out of the web for me, and that's a real shame. Doesn't have to be like that.

This might also a good way of getting back into a regular writing pattern. I've realized that this (writing) is something I'd like to keep up, and that in the longer-run, maybe I can have some of my career based around writing english rather than writing code. That or I'll hit the high grade one of these days and can start living that charmed boho life that suddenly becomes possible when you've got a pile of cash on reserve. Ah, dreams.

More resisting apoccalyptic thinking: researchers at MIT improve solar cell performance:

As a result, rather than covering a roof with expensive solar cells (the semiconductor devices that transform sunlight into electricity), the cells only need to be around the edges of a flat glass panel [e.g. a window]. In addition, the focused light increases the electrical power obtained from each solar cell "by a factor of over 40," Baldo says.

The real solutions to all of humanities problems are energetic in nature. Currently, as we confront an end to the burning of a billion or so years worth of stored photosynthesis that we dug out of the ground -- that's what oil, coal and natural gas are, really -- we look in new directions. The future is in fusion, and while there are some exciting things (which aught to get funding) happening with small-scale earthbound actions, we have a pretty functional fusion reactor up and running in the neighborhood. It'll burn you too, if you're not careful.

The Sun is the root source of almost all energy, of all life on our Earth. With the exception of geothermal, tidal, and nuclear power, everything else comes exclusively from the Sun. It's a mind-bogglingly huge thing, a mas of incandescent gas emitting literally incomprehensible amounts of energy. There is no scale of reference that can even begin to convey the reality of what the sun is, it's power.

It is truly the most God-like for 35 light years around. We should do a better job of worshiping.