Wherin I may be boring what audience I have left

A programming note: I'm itching to talk about John Ensign and "The Family," but I'm holding back until I can get my hands on the book. That the membership of multiple Congressmen in a misogynistic, totalitarian Christian Mafia that looks upon Hitler with admiration, considers its members to be unburdened by ethics, and accountable only to their fellow "Family" members, and may by its doctrine, require its members to obstruct justice if one of their own has committed a crime hasn't seen more play in the media astounds me.

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You should have stayed on the sidewalk!

I kept my eyes forward, waiting for the light to change.

You can't just come out of nowhere like that. I couldn't see you.

I made a small adjustment to my right handbrake, tightening it slightly. The man in the truck beside me kept talking at me and, confident that I could safely skip this one-sided conversation, I tuned him out.

[unheard lecturing]...You're black...

My attention snapped back into focus. Had someone invented a new way to be a racist shitbag? Was there a stereotype about black people riding bikes and not listening to self-righteous shitheads that I'd never heard before?

You should be wearing something brighter

Oh. oh. It's true. I was wearing a black jacket. In the middle of the afternoon.

Are you even paying attention?

To you? Not really

You should be. I'm a good driver and I almost hit you because I couldn't see you.

The light for the cross street turned yellow, and I put my weight on the pedals

Fuckin'... get your eyes checked then. I've been in the middle of the right lane for five blocks.

The light on the other side turned red, and I pedaled hard, pulling away before the other guy could touch the gas

Awful jackass!

It's amazing how often people go into full-on lecture mode without making any notice of the crucial detail that renders their position utterly nil.

There's so much in the news that I could seque to from that lead-in.

Every time Google announces a new move, there are predictable reactions. There are those who will declare the death of whatever the dominant company is in the market they've just entered. There are those who decry Google as a one-trick pony because all that they've been able to profit from is their search engine (despite the fact that most of their moves have directed more traffic through their search engine and thus increased profits). And there are those who manage to find new and exciting ways to be fucking idiots.

Dvorak presumes Chrome to be a brushback pitch. A response to Microsoft's Bing, which has yet to offer comparable functionality to Google or even approach Yahoo as first runner-up in terms of popularity. Not something that they intend to actually follow through with.

Right. Because Google is in eighth grade.

Chrome OS is an exciting proposition if you're like me and smile when Microsoft gets taken down a peg. But also utterly predictable to anyone who uses the browser, or read any of the press releases about how Google was envisioning a new era of computing, one where the browser is considered the most important piece of software running on a given computer. The sudden surge in the popularity of netbooks gives them a platform to preach the gospel of browser-centric computing, and one that doesn't have a clear king of the hill. Not really. Sure, Microsoft Windows ships with about 80% of netbooks today. But for a company that only recently dipped below 90% in total marketshare (and even there did so mainly due to the increased popularity of OSX, which isn't present on netbooks at all), those numbers are looking assailable.

The other 20% of the market is controlled by various flavors of Linux, which all told account for about one percent of the market at large. The major, indeed only stumbling block for Linux as a netbook OS seems to be name recognition. And Google has that in spades. How much traction this new move will gain remains to be seen. Whether or not MS is willing to admit it, heavy hangs the head that wears the crown.