I have always loved No Rouz because it is a huge Iranian holiday that has nothing to do with religon. I wish I could travel to visit each of you or welcome you into my home and serve you amazing Persian food.

I wish you could visit AND serve amazing Persian food (well, teach me to make it)! I have a sleeper sofa! Now we just have to get you here...

Amych,

You have a cool dad!

Consuela - has she talked with the police?

Oh, yeah. She (somewhat foolishly) pulled over about a block later and called the cops. Wasn't until she got to TJ's that she realized the car had been hit. Funny thing is that she'd been dropped off at BART by the deputy chief of police for SF (she'd been at a reception).

I'm going to recommend she take the transbay bus into the city from now on, although she probably won't because she'll have to make a transfer. Still, the transbay buses pick up right by my house, which is much safer.

Just read the Times article. Awesomeness, amych! Your dad is fabulous.

'suela, holy hell! I'm glad she's OK, but this has not been a good week for her. Much coping~ma headed everyone's way.

The only gunshots I've heard in the wild (as in, not at a range) were semiautomatic and they sounded just like fiction. Ranges indoor and out are a different aural experience.

So yesterday I'm complaining not enough pink shirts. I got a decent bonus and a decent tax return--I think I will skim some off the top for pink standards, so I check my ecommerce email address for sales, see Banana Republic, go to the site, and weirdly--there's something in my shopping cart, which I never deliberately leave populated. A pink button down shirt. That must have been sitting there for a week.

I CAN TELL MY OWN FUTURE.

Oh, and people whispering on the conference call? YOU'RE ON A CONFERENCE CALL. Please mute your handsets.

Sarameg, are you saying your VOIP lines are usually bad? We're 100% VOIP, including soft phones running on laptops, and you can't tell whether someone's in or out, calling from upstairs or Florida. It's definitely better than cell, and I don't think I could tell it from a "normal" land line. How none-VOIP are they these days? My brain has a hard time visualising complex switching without some sort of network protocol, so why not IP?

I'm sure this has been posted to another thread, but... io9 interview of Pete Venters:

The artists who made you fall in love with Magic: The Gathering are reuniting for a new book

I far prefer VOIP calls to POTS for conferences, though I'm guessing that's more the difference between a headset and a speaker phone than the technology on the other end of the line.

Wow, this is cool: Jeff Bezos funded an expedition to salvage some of the Apollo rockets from the ocean floor. [link]

Yes, that is cool. But I think this might be cooler:

NASA's Voyager 1 Spacecraft Has Left Solar System

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft — the farthest-flung object created by human hands — has left the solar system forever, scientists say.

On Aug. 25, 2012, 35 years after the Voyager 1 mission launched, Earth's most distant spacecraft detected a sharp change in the intensity of fast-moving charged particles called cosmic rays, suggesting it had left the outermost reaches of the heliosphere marking the edge of the solar system.

"Within just a few days, the heliospheric intensity of trapped radiation decreased, and the cosmic ray intensity went up as you would expect if it exited the heliosphere," said Bill Webber, professor emeritus of astronomy at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, in a statement.

This is just fluffy celebrity news, but Rory Gilmore and Connor are engaged.

Or, if you prefer, Rory Gilmore and Pete Campbell. Either way, get ready for some kids with gigantic blue eyes.