A couple of days ago I clicked on the StumbleUpon toolbar and landed on this incredible photo of lenticular clouds over Mt. Rainer at APOD. It was a bit unnerving, because that picture has been my desktop wallpaper for the past year or so! Good call, though.

Windows 7 is doing what Vista couldn’t: convincing people to replace Windows XP. The best quote in this ZDNet article: “Windows 7 is the Anti-Vista.”

The Straight Dope experiments with Kahlua cupcakes to determine two questions: How much alcohol is left in each cupcake? (Not much) Can you get drunk? (Not unless you eat so many cupcakes that you’ll be sick anyway.)

Some comics fan art. First, a realistic Darkwing Duck by Mike P. Mitchell. I suspect that if someone other than Disney owned the character, we’d be seeing a “live-action” movie that looked like this. Second, Comics Alliance collects a fantastic series of cover art for Great Comics That Never Happened – team-ups like the Justice League and the Wu-Tang Clan, or the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen featuring 1980s icons like Mr. T, Doc Brown and MacGyver, or Hannah Zatanna, torn between the worlds of superheroes and magic, or a race between Superman, the Flash…and the Dukes of Hazzard.

Organization for Transformative Works – dedicated to protecting the expression of fan fiction, fan art, etc. (via Naomi Novik)

Open Standards, One Web, and Opera – Just why are standards important, anyway? (via Opera Watch)

Speaking of Opera, their EU antitrust complaint against Microsoft has been making waves. Responses at CSS3.info, Web Standards Project, Slashdot (edit: more Slashdot), Asa Dotzler, Opera Watch, plus a Q&A w/ Haarvard. My take: Good luck on unbundling, but if they can force Microsoft to catch up with the rest of the market in terms of standards support, I’m all for it.

Nissan vs. Nissan. On my way to work I saw a bumper sticker on an XTerra that said “In support of our freedom, it’s my last Nissan.” Huh? There was clearly a web address below it, but it was too small to read at that distance. So I looked up the phrase, and apparently there’s been a long-running dispute over the domain name nissan.com, between a small computer business named after its founder, Uzi Nissan, and the Nissan car company. The dispute was eventually resolved (correctly, IMO, since he has a legit reason to use the name) in favor of the little guy. On the other hand, I don’t see why the site makes such a big deal about Nissan’s “French Connection” to Renault.