Nice.

There is a mountain bike downhill race in Lisbon Portugal called Lisboa Downtown that winds down these endless flights of stairs and cobbled streets and goes over man-made ramps and looks absolutely SICK. I first read about this on cyclingnews.com and then I watched some of the video on the event web site and all I can say is wow...

I remember when I worked downtown at Ti Cycles and took Dave's 2nd generation titanium DH bike for a spin down the SAM steps and all over Pioneer Square. Never before in my life had I been able to hit a curb head on and barely notice it. Or haul ass down a flight of stairs and not be worried about getting pitched over the bars. And that was with way old school suspension technology.

What a blast this event must be. Every kid dreams of riding down stairs - who doesn't love that, right?

The proximity of the stone buildings probably add a little to the excitement level of the riders I'm betting.

So... do you think this will really work?

https://www.catalogchoice.org/

You are supposed to able to create a profile and then elect not to receive catalogs from anyone who is sending you one currently. Since I'm a huge sucker for not getting mail I threw caution to the wind and signed up. I love the mission and they are endorsed by everyone and their dog (including hopefully me soon) but what if a business does not volunteer to sign up with this service?

I bet there is math out there that proves it's more profitable to send millions or catalogs out, have 999,000 end up in some landfill - meaning the other 1,000 get used to buy stuff - than to let people opt out. I mean if you don't get the catalog, how are you going to know you can spend money on this retailer? You get the idea.

Shit, here's hoping it works.

NOTE - I did not have to provide my full name in my profile so I didn't.

Every once in a while something comes along that you just know will not be a flash in the pan and this - for sure - falls into that category.

Xobni is an add-in for Microsoft Outlook that is amazing. It indexes all your email and displays relevant, contextual information in the Xobni bar no matter what you are doing be it messing with your mail, calendar, tasks, contacts, whatever.

Already with Windows Vista and Outlook 2007 it's hardly necessary to file messages into folders as the native search in Vista is so powerful but this takes it to the next level. Now you can see stuff like how many messages you have sent to a particular person, what dime of day you usually correspond, your recent correspondence, what attachments you have sent back and forth (I LOVE this feature, no more hunting for messages to find attachments!) and much, much more.

And the best thing? It's so intuitive to use! I had almost no learning curve and was able to just reap the benefits. Gotta love that. Nothing worse than some obscure tool for power users only. Except for that power user obviously but hey, it's never going to get much traction if it's insanely complicated.

I heard that as soon as Microsoft saw this they began to incorporate all of the features into the next version of Office. Duh...