The Blue Angels show on Saturday had perfect weather. It was crystal clear in San Francisco on Saturday afternoon for the show and aquatic park was packed to the gills with people. Melissa and I realized that we have never seen the show from that vantage point, we’re usually perched on a hill somewhere. The grandeur of the planes is even more apparent from the flat ground at the wharf. I took some pictures of the planes but without a telephoto lens they are pretty sad. You should check out the Chronicle photos instead. Also, if you missed them, they fly again today at 3:00pm.

I have had a Palm Treo 650 for the last two years and it has served me well. I used it to check work email, keep contacts, check my calendar. Basically, I used it for all of the Outlook functions without having to turn on my computer, which isn’t very practical just to check my availability for an appointment. The Treo was a big clunky device that had poor sound quality, low battery life, and a small screen with a weak backlight. It was so poor as a phone that I still carried a Motorla Razr as my phone.

About three days ago, I upgraded to the BlackBerry Pearl 8100 and the device is nothing short of amazing. It is small sleek, has a great high contrast color screen, good sound quality, amazing battery life, and even great native third-party apps, like a GoogleTalk and Gmail client. Best of all, the built-in camera is 1.3 megapixels and has great image quality. With all of these features built-in I am going to get rid of my Razr and carry just one device from now on.

After two years I saw the Treo as a necessary tool that I simply tolerated. After only a few days with the Pearl I can honestly say that I love it. I understand the strong emotional attachment that a lot of people have for their BlackBerries and understand the term CrackBerry intimately. I can’t put this damn thing down!

Scientists now believe that birds have special molecules in their eyes that allows them to literally see the Earth’s magnetic field within their normal field of vision. This becomes particularly helpful for the birds when migrating long distances. It is likely that the magnetic field looks like dark or light spots or lines within their normal vision.

It seriously must be like herding cats, but patrols in the South of Market (SoMa) district are cracking down this week on homeless who commit quality-of-life crimes, which include littering, camping, trespassing, urinating, defecating, blocking sidewalks or publicly intoxicated–not panhandling. All I have to say is it’s about fucking time! SoMa residents that live near Moscone Center and the Metreon, including us, have been asking for a crackdown for a long time now. Let’s get these mofos off the streets and into shelters and services!

Late night television presenter Eva Nazemson was hosting a game show when she blew chunks on live television and blamed it on painful menstrual cramps. Amazingly, she stayed on the air for about two hours after the incident. That’s some serious work ethic! If this had happened to Regis Philbin, he would have been in an ambulance on the way to the hospital before the chunks had hit the floor. Awesome.

Well, at a very small scale anyway. Scientists have found that when water in two beakers is exposed to a high voltage, a floating water bridge forms between the beakers. The water stream can be as wide as 3mm in diameter and as long as 25mm. It’s interesting that while water is everywhere in nature, some of its unique properties are still a mystery. Via BoingBoing.

In the last couple of days, there have been two separate shootings on the 101 Freeway. The shootings are thought to be not related to each other, but it reminds me of what happened in Southern California in the late 1980s and early 1990s, where freeway shootings were all the rage. Another rash of Southern California freeway shootings occurred in 2005, prompting the New York Times to publish an op-ed piece about the psychology of freeway shootings. That story has the best excerpt that explains how everyone feels about the shootings:

Secretly, everyone wants to believe that the shootings have been motivated by violations, however slight, of automotive honor. That would leave the rest of us on our best behavior, which is pretty much where we already are. What we really fear is that they are genuinely unmotivated. If that is true, then suddenly we all live in a very different neighborhood.

That’s exactly how I feel. I would hate to think that everyone on our freeways has only two emotions: rage and repressed rage. The person that survived the second shooting claimed that he did nothing to provoke being shot. If that is so then we live in a different neighborhood indeed. Let’s hope the shootings stop and this isn’t the start of a new trend in the Bay Area.