I read the article, though, and found myself disagreeing with its author, Marisa Meltzer.  How can you provide an accounting of Tumblr’s success and not use the word “Gawker” once?  The service was launched in New York in the right kind of scene, was pitched in the right kind of way, attracted the right kind of writers, and grew from there. Like so many successful products, you can’t simply run Tumblr’s featureset backward through the perfectly-deterministic mechanism of the imagined market and arrive at a proper accounting of why it succeeded and its competitors failed.

I agree that it’s worth talking about the subtle mechanics of the site — how there’s a thumbs-up mechanism but no thumbs-down; I think the consolidation of reader and blog into a single form is a genuinely interesting idea. But Meltzer’s account seemed to me a bit like explaining the success of the iPod via a discussion of its clickwheel.

What? Right, Central America.  Emily and I just spent 7 days in Costa Rica, driving through mountains, clouds and grids of oil palms, attempting the full volcano/cloud forest/beach trifecta.  I want to write about each of those things, but for now you’ll have to be satisfied with some pictures.

Between this and their executive-elect being named President Chinchilla, it all sounds like a promisingly animalcentric vacation.

But it went surprisingly well! Everyone’s kit worked immediately; in fact, they even seemed to work with the iPhone 3GSes that were on hand — something that the MintyBoost can’t necessarily be relied upon to do.

I think that my favorite part was watching everyone mess around with the Dremel. That’s some advanced nerdery for you.

I think that folks had fun; we might do this again, perhaps with more of an Arduino bent. If you want in, let me know.

The look is just as bespoke, concentrated and confusing as his description had implied, and the noise it makes every bit as terrible as Tara had promised.  I think it’s great.

Charles and I have been watching the Olympics avidly, as it’s provided a welcome and unexpected outlet for the violent anti-Canadian sentiment that we hadn’t even realized was building up inside us, poisoning our hearts and minds. They think they’re so great. Or at least, they think they’re okay, but will resolve to try harder. Those bastards.

The Olympics come with various apocryphal stories, most having to do with athletes overcoming personal adversity.  But Charles also heard a good one about the South Korean speed skating team’s training regimen.  Supposedly they’re in the habit of doing interval training where they sprint for 40 seconds, then walk for 20, then repeat the cycle seven more times.  Charles said he’d tried it and it was a surprisingly exhausting way to spend 8 minutes.

I can back that up.  When I was done with my first attempt, I could swear I tasted blood.  I kept walking around the track for what seemed like forever, afraid to let my heart rate drop to the level it desperately wanted to.  Eventually I was fine, though I felt like I had completely exfoliated the inside of my lungs.  Man, was it exhausting.  And I was cheating, using 30 second rests!

Perhaps your cardiovascular system is not as pathetic as my own (I hope not; these lungs have proven to be serious underperformers).  Either way, this is worth a try.  And as a bonus, it produces an unusually bumpy and cool-looking heart rate graph, captured courtesy of the neat Garmin monitoring doohickey that Emily bought for me a year ago (that first peak is from me climbing up the six floors to the YMCA’s indoor track).

If you own a pair of these earphones, and have owned them for a while, go buy some replacement filters.  I didn’t believe the manual when I read it, either, but this actually does make a huge difference.  Wow.