snow retirement search

Went snowboarding again yesterday and the amount of snow falling was quiet something. The conditions on the whole were excellent though it was a bit of a shame that the place was so crowded. The amount of snow that has fallen here recently was brought to home by a one person in our group commenting that the restaurant that we just walked down hill to is normally (during ski-season!) at the top of a rather large staircase. Other people wondered what would happen to the local towns when all this snow/ice started to melt come spring - since it all doesn't melt at the same time I am not convinced that this is such a huge issue. Perhaps the streams will be high for longer, but will they also be significantly higher ?- I don't know!

A subject close to my heart that I've not yet managed to realise is early retirement. Here is an article that looks at the issue more completely than the "I just need to save this much money" over-simplification. I have plenty of things to spend my time on (actually I have too many things) but for the forseeable future (ok, so I can be a bit short-sighted) the "save this much money" issue is the biggest one on my plate. I have some ideas, one of which I was going to write about here, and then I wondered about all these search engines getting all those tentative queries that people submit when looking for a service that they don't know exists. If they mine their data properly they should see what gaps exist that have a waiting market...I wonder how many of these recent betas were inspired by the mining of search queries ? I wonder if the search engines will ever be asked to provide search logs to help with patent disputes, etc.

On a totally different note, this is a very serious round-a-bout in the UK. Next time I am there I am tempted to go there just for the experience (though my gut tells me that it is likely to be less exciting than it looks :-) ).

Here is another Aussie beer commercial (these are hilarious - there was another link to one in the same series in a previous post):