Every once and while you get an unexpected, pleasant surprise. Today I found a treat in my rarely visited snail mail slot at work - my friend AaronFil sent me a copy of David Rees' book - Get Your War On. I've mentioned Rees' hysterics before, and it's just great to have a collection of his work in an off-line form. Even better to have it signed by Rees himself - "Best wishes under god" - and knowing that the profits are going to pay for clearing land mines from villages in Afghanistan. Thanks Aaron, you made my day.

ps - Rees has a regular strip in Rolling Stone (no link, print only)   .:

at: 5:05 PM

Tonight is turducken night. I better explain. Every year the Large Software Company I work for sponsors a giving campaign with United Way. It is a big deal with lots of supposedly low pressure events to get you to contribute; you can contribute to almost anything and the company matches, so I have no complaints. The company even pays the 5% "administration" fees that UW has, so all your money goes to your cause. But I digress. Each year we have a giving goal and a percent goal for team contribution. To inspire the team to meet our goal we come up with motivational events, like team ice cream party, team movie night, whatever. This year our general manager offered to prepare turducken dinner for the whole team if we hit 90% contribution. Well, much to his surprise, we hit 100%.

Now, I'm no expert on nested poultry preparation, but I do know a little something about salmonella. Chef Paul Prudhomme says cook it for 8 hours... I wonder what happens to a manager that wipes out his entire team in one meal? Maybe I'll stick with the Tofurky tonight.

If I remember, I'll snap a couple spy shots with my phone cam.   .:

at: 11:28 AM

Over 20 years ago I graduated from high school. I can hardly believe it. Not that I particularly liked high school, I didn't, but 20 years is a long time passing, more than half my life (just barely), so I'm paying attention. Our reunion is coming up over Thanksgiving weekend. I missed my 15 year reunion and I've decided to attend this one. I'll be making the 3000 mile trip to Boston on Thanksgiving day (my clever attempt at avoiding the travel rush - ha, we'll see), and the reunion is Friday night. I don't have the cliche reunion angst; I graduated with a small class (100+) of mostly nice people and I'm fortunate enough to have a wonderful life now; great family, great friends, and - if you knew my grandfathers, you might say - a surprisingly large amount of my hair.   .:

at: 9:06 PM

Have you been paying attention to search engines? There's neat stuff going on there. By now you're probably using Google toolbar (bye bye pop-ups), and they just released Google deskbar, which puts the Google-iscious search box right on my Windows start bar. You can see where they're going with this - total, world-wide online knowledge search domination. Want to know how many inches in 33 centimeters? Just type "33 cm in inches". Google knows all.

But it's not just Google (though clearly they are leading the way). Check out the categorized search results in Vivisimo.com.   .:

at: 7:45 PM

Ok, so I won't blame you if you don't come back to read my blog. You're probably not reading this right now. I mean, if the NYT just stopped publishing their paper for 18 months, would anyone expect their readers to jump back in when they started up again? What if the NYT had a new baby?

Some excuse. Well, that's what I've got. A little more than 18 months ago, our baby was born. She's an amazing little creature and every day becomes more of a wonder. For a while she took up all of my free time and energy - no time to blog. Then we out grew our place and finding a new home took all our free time and energy - no time to blog. Then we found a place and it needed lots of work - not time to blog. Well, we're not done yet (will we ever be?), so I'm going to plunge back into it - Welcome back! Did you miss me?

There are changes in the air, so stay tuned... And in the mean time, read this poignant piece about hope, disappointment, and baseball by my old pal Paracelsus, and when you are done, take in this fascinating sand painting movie (windows media).   .:

at: 6:38 PM