It has been alleged that i have a short attent

oooooh, butterflies!

I’m not in love with the subject of the photo, but the colors are mesmerizing. At least, I think so.

i’ve (re-)discovered a note that i had written some time ago. It goes like this…

Subject: Odd thing to think about
Date: October 17, 2004 8:22:13 PM CDT

double cheeseburger without pickles
undefiled
pickle-less state

i have no idea, whatsoever, where i was going with this thought. i assume it was amusing at the time.

Sudoku seems to be not much of a real challenge.

I’ve been sitting on this for a long time. It’s time to get it out of my “inbox” – shame on me!

In his Working Smart blog, Michael Hyatt writes:

How to Sell Your Boss

Selling your boss is critical to your success. If you can’t get your boss’s approval when you need it, you are not going to go very far in your career.

As the president of a company, I spend a good deal of time listening to proposals. Those doing the pitching usually need my approval to proceed with their project. Frankly, I never cease to be amazed at how poorly most people do in this kind of situation. Unfortunately, most of us never receive any formal training […]

The article is moderately long but contains a lot of fantastic advice. I’ve been caught in most of the traps that he refers to over the years. Hopefully, never again.

If an item is described as “priceless,” does that mean it’s free?

Or, why do “priceless” and “worthless” have different, and essentially opposite, meanings?

This was something I talked about well over a year ago that never really took off. It was slow. It ran on a piece of hardware I didn’t really want to maintain. It was outside my firewall, making it difficult to get to. It sucked power. And that’s the honest-to-goodness truth.

So, I killed it.

Now, I’ve put up a very bare-bones page that directs you to either my .Mac home page – the place where I put family pictures, movies, and such – or to this blog. It’s hosted on the same hardware as this blog. I’m also running an occasional streaming audio feed through the server. None of these, however, are the primary purpose of the machine, so that means it actually gets attention. Once in a while.

In other news related to past entries, some of which you probably know:

• My iPod mini died. It was dropped once too many. It’s not completely dead, just mostly dead. But that’s enough to make it practically impossible to use in the car. Sigh.
• NetBSD vs. ThinkPad update: I’ve updated to NetBSD 3.0.1 and KDE 3.5.3. Almost everything works, still. I goofed up something in power management that requires me to manually put the machine to sleep instead of just closing the lid. Overall, though, the machine is just as functional as when I first set it up. I’ve also tweaked Linux a bit so that it almost works properly. Still fighting with sound drivers, though. How annoying.
• Katrina blew through more than eleven months ago. In spite of this, they still need your help down there. The rebuilding effort will be going on for a long time. Don’t forget them just because the media has. Please.
• Gizmo Project has added XMPP (Jabber) IM support, and this past winter, Google Talk opened up their network. This means that you can IM your Google Talk friends with Gizmo Project and vice versa. We’re still waiting for voice chat interoperability, but expect that it will happen before long. (Feel free to give me a holler!)
• I’m still not sold on converged mobile phone/PDA/music players. Two out of three might not be too bad. I don’t see a way to combine a phone and a PDA in a way that makes them palatable for general use. Yet. I sense a paradigm shift…
• Microsoft won’t be adding support for Intel Macintosh systems to Virtual PC. What a waste. I suppose it’s just as well; Virtual PC doesn’t really seem to compete with VMware, the virtualization big kid on the block, anyway.

That’s about it. At least. that’s all I can think of, at the moment.

The new web site is dead. Long live the new web site!

A lot of us know about what might happen to the Los Angeles area if – or when – the next big earthquake hits that area. However, there’s another city that is in perhaps even more danger.
Continue reading →