I got a nice note from Trudy Schuett this morning, letting me know that she mentioned my Blog Service Pinger in her list of Once and Future Heroes 2003. I feel a bit out of place, being mentioned alongside such famous people as Doc Searls, Dan Gillmor, and Chris Pirillo, to name a few 🙂
We got the word about two hours ago (shortly before lunchtime) that we could leave the office and enjoy a slightly extended weekend. I opted to take advantage of the holiday lull to finish up some database cleanup on our production web server that I just can’t do when customers are relying on everything to work. I’m finally done, the databases are cleaned, reindexed, and the apps that rely on them work faster now. Time … Continue reading
I’m leaving the office now, and won’t be back until Friday. Merry Christmas!
Here in the Northern Hemisphere, today is the Winter Solstice, the beginning of winter, the shortest day of the year. Winter is one of the two seasons down here in South Alabama. Most people get four seasons, but down here, we only get Winter and Summer. Plus there are a couple of weeks of mild weather that most people would call Spring and Fall.
Where I work, we all bring in food for every Friday in December (if there’s a Friday after Christmas, we bring Christmas dinner leftovers). This year I brought two different things. On the first Friday, I brought sausage bread, and last week I brought a chocolate eclaire. This week, one of the ladies brought in these cute Santa Claus cookies. It’s made from a Nutter Butter cookie, with white chocolate for the beard, a Red … Continue reading
It’s that time of year again… Pretty much our entire household is on antibiotics right now. Our daughter had strep throat, my wife got it, her mom got it, and the doctor put Jamie on antibiotics as a preemptive measure. I went to the doctor yesterday and he decided that there was no point in waiting for the results of my strep culture, because he was going to put me on antibiotics anyways because I’ve … Continue reading
Surprisingly enough, not with a bang, but with a whimper. Saturday, U.S. soldiers found the former leader of Iraq hiding in a hole in the ground about 6-8 feet deep. Saddam was captured about nine miles from his hometown of Tikrit and across the Tigris River from one of his lavish palaces. Saddam had a pistol but was taken into custody without firing it. It’s going to be…interesting to see what kind of spin people … Continue reading
I meant to post this a few days ago, but just didn’t get around to it. Blogshares is alive again. My interest in Blogshares was already waning before it went down. It seemed like a good community for developing new links, but even my B$1M bounty only netted me a few new incoming links.
Boll Weevil Honored On December 11, 1919, the citizens of Enterprise, Alabama erected a monument to the boll weevil, the pest that devastated their fields but forced residents to end their dependence on cotton and to pursue mixed farming and manufacturing. A beetle measuring an average length of six millimeters, the insect entered the United States via Mexico in the 1890s and reached southeastern Alabama in 1915. It remains the most destructive cotton pest in … Continue reading
IBM has been doing a lot of research into how to help people use email more efficiently. The result is something they call Remail. The Collaborative User Experience (CUE) team in IBM Research has spent nearly a decade studying email. Not only has email become one of the most pervasive and successful collaborative tools available, it has also become a key component of IBM’s Lotus Software offerings. In many ways, email can be seen as … Continue reading