Hollyweird

After arriving home very, very, very early on Saturday morning from Florida, I'll be out of the office for yet another week. While at the conference last week, the folks back home were busy trying to get a recently approved project up and running. They weren't kidding and I'm finding myself hopping in the car this evening and heading to Hollywood. Since the training is during regular business hours and the drive would just be too much to handle, I grabbed a room in Hollywood.

On one hand, I'd rather be in the office this week to catch up from last week. On the other hand, I've only done day trips to Hollywood, so the evenings should be interesting. We'll see how out and about I get.

Oh, and about those photos from last week. The wireless cloud at the convention, quite frankly, sucked. I gave up even trying somewhere on Monday. The photos will be posted shortly, when I can find a spare minute.

Home

I recently moved to a new house that is within a few miles of the city that I grew up in. It’s great being around old friends again, and quite frankly, feeling “home.” I’ve been a bit of a nomad for the past 10 years, so I’ve had a hard time considering anywhere “home.” From the Marine Corps to the Silicon Valley to Los Angeles and finally back home, in a desert community outside of Palm Springs.

The point was firmly made to me yesterday when I stopped in at the local barber shop to get my haircut before heading to the conference next week.

I had never met him before, but the barber was:

• An uncle of a good friend in high school.
  
• Was a Sheriff’s Deputy for 30 years, and knew one of my best friends who is currently a Deputy and his entire family, including their grandfather.

I was even able to deduce his last name without him telling me it, just by who he knew.

They say you can’t go home again. “They” are wrong.

Lotusphere 2005

It's that time of year again; the annual pilgrimage to Walt Disney World to geek out with 8,000 complete strangers for Lotusphere. This year, my plan is to take photos each day and make my best effort to have them online the same day. We’ll see how well that works out.

I’m leaving late Friday night and arriving Saturday morning, where I’ll meet up with a long time friend to soak up what The Mouse has to offer. Our first stop will be to the Rose & Crown where we'll imbibe a well poured Guiness accompanied by fish and chips. On Sunday the non-stop geek-o-rama begins until Thursday afternoon. Then back home on Friday evening.

My interest with the Lotus Workplace product has piqued, and I’m very interested in hearing more details on how this product integrates with the rest of the IBM Lotus technologies.

What the?

Okay, I'm back to blogging, but maybe I shouldn't be about this! I was wandering over at Rocky Oliver's weblog, and noticed he took one of those incredibly stupid time wasting irrelevant personality tests. I just couldn't resist!

What Famous Leader Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

After looking at the results, I should have resisted. As I've said in the past, I'm completely in touch with my inner asshole, so perhaps the assesment is correct. Whatever. Time to go waste time elsewhere, like getting some programming done.

Merry Christmas

I'm done. Super duper done with "Happy Holidays." I'm so very tired of all of the political correctness now a days. It's completely out of hand, and I have zero desire to live in a country like France that doesn't allow any religous expression.

So I'm officially announcing that "Happy Holidays" has left my vocabulary and will be replaced with "Merry Christmas." If you have a problem with that, I'll give you a cookie to help you over the pain and suffering that you must be feeling.

You Don't Know Jack

We live in a world where seemingly everything is known. That’s how I saw the world until the wonderful audio book, “A Short History of Nearly Everything” entered my life. I’m halfway through the audio book, and I can confidently say that we know jack. That’s being generous.

It’s probably because I’m not as educated as most, but I just didn’t understand the level of guessing that goes on in the sciences that is presented as fact to the general public. Here’s a couple of examples:

* Our attempts to uncover what the Earth is constructed of and how it is constructed are educated guesses at best. If the Earth were an apple, the furthest anyone (Russia) has been able to penetrate is 1/3 of the way through the skin. That leaves a lot of room for guessing errors. Granted, scientists have a really good idea of how it’s constructed from reading various waves that pass through the infrastructure, but then again, those ideas seem to change every 30 years or so.

* Scientists in Switzerland were able to take 2 neutrons from the same atom, separate them by 7 miles (the book didn’t get into how they did that), and then spin one of the neutrons. The other neutron immediately spun in the opposite direction at the same rate. Why? No clue.

Here’s two thoughts rumbling around in my head now:

1. Anytime I hear anything that is from a scientific study, my instant reaction is “riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.”

2. I actually think that there’s a lot of opportunity for those folks that enter the sciences to discover new and interesting things. I didn’t think that previously.

This blog now has an RSS feed. Schweet!