Month: May 2004

How the hell did that happen?

I needed some good clothes because I’m going on a cruise next week. The cruise has two “formal nights”, and Vicki was trying to convince me to rent a tux for the cruise, but I figured I could use my existing suit, because it’s only about 8 years old and only been worn about 5 times. But I really needed a couple of good shirts to wear with it – the shirt I normally wear when I need to wear a tie looks bad – sort of iron scorched or something. My only other shirt with a big enough neck and long enough sleeves for wearing a tie is missing a button, so it’s been out of circulation for a while. I also need a couple of pairs of Dockers or similar casual pants.
Continue reading “How the hell did that happen?”

Even the worst day flying…

I took my wife, Vicki, her two kids, Laura and Stevie, and Stevie’s friend Lindsey flying today. I’ve been waiting for good weather for the last two weeks and not got it, and today it was finally good. Unfortunately the plane wasn’t available until late afternoon, which is less than optimal because it means lots of convective turbulence and higher winds. But even if I didn’t have four other people I wanted the Lance – when you’ve got people who’ve never flown before, I think they’d be more impressed by the roominess of the Lance, not to mention the club seats and the rear door so that they can get in and sit down while you’re still pre-flighting.
Continue reading “Even the worst day flying…”

A three hour tour….

Yesterday as a reward, my employer took the whole team out for a lunch cruise on the lake. Unfortunately the weather forecast was calling for “chance of thunderstorms” and I was sure we were all going to be lost at sea. Fortunately the weather turned out better than that, and a good time was had by all, except for the boring PowerPoint presentation. Can’t managers even say “We’ve done well this year, thanks” without making a 45 minute long PowerPoint presentation showing every bullet point accomplishment we’ve done? And let’s not forget that this is PowerPoint, not boring “old media”, so of course every bullet point has to come skidding in from one side of the screen or the other. Sigh.

I saw Vint Cerf give a talk on the future of the Internet and when he was hooking up his laptop to the projector he said “Power corrupts, PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”