1000 buffalo stampede

Well, with probably not nearly enough forethought whatsoever, I’ve signed up for National Novel Writing Month. Yes, another project – this one with a pretty rough deadline. Such is the way of things, or at least the way I tend to do them, I suppose. It should make for some good motivation to bang out a whole mass of words on the ol’ laptop if nothing else.

Come November 30, I’ll have a novel of at least 50,000 words completed. Or I won’t.

Either way, this kinda clinches me being kinda insane, doesn’t it?

It’s taken a few generations, to be sure, but the Boston Red Sox have shaken of “the curse” and landed themselves the World Series (as no doubt everyone already knows). It’s been a good year for the New England home teams – first, my Alma Mater pulls of a dual NCAA win and then some, and now the Red Sox. Now, I was raised as a Red Sox fan. Truth me told, I’ve never been terribly into baseball, despite have played some little league, being brought to Fenway Park and some Red Sox minor league games as young boy. While I’ve changed some team allegience over the years (namely in football), I’ve considered myself a Red Sox fan if nothing. My Dad, of course, is a big Red Sox fan obviously.

My co-workers were surprised to hear me state last week that I was staying away from the games. “The Red Sox will find a way to break your heart,” I said (and I haven’t been the only one to say that over the years). One co-worker made a point of keeping me up to date, however, and today told me that she really felt they were going to go all the way. I felt some excitement, but kept my jinx-y, fair-weathered self away.

… and so, I’ll gladly take my ribbing at the office and my share of fair-weathered fan comments gladly. My hat’s off to them, and their dedicated fans who have stuck with ‘em!!

Tired of taking my money a mere $0.99 at a time, Apple’s raised the bar, bringing in U2 to sell a new iPod U2, complete with laser-engraved band signatures, special color scheme, and whatnot (including a $50 discount off the upcoming ‘Complete U2′ collection). This has been rumored for a few weeks, since Apple and U2 announced a special press release event which finally came to pass today (no, I wasn’t invited, for some strange oversight).

Now, I’ve been into U2 since, ah, that would be about 13 – so not quite their entire career. While the rest of the KFOG listeners debate the morals of U2 hawking a special iPod with Apple and where it will lead …. well, I’ll be signing up for one of those iPod U2. Of course.

I mean, I need someplace to put my U2 collection while I’m on the road. It’s only – as of the moment – 148 songs, running for 11.2 hours and taking up 706.2 MB. And growing …

Well, there goes the disposable income. With my luck, U2’s next co-sponsorship will be a limited edition Mazda RX-8. Sheeesh…

‘Tis the Festive Season, or at least a start to it. Odd as it may (or may not) seem, the past several years, I mark the start of the whole Holiday shebang with Angelo & Kim’s annual Halloween bash. Garbed as “something evil”, I showed up pretty much on time for a change, and stayed a bit more than three hours. They had a great turnout, and the place was looking sharp and spooky. They usually go all out, but this year, the whole layout of the house was well accomplished, and included both room for dancing and some quiet lounge areas for chatting.

I had planned on staying longer, but thanks to yesterday’s highly obnoxious headache – which pretty much shut down my Friday right about noon – I was pretty tired, and called it an early night. I’m sure not getting trashed helped me avoid a return of the headache for Sunday morning.

Anyhow, from here, the slide out to Thanksgiving, Hannukah, Christmas and New Year’s has begun. It starts with “Boo!”, “Trick or treat,” and the next thing you know, you’re rushing around trying to get that last gift for someone’s Christmas stocking before the stores close. Where the time goes, I’ll never know. I was just saying to Angelo on Thursday that it felt like we had just finished his last Halloween party.

Oh yes, and as a side note, while I was quickly writing this, I noticed my new Blacklist / spam-catcher (which I had installed this afternoon) had already caught about half-a-dozen spam comments from that damn idiot casino spammer. Bugger’s been making a run on my blog for the last several days – looks like I just shut him up.

I had to give a presentation at work this past Tuesday, the the collective group (all of IS Procurement). The goal is to self-educate on a topic relevant somehow to our work in technology purchasing and present to the Team. Build professional presentation skills and such. My topic of choice was “Linux, Open Source Software, and Procurement” – no big surprise to folks who know me.

It’s a topic on which I’m fairly knowledgeable. Of course, part of the trick is to prepare the presentation – it’s not enough to just know the topic. So, it was off to do some spot research. I haven’t worked on a research project like this in a good while, and I’ll say, the process was very educational. As in, it was easy. From a comfy chair, it was a snap to use Google, the wi-fi laptop, and cut-n-paste from the browser to the presentation. I had proper quotations, facts, and citations, all efficiently gathered and properly referenced. I tapped into academic and business research and texts. It was actually fun to do. Yes, yes – I know this may seem obvious. It came as a pleasant reminder to me.

All I can think is how much easier my undergrad days would have been if I had access to this kind of pervasive computing and knowledge. Understand, I’m in my mid 30’s now. When I was in Middle School, the first TRS-80’s came out. My school had one, and my neighbor had one. By the time I got to High School, there were Macs and PCs; my folks got us a PCjr. At college – well, at college I still had the PCjr (at least for a while). It worked just fine for turning out assignments on a dot-matrix printer. It was handy, but internet? On-line research? Try photocopies at the Homer Babbidge library.

Sheeesh. Kids these days – they got it so easy…