mjm wired ;)  

Well another Thanksgiving came to a close. I often wonder what "tradition" means when it comes to this particular holiday. For the past 5 years or so, every Thanksgiving has been wildly different from the previous. While I'm not saying that it is a "bad" thing, it always makes me feel ambivalent before the day and quite relieved after. This year was no different. If I could pick one common thing about Thanksgiving when I was growing up, it would have to be that [...]

I know this is from last year (perhaps 2 yrs ago), but it made me laugh thinking about it. "Michael, what do you want for Christmas?" "Grandma, can you get me an X-box?" "What? A next-box? I don't even know what the first-box [...]

I don't get it. Seriously. Twitter? Identi.ca? Jaiku? Huh? It's stupid. 140 characters. I have EVDO in my pocket. I'm a hypocrite. I know. Follow me. Or [...]

A high level director at a major corporation is promoted. The executive position which he assumes is for a large department and a great deal more responsibility than he previously managed. His predecessor gives the newcomer some advice. He says that things will not always be easy, so when times get difficult open one of these letters he has written. With that he hands him 3 letters and departs. Before long, the executive finds himself in a difficult spot. Things have not been progressing [...]

Some of my more frequent visitors may have noticed the obvious banner on the top right of my site. I debated for a while as to whether or not I should have done so, but I decided that it might make a tiny difference. I want to say that I don't "believe in Obama". This is not a personal criticism, rather I see him just as much a politician as anyone else in the U.S. government. However I do believe that a better choice [...]

Oddly enough I find Amazon.com's new music suggestions pretty useful. While I do generally pay attention to media news and most of my favorite bands, there is always some news that I haven't heard that Amazon never fails to miss! Data mining at its best, I guess. I'm really happy to hear that both Oasis (Dig Out Your Soul) and The Verve (Forth) have new albums for this fall. I didn't think that The Verve would get back together and produce a new album [...]

Towards the end of last summer I purchased a new laptop since I was on road quite frequently. I selected a Lenovo Thinkpad T61 notebook for two reasons: well known reliability and a I got a good deal from a friend. It was working flawlessly till I updated it with XP SP3 (note that I purchased Windows Vista Business but later installed Windows XP). I found myself having occasional lockups and reboots. I downgraded SP3 but I still found it occasionally problematic. I decided [...]

I spent almost 4 weeks cleaning my music collection. It was one of the most tedious, time consuming, frustrating things I've done on my computer. I started by systematically re-ripping every CD I own. In my foolishness a few years ago many, if not all, of my albums were ripped in the Ogg Vorbis format which led them to be incompatible with my MP3 player, a Creative Zen Vision:M. Anyway for ripping I started with free ware options, but their reliance on the often [...]