On the phone Friday night, my Mom told me that she had bought special flower arrangements on Tuesday afternoon to put on my father’s and grandparents’ headstones for Easter week. My brother-in-law took them over Tuesday evening and placed them, securing them with fishing line to keep the wind from blowing them away. The following […]
Over the past month of applying to jobs in the Bay Area I’ve garnered a few automated responses but nothing more. Today, though, I received my first personal reply. The most intriguing part of the e-mail was that the hiring manager took the time and effort to highlight certain specific components and constraints of the […]
The past few days I’ve been really diligent about taking care of data on my hard drive, backing it up, defragmenting, etc. Tonight I was working on my blog’s stylesheet and, due to the flaky way Firefox (which I otherwise love) seems to handle long content in forms when switching tabs (if I have content […]
Sunday afternoon Jeff and I will again have Easter brunch at David Greggory, the third in a trend that started our first Easter together in 2004 (we’d begun dating the summer of 2003) and continued last March. The menu for Easter brunch hasn’t changed much in three years (with the sad exception of the disappearance […]
The Washington Post reports that Democratic Virginia Governor Timothy M. Kaine is urging Virginia voters to reject a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. Woo-hoo, right? Hold on just a second. Lest you think Beelzebub is about to have to pull on his mittens and scarf, the article goes on to note that the Governor […]
Today I offered a two-hour session on new web technologies (blogs, wikis, RSS, podcasts, folksonomies and tagging, etc.) and their potential application for public diplomacy to a class of Foreign Service officers who are about to head off to various posts abroad as public affairs and cultural affairs officers. This was the first time both […]
Arlington County, Virginia, where Jeff and I live, has just released its 2006 demographic profile [website] [3.69Mb PDF]. Some interesting tidbits: population 200,226 population density of 7,761 persons per square mile is higher than Seattle, Minneapolis and Pittsburgh more private office space than downtown LA, Atlanta or Seattle 43% of residents are Hispanic/Latino, African-American, Asian […]
OK, I realize that a Russ Feingold candidacy probably would mean at least four more years of a Republican administration, since its unlikely that a majority of Americans would vote for him, but isn’t it nice to dream? Let’s catalog some of his virtues: the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act in 2001 […]
I admit it; I truly enjoyed leaving work today to see the sun still significantly above the horizon. It made me happy. But I still find really stupid and icky the concept and mechanics of Daylight Saving Time. If we really think that this is the schedule on which we should operate from April to […]
Despite my occasional flirtations with the fantastic, I tend to think of myself as reasonably rational and not particularly prone to superstition. But I find it hard to let go of a twinge of a feeling that I could “jinx” renewed plans to visit London merely by saying aloud (or the written equivalent) that we […]