Back from England

Turns out the union jack is a combination of the crosses of the saints of England, Ireland, and Scotland. If you look at it and cross your eyes you will see a pony. His name is Charles.

So, Christmas is over, thank God, and it was well spent in England with family and friends. There were side trips to London, but mostly we stayed around the family homestead.

A good deal of beer, brandy, wine, and especially sherry was drunk by all. If America has a fascination with food, England would like to slur some ill-chosen jibes about it at us before falling under the table.

The big news is that J-- and P-- are engaged! Congrats to both of you. I'm only putting this on my blog because I happen to know that the people who read it either don't know J-- and P-- or know already. If you don't fall into either camp, keep it under your hat for chrissake! Welcome to the family P--, you poor sod.

Now, on to New Years! I don't believe I'll be doing anything for new years. The party I was counting on fell through and I don't feel like dragging my ass to Boston where Eric has kindly offered to try and introduce me to desperate gals looking for someone to kiss at the stroke of midnight. With great thanks to Eric, I'm going to stay in Reston unless something truly awesome comes up locally.

In retrospect this year has been a fucker, and the sooner we can put it to bed the better actually. I moved to Reston for a new job and while the job's still pretty engaging I know it's not what I want to do with the remainder of my years. Reston can suck it, not least because I still don't really know anyone here and I'm not about to meet them at the local Porsche owners group. I will be going to Champps later tonight to watch the UFC fight with folks from my dojo though so I shouldn't complain.

K--- and I broke up, although I'm beginning to think in retrospect that I was dumped. I believe in self-help one calls that a "growth experience" but I'm not so cheerily inclined and I'll call it a bit of a poke in the eye and move on. Not bitter, just single in Reston without much to look forward too vis-a-vis moving on. Also, not nearly as maudlin as the rest of this paragraph would seem to indicate.

My resolutions for the coming year are, in their entirety:

1. clean the living room (9 months without ever actually finishing unpacking borders on the ridiculous)
2. create a website for mom to display and sell her art on - it's coming mom, I promise
3. create a website for my damn self for things like resumes and so forth.
4. start either kickboxing or jiu-jitsu again so I don't look like a girthy sausage any longer - not helpful in the singles market
5. invest money cleverly, or at least understand how

I'll come up with others, but New Year's isn't the only time for self-improvement so I'm not bothered about having an incomplete list.

Happy new year's all!

2008 cars are up

The car ranking and review website I work for, US News, has been working hard to get reviews and rankings of the 2008 models up.

I'm glad to say we're most of the way there. It's been a crazy time at work and everyone deserves a solid congratulations. The remaining car reviews are either in process or the cars aren't out.

Lovely photo

I went to brunch with sister J--- today (happy birthday T-- and J--). Afterwards the lot of us went over to Adams Morgan where they were having the Adams Morgan street fair festival. Just as J--'s friend D-- and I were talking about how to know when and how much you should pay for art, I saw a photograph I really like.

I asked the guy how much it was and haggled him down a little - thanks Dad for teaching me how. Now I'm the proud owner of this great photo.

By Val Proudkii

What I really liked about his work was how he manages to use peoples' gazes to draw you into the picture and tell stories. I know that may sound unusually pointy-headed even for me, but take a look at the rest of the pictures on the site. One of my favorites is this one with a cat and a baby looking with different interest at a fish.

Oh, by the way, the way you decide whether or not to buy art is by figuring out how much you like it. Avoid seeing it as an investment. If it'll bring you $100 of enjoyment when you look at it over the course of your ownership, pay $100 or less. I thought this one would be a lot more than I paid for it, so I feel like I got a deal.

My kung fu is . . . inadvertently dangerous.

I punched a guy in the nose today. Very gently, thank God. That'll teach him to whack me in the thumb with a stick though. Actually, there's no excuse for popping a training partner in the schnoz, so if you believe in a god (only non-vengeful ones need apply thanks), say a little word of benediction towards John. I think I frightened him a little because it was all camaraderie and funtimes before I grazed his nose, but a little stiffer afterwards. Can't blame him really.

I finally got to check out the local dojo today. I started with the Kali class. Kali, not the Hindu goddess of death, but a Filipino martial art segued later into a Krav Maga class. Krav Maga is what the Israelis teach their special forces and focuses a lot, apparently, on me gasping for breath. However, I know all about getting out of a headlock now. Go ahead, put me in a headlock, I dare you.

I could totally take these guys . . . at like, statistics. Maybe.

I'm definitely going back for the kali. I'm less sure about the Krav Maga.

cats and management

by this guy

I heard a lovely management adage about cats the other day. We're trying to think about how we structure for the long term at work and some of our ideas have been better than others. An abiding concern is that people shouldn't have more than one manager.

As a result of the conversation, I heard a fantastic maxim that I'll probably never forget. Someone at Havard Business School apparently felt so strongly that one employee should have only one manager that he or she decided to coin a phrase foul and audacious enough to stick with anyone who heard it.

The saying is, "never have two people fucking the same cat, because the cat will get confused". Yeah, the cat part and the other obvious bit don't need to be included, but you'll never forget this most important bit of business wisdom will you?

Boring games

I thought you guys might get a kick out of this picture I found on somethingawful's photoshop phriday this week. This week's topic was boring games.

Have a gander at "Mean Time Between Failures", created by goon Aardmania.

Meantime, this is could be the seed of a great idea. Is there any way to turn testing into a game. It's worked for Google and their images after all.

Wired and late breaking news

I was just at Barnes and Noble killing time and I picked up a copy of Wired to browse through. I ended up getting it because it's nice to have something to read on the can or during the many hours I have nothing better to do.

When I was checking out, the guy at the counter made friendly conversation by asking if I was getting it to "stay on top of things".

My thoughts went like this:

• Huh?
• Stay on top of things? With Wired?
• Oh he's joking
• Wait, he's not joking.
• Oh, hang on, he's a norm.

The guy was friendly and I said, in a friendly way, oh, not really, because, you know, it's in print so it's already about a month out of date. He nodded and smiled and I wandered off feeling like an alien.

I remember when I was reading Wired to stay on top of stuff. That was about 6 years ago. RSS feeds and iGoogle have changed all that for me. Now I enjoy Wired precisely because it's a little more relaxed. They've done the research for me, digested it, put some thought into the analysis. It's like the week in review for tech stuff (only not TWiT, I know).

Funny that Wired has moved from being cutting-edge for me to post-news roundup in the span of just a few years. Is it like that for anyone else reading the blog? I know both of you, and I've got my guesses.