Yesterday, along with Akumi’s uncle Tadashi, we visited her grandmother at a rest home. She’s a spunky 90 year old woman and gives me great insight into where Akumi gets her rebellious nature from. We took her for a walk and I jumped onto a thin railing. Her reflex wasn’t to wave me down for my safety, it was to reach out as if to push me off and cause me to crack my skull. We made sure to push her wheelchair to the edge of the river as if to push her in. We all had a good laugh afterwards.

I can’t access Google, Gmail, or BlogSpot. Gmail.com (which used to redirect to my Gmail account) now takes me to http://www.gmail.com.org/. However I can get to microsoft.com etc…

No, I haven’t become a paranoid privacy freak ready to purchase a cabin in Montana. This is just something that struck me as I opened my browser today. My default home page is http://my.yahoo.com/. Thus when I open my browser, the following information is sent to a Yahoo! server via HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol. The rules for sending and receiving data between a browser and website) (note: some data omitted for brevity).

Chris Sells humorously relates his experience dealing with his traffic violations.

We finally have a moment to sit down and make a donation to the relief efforts under way in South Asia. With the death toll at 141,000 and rising, it’s impossible to grasp the amount of devastation caused by this disaster.

I read with interest Dare’s post on the quandary social software finds itself in today. In a nutshell, the current crop of social software tools are not very sociable once you step outside of the particular tool. It’s really like one big world wide cliquish high-school. Your orkuts won’t talk to the friendsters who won’t talk to the Amazons and so on…

Back in the day when I was a wet behind the ears developer a coworker gave me some sage advice. He told me that if I wanted to become a good developer, I need to read the bible. He was of course referring to Code Complete, the bible of software construction. When I was promoted to manager, I made it required reading for developers. Several years later, I’m reading through the second edition savoring every page like a fine glass of sake.

After a wonderful time with my family in Anchorage, we flew back to Los Angeles for a day, dropped Twiggy off at a doggy day care, and flew into Tokyo. Below is a picture of Anchorage from our airplane as we were leaving.

Ok, the title is a mouthful, but it addresses a concern with the new alpha version of RSS Bandit. As of the current build, the feature to view the raw XML before it is rendered by the stylesheet is no longer there.

In case you’re wondering (and I know at least one of you is), my blog is hosted at WebHost4Life and is running .Text version 0.95 (or is it .96?). I chose it over DasBlog because of its SQL Server support, but I’m not sure that’s such a compelling reason given that configuration is such a pain. I’m hoping that Community Server will address many of the issues I have with .Text.

It’s been said that native Alaskans have 40 or so words for snow. Roughly translated, they all mean “Fuck! Get the shovel!”. It was a winter wonderland for my wife until I handed her a shovel and led her to the driveway.

Took this picture of a Moose wandering my parents’ neighborhood.

This is the road out of Anchorage towards Turnagain arm. It’s around 10 AM and the sun is just about to rouse its lazy butt above the horizon.

We went snowboarding this morning after finally getting in and to bed at around 3 AM last night. At the top of the quad, it was -1 degrees Fahrenheit. This is the coldest weather my wife has ever snowboarded in. She’s such a trooper. We won’t be going outside the rest of this vacation. ;)

As with many blogs right now, my blog has been graced by the quiet sounds of tumbleweeds rolling by due to a long period of lack of use. The primary reason for my absence is an end of year push to get several projects completed before I head off to vacation.

‘Tis the time of year to find a new job for many. Among many pieces of advice I could give you, I leave you with this one. When you go to an interview, please please please bring several copies of your resume. For your own sake!

There are some things you just can’t outsource… or can you?

Check it out… EugeneMirman.com. No seriously, click on that link.

Sasha is starting a US Residency at Avalon. Noticed this on Groove Tickets. That’s pretty sweet as he’s one of my favorite DJs.

Work has been crazy busy which has kept me from blogging much. We leave for Alaska on the 23rd and then for Japan on the 1st. I have a lot to get done before then.