Welcome to 2006. I am, once again, on the road. This time I’m in North Carolina for the Common Solutions Group meeting. I was struck by the smell of the South when I left the airport this afternoon. It is interesting that places have such strong and unique scents. The deserts of Utah and Arizona smell of sage and wet sand. Denver smells thin, cool and like pine earth. The south is rich and earthy and something like mildew (don’t take that wrong – that’s just what is smells like). Imagine if we had the noses of dogs. The smells must be as stark and different to dogs and the landscape of Mars and Venus are to us.

I have business trips lined for February and March already and April too I think. I actually have had enough business travel for a while. It is exhausting and disruptive. I took two weeks off over Christmas and New Years. I made a list of “To Dos” that had built up over the past few months while I’ve been traveling. It was 15 items long. I was as busy on vacation as I am at work – okay, I did get more naps but I needed them.

I had to get up this morning at 4:45 this morning to catch my flight. It was pretty tough after sleeping in until 7:30 for the past couple of weeks. I’m now starting to get the “all-day-business-flying” blur.

I head back home of Friday. Lola and Ena will be happy to see me I’m sure. Ena does get to make hot-and-spicey tofu stir-fry when I gone. When I leave town, Lola moves down from our bedroom to sleep on the couch in my office just inside the front door. That way she will know as soon as I get home. She is always very happy to see me which is very sweet.

I have a few other things to post but I do them separately.

Welcome to the new year everyone. Hope you had a great holiday.

Ena and I have had the following three conversations recently. Thinking about these made me realize that we had adjusted to Winter in Wisconsin. (note: The current temperature is 7 degrees with a -6 degree F wind chill. It is lunch time)

(1) Saturday afternoon, me looking at thermometer. “Well. It is almost 20 degrees and it isn’t snowing too hard. I guess I’ll take the dog for a walk.”

(2) Sunday afternoon, Ena rousing me from what-ever I’m doing. “It is 22 degrees and Sunny. We should go to the dog park before it gets cold.”

(3) Ena and I this morning on hearing today’s weather forecast. Me, “2 degrees isn’t too bad if it is Sunny.” Ena, “and there isn’t a breeze. A breeze makes it cold but if there isn’t a breeze it is okay.”

Wonder what my friends from Hawaii think of such talk?

Things I have noticed when it is REALLY cold in Wisconsin:

— You get almost into work before the cold weather idle finally kicks off. Or, to put it another way. Your car’s idle is stuck on 2000 RPMs for the first 15 minutes of your drive in.

— You wait and wait for the temperature gauge needle to move off of the “C” so you can turn the heat on. When you turn the heat on, the needle goes right back down to “C” and it doesn’t move.

One final clarification – according to the last two items (the Things I have noticed when it is REALLY cold…) – today is not really cold.

Heroes pull woman from Xbox blaze | The Register
An Anglesey woman was pulled unconscious from her house by two strangers after succumbing to smoke generated by a faulty Xbox.

Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters
>“There have been several postings over at Xbox-scene complaining of crashing Xbox’s on new games, with default settings on single player. Crashes on Xbox Live and on startup have been reported too, and Project Gotham”

I used to run a Windows network and support a bunch of Windows users. Granted, this was back in Windows NT days. But, my history with Microsoft’s products – especially the version 1.0 or 2.0 or 4.0 actually – makes the story above seem like an old refrain from a crappy song that you can’t get out of your head.

I thought I would: (a) use the web, (b) get an early jump on this and (c) have a fun time putting together a post with pictures of things I want for Christmas.

I just finished reading A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby. This is a very funny, laughing out loud and waking up your wife, story based on a dark theme. Four people meet on top of the Toppers building on New Years Eve. Each has come up to commit suicide. The four very different people become intertwined by their common goal and their desire to understand how they reached the top and how they can stay alive.

The four characters are excellently envisioned. Each one is pure to their character in their thoughts and behavior. The tale is told by cycling through each characters first-person voice. Each person’s character is so strong that there is no mistaking who is doing what. By the end, I was thinking things like, “that is so Jess”. The ending was bit weak but given the starting premise it is hard to imagine an ending that wouldn’t be either preachy (“and that’s how we all came to love life again”) or trite. I’ll don’t want to spoil the read so I’ll leave the ending out. I think that Mr. Hornby let his characters find their way to the endings and that the ending matches each one.

This book, the story of four characters who all start out with suicide on their mind, was an interesting contrast to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go where three young students start out full of life. Read them both. Read them back-to-back. They make an interesting study in human nature.

This was a very funny book and a quick read. I’m certain we will see this as a movie or a miniseries (from the BBC) in the near future.