I have no idea what might be in a Drag Gable, but I do know that it's almost completely pointless to spell-check a marketing presentation.

• Draggable?


• Maintainably?


• Optimizable?


• Visibilization?


• Scalabilize?

This is a very sad dialog to see when you're trying to rebuild your workstation after a hard drive crash at 2:00am.

If you don't immediately get it, ask yourself the question: What's the one piece of hardware that you would definitely need to already have working before you could search for an Ethernet driver on the Internet?

I happened to have some track lighting lying around from my old office (if I stole the lights when I left my last company, imagine what I'll steal when I finally get fired from this job). So we installed it in the upstairs hallway over the weekend.

I can't say it's exactly what I would have chosen to put there, but (a) it was free and (b) still better than the wan, spider-infested globe that was up there before.

So even though I get this weird urge to buy dot.com stocks and drink overpriced coffee whenever I walk into the hallway now, overall it's an improvement.

To all of you who mocked my blaze orange T-shirt today:

We'll see who's laughing when you get hit by a car while trying to cross the street in your tasteful clothing.

Looking at Gwen's insanely cute kitten pictures makes me realize why I keep putting off getting pets:

I'm afraid that if we get kittens, they'll be adorable for 6 months, but then, like the pet of certain friends I have (you know who you are) they'll grow up to be neurotic, destructive, unlovable adult cats that I'll hate for 15 years but will feel too guilt-ridden to neglect or get rid of.

This proves that I'm not ready to be a dad, doesn't it?

(incidentally, this is why I think my kitten subscription service would be such a hit.)

A glimpse into the mind of a pessimist:

The Winter Solstice is the darkest day of the year. It is the heart of cold and black, the day the sun cares the least for you. Some cultures celebrate the day because even though it is the darkest, tommorrow will be brighter; it is the turning point. But that small consolation does not stop the cold.

The Summer Solstice was this week, and it was the brightest day of the year. It was warmest, lightest, longest, your day to stay outside enjoying the sun's maximal attention. But I can't forget that it is the day that marks the down-turn, the descent into darkness that will last for 6 months. Every day darker than the last, until the year has ground to its end.

Happy Solstice!

Notepad is my last weapon against Microsoft Office. If they ever take it away, I don't know what I would do.

Do you find that on your Windows machine, you are constantly laundering your text-based clipboard data through notepad.exe in order to strip out the "smart" meta-data that Office applications send into the clipboard in order to confuse themselves with indentation, smart-quotes, over-wrought table formatting, etc?

Or is it just me?

Back when I worked in Santa Barbara, I came in one morning to find that my office window had been shot out. The glass was all held in place by the tinting laminate, except for the bullet hole. It looked kind of neat, actually. I was sorry when they replaced it. (Except for the terrifying creaking sound the glass made when the wind blew and the sun heated it. I guess that wasn't as neat.)

At the time, we wondered whether it was me or my office-mate who was the target. But I just found out that it happened again last night, so I guess I wasn't the target.

In a way, I'm kind of disappointed.

Oh god yes.

I hate to be a blog recycler, but I have found POSTSECRET to be a consistently amazing thing to read. New posts are up every Sunday; you can look at all the new ones in just a minute or two. Always worth the time to read (and you know how impatient I am--- that makes for a high bar.)

Fantasy Goat is not quite as good, but still often amusing.

So, there's this guy who sits in the cube next to me who is on the phone all day. I never work with him, but I do always hear him talking to customers and so on.

The other day I actually needed something from him, so I stopped by and we chatted about it. He agreed that he would get back to me.

A couple hours later, I see a hand wave in front of my face--- "Dude, it's ready, did you get my email? Hello?" I turn and he's standing right there in my cube. I don't have headphones on or anything. I realize at that point that he's been repeating "It's ready" for about the last 30 seconds, but I'm so used to ignoring the sound of his voice that I literally did not hear what he was saying. The poor guy had to occlude my line of sight in order to get noticed.

I guess this makes it a little easier to understand why relationships fail... :)