But I do love to make odd pictures, especially for my work neighbor Mice. An imagined rendering of a long-deceased prospector ancestor of my neighbor. He puts up with a lot.

Next week I’ll be travelling to Research Triangle Park, NC to visit my corporate benefactor’s other home base outside the Valley. The funny thing is that I have been to our sites in London, Sydney, and Amsterdam: all the sites that are > 10 hours, by air, from SJ, but never the one that’s roughly half that. Well that era ends clap next week. I’m catching a mid-morning flight out to the East coast. A conference is being hosted internally on uhm, well, Web 2.0 in IT. Wait, wait, before you start thinking that I’m talking vaporware nonsense ( “Hey Steven, didn’t you mock this ‘Web 2.

When my friend Mice had his first child I christened her in the language of hip-hop: “DJ So B. Real” Today I proclaimed his son’s name “Mike Check 1-2”

What a party city! Now I see why Bostonians are always going on about what a great place Boston is to go out in. Last night after the conference my boss and I and another colleague headed to Fanueil Hall area of Boston. It was kinda like an outdoor mall ( see Stanford Mall ) but set among old colonial buildings ( Ye Olde Brookstone: Thy Pillowtoir since 1668 ). After being given several opportunities to buy tourist schwag we went in hunt of a place to eat. After walking around in the area we settled on the Bell In Hand tavern on Union Street.

At my megacorp we now have Crystal Light in the breakroom. These ‘single use’ crystal packs are to be added to bottled water ( boo bottled water! ) so that instead of having another bullet of brown sludge you can have a nice lemonade. I, for one, welcome this change. In that spirit, I provide an advertiser’s wet dream by repeating this mantra:

Today was my VP’s quarterly all-hands meeting and much to my surprise, I was honored with an award. Apparently an elf, or several elves, thought that the work I had done since joining the team 7 weeks ago was exceptional and nominated me for being an exemplar of the corporate culture we seek to foster in my organization. I admit, there was a second where, as the introduction was read, I thought: “Hey this person is doing a lot of work like I do, that’s funny.” But then it dawned on me, the person reading the description was my manager’s manager, my director; wait, was that suggestion from my manager that I ‘be sure to be at the all-hands on Monday’ more than just a pull for team turn-out at the big conference facility…"