Swans on Tea

If anyone is missing the recently-late Billy Mays … you can either tune into cable and wait 5 minutes, or go here:
5 Strangest Products Pitched by Billy Mays
(I am not lamenting his loss any more than the other ~150,000 people that die every day)

Pixar grants girl’s dying wish to see ‘Up’
From the minute Colby saw the previews to the Disney-Pixar movie Up, she was desperate to see it. Colby had been diagnosed with vascular cancer about three years ago, said her mother, Lisa Curtin, and at the beginning of this month it became apparent that she would die [...]

Meetings Are a Matter of Precious Time
As a general rule, meetings make individuals perform below their capacity and skill levels.
The most common meeting in my experience is the status meeting, where everyone gets together and reports on what they’ve accomplished. If it’s a small group, these are usually fine because you already have familiarity [...]

News IQ quiz
You correctly answered 11 out of the 12 possible questions, which means you did better on the quiz than 82% of the general public.
Couldn’t remember where the DJIA has been hanging out recently.
You can check out nationwide results by age, gender and education level.

I went out hiking Saturday, taking advantage of the awesome weather that just showed up. Did some geocaching, but also brought my new camera out to Huntley Meadows Park, a wetland wildlife sanctuary about 40 minutes to the south of me. We had a downpour on Friday (after rain off and on all [...]

25 And Over
Instructions upon reaching the age of 25.
Grow up.
And when I instruct you to grow up, I do not mean that you must read up on mortgage rates, put aside candy necklaces, or desist from substituting the word “poo” for crucial syllables of movie titles. Silliness is not only still permitted but actively encouraged. [...]

Lots of great stuff on kottke recently
Dan Baum: The Following Account of My Short Career at The New Yorker Ran as a Series of Tweets on May 8, 11, and 12, 2009
Three tweets: (Thufferin’ Thuccotath!)
of arms. Tom Wolfe is right, I think, when admonishes young writers to ignore the old advice about “writing [...]

Mmmmm. Free-range kids. Salon.com: Stop worrying about your children!
Basically, being exposed to all of the worst-case scenarios on TV has coupled with our poor ability to assess risk of unlikely events, results in parents being way too overprotective. I see kids getting driven to and from things I would have walked/biked [...]

Not only was Wednesday Tax Day, it’s also audit season at work. I got a call recently about one of my recurring purchases for nitrogen gas (and the bottle rental), to make sure it’s within the rules. You see, I’m not allowed to buy hazardous materials for the lab with my credit card, [...]

I was waylaid by dust bunnies yesterday. It started in the lab; I was exposing the fresh layer of sticky mats as I usually do, and noticed that the air disturbance (quite a flourish if you want to get the sheet up in one motion) had sent some dust bunnies scurrying. I tracked [...]

How do you measure yourself against other bloggers?
By height.
Wow. I’ve been doing this for a whole year.
It’s not surprising that I started at this time of year, since the football season is mostly over and there’s a huge gap in the day wanting to be filled, and the weather isn’t consistently good [...]

via Kottke and reminded by Chad posting his list. I didn’t travel a whole lot, owing to various conflicts.
Places I visited, in which I spent at least a night in 2008
Niskayuna, NY
Dewittville, NY
Pacific Grove, CA
Cities I got screwed out of visiting because of bureaucratic SNAFUs
San Francisco, CA
Honolulu, HI
State College, PA