Back in Pittsburgh.

Holy cow... have you played with Google Maps? It's a lot closer to what I've wanted in an interactive map. You can pan by dragging the mouse on the map, and it loads the new pieces right on the map -- no clicking on directional arrows to go to a new page.

They suggest trying searches like "Hotels near San Francisco." Here's the result for Brothels near Essex Junction, VT.

On a whim, I decided to buy two computers today.

Yes. Let's have an hour-long meeting first thing in the morning and agree to do nothing.

RAGE.

Ah, you must visit zug.com.

These pranksters sign their credit card receipts with interesting names. They leave IOUs to the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority from Mariah Carey. They got U.S. Senators to send jokes to them.

You could easily kill a couple hours at work on this site.

The corporate online directory is not the way one should find out that he reports to a different manager.

There's a piano in my living room now. Weird.

Drunk birds crash into building's glass
Forget Amazing Grace and Ave Maria. I want John Deere tractor noises at my wake.

Grr. ETrade won't let you transfer funds from one account to another without jumping through some hoops and waiting n days. I somehow have two accounts -- one is in my name only for the Cadence employee stock purchase plan, the other is a joint account.

I am hoping to buy a share of Berkshire Hathaway class B stock. I'd prefer to get a class A share, but at $90,900 per share I can't exactly afford it. :-\ (Heck, class B shares -- the "inexpensive" shares -- are at $3,033 today.)

The price is so high because Warren Buffet refuses to allow a stock split. I agree with his philosophy behind this, but the impracticality behind it is a pain.

Carly's reign of terror has come to an end.

Oof. Authored an eight page spec today from scratch, ideas and all. That meant I was pretty much cranking away at the keyboard for nine hours straight. I was amazingly productive, though, and it felt good to get so many words and diagrams onto paper (err... well, onto electrons and then magnetic domains, at least), even if it's just a draft.

I'm especially happy because it's eight pages of meat. I blatantly disregard our formal spec templates because they're full of verbiage that nobody reads and simply distracts from what's real.

The main reason I cranked out so much so quickly, though, was that the presention of this was suddenly moved to tomorrow morning (from Friday). Or so I thought. Only after I had gotten it out and sent it for review did I find out that the meeting is a week from tomorrow. Oops. Still, though, it's a good feeling to know that I still have what it takes to grind this stuff out.

Watching people go into the VP's office, coming out, and then cleaning out their desks.

Some folks have inexplicably bizarre fetishes.