Oh, , you're going to hate me for posting this...

The Boston Globe

   August 21, 2006

   Roxbury MA (AP) - A seven-year-old boy was at the center of a Boston
   courtroom drama yesterday when he challenged a court ruling over who
   should have custody of him. The boy has a history of being beaten by
   his Parents and the judge initially awarded custody to his aunt, in
   keeping with child custody law and regulations requiring that family
   unity be maintained to the degree possible.

   The boy surprised the court when he proclaimed that his aunt beat him
   more than his parents and he adamantly refused to live with her. When
   the judge then suggested that he live with his grandparents, the boy
   cried out that they also beat him.

   After considering the remainder of the immediate family and learning
   that domestic violence was apparently a way of life among them, the
   judge took the unprecedented step of allowing the boy to propose who
   should have custody of him. After two recesses to check legal
   references and confer with child welfare officials, the judge granted
   temporary custody to the Boston Red Sox, whom the boy firmly believes
   is not capable of beating anyone.

I hate Amazon's plogs (blogs written by authors). I've been disappointed just how bad most authors come across when they don't have an editor between me and them. That and plogs take up room on the website.

So I wrote a Greasemonkey script to get rid of them: plogs-die-die-die.user.js. You'll need to be running Firefox to use Greasemonkey.

To clarify, I was not responsible for that outage. In fact, I was in the place where I could cause the second-least damage: a meeting.

The place where one can cause the least damage is, of course, management.

In a pardoxical twist, the most amount of damage is caused by a manager in a meeting... but I digress.

According to an article in today's Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Amazon.com is developing a system to gather and keep massive amounts of intimate information about its millions of shoppers, including their religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity and income.

Gee, if only I knew someone who managed the customer database at Amazon to check up on this. Wait a second. I'm one of the folks who manages the customer database.

But... there aren't any fields in the database for this. Oh, wait -- this is a super-duper-ultra-black-top-secret project, right? After all, I did learn about it in the newspaper and not from my bosses. Let me check -- oh, I know! I'll bet that IS_TAX_EXEMPT column is actually storing sexual orientation!

Sheesh.

I can type faster than I can write. However, I can talk faster than I can type.

As a project lead, this means that I can sketch out an idea on a whiteboard and someone will go off and implement it. In the meantime, I can start working on something else; evetually, the person I was sketching this for comes back with the idea implemented.

It's all a bit strange, and I'm not used to working on interrupt cycles like this. At the same time, it's neat; it's almost like I'm parallel processing without resorting to cloning myself.

My cats have found out how to get my attention when I'm out of town. They've learned to press the power button on the power extension/tree which my router is plugged into.