Detroit Car Show

Here's some cool (and at least one scary) looking cars from the Detroit Auto Show.

Frozen Lake

The Last Word

It's difficult for me to get an email and read it and then not respond. Sure, there are some where deleting is fine, and some I delete without even reading.

But I'm talking about emails from actual people sent directly to me. I feel like I owe everyone a response. To not respond seems, well, rude.

But I was thinking today. What if everyone felt that way? Our inboxes would be more paralyzingly useless than they are today.

But what I need to keep in mind is that there are plenty of times where I've written to someone and they haven't responded. In many cases, I probably won't remember that I wrote to them, so I'm not sitting there upset at the lack of a response. Moreso I'm pleasantly surprised to find a nice new personal email in my inbox.

And someone has to make the bold commitment to kill a thread that has died. Like when you stand there with someone in the hall long after you've run out of things to say and both of you are panicking because your coffee is getting cold and you can't break free. (I'm not good at ending those kinds of conversations, either.)

So, that's an unofficial goal of mine for the year. Getting better at knowing when a thread should die -- and then letting it go peacefully into the Trash folder without worrying that I've offended.

I Love My Backspace Key

Ok, here is the rules. four minutes on the timer. No use of the backspace key. Just type until the tier timer runs out. About what, I do'nt know. Arg, this is hard. I like my backspace key. I am a really poor typer, I just type really fast and my fingers naturally go to the bakstap blech blach b dang it. naturally go to the bakcspace key, they nowk dang it know I'm about to mistype and they're prepared to catch the pieces as we continue on. This is probably how my typing looked whe I used to send emails after having confusss this sucks! This is probably hot my t sheesh. Trust me, I am not drunk, I've had nothing to drinlk. I'm just trying to type without the backstpace oops, I used it. I can't help it. I love the backspace key. 2 minutes to go. It's nearly 11. I need to feed the cats and get upstairs and get stuff ready. One of my goals this year is to ebbeeeerewrwerfsdlfsd;ka stupid stujpid what a dumb idea this was. Maybe yeah, that's it. I'll title this post ode to the backspace key. Of course, I'll probably type that wrong. 1 minute to go. I'm not tired. I don't wnant to go get ready for bed. I want to sit down here on the couch and play on the computer for awhile longer. Oh well, at least I can read some more in my book, even though it's quite cdull so far. It's a Jonhn Grisha,m. No idea how old or new it is. Called The Innocent Man or something like that. 3 seconds. Bzzzzz.

Later added as an honorable mention to the "120" category.

Overload

I was looking at my contacts in Gmail. There were close to 500. That didn't seem to be right, so I started looking closer at who was in there. There are contacts in there going back to the late 90's. I guess I've been carrying them forward, importing, exporting, syncing. To be sure, I've done weeding over the years, but the list still keeps growing. Worse yet, there are old email addresses, old phone numbers, old addresses. Lots of useless chaff. So while I've been watching TV tonight, I've been doing some more weeding. I'm down to 425. I figure, ultimately, I should arrive at a number somewhere between 100 and 200. Thoughts?

Trolling

Hehehe... just saw this ad. The entire premise was that they "don't know why people don't get accepted into eHarmony" - so apparently this other site is a good place to sign up for if you're ready to lower your expectations.

Hungry?

This is a really compelling gallery of how much people spend each month on groceries. In a very interesting way -- all the groceries laid out on a table. I think it's more interesting if you work backwards from the most money spent to the least money spent. Go here...