Arrr!

Lint-roll yer eyepatch and sand yer pegleg. Tomorrow be International Talk Like A Pirate Day.

How to Dissuade Yourself from Becoming a Blogger

The New Irony (tm) virtually requires that The Elkridge Hollerer point you to this wikiHow article on why you shouldn't blog. Separate from such obligations, I would note:

a) Your reading of The Elkridge Hollerer indicates that you already are well underway with Step 1.

b) Their second, self-serving tip, that instead of a blog you write for a wiki (like oh, say, wikiHow) ruins the tone of the article.

Humor is a funny thing

Innumerable times over the past years (as Kerry would wearily confirm), I have quoted, in voice, Comic Book Guy saying to Bart, "No banging your head on the display case, please. It contains a very rare Mary Worth in which she has advised a friend to commit suicide. Thank you." It have always found it funny. And yet today, when it popped into my head for no apparent reason, I found it so funny that I couldn't even get through the line without laughing. I'm still chuckling now (though I must admit, not has hard as I was when blogging about The Economist).

The cable guys (almost) win me over

My favorite advertisers have a new message in their campaign, replacing the cable worker with twins. It's simple: "Cable delivers today."

And that's how they almost got me. If they had just finished off the obvious laugh-line - "Cable delivers today (sometime between 9AM and 5PM)." - then I would have admired their self-depricating chutzpah and immediately called to order the most expensive service package on offer.

A picture from Lagos

This was the morning view from my hotel in Lagos. Actually, it was also the midday and evening view, I suspect; the weather was persistently overcast.

I'm not really sure what's in the picture, except for the cell-phone towers. I think the big dusty square might be an elementary school. Under the big trees next to the road on the left one-third of the picture, someone was arc-welding in the morning. I know this because I could see the arc from my 8th-floor balcony. Have to imagine it was awfully bright for someone driving by, about 15 feet away.

(I have a higher-resolution (3496 x 948) version of this picture. Let me know if you're just dying to see it.)

1x1

Today is the first anniversary of my becoming Greengate LLC employee #1. So far, so good.

In honor of this momentous occasion, I'm moving our web and email to a new host over the holiday weekend. Though it's a fairly straightforward process (at least the part I have to do), it's a little unnerving. The NR engineer in me still imagines dozens of things that can go wrong, all of which end with the cessation of any and all communications with Greengate, business failure, bankruptcy, etc. I didn't say it was likely or realistic; this is just the way I think of it.

But if the link in the title of this post doesn't work, now you know why.