It all feels oh so very 2001

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Looking through the schedule for the San Francisco Web Two Dot Oh conference takes me back to a time when there was a fooz ball table in the data center, all the free sodas I could drink in the fridge, and my entire professional wardrobe consisted of shorts, bowling shirts and a pair of tevas. -- "Cross Cultural User Experience Design" --"Strategic Domain Name Selection for Increasing Traffic and Conversion Rates." ... also known as "thinking of all the typos for yurdomanenamehere.com" -- "Innovation Matters for the Next Generation Web" As opposed to, you know, yesterday when innovation was passe, like when your grandfather ran the internet -- "Mashing Up: Taking Enterprise Mashups to the Next Level" -- "The Production Mashup" -- "What's your enterprise mashup strategy?" -- "Defining cool new buzzwords, like 'mashup'" Ah. The good old days.
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100 Things Worth Doing: 26-50

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More things I hope flash before my eyes. For more, go here. Or see the original 26) Winning 3rd place in the open waltz competition. 27) Seeing my article published in a trade magazine for the first time. 28) Chasing crawdads in the creek. 29) Getting lost on the way to the Etowah Indian mounds with my grandmother and her friend when I was six 30) Camping in the Florida Keys because we were too poor to afford a hotel room. 31) Eating sushi at a restaurant called the Pink Godzilla. 32) Playing Nintendo and eating pastrami sandwiches until 4 a.m. 33) Exploding balloons while trying to make chocolate cups. 34) Riding my bike to school. 35) Spending $20 in the arcade. 36)Skinny dipping in the hot tub in Santa Cruz 37) Graduating from boot camp. 38) Learning to operate a table saw from my step-father. 39) Helping my father, the doctor, operate on a pig in the back yard 40) Climbing inside one of the pyramids at Giza. 41) Taking a bulldozer for a joyride at 1 a.m. with Ryan and Darren. 42) That bed and breakfast run by two old gay guys in Charleston, South Carolina. 43) Walking out of the interview, knowing I had landed my first real job after the Army. 44) Opening the shipping crate of my new Stelling banjo. 45) Snowmobiling across a frozen lake in Ontario. 46) Being best man at my father's fourth wedding 47) Laughing as we realized that Poulnabrone is only 4 feet high 48) Standing in the coliseum. 49) The smell of dogs and old books in my grandmother's house. 50) The anticipation and excitement that came along with Woodward Academy's Super Goober day.
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Another step closer

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Earlier this week, our household goods which have been in storage in California for the past four years were delivered to our new house in Massachusetts, which represents a tremendous step forward towards our move, psychologically, as well as physically. I'm not sure exactly what it is, but knowing that the house is no longer completely empty, but has goods piled up into a somewhat precarious pyramid in the garage waiting for us to come out and re-discover and catalog all of the precious material items that we haven't needed for the past several years, but couldn't quite bear to part with altogether, somehow moves my brain one giant step further along in our move preparation. A friend of ours in the area kindly agreed to go receive all the goods (as we're all the way over here on the other side of the ocean, it would have otherwise been pretty difficult to manage), and commented that the boxes all looked very dusty and grungy, which is why she had them placed in the garage instead of trying to direct them towards vaguely the right areas of the house. Considering the goods were supposed to be stored in a "climate controlled environment" is a little irksome, but hey, at this point, I'm glad to have them arrive at all. Truth be told, we have only the fuzziest of notions as to what's actually in those boxes and plastic wrappers. A lot of books. And some power tools. A kitchen table and chairs, and some baby furniture. And my TiVo. Beyond that? I've no clue. I've got the feeling that about half of the boxes will provoke comments along the line of "why the hell were we keeping that?" I can't wait. As a next step, the movers on this side of the Atlantic came out to "survey" our goods, and get an idea of how big a container we need to shove all the accumulated crap from the last four years into. His comment on seeing our bed (one of the few pieces of furniture we brought over from the US on our move was, “Wow. That’s a big bed. Is that a super-sized bed? Like special order?” Um, no. It’s just a regular American king sized. “Wow. Over here we’d call that a super-sized bed. I mean, I've never seen a bed like that.” Ok, stranger-guy in my house. Could we get over your fascination with my bed, yeah? The only other piece of advice he gave was after poking his head into our closet where I've installed our wine rack. We'll need to be very selective about which wine we wanted to ship, as it would incur some hefty duty fees, he tells us. Which means that we'll be opening more bottles in the next few weeks, if you'd like to stop by.
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