So go, young lads and ladies, and visit my iBook on ebay and bid like it's 1999: JohnEklund.certified Apple Blueberry iBook Laptop. Happy bidding!

UPDATE: SOLD for $385.

Toronto was a fun city and I really like their monetary system. Who the hell needs bills for $1 and $2? Coins actually worked out nicely and I'm in favor of adopting that system here in the States. I do have to comment on their half-assed commitment to the metric system though. I totally expected to be able to get a "Royale with Cheese" at McDonald's but it read "Quarter Pounder with Cheese" on the box (it also read "Quart de Livre avec Fromage"). What the hell? Shouldn't it be in centimeters or something? If you're metric, go metric and embrace your metricness!

The Mexico trip was good except for the, oh yeah, chronic diarrhea (try and spell that without spell checker) that persisted for a week after the trip. But other than that, top notch! Luckily a visit to the doctor and some antibiotics fixed me up. It's funny, when you think about what's most important in your life you usually think of things like friends, family, stereo equipment, high-def, etc... but you go a week without a solid bowel movement and all of a sudden your Christmas wish list gets very short (Dear Santa, Solid stool would be fabu! Thanks, bye).

The good part of the Mexico trip was that my hotel offered up the ability to rent people to do things with you. Not in the way you're thinking though, because I know where you're headed with that. I rented a guy to play tennis with me, since I've recently taken up tennis. It turned into lessons instead of play, which was good because apparently I have what they call "bad technique" - at least that's the medical term. Two lessons later and at least I know the right way to hit the ball - that's progress my friends for less than 300 pesos. The other interesting part was the Mexican tradition of the fortune-telling clairvoyant canary. At the La Valentina restaurant a guy brings a canary cage to your table and the little canary comes out and pulls your fortune and does other stuff like put the sombrero on the little Snoopy figure (Snoopy being the predominant Latin American symbol since the early 1700's). My forecast calls for huge run-on sentences and copious amount of gibberish: Your good and open heart makes you willing to reveal your thue (sic) feelings, thereby betting you in some severe difficulties, and also making you unwilling to mistrust those who praise you with the sole purpose of deceiving.

The Cincinnati trip came and went in a flash and consisted mostly of meetings, but we did have a great dinner at the Montgomery Inn at the Boathouse - the best ribs I've ever had in my life (fun fact: the Montgomery Inn is the biggest buyer of pork products among independent restaurants, using between 16 and 20 tons of ribs per week.). As a general rule of thumb any meal where the waitress ties a bib on you before you eat is going to be good. We also had a view of the Ohio River and some terrific Graeter's Black Raspberry Chip Ice Cream for dessert.

The Charleston trip was for me and Erin to relax and unwind and get the hell away from work for a while. It was also to celebrate our one year anniversary, which happened the previous weekend but unfortunately coincided with the Mexico City/Cincinnati trips. We got to spend the 4th of July weekend there and it was superb.

It was our first visit to Charleston, so we didn't know our way around as much as some of our old stomping grounds like New Orleans, but we picked it up quickly, I think because it's a lot like New Orleans, only without the extra heat and humidity, the lewdness, the vulgarity, the stench and the boobies (I miss you New Orleans!). We had a great room at our hotel (The HarbourView Inn) that overlooked the harbor and the waterfront park fountain that had kids playing in it nonstop. You'd be surprised what having kids laughing and playing and having a good time as background noise for 4 days can do to improve your mood. Innocence of youth or whatever it was, it was totally great - Erin and I actually took some time to go play in the fountain ourselves.

Charleston also has some magnificent architecture (which I think is another reason we like New Orleans so much, the nakedness aside). We took lots of walks around the historic district and took in the churches and homes and great buildings. It was a great way to cap off our one year mark and I look forward to lots more anniversary excursions with my wife.

This particular lead retrieval supplier that has been sending out email blasts has been great. It's a Spanish vendor who must not have wanted to go through the expense of hiring an actual translator and instead opted to do the translations themselves. It's close enough to understand, but some of the subtle nuances of the language are lost and the typos are fantastic. The fact that they use cartoons in their email is also great. Their first email I got about two weeks ago:

In case you can't make it out, the left side contains the unhappy customers, because they are waiting too long for her to write down their information. She asks them "Excuse me May I have some information please?" and as she busily takes their info the unhappy guy says "I hope she hurry up because we have to visisit a lot of stand" On the right side are the happy customers because they didn't have to wait long at all. The guy asks them "May I read your badge please?" and as he scans their information the happy guy says "Do you see how fast it that machine" Good stuff! And the customer was impressed! Too bad you're not selling badge scanning machines!

Yesterday I received another email from them with a new cartoon. Happy times were here again!

In this particular cartoon, once again the unhappy people are on the left. However this time it is not the end customer we focus on, but the exhibitors - one who didn't get a badge scanner and one who did. The guy on the left, who looks like Beetle Bailey says "Oh, oh! This is full I don't know we will order this well we will see" I'm not exactly sure what the heck he is saying, but he's not happy about people dropping in their business cards. On the right side is the happy exhibitor, who says "This show was very succesfull, thanks to our reader equipment, because now all the leads are our clients"

I love the implication here, that because you were able to get their info in the computer instead of from a business card, that people would become clients at a conversion rate of 100% (or more, who knows?). I gotta get me one of them confounded machines what read them badges!

After reading the article a few times I knew I had to do this with my dad so when our next regularly scheduled phone call was up (our Thursday night call) I asked him to think about it and get back to me the next week. He did and I went to work pulling as much as I could from iTunes and the rest from various other unnamed sources, which as you can guess shall remain nameless. I put it together and burned it to CD and sent him a copy in the mail. I burned myself a CD as well and have been listening to it in the car to and from work. It really is incredible to hear the music that shaped his life growing up and knowing from him not only what songs he liked, but why that song affected his life in a certain way. It introduced me not only to new music (well, new to me) but also to the depths of my dad in ways that words just can't. I recommend you talk to your parents and do this with them. It will open your eyes to who they are as people and you'll be able to capture the soundtrack of their life and share it with them in a very cool gesture of giving. They did give you life and put up with your bullshit for 20 years - it's the least you can do!

Side Note: The Schoolhouse Rock Archive. Some of their crazy music would have to be in my life's soundtrack, as well as many other Gen-Xers. I'm thinking specifically of "Conjunction Junction, what's your function? Hooking up words and phrases and clauses..." (Full Conjunction Lyrics)

Then I remembered a day from my childhood where on that day I think I actually said "This is the best day ever!" It was, I believe, sometime in late 1982 - which would have made me around 6. The first great thing from that day was my parents taking me to Hamel's - which at the time was the largest amusement park in Louisiana (I always assumed this was by default as there must have been no other amusement parks in all of LA. Of course my only real sense of scale was Six Flags Over Texas, which was bloody huge and Hamel's always seemed to pale in comparison - so this could have affected my rationale). We had a great day there and they had a lot of the usual amusement park offerings - roller coasters, the log ride, bumper cars, the twirly thing, etc... After that I remember we had to run by my mom's office for something - which probably would have made this day a Friday or Saturday. Then when we got home we got the mail and HOLY CRAP - I had mail. Do you remember when you were a kid and you got mail? It hardly ever happened so it was always awesome when it did. That alone could make it the best day ever, but it was the contents of the package that excited me even more - the commander of the Alliance Fleet, Admiral Ackbar, was waiting for me inside the box. I'm sure it was at this point I averred "This is the best day ever!" because I had been waiting for an eternity for this Star Wars action figure to arrive in the mail. You had to collect 6 proofs of purchase from other Star Wars merchandise and mail this in and wait 10 to 12 weeks for processing but it was totally worth it. If I were to theoretically ever get into a situation where I could only pick one day of my childhood to keep in my memory forever, this would be the one.

By the way, after looking up some of this Star Wars stuff online I found the absolute greatest site in the entire world: The Star Wars Collector's Archive. After scouring the site I had to drop an email to my cousin who was as much into the Star Wars toys as I was - we used to play together all the time (he's a doctor now). The email read like I was the dorky leader of dorkydom:

With the micros didn't we have the Hoth Wampa Cave and the Hoth Ion Cannon? I know for sure we had the Bespin Freeze Chamber but didn't we also have the Bespin Gantry? I don't remember for sure which action figures we had - I remember I had a C-3PO that broke apart and that I got Admiral Ackbar in the mail. I know I always wanted an AT-AT but never got one. I had the Slave-I and Boba Fett too I'm pretty sure. Didn't you have Darth Vader's TIE fighter with the curved in wings? We might have also had the Imperial Attack Base Playset. I also want to say I had a TaunTaun too with open belly feature. And I know you had Chewbacca....

I guess you had to live through that period of time to fully understand it.

• Sunday - The Simpsons, Charmed, Desperate Housewives, Grey's Anatomy
• Monday - Las Vegas
• Tuesday - Scrubs, The Office
• Wednesday - Smallville, Alias, The West Wing
• Thursday - Joey, Will & Grace
• Friday - JAG, Numb3rs

Now throw into this mix three variables:

• Disconnect between perceived self and actual self - I don't really consider myself much of a drama watcher, but apparently that's almost all I watch. In my head I prefer comedies.
• Inconsistent viewing habits - On any given night we'll haphazardly throw shows into the mix out of either boredom or laziness.
• The DVR effect - We DVR every single one of these shows (set to record the entire season of new shows only). So on any given night we may or may not actually be watching the shows live, since we know they're being recorded for us. Some shows conflict with other shows, like The West Wing and Alias, so we always watch The West Wing on DVR - never live - which means we NEVER see the commercials for The West Wing because we always fast forward through them. On any given week we'll watch half the shows live and half recorded - meaning we only see about half the commercials we're supposed to see, but rarely is it the same shows each week (say for example we decided to go out one night and missed all the shows).

Now I know it's early on in the adopter life cycle for DVRs, but I think networks will have an increasingly tougher sell and advertisers will have increasingly more headaches when they realize the viewing patterns for shows are all messed up - and I'd consider myself a mild example of how this could be.

I'm sure there will be some interesting things going on in both television and advertising in the next few years to counter this effect and it will be interesting to see how it all pans out. I, for one, am glad I've yet to be employed with a company that does television advertising. Score one for the small b2b's!

Back in my formidable IE days if I was browsing and wanted to look at something else, but not close the page I was on I'd open the link in a new window. This happens a lot when you're reading blogs or news sites - you want to scan the entries and click on links that might have some appeal to you - but you want to stay on the main page and skim it only once, then move on to the new windows you opened. So I might have upwards of 4-6 browser windows open and at that point it started to feel unmanageable - like it was information overload.

Now though, with FireFox, I routinely find myself with anywhere between 10 and 20 tabs open at a time (as of this writing I have 11 tabs open). The crazy thing is I don't feel like this is information overload - even though there is as much as 4 times more information there than the separate IE windows. It starts early in the morning for me as I skim some news sites - maybe Yahoo News. I'll go to the Most Popular and maybe open 5 articles in new tabs to read. Then I'll scan the Charlotte Observer online and open up some more tabs. Then I'll scan the sports sites - ESPN, FoxSports, Sportsline, NFL.com, an open up some more links in new tabs. Then I'll knock out some blogs - Dooce, Kottke, etc.... So to start my day I might have 20 tabs. But I don't read them all immediately - I'll let them stew and simmer over the course of the morning, taking breaks from my work to read a few here and there. A visit to Kottke's site might create me 8 new tabs some days, some days 1 or 2. Sometimes at the end of the day tabs from the morning are still open and I'll give each tab a good reading before going home.

It's crazy to think this one little feature - tabs - can make such a big difference - but the difference is bigger than the feature - it didn't just change the way we open new content, it changed the way we consume the content.

Now, I'm not looking for a new job as I'm happy where I'm at and emailed him back that I don't have an updated resume but if he sent me some info about whatever he had I'd be willing to look at it. He then emailed me back and wrote "It may be a mute poit as the position may have been filled."

Now I know that email is a conversational medium and typos are inevitable, so I let this slide and emailed him back saying "No problem. Thanks for the update..." because as I said before I'm not really interested in new jobs.

An hour later I get an email from him saying "Well I just found out it might not be mute." At this point I can no longer take it, as he thinks that "mute" is in fact that correct term for what he's trying to describe, which apparently is a job that may or may not be utterly devoid of sound. Who wants a job like that? Not me, so I guess this entire thing is moot.