William Reardon’s Blog

Here in the Midwest, it’s still about an hour away from New Years, but since the ball is about to drop, Happy New Years!

So, so tired. So, so sore. So, so cold.

It’s day 10 of my annual Christmas trip back home to the Midwest and day 2 of a family trip to visit extended relatives in Gaylord, MI. While no Tahoe, we did get a chance to hit the runs at Treetops Resort today. It was a lot of fun, but man, it was cold. You know it’s cold, when you’re “lucky” that the tempature broke out of the single digits. (Sad thing is, it’s true — it was -1 when we got here.)

Merry Christmas, everyone.

• Joel has a link to Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story, the inspiration for the wonderful movie Smoke.
  
• Rick’s son, Sam, has Christmas wishes for all.
  

I’ll let Craig explain.

Or rather, he’ll let me, but … ah, um… look, just know I hate Geoff okay?

8:30 in the morning. Damn this is early.

The upshot is that I’ll heading of to Chicago shortly. My depature will be from LAX, where I will hope not to be blown up by a portable missle. (Reg required if you haven’t gotten around to installing BugMeNot.) The Terror Level remains the same, so I guess that means there’s no plans to hit my specific plane.

Microsoft recently launched their desktop search.

Something’s lost on me here. Let me see if I understand:

The owner of the desktop has released a new search?

And that’s news?

Um, so how is this different from the search built into Windows? Is Microsoft telling us they’ve been shirking us for years and now we need this fangdangle? Because it shows results in a browser?

It’s easy to look back at some of the crazy ideas of the bubble in hindsight and wonder how people ever drank that kool-aid. The truth is, a lot of the ideas where suspect at the time, but since there where so many and frequently, many doing the same stupid thing, it was hard to be the one who claimed the emperor wore no clothes — to be the one who “didn’t get it.”

Of course, since Google did it, everyone has to do it. But was there really even needs Google’s? Where people saving files to their drives in such vast quantaties and in such haphazard manner that nobody could find anything? Did a Google Product Manager have an image of users treating their icons like the pull of a slot machine, shooting “Oppa!” when finally opening the right file?

I’m clearly not getting desktop search.

I usually don’t blog twice in one day (that’s just greedy), but this is terrific:

http://www.bloodletters.com/hackyourself.shtml

My brother sent this to me:

FYI, the complete farside is $54 shipped at amazon. This is a VERY good deal and this is a very, very nice set. The price breaks down to about $2.50 per pound of Far Side… that’s cheaper than pistachios.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0740721135

You could ask your why someone would figure out the cost of a book per pound, or why they would related it pistachios, but then you wouldn’t know my family that well.