Nice Ride Last Night

With last night's snow/freezing rain/slushy mess, I thought I might get the riding bug on my way home.  The forces of nature seemed to be conspiring against me, though.  Although I left the office early last night to try to get a jump on the commute, a lot of LIRR trains to Ronkonkoma were canceled.  There was an accident east of Farmingdale, and the 6:35 Hicksville train was extended out to Farmingdale, so I decided to take a chance and hop on it.  We got held up at Hicksville for a while, and then the train made it to Farmingdale and let us off.  I thought I was going to have to take a cab, but then two school buses pulled in to the parking lot.  As I was about to board the bus, an announcement came over the PA that the train we had just gotten off of was going to pull back into the station to pick us up, and then make local stops to Ronkonkoma.  So I was in the clear, just really delayed. After I got to my truck and cleared the snow off, I found very quickly that I needed 4WD in a big way.  Lots of people were sliding around in the parking lot.  As I was taking the back roads to get to Patchogue-Holbrook Road, I saw a bunch of accidents - mostly people sliding off into the woods.  That's when I thought that maybe taking the Cannibal out around the neighborhood might be fun.

When I did get to Patchogue-Holbroook Road, cars were doing 25 MPH, tops.  I was stuck behind two cars when someone on a Yamaha Raptor came flying out from Broadway and tried to pass us on the road.  That was it.  If other riders were out, I was going out too.

I came home, kissed my wife and turned around to go back outside again.  Lauren protested, but hey - I only get to go out in the snow every once in a while.  This could be my only opportunity this year.  So I started it up, let it warm up, grabbed my helmet and took off.  (Yes, I did still have my work clothes on under my jacket.)

I was only out for 15 or 20 minutes, but I had a ball.  No cars were out.  I didn't see a single one.  I slid around for a while, doing donuts in the street and generally acting like a little kid, and then did some laps around the neighborhood, getting up into the higher gears.  Since it was so cold and the top layer on the ground was more frozen rain than snow, it was ultra-slippery.  Thankfully, I still have Realtors on my quad - the paddles really get traction in loose and slippery material.  I'm really happy with the new nerf bars, too.

'Twas a nice night.  I hope we get some more snow before the season is out.

Microsoft to Yahoo - Prepare to Be Assimilated

Link

It is unfortunate that Yahoo! has not embraced our full and fair proposal to combine our companies. Based on conversations with stakeholders of both companies, we are confident that moving forward promptly to consummate a transaction is in the best interests of all parties.

Translation: Lower your shields and surrender your weapons. Your technological and biological distinctiveness will be added to our own.

We are offering shareholders superior value and the opportunity to participate in the upside of the combined company. The combination also offers an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market.

Translation: It's a fair offer, even though everyone knows the combined company wouldn't be able to find its own ass, even with the help of GPS satellites.

A Microsoft-Yahoo! combination will create a more effective company that would provide greater value and service to our customers. Furthermore, the combination will create a more competitive marketplace by establishing a compelling number two competitor for Internet search and online advertising.

Replace "more effective" with "lumbering," "greater" with "nominal," "more" with "less," and "compelling" with "distant."

The Yahoo! response does not change our belief in the strategic and financial merits of our proposal. As we have said previously, Microsoft reserves the right to pursue all necessary steps to ensure that Yahoo!'s shareholders are provided with the opportunity to realize the value inherent in our proposal.

Translation: Assimilation will proceed as planned. You have no chance for survival. Make your time.

I'll say it again. The best thing Google can do right now is let this happen.  watch shareholders hold out for more money, and then let this happen.

I Met Don Mattingly!

Last night, Dan and I went to a charity dinner for the Connecticut Sports Foundation Against Cancer at Mohegan Sun, where Don Mattingly was honored. Mike Francesca and Chris "Mad Dog" Russo, WFAN and YES Network's “Mike and the Mad Dog” emceed and the event raised more than $1 million for the charity.

The event was supposed to be a roast of Mattingly by his fellow Yankees and other figures in baseball, but as the New York Daily News' Bill Madden quickly found out after having a joke about Mattingly's recent troubles fall flat on its face, nobody was much in the mood for roasting. Mattingly was praised by the likes of Don Zimmer, Goose Gossage, Mel Stottlemyre and Jim Leyland, with other great players like Moose Skowron and Robinson Cano in attendance.

There were also live and silent auctions for some terrific sports memorabilia. I bid $60 on a ball signed by Hank Bauer, one of my Dad's favorite Yankees, and won it. So I'll be sending that down to him in Florida.

At a private cocktail party after the roast, I got to shake hands with Mattingly and get my picture taken with him. He was a very nice, down to earth guy and stayed at the party for a while, chatting with guests, taking pictures and signing autographs. I was really happy to have met one of my favorite Yankees, and I have the picture here as a souvenir of the occasion.

Thanks to Dan for giving me the opportunity. It was a fun time.

Gleeful About My eeePC

My Asus eeePC was delivered to the office this week. I read one too many positive reviews about the machine and decided I wanted to get one to see how viable it would be as an office machine. I love it. At the office, we have one of the OLPC machines that Eric ordered a while ago. So far, the only similarity I can see between the two computers is that they both run Linux. I think the OLPC isn't very intuitive, whereas the eeePC is easy to use right out of the box. After I unpacked the eeePC, I booted it up, was able to immediately connect to the office WiFi and surf the web with Firefox. I also set up an e-mail account in Thunderbird and then started checking out how well the included OpenOffice dealt with MS Office documents. Yes, it does handle Word docs, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint 2003 documents with ease, but it won't read the Office 2007 (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) formats. No matter, since we send all of these out to clients saved as Office 2003 documents anyway.

As an experiment, I edited a PowerPoint presentation on Conversational Marketing I was delivering to the team in the afternoon on the eeePC while sitting on the couch in the office. While it took a few minutes to get acclimated to the undersized keyboard (and some annoying things like a tiny right-hand shift key), I was able to easily make my edits. When it came time to present, I plugged the eeePC into my projector and delivered the presentation just as I would have if I were on a Windows machine. The eeePC would make a great machine for PPT road warriors, since it weighs only 2 lbs.

One of the things that really surprised me is how fast this machine is, with a Celeron M processor at 900 Mhz and only 512MB of RAM. It boots in 10 seconds and shuts down even faster. Applications spring to life. and working on this machine is a great testament to the fact that all these Linux propellerheads who constantly harp on how MS software is so bloated and slow might actually know what they're talking about. If all you need a machine to do out of the box is run an office suite, get e-mail and surf the web, this is a great $399 alternative to spending three times as much on a Windows ultraportable notebook, or wasting $3,500 on a Macbook Air.

I picked up an 8GB SM card to give me a little extra capacity, but there's room for a ream of office docs on the 4GB flash drive. Not having to spin the platters of a traditional notebook drive extends the battery life of the eeePC so it would be good on a cross-country flight or on a long car trip. I pulled it out on a crowded LIRR train, where my seatmates were practically on top of me and had no problem happily typing away, whereas doing same on my 17” HP notebook would have been impossible.

There are some shortcomings, like the 7” screen that runs at 800x600 resolution, and the small keyboard, but I don't see too many drawbacks to using the eeePC as an alternative to a Windows notebook. On nights where I don't feel like lugging my backpack home, or when I need to travel lightly, I'll take the eeePC with me. When you fold the screen down, the eeePC is the size of a paperbackbook. Do yourself a favor and order yourself one if you're a road warrior or if you have a significant commute to work. You won't regret it.