Not that anyone will really be surprised by this … but it's nice to have ironclad proof. At Foo Camp, I finally learned for certain that James Duncan Davidson sleeps with his PowerBook under his pillow.

I just realized my childhood friend Mike Datwyler would have been 40 today. (He didn’t make it to 20.)

I still miss you, Mike.

"Oh. That's not your baby ... that's the Stevie Ray Vaughan boxed set."

I'm sitting in Jason Hunter's Web Services Tutorial at the Northern Virginia Software Symposium. It's not the usual web services talk ... Jason gives a lot of interesting examples, and essentially ignores the low-level mechanics of SOAP in favor of showing you how to do it, and do it easily. Most of his examples deal with the most useful web services out there right now: the Google and Amazon web services APIs. It's a great talk full of extremely practical information.

But I do notice a disturbing trend in the example services. So far we've seen:

• Does Google know how to spell my name?
• How often does Google crawl my website?
• Darn! Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, is a more popular Hunter than I am.
• How's my book selling compared to the latest Tom Clancy?

This is getting more meaningful all the time. :-)

James is taking his TiBook along on visits to his therapist now:

Jason's too-hip AIM icon and iChat combined to give me a good laugh yesterday:

An alarming proportion of drivers are complete idiots. I know this isn't news to anybody, but it's still occasionally amazing.

Today on the way to work I was approaching a toll plaza. This plaza comes fairly soon after a major entrance ramp, so people who enter the turnpike at that entrance have to cross multiple lanes quickly if they want to make it over to the high-speed tolltag lanes. This morning some goon cut across about four lanes, just in front of the toll plaza. *sigh*.

Cutting across multiple lanes isn't ever a really bright idea. But this was worse for several reasons:

• Traffic was heavy
• The lanes were moving at different speeds ... most of them were full of people slowing down to drop coins in the toll baskets or to get change from a real live human, but the lanes she was aiming for were heading full-speed through the tolltag lanes
• There was no room for error. We were all traveling pretty fast, with only about 25 feet left before the concrete pylons that divide the lanes of the toll plaza.

All that to save probably 20 seconds or less.