I'm going to miss the early mornings at the beach when winter gets here. I had to get up at 5:30am last Friday (due to evil 8am meetings) and the sun hadn't even come up yet. By the time I was done in the waves and heading back to the car the sun was coming up over the valley, very pretty. I managed to catch some waves *along* the face of the wave rather than just down it, very cool.

I tossed out a previously written post, or partially written. I finally understand why important people outsource their speech writing. It's a lot of effort to get all worked up about something. Okay, no it isn't. It's a lot of work to get worked up about something and try to write about it in a serious manner with fact checking and well created paragraphs. Also grammar, don't get me started on grammar, once it gets its evil clutches in to you it colours everything you read. I need to be rich so I can hire some smart people, tell them I care deeply about X and Y, and I want them to write me good speeches and articles about it. Go make it happen, I've got a really big check here that says I care.

I can see why people on the fringes like the one sentence summaries and sound bites, WAY easier to do. Throw the sound bite out there, piss people off, make THEM do the work to prove you wrong. More time for the fringe people to think up more sound bites while you are working on gathering the facts to disprove the stupid things they've said. They can think up 10 stupid things to say while you are still trying to disprove the first one, you can't win.

Let me find some of the doozies they've been tossing out regarding socialized medicine ...

Stephen Hawking, I'm sure you have heard about.

Sarah Palin and her "Death Panels".  I hope she runs for President, that's a farce I'd almost pay to see.

Mmm, post soccer game laziness. I've finished off some english muffins with peanut butter and I'm eying up the wine bottle. Don't worry mom, I had a good lunch.

Kathleen has decided to kick the unemployment monkey in the gonads and head back to school. She has always been interested in massage and she has signed up for a nine month course to get certified. She figures this will work well in conjunction with theatre and it is something she can be passionate about. I'm all about the side benefits, practice, practice, practice. It is starting next Thursday so we will see how that goes, I'll keep you updated.

Previous to that she has been on a real spree around the house. The wall along the stairs is now painted, the low wall where we used to feed the cat has been painted (and covered over all her dirty paw marks, yay!). She even painted the upstairs bathroom!

Me, I'm going through an unfocussed streak at work. Doing more reacting rather than preemptive strikes. There is a whole centralized user storage and registration process that I'm working on, but it has stopped thrilling me. After going to all these Web 2.0 seminars at work and finding out we don't have much of a budget to send me to talk to our customers, I decided to leverage the new social media to get feedback on our sites. Turns out everybody loves talking about it, but nobody has any externally facing infrastructure. Woo. I'll find some other way to gather information.

I went to a lunch presentation on 'Where is my motorcycle?' put on by the motorcycle club at work and the local police department. Very informative. It turns out that stealing sport bikes are really, really big business in San Diego. They tend to focus on the latest model race bikes from Honda, Suzuki and Yamaha. The two police guys who came in described how the crooks steal the bikes and it turns out they are dead easy to steal. Crooks just bring in ignition pieces of their own, wire them to your bike, start it, and ride off. They figure an unlocked sport bike can be hot wired in less than a minute and ridden to Tijuana in less than 15 minutes.

I mention TJ because that is where all the stolen bikes from San Diego go. A couple of years back the San Diego police used to work with the TJ police in recovering bikes. Bikes that have LoJack installed are easy to trace a lot of the police cars have the LoJack scanners installed. Unfortunately one of the drug cartels became interested in the money being made from stolen motorcycles in TJ and decided they wanted a slice. So now bikes that make it to Mexico are never recovered by the police, ever. Retrieving stolen bikes in TJ is neither safe, nor fiscally wise for Mexican police officers. San Diego police officers that work near the border turn off the LoJack kits in their car because of all the noise it makes when they get close to the border. It is depressing.

Happily for me there is little demand for the type of bike I have, which means there is a very low risk of my motorcycle being stolen by professionals.

I miss all our friends back in Ottawa. We had a link sent out yesterday regarding Pigeons being faster than the internet. The email thread degraded to the point where Rick Pali was causing hat makers in Surrey to be tossed out in to feces filled gutters. Nice going Rick. In case you read the link about pigeons carrying memory sticks and thought about the airspeed of an unladen swallow, yes, we went there too.