We slept in this morning. Well, sort of. Marley is used to having me up by 5:00. I guess that he was concerned and came into our room to make sure that we were OK. Anyone need a 90-pound, cold-nosed alarm clock? It's one of a kind.

Two weeks from today, our product goes to manufacturing, meaning that the software and documentation is done and is ready to be put onto CDs for shipment to customers. Three of my four books are in good shape and one is in deep trouble. Quite often we use a green, yellow, or red coding for project status. Green means everything is going as planned. A yellow project has problems, but the team has a plan to recover. Red means that we're off schedule and don't know how we'll get back. I hope to bring this fourth book from red to yellow today.

Grumble, grumble. I've spent more than a few hours this week wrestling with problems that ought not exist. One had to do with hyperlinks in FrameMaker files. The other involved the stream editor sed. I need to make one change to more than a 1000 files. This works fine on Linux and UNIX, but fails on Windows.

Even though he's lost half of his net worth in the past few years, Bill Gates is still the richest person in the world. On a related note, Microsoft's purchase of Groove Networks has the potential of being a very big deal. Groove has a great concept for collaboration, but hadn't been able to achieve takeoff velocity on its own. It's also very interesting that Microsoft will keep the Groove office and employees in Massachusetts. Microsoft typically brings its development teams to the Redmond campus. One analyst, however, said, "Groove plugs a hole that Microsoft has never built into its software..."

It's going to snow again today and tomorrow, perhaps even in to Sunday. One way to spend time stuck indoors is look at pictures of cats watching images of cats.

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