Watch your feet, knees, and elbows

My flight from Chicago was delayed by nearly three hours, mostly the result of bad weather in the East. We were, as has become typical, crammed in, with all of the overhead bins full. I had to check my suitcase at the gate. As the flight attendants wheeled the beverage cart from the back of the plane, they politely, but resolutely, let us know that extremities in the aisle were in harm's way. The plane ride was somewhat bumpy as we neared the coast, but not too bad. The Logan parking garage has one four-story elevator that doesn't go to floors one and two and a seven-story elevator that only covers floors one through four. I parked my car in Row Z-1 which is right next to Row S-1.

There was a foot of snow on the ground when I left on Monday morning. Now it's gone. Who took it? And why?

Hot dogs and beans are the traditional New England Saturday night supper. After our trip to Britain a few years ago, Sandra and I have been having eggs and beans. In either case, whether served with hot dogs or with eggs, beans are best served with not very much bird head.

On the plane ride home, I sat behind a guy who was preparing a presentation with PowerPoint. He was copying the text, including pictures and tables, from a Microsoft Word document, and then hacking and stuffing to make the content fit into the slides. I pity the folks who have to sit through that presentation. A Google search of "Death by PowerPoint" comes up with 47,000 matches. In one case, we might have a clue about why the war in Iraq is going as it is. An American government worker acquired an insurgency training manual from a web site, translated it, converted it to PowerPoint, and posted it on a web site to make it available to U.S. troops. Whatever was retained from the translation from Arabic to English was squeezed into sloganeering by the time it was brought into PowerPoint.

(There's an interesting thread coming from this story. The insurgency web site, Al-Rashid.com, is a bit of an odd name for a domain in Iraq. They'd have to do business at some point with U.S. domain registrars. And, now, that site points to a escort service in the U.K.)

We have a long weekend (President's Day) and a somewhat quiet week in the office. Several co-workers are taking the week off to be with their kids who are on school vacation. Sandra and I have a list of fun things to do and will get to more than a few of them in these three days.