Opening Day

Baseball returns to Boston today. We've had some anxiety about this team this year. So many new players on the team and several key people gone. (Johnny Damon is doing ok with that other team.) The Sox, however, have shown that they have some good stuff and that they'll give us a fun season. Oh, and did I mention that the Yankees are in last place?

This morning's Boston Globe had a couple of additional Sox items. The Olde Towne Team used the most smokeless tobacco (free registration may be required at the Globe site.) of any of the teams in the 2004 or 2005 World Series. And, there's a self-published kids' book by North Shore writer, Todd Balf, called, Manny Being Manny.

When people ask me how I'm doing, I always stumble a bit as I gauge how much I can say. Sometimes, I just don't know. It can be a bag of adjectives and anecdotes that make little or no sense (yet). I mumble something and change the subject. I'm not at the curmudgeonly level that lets my father say, "Who the hell knows?"

For many folks, "How are you doing?" is just a greeting, a different way of saying, "Hello." When asked how she was doing, a college friend would answer, "Yeah." Most people never noticed.

Cell phone technology, as the pundits have observed, can render location almost irrelevant. My boss needed to take a business trip on short notice, so we had our regularly scheduled one-on-one meeting via phone. I needed to speak with my doctor yesterday. He returned my call while I was standing in line at the grocery store check-out. I stepped out of line and had the conversation while next in the frozen food section.

If you have a choice about where you are when a fire breaks out, don't be here. (via)

I wouldn't think that you could find a way to do $100,000 worth of damage in a salvage yard, but five kids from Gardner figured out how to do it.

If you want to be a successful project manager at NASA, here are 100 things to remember, just for starters. Or, if you'd like to start with something simpler, you can become your own web host in 75 steps. Step 71, for example is:

Type "cat >r;>r; /usr/local/etc/apache2/httpd.conf". On the next line type "AddType application/x-httpd-php .php" and hit CTRL+D.

This Macintosh ad, in my opinion, was second only to the 1984 Super Bowl ad in power and effectiveness. In brief, it shows how much more documentation is required to use an IBM PC that with a Mac. The site has a link to the full series of ads, but the files are on the far end of a slow line, so you may not be able to get there.