View From the Bushes

You may have heard of Phil Specter's "Wall of Sound." Well, on Friday I had a "Wall of Meetings." Of course, partially that was my own fault for scheduling myself to donate platelets at 7:30 that morning. And then I guess the hubris of trying to take advantage of my brief break to go to lunch would also be my fault, and said hubris resulted in me getting a flat tire. Ordinarily that's not a big deal, but apparently although my $1000 car came with a spare and a jack, it didn't come with a lug wrench. As a result, though I actually wanted to blog on Friday, it didn't end up happening.

We're selecting a content management system. We started with three candidates and then we pruned it to two. Well, the one we pruned didn't want to go away. Since our primary objection was technical, they decided after several fruitless attempts that they needed a technical guy to tell the vendor to bugger off, so one of my meetings was a half hour conference call with one of their technical guys and a salesperson. The whole process reminded me strongly of high school debate and breaking up with someone. The former, because we were having an actual argument as to the relative technical qualifications of the different products and the latter because of the audible sadness and disappointment in their voice when I told them we were removing them from consideration.

Finally in news of the weird, a scientist is proposing including MP3 players as part of a breast implant. As an example of some of the humorous quotes in the article "Quite how playback is achieved we're not quite sure, but it may well involve the listener burying his or her head in the cleavage for a full stereo effect."

Drunk with power
Ross