Earlier today I saw a guy in a shirt that read:

Haikus are easy
But sometimes they don’t make sense
Refrigerator

I laughed.

So Conan did his first San Francisco roadshow last night downtown at The Orpheum. And we loved it. And of course by “we”, I mean those bastards that actually got tickets for the show. Not me. I dutifully filled out the form at NBC weeks ago when he made the announcement. I got my friends to fill out the form. Near as I can tell, nobody I know scored a ticket.

I provided a small bit of help to a talented friend setting up her back-end….no wait, that would be website back end…for a new blog. She thanked me by giving me a “part” in her first posted cartoon on the site. I wish I could draw…

Check out Carole’s art and thoughts on LittleCarotte.com. I look forward to seeing more!

I decided early on to put together an Oscars pool for my new co-workers. Most of them are serious cinematics. So I picked a dozen categories and went in search of a Web 2.0 solution for running the pool. Googling “office pool” brought me piles of links to betting sites. There seemed to be several sites hardwired for NFL weekly pools. But I had a really tough time finding a service that would give me some flexibility to do something besides a sports pool.

Not me. I’m barely in corporate America to begin with. My past and current are packed with tech start-ups, entrepreneurial self-ventures, non-profit, and for-profit but for-service small companies. I haven’t worked for a company as big as 3000 employees since my first job out of school.

For those of you who think that the far-out ideas in politics come only from California, I submit Initiative 957 from the great state of Washington…

Proponents of same-sex marriages have heard for years from the conservative right, that gay marriages make no sense, because marriage exists solely for the purpose of procreation. So, in a put-up-or-shut-up move, the Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance puts forth Initiative 957 that would make it law that those wishing to marry must prove they have the ability to procreate (I’m guessing biological proof of fertility, not an actual demonstration of knowledge of proper technique). Further, should any marriage actually fail to produce progeny after a period of 3 years, that marriage would be “unrecognized”. You can read a bit more here, here and here.

America seems, at times, to be intent on adopting stringent Luddite tendencies and shunting all potentially valuable scientific research off to those parts of the world that have a clue. We debate and censure promising areas like stem cell research using a modern version of the if-god-had-meant-man-to-fly-he-would-have-given-him-more -frequent-flyer-miles argument. There were folks who objected to the money spent on fighting HIV by saying that the only folks affected are those who make bad lifestyle choices. Though apparently all the ongoing research on anti-fat pills is ok, because our super-size-it mentality is a product of the bad influence of media and mega-companies, not personal choice.

I picked this off Snopes last night and wanted to share. Follow the link to read the whole story…

OK. If I were a real journalist I couldn’t write this. I’d have to make all the phone calls, all of which I expect would turn up no real information and a few “no comments”. But I’m just blahgging here, so what the hey.

I spent the day at Macworld today so you didn’t have to. No, no. No thanks are needed. It’s just who I am.

I made the trek into The City with several goals in mind: I wanted to talk to the Quickbooks guys about the issues in moving from Windows to Mac; to talk to the QB and FileMaker Pro guys about ways to move data back and forth between those apps; to check out some project management packages, see the Leopard and Microsoft Office 2008 demos, and to see how close I could get to the iPhone.

Are you sick of reading about the iPhone yet? I’m planning on trekking into The City tomorrow and hope to get a first hand look, but spent plenty of time last night reading the specs, watching the keynote video and going through the flash presentation that Apple posted. After the first blush of excitement several questions popped up that will require some answers between now and June when this puppy actually goes on sale.

Here’s my short list:

Steve walks out onto the auditorium stage, set just as the Moscone Hall will be on Tuesday, though the crowd today is only 2 people instead of thousands. He walks over to the stool in midstage and cracks open the water bottle sitting there. He takes a drink while he imagines the cheers from the crowd on Tuesday.

“Welcome!” The crowd cheers in his mind are still so deafeningly loud that he is sure nobody heard him. He raises his hands to quiet the crowd, waits a moment, and then again says, “Welcome!”