A special girl is in town, so I’m getting “Hugs!” from her. Yay! This morning we listened to Here Comes a Special Boy by Freeze Pop. It is stuck in my head, and that’s just fine with me!

Google’s Gmail is pretty cool. In fact, I’m using it as my primary user interface for my personal mailbox right now. Now I’m trying to figure out how to make mailto: links result in a jump to the Gmail compose screen. The first step is getting Windows to turn “navigate to a mailto: link” into a jump to a parameterized URL of my choosing. Then the second part is to figure out what a Gmail compose URL looks like. ...

This is well worth reading. Something special is happing at Google, and with luck they will chart a new course that other companies can follow as they go public. Perhaps my employer, Tellme, will choose to follow such a course, though it seems unlikely. Our core values are probably as strong as Google’s, but are not exactly aligned with theirs.

I ran across Freezepop today as a result of reading a bit of Achewood. Two great cultural influences in one day! Yay for sickpuppies.

Why are people strange about powers of ten? If we had 8 fingers, would be be a really big deal when the car had 32769 miles on it? And what if I lost a finger, would I start getting excited about rollovers in base 9? And what about yakuza, who screw up and lose a half or a third of a digit? What is the meaning of fractional bases? Just wondering. ...

Karl and I watched The Island of Dr. Moreau tonight. Luckily we were, uh, enhanced, by several beers, a white Russian, a screwdriver, and a glass of Kamikazes. The move sucked. But at least Karl uttered these memorable lines: “He’s getting the hang of the boom stick.” “Quonset hut madness!!!” “Cat versus Dog!” “He’s not dead YET.” I think maybe I need to redeem myself by reading the H. G. Wells novel now. ...

A friend is on her way to Budapest, and I wrote some of this to her. I’m copying it down here so that I don’t lose it. I was in Budapest in the fall of 2000 on my way to Oradea, Romania. There, I helped build a huge house to be used for a family-style orphanage. It had 8 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms, 1.5 kitchens, 2 living rooms, and a dining room. We had to finish it from a finished foundation and framed walls to “pillows and sheets on the beds” in about 8 days. ...

This is the coolest keychain tool ever.

I currently live in California. It is not considered a “key battleground state” for the presidential election. Both parties have essentially conceded the electoral votes to Kerry. As long as Californians as a whole vote the way everyone expects them to, Democrats in California can afford to ship some of those votes off to other precincts in the nation, where the election will be more competitive. The same reasoning would allow Republicans to move some votes from states like Texas to the battleground states. ...

I had forgotten it was St. Patrick’s day until I checked my personal email and discovered mail from Michael Mullen giving last-minute notice of a Tempest show in the City. Karl and I headed up around 7 pm on the train. We ate at Cha Cha Cha, which was interesting fare for an Irish holiday (things got stranger later when the Swedish lead singer of an Irish band started playing Swedish folk songs). We went down the street to 12 Galaxies to hear Tempest. ...