The meteorologist says to expect unseasonable cold weather today. Guess he hasn't looked at his calendar in a while. Far as I know it's still winter for at least a couple more weeks. It's usually cold in winter though we sometimes get a reprieve here in the golden state. But then I realize it's the weatherman so it's OK for him to be wrong. Heck they can't even get the title right. None of my educators were ever able to explain why a weather person is named for somebody who studies meteors. They said it had to do with the Latin root but none ever offered anything beyond unsupported hearsay. They haven't taught Latin in the public school system since the fourties or fifties. I know I've got a book of Latin roots and grammar somewhere which I bought precisely to answer questions like this. I promise that one day I will get to the bottom of it.

Don't get me started. Now I'm starting to question urologist as well. It's a urinologist. Or maybe a urpologist because he/she studies ur p. A eurologist is somebody who studies Europe. Am I ever thankful for my decision not to be an English major. You should be also.

A pretty lady passes me on the street and blurts out "I love you!". Luckily I noticed the cell phone before I was able to respond...

Oh and before any of you call the board of equalization on me, I haven't taken home anything from the store which I bought tax-free. That's illegal. Everything in the attic is considered damaged or non-saleable and for which I paid nothing. I haven't completely figured out yet how to sell myself guitar strings. Can give myself a steep discount but still have to pay the tax. The line can get pretty blurry in a proprietership since for federal tax purposes the business and inventory are personal assets. I mean I pay for it out of pocket and at the end of the day put the money back - in the same pocket. There's nothing to indicate whether this particular dollar is a business dollar or a personal dollar unless or until it gets on a deposit receipt. But it's something I need to be careful of because they're sending people to jail for buying furniture stores and taking home new sofas and bedroom sets tax free. And especially the folks who buy new kitchen appliances wholesale when they're in the shoe business.

One of my former co-workers stopped by - this time from the server division, which I haven't heard from in several months. Seems that the Netscape/Sun 'Alliance' was quietly disbanded a few months ago. The remaining small handful of Netscape employees all came back to AOL-West, where they will probably be laid off in the next round since AOL doesn't have much need for multi-platform standards-compliant servers. The rest of the intellectual property (i.e. the source code) is now completely controlled by Sun. As for AOL-West it seems that everybody has moved into the inner quad - that's four or five buildings out of the nearly thirty which Netscape once used. I would say that qualifies as serious downsizing. They say the captain's supposed to go down with the ship, but as you may know the captain left years ago. The ship sank. You'd think that AOL would want something more for their 4-8 billion dollars than a tired web portal that wouldn't have survived the dot-com shakeout; and a web browser which runs on Linux. AOL-TV, which runs on Linux - is a loss leader. I'll give about one more year for 'em to shut down the west coast software operation completely. They never did understand our laid-back culture and basically left the most profitable divisions to die whilst they concentrated on strategic (but unprofitable) assets. If I was Steve Case I would be putting padlocks on the doors and cutting my losses. Oh wait - that's what he's been doing.... nevermind.

It doesn't bother me that companies do marketing studies and create new product lines as a result. What bothers me is when they change existing products radically and don't even mention it on the label. Today it's Sierra Nevada Bigfoot Ale - one of my favorites. This is malt liquor in the true sense of the word - enough malt to kill a bull elephant and highly alcoholic. This year's batch (that's how often they make it) doesn't even taste like malt. It tastes like friggin' hops. Way too many hops. I realize that's the trend in craft beers these days but this was an old standby; always dependable. Until now. Sigh... It's like opening a bottle of Guinness stout and finding it now tastes like Schlitz.

The economic stimulus package finally passed. Yay. Now let's see... in the last six months most everybody who lost their jobs because of or around September 11 ran out of money and have found other ways to cope. Every week of delay since about January 1 has meant that they don't need to help another hundred thousand or so people. Was it congressional deadlock or simple math which resulted in the delay? Careful - it's a trick question. I have yet to see a ballot which listed PhD in mathematics as a qualification. But we're talking simple math. A billion dollars saved for every month of delay. There isn't a public servant alive that can't crunch those numbers.