Random Thoughts 11/30/06

• Microsoft's Zune music player was listed as the 75th best-selling electronic product on Amazon, which was still nine spots behind the iPod's USB charger. That's right, the supposed iPod-killer was getting outsold by a power cord. That's just funny.
• Here's your annual reminder that X-mas is not a sacrilegious way to abbreviate Christmas. The Greek letter chi (pronounced by saying "key" while clearing your throat) looks like our letter X, but is actually a ch – the same ch that starts the word "Christ."
  
• Napoleon said that an army travels on its stomach. Little did he know that the Army actually travels on overly-flashy Power Point slide show presentations. Power Point is often ribbed as being the bane of a staff officer's existence, where hours are spent making sharp looking slides that contain precious little useful information. It's become the plastic banana of communication skills – it looks good but provides no nutritional value or sustenance. Nevertheless, Power Point remains an essential element of military culture, as it is in parts of the business world. So for our friends who have nothing to say and an hour in which to say it, here's a patch to identify you as one of the elite warrior class armed only with a government issued laptop, a Power Point Ranger:


• We're putting up the Christmas tree today. The way I grew up we decorated the tree and everything for Christmas on the 23rd or 24th of December. When did we take it all down? Well, that's what Valentine's Day is for! But since I have a family of my own now, we've been decorating around the first of the month and we take it down the day after Christmas if possible.
• Shannon and I spent the better part of an hour trying to unfreeze a pipe our sump pump uses. It's cold out there! I ended up just pulling the miserable thing off entirely. Poor Shannon crashed and burned when she fell down the frozen steps of our back porch. About an hour later Shannon was pulling the Christmas decorations out of the upstairs storage and she fell down the stairs! She's normally pretty graceful but now she's just black and blue.
• I'm interested to see if the boys try to unwrap and rewrap any presents this year. They know where the scotch tape is and the presents will be sitting out under their noses for a few weeks. It'll take a lot of will power not to cheat.