Hey Folks – was just wondering about this myself, curious what others think…. Sometimes I’ll reply to a thread with 6 other people, and in it I have questions embedded for specific people, e.g. Aaron can you please let me know if you have a velociraptor and take it for walks in the park.

To help people see their names and ensure a reply is expected, sometimes I’ll highlight their name in bold just to make it clear that there’s a question. Josh, I am curious if you have done this yourself, if so please etc etc etc.

What do you guys think  – is that a perfectly appropriate thing to do in a work environment according to general e-mail etiquette, or is it ‘annoying’ or is there a better way it should be done?

About 15 minutes ago the winds blew through a typical “corporate reply-all storm”…. I wasn’t on this myself but a buddy printed out one of the e-mails to document the exceptionally absurd number of people this guy sent mail to. His e-mail was regarding how corporate iPhones could not use some new service because AT&T said the numbers were not personal lines, or something like that.

Yes, these are all individual unique names in the To filed of the e-mail, a quick count of the semicolons shows there to be 1,943 people this was sent to.

Seven replies (yes with reply-all) went by with “Please remove me from this e-mail list”, one with the one-word reply “Thanks”, and another with “Shouldn’t we be focusing on end of quarter work instead of this” before someone put a stop to it.

Erika (my pregnant wife) and I got into bed last night and she put her Droid phone into the bedside docking station. For those unaware, it detects that it is in the docking station and turns into an alarm clock – shows a big-font clock, etc.

Well, E put it in last night, rolled over, and then 10 seconds later rolled back to change the alarm. Instead of the alarm clock mode, it looked exactly as it does in the picture above — the clock mode was gone, it was on the contacts tab, but no contacts showed up and it displayed the single word, “Pregnancy”. I swore to her that I didn’t do anything (I really didn’t) and I got up and took that picture. I then clicked on ‘Home’ and went into her contacts, it displayed her contacts as normal and we couldn’t get it to happen again.

Anyone have any ideas or theories? A 6-pack of Chris’s beer for anyone who can make sense of that.

It’s interesting to look way back 8 years ago and see who first played at Bonnaroo and then check out where the lineup is for 2010. You can sort of see this progression happening 4 years ago…. Any guesses who will be playing 4 years from now?

Possible scenarios here? Please do take physics and time into account….

http://upnextinsports.com/2009/11/17/sports-pictures-doug-warrent-chicago-fire-wtf-doing/

What confuses me is that fact that the keeper already has the ball and there is nobody else in the picture who this guy could be flipping over.

Could this actually happen?

This question just came up a minute ago here at work – anyone have any insights?

Imagine you have a single tic-tac suspended in the air somehow. An infinitely small string or something – doesn’t matter, it’s just magically floating in one spot and not acted on by an outside force. We’re talking standard Earth air and normal gravity in the picture also.

It would be possible to horizontally swing a baseball bat hard enough to shatter the tic-tac where it is as opposed to having it bounce off and fly somewhere else, correct?

I assume that it would be related or proportional to the amount of air resistence that would prevent it from moving plus the standard force it would take to crush a tic-tac – but that’s as far as I can get. What would have to be known or determined to figure out exactly how hard (fast?) you’d have to swing?

Time for something a little different. Some ground rules:

1.) Do NOT look anything up, this has to be from memory.
2.) Explain as much as you can but stick to the facts you think you know. To an extent, vague is fine.

The question – what is the oldest (or most memorable!) event in world history that you know something about? It has to involve human beings, let’s not get crazy here. Picture you are at a party and you hear someone telling someone else about this  – you got to know enough where you could add something to the conversation. In other words, having heard that something called “The Spanish Inquisition” happened doesn’t really count.

I can just check here.

Pretty interesting read on China here, very well written. As the editor states, “[The writer's] geopolitical focus filters out the noise in the popular press and concentrates on the real drivers behind national policy”. If you have some time and want to get a solid picture and ‘deep-enough’ understanding of the country, here is your fix.

http://tinyurl.com/geopoliticschina

No description necessary:    click.

(I found this through PA, if you’ve already watched it then IAIA).

http://tinyurl.com/3tao6x

I’m curious about the big circular spot – anyone with time or knowledge?

Gentlemen and Gentleladies,

My little sister (still off limits, Josh, but she says, “hi”) is heading to college in the fall and needs a laptop – basic going-to-college style. I’m out of the loop on this (Steve’s knowledge of something called an “Eee PC” hardened that realization) and I wouldn’t know where to begin…. Anyone got a recommendation I can pass along? Requirements are basic college stuff (e-mail, Word, etc), low technical skills, small to medium $, nothing too fancy but something decent. To quantify, a 6/10.

[Side note - I find it harder and harder to get that sort of info from the Internet. I need a new breed of websites to pop up that review the Review websites, and then a trained monkey (or baboon, whatever, I'm open) to review those new websites for me and tell me which is the best.]

Looks like extra bandwidth for them means easier times for me/others who get the typical family computer questions…. Anyone use Copilot before?

Been meaning to do this for months now…. I got three shameless, 100%-voluntary plugs for a real estate agent, a home inspector, and a wedding videographer. I could have used a reference for each in the last year so hope it can help someone:

Back when E and I went through the home buying process we used Brian Cichella and I’d recommend him to anyone looking in the west-of-Boston/Natick+15mi-radius area. He was real professional yet personable and it only took 20 minutes with him to realize that he’s really actually honest about things, not cool-and-friendly-sales-guy honest. Also he gave us a $100 gift card to HD _after_ closing as a gift and has e-mailed multiple times since the spring with things like ‘hey how you guys doing?’ or ‘erika how is school?’. All in all, he was exactly what worked perfect for us.

Second the guy who did our home inspection was fantastic. Has been doing nothing else for decades…. Name is Frank Deveau and he works for Jackson, I was just blown away by how he performed.

Lastly the guy E and I used for our wedding videographer deserves mention, his pricing was good and he did a great job the day of and with all the post-production. He is JG Lis from Revel Video.

One of the guys here at work needs an intern and so somehow procured a list of resumes from a Boston university. In this packet he found a resume with the following:

“An enthusiastic movie watcher. Have seen over 750 Hollywood movies.”

and right below that:

“[...] player computer and console games. Have finished over 50 games in single player mode.”