Aldoblog

I just finished installing my new copy of Keynote, Apple’s new presentation program. It’s so beautiful, I am imagining that I will borrow a Mac to be able to give a presentation using Keynote during our sales kickoff, next week.

One of my many New Year’s resolutions for 2003 is to do something for the house, every day. It can be a small thing, like changing a light bulb, but it can’t be an ordinary thing, like washing the dishes. And every day, I’m going to list it here in my blog, where you can hold me to it. Gulp!

I have five brothers and sisters, which can make holiday gift giving very stressful, so many gifts for so many people. Years ago we simplified, with a gift exchange where we drew names out of a hat. Well, that’s how my siblings did it, but I have “more sophisticated tools for assigning gift-receivers to gift-givers.”

When I was a kid we got a VCR with an early model remote control — with a wire! (This obviously dates me.) When watching movies, the kids would want to fast-forward past the FBI warnings, and our father would make us stop.

At the recommendation of a new co-worker, I recently installed Cloudmark’s SpamNet add-in for Microsoft Outlook, the e-mail client I’m using at Persistence. If you’re using Microsoft Outlook on Windows (as I have to at work), this tool should be a no-brainer.

Today is, I can hardly believe it, my one year anniversary of working at Persistence Software. I am thankful to have what is by any measure a very good job.

I saw more than a little of my (older) self in this rant at HBI. I’ve come a long way since my younger days, but reading this made me cringe. I wonder who I would be with if I had learned some of these lessons earlier.

If you had bought $1000 worth of Nortel stock one year ago, it would now be worth $49. If you had bought $1000 worth of Budweiser (the beer, not the stock) one year ago, drank all the beer, then traded in the cans at a redemption center for the nickel deposit, you would have $107.

Thinking about the difference between the public and private sectors, I realized that my professional life is roughly split between the two. I was in my first job, at UC Berkeley, for more than five years. I recently hit the point where my professional life after UCB is longer than the time I spent there.

Rochelle and I just few back from NYC, and boy are our arms tired.