Author: corey

You know how the days leading up to a vacation can be the most productive times since you are making effective authoritative decisions to get things wrapped up before you leave?

Well, I’m learning there is a polar effect when you know you’ll have some spare time ahead of you. The lady-friend is going to Wisconsin for the weekend and I am planning on getting all this work done then, but these days leading up to it I’m finding items falling in to the “I’ll get to it later” category.

I suppose the thing to do is pretend that I’m going too and try to trick myself.

“Purpose”-driven life, eh?:

Is the intro to Saturday Night Live filmed at the Cellar Bar, in the Bryant Park hotel, aka “Corsets”?

My bottle of beer at dinner had the familiar five cent deposit markings. I thought, you know, I haven’t even thought about taking cans or bottles in to get the deposit in years. The last time I remember doing it was in Boston. Furthermore, I don’t even know of a place to take them back in NYC.

It seems that New Yorkers are willing to accede that market to the homeless and the determined elderly and not even try to recoup their nickels.

Since I’ve been working during the days here in Florence, I haven’t had the chance to see a whole lot yet, but I did notice a couple of things.

There aren’t many homeless people on the streets, but I did notice one on my way into the office today and while clearly down and out, he had dangling from his perma-dirty-hand a bottle of red wine. No Thunderbird or Mad Dog here.

Another thing that stands out to me is how much cooler old people are here than in the US. They are substantially more fashionable, they are out riding bicycles and scooters, it’s great. It goes some of the way to making sense of Flavio Briattore, a 55 yr old F1 team manager who is the father of Heidi Klum’s child. The pic to the right is not Heidi, rather another model he date(d?)(s?).

It proves that growing older does not necessarily require nurse-shoes, house coats, padded toilet seats, and immobility.

Just as the day was ending, filled with extolments about Florence and Italy, the band at one of the cafes outside our window began to play a spirited “New York, New York.”

Floss then brush or brush then floss?

Bonus Q: Floss in AM or PM?

I just found out I’m going to Italy tomorrow for work. This will be my first trip to Italy. Any travel advice for Florence is appreciated.

Ciao

 

 

 

 

 

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The Biggest Loser is back for season 2.

I can’t wait until tearful wife/husband reunion time. While it seems cruel at first to keep someone out of contact with their families for five weeks, it is worth it the greater good of TV entertainment.

Semi-seriously, the main reason I like this show is that it is inspiring by virtue of the reality stars themselves. The show does some amount of over-producing TV moments, but really, if someone can lose 28 pounds in one week, that’s pretty incredible, no matter how you slice it. I don’t need to be dropping that kind of poundage, but I could put more effort and time into my workouts and this silly show does just that little bit to get me motivated.

Going away to summercamp for 4 days two weeks ago put me behind a 2500+ RSS item backlog that I still haven’t caught up with. There’s some question of whether this onslaught of information is worth the time it takes to wade through it, but every single time I sit down and go, “OK, I’m just going to scan headlines and be quick with the Ctrl-Q mark-as-reads” I find some jaw dropingly great nugget of information that I feel fortunate to have the means (time, knowledge, experience) to find.

My current system has my feeds divided into three categories with corresponding Outlook 2003 search folders: RSS.Scan, RSS.ScanTextAndPix, RSS.ReadEveryWord. 80% of my feeds are in the second category, I click on the item, scan the pictures first and scan the text of the article. I probably read 60% of the text on average.

Anyway, I’m down to 149 posts and I think I might achieve a zero unread bounce tonight. Once I get to this stage I’ll be much, much more apt to post here.