I got to invite many of my friends and colleagues, some of whom I’d known for close to 20 years (none of my earliest colleagues from my years in Boca Raton are out here), and we had a pleasant lunch at the Fish Market in San Jose, which IBM paid for (that’s always a sign of a good meal!).

[From left: John Patrick, Diane Goldman, me, Tony Rall, Jon Reinke, Glenn Deen, Brad Wade, Diane Reese]

I had considered holding the lunch on a trip to the East Coast, so that my immediate manager and more of my offical teammates could be there, but then I wouldn’t have been able to have my best friend and most important colleague present.

One of the customs at a QCC lunch is that the employee’s manager sends out notes to the employee’s friends asking for letters of congratulations which are then printed out and put into a binder which is presented at the lunch. My friend Sam sent me such a letter; Sam, this photo is just for you.

Missing and Weakest Links

Other than having my QCC lunch, things have been pretty quiet. Last night, though, I was unhappy; my Internet connectivity vanished for no apparent reason (I had all green lights on the DSL modem, but my router couldn’t talk to the Internet). I couldn’t reach my ISP by phone last night, so instead, we watched the special Star Trek episode of The Weakest Link. It was a lot more fun than the regular episodes I’d watched near the beginning of the show’s run; even the sniping and back-biting didn’t seem too serious. And I was glad to note that each star’s charity got a $10,000 donation even if the star was eliminated (a change from the usual game).

I finally reached my ISP today just before lunch; they didn’t see anything wrong, and by the time I got home, nothing was wrong. I hate trying to fix intermittent problems.

Keeping the economy going

I bought a TiVo over the weekend. It’s an interesting toy — I used it to watch the local TV news last night in 10 minutes (skipping the two-hundredth story about possible changes to airline security, among other things); this was the first time I’d watched the local TV news in years. I guess that’s an improvement. We also taped…err, time-shifted…an episode of Home Improvement which we hadn’t yet seen, and it’s already building up a backlog of possibly-interesting shows for us to watch in our copious free time.

But that’s not really why I bought it — I bought it to have a backup plan for recording the first episode of Enterprise, the new Star Trek series, which premieres tomorrow evening, during Kol Nidre services. I don’t entirely trust my VCR right now — if I try to record in S-VHS, I get horrible noise bars in the picture, and cleaning the heads with a cleaning tape doesn’t help. So having a TiVo gives me a second chance to get a clean copy of the show. Any other use is entirely coincidental. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

Weather Report

We had quite a thunderstorm last night — the radio and TV claimed that the rain would be north of San Francisco, even as drops were starting to fall at my house, 50 miles south of the city. And then the heavens opened, and the lightning started, and the thunder boomed — it was almost like being in Florida on a typical afternoon. I guess summer’s over.

Mystery no more

I found how who sent me the chocolate — a friend from work. Thanks, John!