Well, not quite.

But it was a very good day for me at work today, because my appointment as an IBM Distinguished Engineer was [finally] announced; I found out about it in late February, but was under a vow of silence until today. Interestingly enough, the appointment became effective last Monday — yes, that was April Fool’s Day — I hope they’re not trying to tell me something!

I wasn’t alone at being named a Distinguished Engineer; 62 of my colleagues were promoted at the same time. I don’t know all of them, but I feel honored to be in the same group as the ones I do know.

Knowledge Management is a mystery

I’m in Toronto this week at the IBM Knowledge Management conference. Tonight, we had the conference dinner at Mysteriously Yours on Yonge Street; a fine time was had by all, and the food was pretty good, too (though I could do without a banana leaf under my salmon in the future). I can also cheerfully recommend the Upper Canada Dark Ale, which struck me as a far superior choice to the random Chilean wine they were serving.

I’m in Toronto this week for an IBM conference on Knowledge Management (so far, it’s been great). The hotel is a little bit behind the times technologically and doesn’t have Ethernet in the rooms…and the PBX limits connect speeds to 21.8kbps or slower. So I was a bit upset about being cut off (or almost cut off) from the world, and having to pay for the slow connections I get (and pay even more if I stay online for more than 30 minutes at a time).

But then I talked with Diane, who told me that she’s been completely without connectivity at home since I left; I talked her through resetting the router and DSL modem, to no avail. So I sent a note to my ISP to find out what’s going on — their reply said that all of their Northern California customers have been without service since Monday morning but they “hope” to have it fixed tomorrow. Sheesh.

Somehow, 21.8kpbs doesn’t sound so bad after all….

Showing my support

Ilana at Inner Balance made a wonderful suggestion — that “proud Jewish people” who support Israel add the Israeli flag to their weblogs, and, as you may have already noticed, I’ve done so. That does not mean I approve of all of the actions of the Sharon government — I don’t. But there’s no doubt in my mind that Israel needs to be preserved as a Jewish state (we can argue some other time about how much power the religious right should have in the Israeli government…less than they do today, that’s for sure).