The best present so far this Christmas - Mom gave me a t-shirt that says "My Mommy Says I'm Special". Not surprisingly, I love it. =)

Got in late last night - the plane took off late, landed later, and then my rental car was messed up, so I had to wait about 15 minutes for them to find me a new one. Combined with stopping at my mom's, I didn't get to the hotel 'til just about midnight. The real problem, though, is that I didn't get tired 'til like 1:30, and even then had a very difficult time falling asleep. Oh, and I went and got myself a 7:30am wakeup call. I know, kind of stupid, but I'm here for 13 days - I want to get acclimated to EST again as soon as possible, and the only way to do that is to wake up as early as possible. But the end result is that I got about 5.5 lousy hours of sleep and now I feel like crap on a stick. Worst of all, I know I'm not likely to feel much better later today - after all, it's not like I'm going to suddenly catch up on my sleep before tonight. Ah well - at least it's not 13 degrees out, like it was here this time yesterday - it's 18. Heh - makes me really appreciate the fact that the *record* low for Palo Alto in the last 30 years is 20. Plus, I get free buffetish breakfast and will probably manage to get into the office before either of the other guys in my group, even though I've got the timezone excuse. Oh, and great Chinese food for dinner at a nearby restaurant - Bamboo in Westford, MA. If you're from the area, I *highly* reccomend it - great food. Right - time to shower and get movin'.

Argh! My eyes are all bloodshot! I need Ben Stein to give me some eyedrops!

I get really nervous about certain things when I fly - not safety or anything like that, but will I get sick? What will I eat? How will I keep from getting dehydrated? How do I avoid getting bored? The result of all these worries is that I overpack. I have, in my carry-on bag alone, my computer (well, it'll be there shortly), four paperbacks, a mess of granola bars and Kudos, cough drops, ibuprofen, my Ritalin, Rolaids, a small bag of hard candy, two bottles of water, and random other crap. Oy. I wish I wasn't such a worrier. Ah well - time to go wait for the shuttle to the airport.

Not Modest Mouse - oh no. Modest Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition". I've heard it before, mind you - back in high school band, we played "Great Gates of Kiev", which blew me away even back then. But I hadn't heard it for a while, until I suddenly felt a craving. So I went out and bought one of those $6 classical-by-some-orchestra-no-one's-ever-heard-of CDs from Borders yesterday, and I'm the happiest boy alive right now. Wow, this is great - I need more. Any other Mussorgsky I should be seeking out? Anything that any classical-loving readers can suggest, based on a love for "Pictures"?

I just went through about 40 hours without my laptop. Long, painful story - I ended up having to reinstall Windows because it blue-screened so much, and it took 24 hours for the IT people to realize that maybe the video problems meant that they should replace the system board. Which I knew they should do from the get-go. Argh. Ah well. I'm back online now, but if you emailed me and I didn't respond - sorry!

A few years ago, I bought Elastica's second album, "The Menace". Their first, self-titled album is one of my all-time favorites (and one that I need to replace - I lost it in the Great CD Vanishing of '98), so I, like many others, was eagerly awaiting a followup. Well, it took like 4 or 5 years, and when it came out, it didn't blow me away. It wasn't the same kind of New Wave on more meth brilliance that the first album was, so I put it down and didn't pay it much attention. However, it ended up on a CD of mp3s I dumped onto my laptop recently, and I've been listening to those mp3s at work for the last week or so. I've heard the whole album a couple times and y'know what? It's pretty good. It's still not as exciting as the first one, and it definitely doesn't have a song as good as "Connection", but I like it.

There's something nice about finding random music you already owned but hadn't really listened to. Randomly grabbing enough albums (in mp3 form) to fill a CD from my overall stash and then listening just to those albums for a while is a good way to find the hidden gems - in addition to the Elastica, I'm rediscovering my T.Rex greatest hits that I hadn't listened to all the way through in ages. Good stuff.

It's "Sunday Bloody Sunday", sung by George W. Bush. No, seriously. Someone's spliced together Dubya sound bites and put together a spoken-word version of "Sunday Bloody Sunday". It's scary. Go listen to it.