Passing On The Right

People unfortunate enough to own trucks deal with it every time a friend moves.

Those who were masochistic enough to have attended med school deal with it every time a friend has a cough.

Folks who weathered three grueling years of law school deal with it every time one of their old college roommates gets popped for a DUI.

So it makes perfect sense that we, the digital junkies of the IT world, would have to deal with it every time a friend or family member has a computer problem.  And no other holiday serves up a bigger helping of this cold, hard fact than Thanksgiving.

For some, Thanksgiving is a day to kick back in front of the TV with Uncle Barney and talk about salary caps and steroids as you try to feign interest in someone else’s team.  For others it’s an afternoon spent collaborating cheerfully in the kitchen, swapping family recipes for stuffing and mashed potatoes while quaffing glasses of the latest trendy biodynamic wine.  And for still others, like me, it’s a day to show up early, hunker down in front of the family PC and try to exorcise all the digital demons that have taken root there since, well, your last visit.  (What’s that you say, dinner in five minutes, my my, where did the time go?)

For those similarly afflicted, I offer some predictions for this Thursday:

* 97% of you will be told that the PC is running slower than it used to.  Of those, at least two thirds will go so far as to call the PC ”unbearably slow”, particularly when browsing the Web.  Most will be infected with one or more pieces of malware.  The lucky remainder will “only” be victims of winrot.

* 82% of all browser homepages will still be set to Dell’s or HP’s or Gateway’s or Walmart’s homepage, basically the homepage of whichever company Aunt Sally originally bought the PC from.  When you ask her if she’d like you to change her homepage to something more useful and less spammy (Google News anyone?) she will reply, stunned, “you mean…you can CHANGE that?!?”

* In fact, at least 80% of everything you touch on the PC will still be set to original factory default values.

* 74% will have antivirus installed but it will be horribly out of date.  54% will have no antivirus protection whatsoever.

* 91% will have a browser toolbar installed.  67% will have multiple.  Of those, 100% will have no idea how it got there or how long it’s been installed.

* Some 45% of you will wonder if it would be quicker to just reinstall the OS.  17% of you will wind up wondering if it’s still not too late to go to law school.

For reasons known only to its residents, Richmond County, NY–better known to natives of the tri-state area as Staten Island–has the dubious distinction of being NYC’s only red borough in this year’s presidential election.

I’d be willing to bet that if you asked random New Yorkers on the street they might guess that most McCain support within commuting distance of midtown would come from tony counties like Westchester (nope, 63% Obama) , Greenwhich (nyet, 53% for the big O) or from get-the-hell-off-my-beach LI (53% and 52% Obama for Nassau and Suffolk, respectively).  Guess they must be stockpiling those effete suburban liberals I’ve heard so much about.

Yet citizens of that mysterious land at the other end of the Verrazano pulled the levers 52% of the time for McCain, breaking ranks, to put it mildly, with Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan and The Bronx (74%, 79%, 85% and 88% Obama respectively).

Now I have no idea how the likes of Alyssa Milano, Ricky Schroder, Christina Aguilera or even David Johansen feel about all this, but I have a funny feeling these guys aren’t too pleased.

Somewhat predictable results for the borough that, ironically, once tried to break ranks with the other four and allow right turns on red.

Yesterday my wife Allison and I celebrated our ninth wedding anniversary, and all we could say to each other was, like, wow.  Has it really been nine years?  Sometimes it seems like nine months and at other times like nine decades.

We spent some time over coffee thinking about our “accomplishments” as a married couple, and we kept coming back to the same conclusion: far and away the best thing we’ve done thus far is to raise our two beautiful kids.  They have done a truly amazing job of distracting us from the reign of terror this decade by the worst thing to happen to this country in its 232+ years of existence.

Of course our kids aren’t the only thing we’ve done together these past nine years, but they remain the primary reason we still have hope in the future.

So here’s to you, hon, so glad your seatbelt’s fastened right next to mine…

I started this site as a private (me-only) blog over six months ago, mainly for testing and debugging eXchange-related stuff.

But now that IABC chair Barb Gibson has her own blog that’s buzzing with activity these days, I thought I’d quietly turn this one public and scoop her by linking to her blog before she had the chance to link back to mine.

To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure how this latest blog experiment of mine will work out.  I’ve started two blogs in the past–circa 2000 and 2002–and both times they resulted in little more than places to stash pictures of my kids, post the occasional environmental or political rant, etc.  After each had collected dust for some months I decided to pull the plug on them.

Come to think of it, that’s exactly how all my attempts to maintain a journal in high school and college turned out too.  Hmmmm.  We’ll see.

Manifesto to follow, once I get my thoughts collected.  In the meantime, a note to Lee Anne: Rays over Red Sox in 6, Dodgers over Phillies in 6, Rays over Dodgers in 5.

Probably the best, most succinct answer to the question “why social media?” you’ll ever see: