Emailaholics??

I’m condensing the article at www.technologyreview.com here:

A team at Yahoo Research work out how to classify individuals by their email habits --   ‘day labourers’ and ‘emailaholics’.  These terms represent “two distinct types of emailer.”  Day Labourers tend to “send emails throught the normal working day between 0900 and 1800 but not at other times.” Emailaholics send emails “throughout the waking hours from 0900 to 0100.”

Mother's Day Weekend

This Mother's Day weekend was absolutely stunningly beautiful this year. The weather was about as close to perfect as one could hope for in the Orgegon springtime.

M didn't go to ballet because of a sore throat. R is done with Saturday gymnastics for the forseeable future. M's sore throat seems to have been nothing major. So, we did some lightweight yard work and had a quiet day. R joined some of the Boy Scout troop in starting woodworking merit badge Saturday afternoon.

Sunday, we all slept in extra late. The kids each had a little gift for C. Then we prepared the house for an Open House. Once that was ready, C and the kids left to have some afternoon fun while I held the Open House.

There's a noticeable shift in the people attending open houses. The people now are not casual; they're looking. Really looking. It was a good Open House, to be sure.

Meanwhile, the rest of the family hung out at Portland's Saturday Market. Our plan was to rendezvous at the movie house after I wrapped up, so we could all watch the new Star Trek movie. And that's exactly what we did. Except that R showed up at the theater with a surprise...but first I have to digress a bit.

You see, I play a bit of harmonica. C plays a passable amount of piano and some survival guitar. M is quickly becoming quite good at piano. Our Baha'i friends all play some sort of musical instrument. R? Well, R doesn't play an instrument. It seems that no instrument has really spoken to him. And yet, on a Friday night at our house, the place fills with two guitars, violins, a cello, a viola, drums and multiple piano players. That R has no instrument has, apparently, caused him some quiet distress. Well, that seems to have changed today.

R's surprise was a well-crafted and very serious African Thumb Piano, or Kalimba. Tuned to the key of F, and packing a 20 note scale, R's Mbira is one of the largest, most melodious Kalimbas I think I've ever heard. It came with its own tuning wrench, and a messenger-style bag for transport. He loves it, is already playing improvised melodies, and took it to bed with him tonight. We mapped out the tuning, and R has already started plucking out melodies for a Bahai prayer that we've all been learning- "God Sufficeth".

So it's been a peaceful and nice weekend overall.

YES! Omaha Steaks! Fire up the grill.

I get one of the following emails every year in early May. And, oh do I look forward to it! My Father-in-Law sends a box of Omaha Steaks for my birthday.*

Dear MR NOLAN JOHNSON,

Someone thinks so much of you they are sending you only the best! MR JOSEPH HORNER has sent you a tasteful gift from Omaha Steaks and it should be arriving at your door on approximately 05/13/09.

If you have any questions about your gift shipment, call us at 1-800-228-9872 or email us at custserv@omahasteaks.com. Your order number is C79xxxxx.

Please enjoy your gift!

I've come to look forward to this delivery with the same anticpation a kid shows for Christmas. I budget my consumption of these steaks so I can have some all year long. I just grilled up the final steaks from last year's shipment a couple days ago.

So it's with immense pleasure that I share the happy news! I'll have beef steak once again in my freezer.


* The first year steaks arrived, I called Joe to thank him profusely. During that call, I asked him what possessed him to send me beef. His reply? Well, you married my vegetarian of a daughter. I figured you'd need some relief! You see? THAT'S why we get along....

NY Magazine – My Manhattan Project

Michael Osinski describes “How I helped build the bomb that blew up Wall Street”

link here

Who Are The Two Forgotten Tribes?

The New York Times has an article from Nicholas Wade, reporting the geographic origins for our species:

Locations for the Garden of Eden have been offered many times before, but seldom in the somewhat inhospitable borderland where Angola and Namibia meet.

A new genetic survey of people in Africa, the largest of its kind, suggests, however, that the region in southwest Africa seems, on the present evidence, to be the origin of modern humans. The authors have also identified some 14 ancestral populations.

This is amazingly captivating information. As a Baha’i, I continue to find the scientific evidence on the origins of the human family to be astounding. The more we learn about the scientific story of how we came to be, the more the scientific facts line up (more-or-less) with the deep folklore of our cultures.

I’m just making the wild PERSONAL connection between the researchers’ claim of 14 separate populations that set out across the globe, and the similarity to the history of the twelve tribes of Israel. No, I don’t intend to connect the 14 populations and the 12 tribes literally, just symbolically.

But isn’t it interesting how the numbers are so similar? Why not five ancestral populaitons? Or 57 ancestral populations? This is the part that fascinates me.

Creating a Nexus

I've been blogging for a couple years, a continuation of the cancer newsletters (The Shunt) I'd periodically distribute to update friends and family on C's progress. And I still keep the blog. In fact, this is being posted to the blog.

The change, however, is that the blog is not also a feed into my Facebook page. Each blog entry gets mirrored into Facebook. My Facebook friends need not follow the blog... they have it automatically.

I've also been tweeting a bit...not a lot, but a little. My twitter circle is quite small. It may only be 140 characters, but the big draw for tweeting is to connect from my cell phone -- survival blogging.

So recently I had noticed that a Facebook friend of mine was clearly mirroring his tweets to Facebook somehow. I checked in to the FB app he was using and included it. Now, I can text messsage a tweet that will also show up on my FaceBook, for a wider circulation. I'm liking the abiltity to reach all venues when necessary, liking having a sort of information nexus.

Because, you never know when you'll have to send that infamous one-word tweet from Colombia that says "arrested"

New Press Release

PCB123 received an award about a month back. I blogged about it, I think. I just posted a link to SMT's press release on the award. You'll find the link in the blog's PROFESSIONALISM area.