Keith Richards fell out of a palm tree on Fiji, and had to be transported to a hospital in New Zealand.

Now, I don't question vacationing in Fiji at all. There are far worse places to vacation, such as the Jersey Shore. I can make fun of New Jersey. I live here. Other than Cape May, which really belongs in another state, anyway, I would not set foot on the Jersey Shore. I wish I could afford a vacation in Fiji. Fiji isn't the problem.

What I want to know, and nobody will explain, is what the heck Mr. Strolling Bones Number Two was doing up in the tree in the first place. Most palm trees aren't exactly the easiest things to climb, having footholds that aren't branches per se, but are the remnants of older fronds that have died and broken off or have been trimmed off by fastidious landscapers. They aren't like oaks or maples that have branches along the trunk among which the average cat (or human) can scamper.

Of course I've climbed many a tree in my day, but some lend themselves better to it than others. Tip: don't climb conifers--the sap will get all over you, your clothes, and in your hair--hemlocks are especially nasty. Stick to maples, oaks, crabapples, cherry trees, and catalpas, if you can. Believe me, hardwood trees are best for climbing. Fruit trees and nut trees are good, but not citrus trees because of the thorns (would you want to climb a rose bush if you were an elf?).

Every once in a while, I come across a story that's simply too juicy to resist, and this one about Keith Richards fit the bill. So happy tree climbing everyone, and stay out of the hospital, please!

Seen in NYC

This is a 2000 Indian Chief. It's not a custom bike. I see a customized one every couple of weeks or so parked across the street from my office building.

The customized one is silver and white, with wide-stripe whitewalls, no saddle bags, no windshield, and the handle bars that you see onthe stock model have been replaced with "monkey bar" style ones that go up almost vertically, but actually point slightly away from the rider. The handles have black fringe to match that of the saddle, and black fringe is also underneath both footrests.

I never think to bring my cell phone outside with me when I take a butt break, so I never have managed to get a picture of it.

This picture of a customized one shows the monkey bars, but it's really hard to see because the dude who owns the bike and is looking to sell it uploaded such a tiny picture of it.

Thank you bloggers, and those out there in IM-land who have written or chinged me to give words of encouragement about my sci-fi short story project.

This is very different for me. I write technical papers as a small part of my career. I've written academic papers for my bachelor's (math, engineering, business classes), and master's degrees (mostly taking literature classes). None of those papers were fiction.

More recently, I've been able to write some fiction in what I call "episodes." It's humor, written in small doses, anywhere from a single page to a five page "Scene 1, Scene 2, Scene 3" about my protagonist. It's not unlike writing for a soap opera, except that it's humorous, and has "story arcs" from one episode to another. Cartoon shorts, if you will, but episodic in nature.

Sci-fi is a completely different ball of wax. I really don't know what I'm doing in this realm, but I do have a grip on the basics of story line, characters, weird events, and a plot twist in the end. I can try. My deadline for submission to the contest is August 3. If I can't come up with something viable by mid-July, I probably won't submit it.

Regardless, this should be fun, and thanks once again, everyone, for the encouragement!

Yes, folks, I intend to write a science fiction short story. I may or may not submit it for entry into a contest for publication in an anthology. It all depends whether it's gripping enough to keep the reader interested, and doesn't seem to be a rip off of some other work out there. I've read and watched a lot of science fiction, and the plot lines do get a bit trite, even though the costumes change.

If it doesn't keep me interested, it'll never keep anyone else interested, and I'm far from self-absorbed enough to think that everyone must dote on every word I say and enjoy what I write. For my purposes with this story, I really do not need a professional editor, but I absolutely must bounce it off a few people who are good critics. They can spot continuity errors, spelling errors and grammatical errors that I might miss. I usually catch them myself, but every pair of eyes helps. And if the plot really sucks, someone will point it out to me, even if I think it's alright.

Plagiarism isn't something I would do, for two reasons: 1) it's wrong; 2) it probably would take me a lot more time and effort to plagiarize something than it would to thoroughly research my subject and just write my own words. Research sci-fi? It's all made up, right? Sure, why not research it? If story details come down to the name of an LIRR train yard, and you're a lifelong Texan, you might need to research it, so that you could say Sunnyside, Queens, instead of using the name of an MTA subway rail yard elsewhere in Queens or in Brooklyn.

It's a bit different for a math person to go off and write fiction as a sideline, but there is a bit more precision to writing (I think) than most people realize.

Anyway, wish me luck. I'll have little to no time to work on it, but I already have a lot of notes jotted down regarding characters, plot line, and extra-terrestrial "props." It's at the idea stage at this point, but it's a short story, so not all ideas need flesh out, and perhaps half won't, without breaking up the continutity of the story. But it's a fun exercise to keep my mind active.

Blogspot was acting really weird last night. It still is. It won't let me add a picture, regardless of whether I give it an URL, or upload from my computer.

Last night, it dumped my entry on twice, but I can't go in and delete one of them, because the blogger dashboard now tells me the entry isn't even there for me to delete.

My completely nuts CEO left me a voicemail message in the office at 9:38 last night. On a Sunday? Granted, he was taking a really early flight from Chicago to Houston this morning to get to a convention that a client is co-sponsoring, but panic mode doesn't necessarily get anything done faster. Altogether, I spoke to him or got voicemail messages nine times between 8:00 pm on Saturday and 10:30 am today.

Cut the umbilical cord, already. You should never expect me to be available 24/7. It's nice if I can help out, but I'm not being paid enough for that kind of aggravation on a regular basis. He bugged my boss at home over the weekend and this morning just as much as he did me. My boss is just as fed up as I am with it. He's on vacation. We all know I used costs given to me by the client a year ago, because we never got updated ones, but even so, commercial length is irrelevant to the analysis we did, unless I have different costs for each commercial length, which I didn't.

I joke that the next correspondence my CEO receives from me will be my letter of resignation, but I really do wonder how much I actually am joking. Actually, the protocol would be to submit it to my boss, anyway. And he's just as fed up with this nonsense as I am.

Forgive me the pixelated photo link. I suppose it adds to the surrealness of yesterday, though. Yesterday, I was so dog tired that I took a nap around dinner time, and went to take out the garbage when I awoke. On my way back to the house from the garbage shed, I heard the phone ringing through a window I had cracked open a few inches in my den. Fine--let the answering machine get it.

Crap. It was my CEO. The client for whom three of us had busted ass on Friday had a complaint about the work I had sent him. The client knew how to contact me, yet chose to call my CEO instead. My CEO called my boss who was "on vacation" but really he was just moving from one house to another, and me. Back and forth. My boss, then me, then my boss, then me. I ended up speaking with my CEO a handful of times. The bottom line was that the only thing wrong with the flowcharts was some cosmetic stuff, which I was able to fix from home in about 40 minutes and toss into a .zip archive and email off to the client.

We were using a cost for their in-store radio network that the client had given us about a year ago, because the client never sent us any new costs on Thursday or Friday, as promised. The costs we used for regular network radio and network tv came from Ed Papazian's book "TV Dimensions 2006." But I almost got into a shouting match with my CEO about it, and the fact that the costs we used were irrelevant to the reach/frequency analysis, inasmuch as we used population to convert between cost-per-thousand and cost-per-point, and while the difference between using a :60 vs. :30 vs. :15 second commercial could affect the frequency distribution for the dollars it could buy, it would not affect the reach numbers, because in most cases, the advertisers were near saturation in terms of audience levels they could possibly achieve. The bar graphs on the backup work clearly show that.

Unless you work in advertising or media, most of this will zip right over your head like an ICBM, but trust me, I know what I'm doing in this arena. I've been in this business for almost 25 years.

The CEO even questioned the method by which I connected to the office computer network from home. "I thought you had VPN." I replied "No, George, I don't use VPN, unless I'm traveling with an ultra-slow laptop computer. It's more efficient to use Secure LogMeIn when going from a really fast tower box at home to a really fast tower box in the office. It works like a charm, but scrolling can be a bit slow and clunky. I'll fix those files, and send them off--the client will have them by 9pm, latest." He gave up arguing that issue, because he knew it wasn't going to be productive. I emailed the revised files in a .zip archive at 8:37 pm.

After 8:30 pm last night, the phone went strangely silent. My guess would be that my own boss told the guy to lay off me. My boss won't be in the office at all next week, because of his house move. My CEO lives in suburban Chicago.

What will happen Monday morning when I arrive for work is completely up in the air. If I get fired, fantastic. It means I can collect unemployment. The only big bill I have to pay is quarterly property tax. With no earned income, what I owe Uncle Sam, NJ, and NY plummets to the level of mowed grass vs. a tree. I can live off my unearned income just fine. I'm a tightwad by nature. Both my parents were Great Depression babies, so their spending mantra rubbed off on me pretty well.

For all practical purposes, this was the role I played today after the conference calls and meetings were over around 2:15. Had a huge project to get done, we were told by my boss by the end of the day Monday. After speaking with the client, I found out he was going to present it Monday morning at a convention in Houston, and had to have it by tonight or Saturday morning. Crap.

I did a lot of the preliminary work and cranked out a lot of runs, did some spreadsheets and graphs with the backup data, but when it came time to take the last few steps and dump everything into flowcharts, I had to parcel it out among my assistant and some other saintly individual who actually volunteered.

He doesn't even work on our side of the business within the company; he just knows how to do this stuff in his sleep, and knew we were in a real pinch to get this stuff to our client (his former boss) tonight. He did us a really HUGE favor this evening, and I owe him a huge "thank you" at our company's next Brunch Club meeting in May.

My assistant was going to drive down to Maryland after work for the weekend, but he's the sort of person who rolls with the punches and said "there won't be any traffic that time of night!" We traded cell numbers just in case there was an emergency over the weekend, but even so, there's nothing the guy could do about it until he gets home Sunday. I owe my assistant a huge "thank you" as well, because I had to make him delay his trip for a good four hours, although if traffic was light, he probably made it there about the time I got home taking off-peak trains.

At 9:00, I told the guys to go ahead and leave. I was only going to stay long enough to .zip archive the 30 files and email them off to the client, copying my boss, and both of them, so all involved would know who pitched in on this one. Carded out of the building at 9:15, but had to wait half an hour in Hoboken for a 10:07 train, and got home at 11:15.

By then the cat had given up on me and gone off to take a snooze, so I surprised her when I came in the house through the garage. It took her about 15 seconds to realize I was home, then come dashing down the stairs to be fed. I still need to give her her insulin shot.

I'd love to go to bed, but I'm really wired tired, so I might as well go off to read some of your blogs before I head upstairs to bed myself. Hope everyone has a good weekend (and I don't hear from the client this weekend).

Here it is. The Scientology episode of South Park, without the commercials. Tom Cruise in the closet.

Okay, not even this guy would look normal in the East Village. It's hard for me to tell the difference between the tattoos and the makeup.

Three questions:

1) How much did all that work cost?

2) How long does it take to get ready to head out the door in the morning?

3) Dare I ask what else is underneath the clothing?

The title of the book this alien left on Earth was "How to Serve Man."

Tomkat had a girl today who they named Suri. Fine if you're Indian or Persian (read Irani). I guess they've had it with ordinary one syllable names like Tom and Kate. I suppose you could call her Su, but then people would just think you can't spell.

From The Sun tabloid in the UK:

TOM Cruise has claimed he will eat the PLACENTA after fiancée Katie Holmes has their baby.

The actor, 43 — who wants her to give birth in silence according to his Scientology cult rules — said: “I’m gonna eat the placenta, too.

“I thought that would be good. Very nutritious. I’m going to eat the cord and the placenta right there.”

But when a GQ magazine interviewer said it would be a big meal, Cruise replied: “OK, maybe I won’t.”

Do you boil that first, grill it, or just eat it raw while it's still warm? Would you like fries with that?

Good grief! The spaceman's at it again. Tom Cruise has been subjecting family members to seminars about Katie's pregnancy. The more I hear about the guy, the creepier he sounds.

Can you imagine having to sit through one of those meetings? You'd have to drag me kicking and screaming to even get me to attend.

Celebrities seem to think they're the center of the universe. Maybe the family members really don't care any more than I do. I'm sure the spaceman never even paused to ponder the question.

Next, he'll be telling us he's going to donate that sonogram machine to a hospital. Oh wait--he's already done that.

I seem to recall he split with Nicole Kidman after she got pregnant. Divorce papers for Nicole. A sonogram machine for Katie. Lectures for his family. There's something wrong with this picture.

Hillary is now a blue eyed blonde. Back in the day, she was a brown eyed brunette. Okay, internet pictures of her from 1991 or 1992 looking like a preppie with a page boy hairdo and a hairband are pretty much impossible to find. Even the picture below shows her with increasingly bleached hair from her original mousy brown, but you get the idea.

Now, for a page full of quotes about Hillary, I present you with this. The author tells me to "share and enjoy." Enjoy, I did. I hope you do, as much as I did.

And since it's Easter today, I'll leave you with this one. It's the world's largest Easter egg--the Vegreville Pysanka. It's quite a feat of engineering, and I think, quite impressive. It's totally Ukranian. A good friend of mine is from Ukraine. He emigrated legally back in the iron curtain days. He's Jewish, but he'd back me up on the design aspects, etc., of this project being "Oh so Russian."

Happy Passover, or Happy Easter. Take your pick. Eggs work for both holidays. Roasted or hard boiled.

So why am I eating Chinese food today? Oh, well. Things don't always work as planned. Maybe mac & cheese later. ;)

Never call me on a weekend if you are a co-worker unless it's an emergency. Never call me after 4:45 pm on a Friday, either.

I don't care whether you use my land lines number or my cell one. Don't do it, period. If you need someone that badly, hire someone else.

Fridays suck the wind right out of the clouds. Sales people always promise to sell something that operations can't produce. We have apples and pears, but they sell bananas and mangoes, then come back and tell us we have to produce tropical fruit because that's what they sold. And they have a nasty habit of sending out laundry lists of clerical tasks they want taken care of by COB at 4:59 pm every Friday. Analytics deals with mathematical modeling and numbers issues. Sales can spend their time making phone calls, sending email, reformat and convert a Word document that already exists into .pdf format just as easily as we can, rather than wringing their hands that they are powerless to do anything further without our mathematical expertise. Besides, they have far more time to do that than we do.

Sure--throw me to the lions on Good Friday, when the only people in the office of 50 are 11 Catholics and one Jew. There's something seriously wrong with this picture.

I've stopped answering my phone after noon on a Friday, and won't answer any email that comes in after 4:45. Co-workers who have an issue with this simply need to learn to contact me well before that time. With a client, it depends which one it is--I will make exceptions if it is an urgent issue we've been back and forth on, but not if it looks like someone's just clearing their desk, so to speak, on a Friday before they jet out the door for the weekend. Those can wait until Monday morning.

I'm sick to death of putting in 70 hours a week for one client who is a thorn in one sales person's side, when I have six other active projects that demand my time, in a capacity that really is part of my job description, and nobody else can do.

On a good note, however, I was able to inform one client late in the day that we had their new data uploaded to our new server and had tested it using their logon/password, and it looks good, so they should be able to access it just fine. Bingo. They could.

Yes folks, Tom Cruise claims in an interview for GQ magazine that he has a spectacular sex life with Katie Holmes, because they have "such good communication skills." I shudder to think what those might be. Trust me--you don't want me to go there with any dialogue! Suffice it to say I have a very vivid imagination involving a Pony Express rider wearing spurs. Katie will indeed deliver that "mail."

Oh please, Tom. Your 15 minutes are up. You've been a punch line for a year now. First, Oprah and the couch. Then picking a fight with Brooke Shields for taking meds for clinical depression after she had her baby. Now this. When are you going to give it a rest . . . and us a break?

So MI-3 is due for release in the next few weeks. Sure, getting your name out there could be considered a form of promotion for the movie. But when other movie stars have a movie to promote, they give interviews to promote their movie, not their sex life. We really don't want to know. It's really a bit pathetic, and sounds like a middle aged guy trying to prove to the world that he isn't "over the hill" and is still attractive to much younger women. Nuff said.

This is so typical. I got kicked off the Leadership Committee at my company by my CEO after at least two years of being on it, and was informed of this on Monday by my boss. Personally, I don't give a rat's patootie, because I always hated those meetings and thought they were a huge waste of my time.

Yesterday, I hung around around until after the Executive Committee meeting was over to ask my boss whether I had to attend today's Leadership Committee meeting which always starts at 8am, after a 2 hour morning commute. He never got a chance to discuss it with our CEO, and told me "do what you have to do." Told him "Well, then, I'll see you at 11:00 at the Brunch Club meeting, and will try to get a seat next to you, if you let me know where you're sitting."

That didn't happen, because by the time we got to the conference room, people had already taken every seat at the table. My boss had forewarned me to tell another department head like me who had also been axed from the committee, but didn't know it yet, and showed up for the meeting that "I'd been given a reprieve to work on client XXX" if she asked me how I managed to get out of the meeting. I never thought she'd actually ask, but at lunchtime after Brunch Club, she walked into my office and asked. I grinned, and said "XXX," even though it was a complete lie.

Yes, I was working like a dog on that client's account, and yes, I was thrilled to get out of the meeting, but it wasn't that client who was keeping me from attending. I simply used it as an extremely plausible excuse, when pressed for an answer. I also didn't attend the afternoon session of the committee meeting after Brunch Club, nor did I attend the expense-account restaurant dinner after the meeting.

Mentioned to my boss that the other department head had indeed stopped by to ask why I wasn't there, and he replied that she'd been there taking notes all morning, looking around. This woman doesn't normally take many notes. Her office is next door to mine, and the walls are paper thin. She was there at the time. Fortunately my boss is pretty good at lip-reading, as am I.

I made it through a conference call with said client XXX this afternoon over lunch hour with two sales people of ours, one from NY, and the other who was in town from L.A. Every time I get off the phone with that client, I feel like I just won the reality game show "Survivor." Now the two sales folks are suggesting I travel out there to meet the client face to face to help increase their comfort level with us, since the client and I are both research people. Half of what we discuss on these calls sails right over the tops of the heads of our sales folks, but the client and I speak the same language. Okay, if I have to go, I have to, but I'm not going w/o the NY saleswoman. I'm so damn sick of being served up on a silver platter as the sacrificial lamb every time we have a "difficult" client. Thrown to the lions is more like it.

Let's put it this way: I composed a draft resignation letter last night at home, and don't even yet have a resume drafted. It's getting to be that bad.

I'm still on the Operations Committee, which meets tomorrow at 8am, so I have to remember to set my alarms an hour earlier than usual when I schlep up to bed this evening. It makes sense for me to be on this operations management committee, but not really the other one from which I got booted. Seriously, I prefer having to wake up at 5am only once every six weeks or so, instead of twice in a row. I don't care if 5 people within the company consider it a "demotion" of sorts. It allows me more time to get my job done during normal office hours.

Yesiree, the folks in OZ are on top of this little problem. Or should I say underneath it?

The model to the right is by another company in Idaho, located here for a mere $49.50.

Believe me, if I could strap one of these on one woman in particular, it would make my life so much easier . . ..

Finally broke down and bought a new pair of these. I've been wearing one brand or another of deck shoes since junior high school (Docksides, Sperry Top-Siders, or L.L. Bean). My last pair was a saddle tan color that I've had for a good 16+ years, and they were just shot to the point where not even saddle soap would get them looking reasonably clean, the heels and toes had worn down to the point that they were very thin, and they looked like hell. Okay, they weren't so bad that I had to tape the toes to the soles with duct tape, but they weren't too far away. I basically live in deck shoes or camp mocs all weekend, since I'm really not a sneaker person. These came in a wide width, so I ordered a 6 and they fit fine.

But deck shoes aren't really something you can wear to the office except perhaps on a summer Friday. Sperry now has expanded their line from the traditional deck shoe to other casual styles more suitable for the office. I'm not sure how quickly the other styles wear out, but the Sperrys that I grew up with wear like iron, have decent arch support, and cushy insoles. Figured I'd try another style more suitable for Spring and Summer in the office, when I actually have been known to occasionally wear a skirt. So, I bought these ballet mocs. These don't come in a wide width, so to compensate, I sized up a full size to a 7. Good move on my part. The soles on these and on the deck shoes are the same length, and I have the same 1/4"-3/8" of toe room in both. They still seem a bit narrow, but they're a fairly soft pebble grain leather instead of the stiff oil tanned leather like the deck shoes. They'll stretch out a bit with wear. Admittedly, the style isn't for everyone, but it's definately a "Froggie" shoe. I seldom wear heels unless they're attached to a cowboy boot.

Now I just need to go through my closet and toss out all the old shoes that are beyond repair. I'm really not Imelda Marcos class in terms of the size of my shoe collection. It's just that I never seem to bother to throw them out, long after they are shot, so they accumulate, even though I no longer wear them, which I freely admit is ridiculous. Time for the big tosser-oo.

Aww. How sweet of Vadim. It's a "Thank You" card for me from our Russian programmer. He gave notice last Friday I think, and I've heard his last day will be next Friday. He was in the office yesterday looking happier than I've seen him in years, with a newfound spring in his step. He does work from home a day or two a week, and wasn't in today, but left me this card last night on top of my keyboard. Dave got one as well.

Things got so bad at work that he quit without even having another job lined up. Believe me, many of us have contemplated doing so in recent months. The pressure is insane.

Vadim and I got along really well. I never barked instructions at him saying "I don't care how you do it--just do it" or anything like that. I always tested new executables, and if there were problems, I'd find them within minutes, while the source code was still fresh in his mind, so he didn't have to waste time tracking down where to look to implement a fix two weeks after he'd moved on to something else. And I was willing to spend an hour or two with him picking through code trying to backtrack to what the real cause of the problem was, because often what I saw happen to the numbers was caused farther back down the line than I would have thought. What that means is that perhaps an internal number was being miscalculated that had a ripple effect on other numbers that were calculated later and ultimately displayed as output in the report.

Programmers, like anyone else, really appreciate it when you don't try to tell them how to do their job, but offer a few suggestions as to where to start looking for the source of the problem . . . in other words, help them do their job. Maybe he wasn't the fastest programmer, but in the end, he always got it right.

It probably helps that I used to do a bit of programming myself, and have my own experience tracking down bugs, even though I never programmed in C++. I was formally taught FORTRAN in college as a chemical engineering major, never got the hang of COBOL after I switched to business, and taught myself BASIC for DOS 1.0 after I started working and had to learn it. The senior programmers, as opposed to the 20-somethings, have a good laugh with me when I freely admit that the last time I wrote any source code was 10 years ago, and at the time it was in GWBasic for DOS. God was I thrilled that my employer sprung for a copy of that software that actually came with a compiler so that I could create an executable from the native source code. Guys, I can read source code, but I can't write it anymore . . ..

They appreciate it because I'm not stepping on their toes acting like some bitchy know-it-all. If this thank you card doesn't prove that, I don't know what does. Adding his home email address means that he wants to stay in touch. I'm really going to miss Vadim. He was always perfectly professional, and although he has a great sense of humor, enjoying a good joke as much as the next person, he was never the type to do more than fantasize about playing a practical joke on anyone--at work, anyway.

Losing Vadim from staff is a bit like having a death in the family, but he seems so happy that I can't help but wish him the best.

Only in England, folks, would anyone think to weld most of a car body on top of a delivery van, then add a staircase.

So what do you do? Pop open the hatchback, and climb in the "guest suite" up top?

I wonder if there's a hot tub and wet bar up there. At any rate, I'm impressed with the custom body work, skill, and time it took to produce this nightmare on wheels. Presumably, it's street-legal.

Do you really want to see this woman reading serious news? I sure don't. Cute + perky does not equal authoritative. Her career to date has dictated that she be perky and cute. It's not her fault, and it's difficult to achieve day after day in the wee hours of the morning when most people are asleep. I applaud her for the phony persona.

But NO. Katie Couric reading serious news is so counter-intuitive to me, that if the rumors are correct, CBS News is ready to implode. Not that it would bother me, if it did. I haven't watched it since the 1980s, but still...

Are things really THIS BAD? Math is one of the only two things that I'm actually good at doing. I make my living doing math. Anyone who doesn't understand mathematical logic as opposed to English language logic will not get hired by me.

The sentence "All dummies are not stupid" implies that they are all smart. Say what? "Not all dummies are stupid" implies that some are smart, and some aren't. That might work for writing, since English majors tend to skip over this, and just let it go. But try telling me that "not all green jellybeans are yellow." By definition, none of them are yellow! Not one single green jellybean is yellow, so don't even try to tell me that some are, and my logic is wrong because I'm approaching it from a mathematical perspective. This is why English majors don't program computers. Make a logical mistake like that when you write source code, and you screw up the whole program.