Friday, January 28, 2005

ACC Hoops: "Cameron Fans Punk'd." And that was before the Maryland basketball team did it, too. 7:31:38 PM    comment []

My paternal grandmother, Isabel Frank Cone, was famously unsentimental, except in regard to her Irish Setters and her father, The Judge. Yet we calibrate meaning according to circumstance; one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me was the seemingly austere "you're a nice boy" with which she blessed me on the night before I moved to New York at the age of 22. In any event, her lack of sentimentality was not inherited by her survivng son, my uncle Terry, who called to request that I mark her centennial today by placing a flower on her grave, which I (also afflicted with a sentimental gene) did this afternoon. 7:29:40 PM    comment []

Blake Ross, Firefox guru and Wired cover boy, has a blog. "People sometimes ask why we work on Firefox for free. It gets hard to keep a straight face at 'work.'" 8:39:53 AM    comment []

A long, positive post from a local reserve officer serving in Iraq at the Diary of a Soldier blog. I was interested in his description of his commander: "She is a West Point Graduate, and her day job is a stay at home mom. But, when she puts on the Army greens, she is all about being a soldier. I am constantly amazed at her ability to transition from wife and mom to soldier. She is not only a tribute to women in the military but to all leaders in our profession." His nonchalant account of an aborted attack on his transport plane, and of the mortars that provide a soundtrack to mealtime, don't conceal the danger he and his troops face every day, they just make it sound like part of the job. Let's hope these elections are the start of something positive over there. 8:31:46 AM    comment []