YES!!

YES! Wow! Unbelievable! Historic!

Barack Obama is our next president. After the long dark tunnel that was the last eight years,we can once again hope that America's future is brighter and that the best of what this world can offer is yet to come. While disappointments are sure to come, for now I choose to enjoy the moment. And consume every article on Politico.com.

The Huffington Post has a slide show on newspaper headlines from around the US, and around the world. More headlines here too.

My favorite is the Sun below "One Giant Leap for Mankind." Over the top yes, but sums up the feeling. The Chicago Times is more artistic and the Sioux City Journal simple but to the point.

Awareness Test

This was a fun exercise we did in one my MBA classes this week.



Here is the original that spawned the above and below, I think.

Seems there's a whole genre of videos on Youtube about awareness tests. Here, here and here. And a synthesis of three here.

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First Day at School

This past week I began a two year part time MBA program at Babson College. The Fast Track program is designed for the busy professional who doesn't want to give up his/her day job to become a full time student. It includes both distance / e-learning and face to face classes.

Our kick-off week entailed about 55 hours of classroom discussion, learning our way around the IT infrastructure supporting the classes and meeting our new classmates. Our 2010 class has about 95 students, broken into two sections. From here on out its mainly online with a couple weekends of face to face time.

It was great to meet all the new students, everyone was excited to begin their new MBA classes. Never having been a fan of school, it was refreshing to attend classes with students actively participating and really adding valuable insights based on past experience to some of our discussions. Perhaps this is the difference between undergrad and graduate courses. The average work experience for a student was 13 years! So its great to be able to absorb and learn from such a deep pool of knowledge.

Verizon

I recently purchased the new Verizon BlackBerry Pearl. I researched the pricing on Verizon's website and it quoted me a price about $100. So I went down to the Verizon store at the Cambridge Side Galleria ready to plunk down my money for a new phone and 2yr agreement. What ensued seemed like something froma used car dealership. First the Verizon guy asked me to login to my account to show him the price I was quoted on the Verizon site. Once he was satisfied that it was a legit price, he proceeded over 15-20 mins of constant back and forth with the 'back row' Verizon representatives. At the mall store there's the front row folks, and directly behind them is another row or reps who apparently have all the pricing power. From time to time he would update me on the 'success' or 'failure' of his ability to get me the same deal. Keep in mind this is a Verizon branded store not a generic cell phone shop. Over the 15-20 mins my wife observed that the back row reps were all fairly young (less than 21) and seemed to act like they were in an exclusive club and how dare anyone try to bargain with them! Finally the best deal they could offer to match their own online price was $150 and a mail in rebate of $50. So I said thanks, declined their counter-offer and went back home. Ordered the phone online for $100 and it showed up 2 days later. I was able to activate it over the phone and am quite happy with my new BB Pearl.

I also bought my wife a new phone via the web, but we still had to transfer the stored phone numbers so we went to another Verizon store this time in Everett on Mystic View Rd. Our experience here was what one would expect. Professional, courteous and efficient. We walked in, talked to the greeter, he took us over to the tech support folks, we gave them the phones and less than 10 mins later walked out with the phonebook transferred from old phone to new phone.

Moral of the story, if you want a new phone,try to do it online first for the best deals, and stay away from the mall stores where it seems that customer service takes a back seat to bratty behavior.

Familiar Feeling

Since moving to Boston in early 2001, I began to understand what it meant to be a sports fan in the city. For RedSox nation, The Curse, represented 86 years of disappointment. The Celtics were long past their prime. And the Patriots had last lost in SuperBowl XXXI in 1997.

But in 2004 all that loss, sadness and grief was buried and almost forgotten, the RedSox vanquished the Yankees after being down 3-0 after three games, and went on to win the World Series, finally beating the curse, and the Patriots won Super Bowl XXXVI. It seemed that Boston sports fans didn't quite know what to do. They were so used to being let down time and again, always being just so close and never quite going all the way. Now the city was on top and the feelings were entirely new though not un-welcomed. Eventually the 86 years of anguish finally began to fade away, as incredibly he RedSox won the World Series again in 2007. The Pats won again in Superbowls XXXVIII and XXXIX Boston sports fans were giddy with success.

In 2008, the Pats represented a chance to permanently erase Boston's history of perennial runner-up and establish the team as one of the greatest sports franchises of all time. The Pats stood at the end of the season 16-0, perfection. No other team in NFL history had accomplished such a feat. Entering Superbowl XLII they were 18-0. But then it seemed that the ghosts of the city's past came back to haunt the Pats. In the final 2 minutes of SuperBowl XLII, history was made, but not in the manner Boston fans were expecting. Yet in a way they were quite familiar with.

Yet again the city of Boston was the runner-up, to a team from New York, in a game they should have won handily. Boston fans will surely take the loss in stride and place it in their collective baggage of sports disappointments. Once again, taking comfort in that familiar almost forgotten feeling of coming up short at the end of the season.

BostonKnows

I've not posted to my blog in 3 months! No excuse beyond the usual work/holidays/time management issues. But this month saw the launch of the BostonKnows by Stephen Warley. Stephen sees the BostonKnows site as a way for local Bostonians (and surrounding communities) to provide local information to each other. As news becomes ever increasingly dominated by big media companies, truly local news and information often looses out to issues at the national and international levels.

This is where BostonKnows comes into the picture. It is a platform for locals to post interesting Tidbits of information as they uncover them in the course of their daily life in the city. Content and editing are done by the BostonKnows community.

Recent topics included Jetblue in Boston, Cheap Ski Deals and the Toscanini's Saga. Incidentally, while I love Toscanini's ice cream, I'm not sure what to make about the Save Toscanini site.

So if you're new to Boston or lived here your whole life, there's a lot you can contribute to the the BostonKnows site. Sign-up here.

Red Sox winners again!

When I first moved to Boston six years ago, I had no idea what I was really getting into. My airline ticket said Boston but we were going to live in Cambridge. Which was the same really, just across the river right? It didn't take long to figure out that the two cities, only separated by a river, are actually quite different. But the one thing that both cities agree on is a shared love for the Red Sox. Though, I'm sure a die hard Sox fan can make the distinction between a Cambridge Red Sox fan and one from a Boston neighborhood. The Broncos are loved in Denver, in college I was a true Buffs fan, but coming to Boston was an entirely different experience with the Red Sox. The Red Sox mean more to the city of Boston than the Statue of Liberty does to NYC. For the longest time, the city viewed the Red Sox as that younger sibling who has so much potential but always found a way to self destruct.

Its impossible to relate to the 86 year drought, having only just arrived to the area. But I seem to fit in now that the Red Sox are two time world champs in four years, as its a new experience for everyone in Red Sox Nation! I heard a commentator this morning use the word 'dynasty' to describe the Red Sox and their future potential. I can't imagine any Red Sox fan, past or future, ever using that word to describe their team. The 2007 and 2004 championships are sweet to be sure, but I for one, think the best series was the 2004 ALCS comeback against the Yankees. It was a microcosm of everything that the Red Sox were in the previous 86 years and everything they've been since. The themes of 'On the brink of elimination', 'Always losing to the Yankees' and 'always the underdog to the Yankees' were all a part of that series. So when the Red Sox came back to win in Game 7 it was thrilling, and as though the city's younger sibling had finally turned the corner. This year's ALCS against the Indians didn't have the same emotional impact, though the results were the same. Nothing brings out the worst/best in a Red Sox fan than playing the Yankees.

The 2007 Red Sox were unlike any other Red Sox team, they had the best record in the league, potential AL MVP, and they won the World Series. Not since Babe Ruth played baseball have the Red Sox been this good!

Summer Reading

Just got done reading Black Swan Green by David Mitchell. A fantastic book! And well worth adding to your list. Its about Jason Taylor, a 13 yeard old kid who lives in England during the late 80s. The book covers one year of Jason's life and each chapter is dedicated to a different month. Reading it, I felt like David had just turned 14 and decided to write a book about being 13. It was real on a level that captures what being 13 felt like.

Also I just finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. While it took me about a week to complete, I heard some had completed it within a day of receiving the book! Its as good as the rest of the series, no let down but definitely darker. Of course once you figure out that Harry....... :) Nah I won't spoil it for the few who haven't finished reading it yet. Triniwife and I each got our own copy because well we couldn't agree on who would read it first!

Wii Haaa!!

I just received my brand new Wii! Purchased from Walmart.com with a couple of bundled games and an extra controller. So far the wii-rience has been great! You can actually work up a sweat doing the boxing, though that might be because I don't go to the gym much..... I'll have to get some wii-cessories such as a neoprene sleeve for the controllers. I'm sure the nice white controllers will get dirty over time.


I bought Big Brain Academy, Marvel Alliance and Super Paper Mario. Though I can't wait for Madden 2008 to come out as its expected to have some enhancements to take advantage of the wii-motes. Haven't tested out these games as yet though. Only tried the Sports disk that comes with the Wii. It includes Tennis, Boxing and a couple others. Should be good fun at parties as they are easy to play, though Trini-wife can't seem to play virtual tennis any better than regular tennis.

Have you moved a house before?

We've ll had to move from one residence to another in our life. At Harvard Law School though they're actually moving the whole house!



And this video gives a little background on the subject.

Really Big Mango

Mango
Originally uploaded by GianJ

We bought this huge mango at our local supermarket not to long ago. The sticker said it was from Nicaragua, and cost $1.25. Mangoes are just so expensive in the US. In Trinidad I can get 3-4 mangoes for the same $1.25. Next to the mango is a grapefruit and a regular size can of lentils.

Not very many people know this, but a green mango cut into pieces, served cold with salt, black pepper, lime, lemon, pepper sauce (if you have it), chopped jalapeño and diced garlic all mixed together makes for a super snack!

Trini-wife insists on eating the mango ripe, because its sweeter. Trini's know where its at though, nothing beats a green mango chow, 'cept perhaps a green plum chow!

Memorable Quote

Its not often I find myself reading a magazine and the author's words stand out as being profound. But reading this month's Nick Hornby monthly column 'Stuff I've been reading' in Believer magazine, I found a line that stood out from Nick's always entertaining column.

"... I found myself wondering whether the complication of language is in inverse proportion to the size of the subject under discussion."

You can follow the link to see the whole article, but the context of Nick's observation was comparing two author styles around the use of the word 'death' and the author's topic. One author used death in reference to her country plagued by corruption, terrorism and despotism. The other author uses it to describe bored spouses in a middle-class marriage. I haven't read either book, so I'll take Nick's description at face value.

But really I find that today especially in the business world we often try to make things sound bigger, more important and vital to the health of the business by using language that hides the true meaning of what it is we're trying to accomplish. The flip side is IMing, texting or other new forms of communication. Here even the most important events are whittled down to as few characters as possible. Checkout the Wikipedia entry on SMS.

Of course the lone exception to this is the US Government. They manage to make both the simplest and most complex issues sound simultaneously trite & insignificant and important & impossible to comprehend.

SEND

Oh dear, has it really been almost two months since I posted to my blog. My only excuse is that I recently changed job roles at work and have been concentrating on that. However, I'm back now.

I just got done reading Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe. A fantastic read on how to make the most of email. I, like most of you have used email for a long time, though I don't think I ever went through some sort of formal class or training on how to write email. In school we learn about spelling, grammar, how to write an essay, research papers, how to footnote, reference and all manner of rules and styles around formal writing. But email it seems we take for granted.

Its assumed that everyone knows the rules for using email and how to use it effectively. When was the last time you saw a class at your university or provided through your employer on writing effective email? It seems odd, because in today's high tech world we spend large volumes of time in front of the computer writing email, using IM and texting.

The authors of Send, David and Will, are editors for the NY Times and Hyperion Books respectively. Their book provides lots of insight and is written in a very easy to understand and humorous tone.

One of the things I never used except on rare occasions was the Exclamation Point '!'. I always felt it tended to overstate things. However the authors think that because conveying affect in email is difficult, an exclamation point can help to make your email more human. For example 'Thanks' vs 'Thanks!' or 'Hooray' vs 'Hooray!'. Without the exclamation point each word sounds kinda flat and almost sarcastic.

There are lots of other such examples and tips in the book, so I highly recommend you read it if you use email for work, or for general correspondence with friends and family.

Indiana vs NYC

For my job I get to see some of the more interesting parts of the US. Places such as Topeka KS, GreenBay WI, Des Moines IA and most recently Columbus IN. Not that there is anything bad about these places, the people were friendly and those native to the area would never dream of living anywhere else. But I guess since I've lived in a variety of places in the US and around the world it seems weird to want to live your whole life in a single small city in under populated parts of the US. Of those I talked to, many stated reasons were that it was safe to raise a family, their own family lived in the area, if they moved elsewhere it would only be for 1-2 years before they came back so why bother going at all. They accepted that there were less activities to do as compared to a big city but they could always go there on vacation. They have lived their whole life in a single place and couldn't dream of leaving it. This applies to those in big cities too. I have friends and family that live in New York city, having grown up or lived there most of their adult lives and have no intention of leaving the Big Apple. What would be the purpose? Everything they need and could want is available to them in NYC or they can go on vacation to see the rest of the world.

One of the fun things to do when visiting these places is to checkout local food oddities. One such food item I found in Columbus IN, was the Gnaw Bone pork tenderloin sandwich. Its a large, and lightly breaded piece of tenderloin. It was pretty good but could have used some pepper sauce.


Recently I visited NYC and went to Katz's Deli, its the one from the movie 'When Sally Met Harry'. This wikipedia article can fill you in. I had the salami sandwich which was just great. The plate of pickles was an interesting side dish, though I only had 2 of the 12 pieces that I got.

Two great sandwiches from two very different places. Hopefully you get the chance to experience both. So what city do you call home and would you ever move from it? Why or why not? And is there a special food item unique to your area?

Frozen in Cambridge

Winter has come to Cambridge with a vengeance. Too bad as I was really enjoying the mild winter in December. We've gotten some snow and wind, oh the wind. And recently we've had some arctic air come down over Cambridge and drop temperatures in the single digits with wind chills in the negatives. On a recent trip to Indiana I missed the cold weather in Cambridge only to get some freezing rain in Indiana. The pictures are from the next day and yes the entire tree is coated in ice, it might look like water dripping of the tree, but trust me its ice. All of the trees in Columbus IN were coated, making it look like Christmas again.

RSS & Reading Blogs

If you've found that you like to read blogs, except you can't always find the time to go visit all your favorite blogs. Well one answer is to get a feed reader or other blog aggregator that will get the most recent posts from all your favorite blogs and either put them on a single webpage or will email you the latest entries.There are many aggregators out there, I think the most popular is Google Reader and there are some that plugin to your favorite browser such as Sage for FireFox.

However, if you are inside a company firewall and there are internal company blogs you like to read, some of the external readers such as Google Reader or Yahoo may not work. Also if, like me, you spend the majority of your day in Outlook, then finding a reader that plugs-in to Outlook can be useful. I have found, and use, RSS Popper. Which is free and adds another folder in your Inbox to collect the various blog feeds. It also works great with internal blogs and external blogs.

You can get feeds from a blog by subscribing to the blog's RSS / Atom feed. Using RSS Popper to subscribe to a blog's feed is a simple matter of copying the RSS link and pasting it into the correct RSS Popper field and clicking OK. You may have seen Atom on a blog page, it is just another method that a blog author/ blog site can use to syndicate their blogs. Both RSS and Atom are transparent to you the reader and as a reader, you only care about the RSS/Atom link. The feed for this site is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/RandomThoughtsFromATrini

So go out and start gathering your favorite feeds into your favorite feed reader.

Poor Grapefruit, Good Callaloo

I'm not sure on the optimum way of removing the peel from a grapefruit, but I'm pretty sure Trini-wife's way is not it. At the end of the process there was more juice in the container than left in the grapefruit! She did make some great callaloo (green stuff) for a dinner party though. The dhalpuri roti (yellow stuff) was purchased from Ali's Roti Shop in Dorchester. Actual Callaloo leaves are hard to come by in Boston, although a local farmer's market has it from time to time. So she substituted spinach instead which does the job just fine. Here's a recipe, you can skip the crab part and add some cubed squash instead.

Err

Err and Ignignokt caused much stress and confusion for some and fun for others in the city of Boston this week. On Wednesday there were bomb reports all over the city that devices which contained components of IEDs were placed on bridges and buildings in the city. I-93, the major interstate thru Boston was shut down for a period along with several bridges, major roads around the city and the subway as bomb squads removed the offending devices.
However, the devices turned out to be nothing more than a bunch of LEDs on a circuit board with some Duracell D batteries. Any why were they placed there? All part of a viral marketing stunt gone wrong, for the Cartoon Network's Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Turner Broadcasting owned up to the scheme and offered to pay the city's costs. Funny or Serious?

Here's what I found interesting about the whole thing:

• The 'devices' were in place for 2-3 weeks before being found on Wednesday, if they were actual bombs then that doesn't say much for our post 9-11 security.
• They shoot a water cannon at the 'device' to disable it. Umm very high tech.
• Now some folks in other cities where the ad campaign didn't create a huge public scare are selling the devices on ebay for about $600.
• The blogs and other internet sources had it figured out by about noon. Yet the authorities continued their efforts through 5pm. Timeline.
  

While you can't fault the Boston authorities for doing what they did, since they have to take every threat seriously, a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. Prosecuting the two guys who were responsible for putting up the signs seems a little overzealous since their intent was not malicious.

Its not like incidents like this have not happened before. The Orson Wells War of the Worlds radio cast in 1938 certainly caused quite a stir. Let's hope future events are as benign as this one.

Birds

After my recent trip to Trinidad, it would appear I have bee bitten by the bird watching bug. While in San Jose I saw this humming bird taking a bath in a water fountain. Not sure what kind it is, but it seemed very interested in the water.

San Francisco

This past week I went out to San Jose and managed to go out to dinner in San Francisco with a friend of mine who I hadn't seen in well over a year! Anyway it was fun catching up with him. Its always fun driving around SF what with all the hills some of them are quite steep. Parking on a hill is a very interesting process. We went out to dinner at Zarzuela, a restaurant that my wife and I visited once upon a time when we were still dating. The food this time around was not as great as I remembered. Not sure if I changed or the place did. Just across from the restaurant was a Swensen's an icecream shop that I was not familiar with. My friend however couldn't wait to go for dessert. Apparently he is a big fan but the one near his house closed and now he has to go without. So we went and he got his favorite flavor, Swiss Orange Chip.
Certainly looks just yummy, however it tastes like Orange and Chocolate, which I guess is the point. I guess I should state , I'm not a fan of fruit and chocolate so this was really really bad. However, my friend thoroughly enjoyed it. And I guess he's not the only one. Someone actually set out to recreate this stuff . To each his own I guess.