Caralis

I did it and I'm damn proud of it

That's right I went to see Rocky Balboa today and I thought it was good!

It was a little too speech laden and had it's cheesy moments but I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was my guilty pleasure of the year.

I've been named Time Person of the Year!

Yes it's true, I have been named Time Person of the Year and so have you.

The year in review

Really can't add much here - just watch the video...

Fire in NewsBlade's Office Building

There was an electrical fire on Dec 9th at the office tower in which NewsBlade is located. The fire at One Broadway was apparently caused by an exploding transformer. Thankfully I was not in the building at the time, but tragically Kevin Fidalgo, an Nstar empolyee working on the transformer was killed.

We will have no access to the building until it is declared safe, which I am told may take a couple of days. As a result the biotech.newsblade.com site that is located in the data center in that building (the newsblade.com site is not) will be out of commission for a couple of days.

On Friday I was driving to a meeting when at 11:20 I noticed an email alerting me that the biotech site was down. Shortly after that I got a call from a friend asking me if I was alright. Obviously I was a bit perplexed by the question. He then continued to explain that my building was surrounded by fire trucks with ladders extending up the side. Later it was learned that those ladder's were being used to rescue the 30 or so people stuck on the roof. 100 people were treated for smoke inhalation and 30 or so were sent to the hospital.

It seems with any event like this there is always a strange set of seemingly unimportant happenings that leads to someone luckily not being somewhere they usually would be.

Strangely enough, the only reason I wasn't in the building at the time (I was planning on leaving the building at 11:15 for my meeting) was that I needed to scan an image of my kids Christmas picture and was unable to get the scanner in my office working. I had spoken with my father the night before (Thursday evening) and he suggested I stop by the Newspaper office that is next store to his store (Alamo Roast Beef) in the morning before my meeting and use their scanner.

On my way to my father's store I realized that I had left the picture at work and started to head to the office when on a whim I decided to just stop by and visit my father anyway and viola, I was not in the building.

I'm sure I would have been completely fine as 700+ people successfully evacuated the office building, but it is funny how even the smallest decisions can have such a big impact.

Pick a source any source

Guess which "news outlet" had the following stories in their Top Story section

• Feds: Mom, son faked retardation, got $200k
• Anti-Bush 'bat signal' ticks off neighborhood
• Doc jailed for illegally injecting the rich and famous
• Oprah's lost her way, gone white, rapper says
• Eastwood's war movie named best in 2006
• Cat falls 25 feet -- in slow, twisty motion

People magazine? Star? Entertainment Magazine?

How about

Nice work.

Should the new James Bond start a blog?

Well according to this New York Times article he should - or a least start reading them.

Looks like the intelligence community is taking heed of "Web 2.0" technologies and practices. They are only a couple of years behind current trends now!

There was a time when the drive for innovation was the other way around. Is this "reverse-innovation curve" due to open source software - it's hard to argue against it.