old.ellsworthlink.net

A wonderful thing happened on the way to… uh… work? Well, it was still wonderful. And it is definitely something I have added to my mental “to do” list.

Thanks to our friend Katie for sharing her story.

Question: why are we so upset by Michael Vick and his dog fighting “issue” yet seemingly indifferent to the bullfights happening Pamplona (et al.) each year? What’s the difference? Kind of a real question, but also kind of a rhetorical one. Deb suggests the issue is simply that dogs are pets and bulls are, well, bulls…

This video is the answer to the question: “What is Colin’s current favorite game.” That’s right… Who hasn’t played a good game of Fall Over in their day.

I had a good old-fashioned LOL when I read the take on Silicon Alley Insider take on the press release Dow Jones issued about some General Manager changes and my coming back to The Wall Street Journal Digital Network.

I am currently in the middle of what amounts to a fairly major overhaul of ellsworthlink.net and there is a lot of stuff just piling up, especially on the right-hand side of the blog page… Lots of reasons for the changes: a badly needed upgrade to the blogging software—WordPress—to which I was at least 3 or 4 “point” versions behind (1.5 vs the current 2.2), the need to move from a really crappy ISP to a much better one, as well as a desire to experiment more with Web 2.0 technologies.

In any case, it isn’t going to stay this way. There will hopefully be significantly more functionality once things settle down, but not so much more that you can’t find your way around.

You also probably noticed that you did not get an email alert about this post. That functionality also broke with the site migration from IMHosted to HostGator. I’ve still got a list of who was on the updates before and I will send you all a note about how to “re-up” your subscription. And if you were annoyed by the emails, this will be a good time to not bother renewing. Or, if you’re a bigger geek than me, you may be subscribed to the RSS feed and reading it from your newsreader. (I’ve only just subscribed to the RSS feed as a part of this whole migration/upgrade exercise.)

Eventful day here in little ole Hoboken. This town floods VERY easily and apparently this is the worst flooding since a Hurricane in 1999! On the wettest day of the year we also managed to have a 4 alarm fire just up the street. A lumber store went up in flames about 5 blocks up from us. The flames were so intense we could see them from our window!

See the links below for pictures of our water-logged town:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sean123/

share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=8EYuWzNuycuZA

kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=17mud8e3.7vhtbeuj&x=0&y=-qqyreo

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisjur/460614929/

http://flickr.com/photos/67738072@N00/

These pictures were taken 1 or 2 blocks from our building: http://tinyurl.com/2gzprk

Here are some of the best pictures I’ve seen of the fire so far: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7267661@N02/sets/72157600081200694/

Video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0wuoHXzWNQ

Lots of video and pictures:

http://www.hoboken411.com

I will post more if I find em!

Deb

I’m trying to coin a new phrase, no more googling, the new thing is called yahoo-ing…

I decided to Yahoo my father, since it turns out he is actually on Wikipedia. Who knew my father was so active in the community, doing speaking engagements, etc.

For some reason I decided to Yahoo my maiden name and I came across this link. If you look at the bottom you will see a note about our wedding. I had no idea anything was ever printed into a newspaper, since I think I still have all the paperwork sitting around this condo somewhere (I’m a pack rat, I’m trying to get help).

I know I had previously Googled (in the pre yahoo days) Debra Ellsworth, but I don’t recall seeing that there were a couple other women named Debra Ellsworth. It’s very trippy to think there are other women with my exact same name.

I love that there are links to the real me as ad production contacts for both Dow Jones Online as well as SmartMoney, I wonder how long the SmartMoney link will stay up!

When I was young and just beginning to wrestle with such concepts, I remember literally giving myself a headache trying to wrap my little pea brain around the concept of eternity. “It’s a long time, so think of the longest time period you can think of and then know it is even longer than that, in fact it just keeps going on and on…” The internal monologue went something like that. Anyway, I’ve found most concepts to be a little easier to grasp than that—probably simply because I’m older (and wiser?) (well, older anyway).

Today, though, I read an article that gave me pause because of its scale—not in a spiritual way, but in a the-implications-are-so-big and the-inequality-is-so-great kind of way. The columnist from Yahoo! Finance (yes, I read it even when I’m not working) is Ben Stein (yes, of Win Ben Stein’s Money and Ferris Bueller fame) and much of the article didn’t stick with me except for the section entitled “Disparity by the Numbers” section, excerpted in part below:

The top one-tenth of 1 percent of earners in the nation earn about as much as the bottom 40 percent. That is, about 130,000 high-income Americans earn as much as the bottom 120 million Americans combined.

I always knew there was income inequality in the world, and that it wasn’t a first-world vs. third-world kind of thing. And I even knew that there were some really rich dudes. But the (emphasis added) portion really puts a fine point on it in my mind. That is a very few elites (the same elites who subscribe to the notion of the Wisdom of Crowds) exerting economic control over a whole lot of “crowd” (who very likely haven’t even heard of the book, let alone read it).

Anyway, the scale on both sides of that equation boggles my mind.

Merry Christmas! Colin, Deb and I had a great trip back to Michigan, despite my playing the role of Patient Zero in a bad Dustin Hoffman movie and spreading the Norovirus to no fewer than 5 people on the trip.

In any event, Christmas morning was a dream. Colin was as wide awake as the rest of us when we got up extra early and—after he really woke up—enjoyed the electric guitar from his grandparents. He had been making a habit of strumming the heat registers in the apartment, so we thought he might like the guitar. I think he digs it even if he doesn’t quite “get” it…

We had another Christmas with David and his family at mom and dad’s house. That’s Colin making friends with Samantha who was really good with him and David with his son Andrew. Though you can’t see it, Andrew got a remote control snake to scare his new sisters with, but when I overheard them asking to play with it, I gathered it wasn’t going to have the intended effect.

I imagine the last pictures are “obvious”… Deb and I were pretty happy about John’s t-shirt, though because I was engaging in my own little epidemiology experiment and getting people sick we had to wait longer than we wanted to give it to him. Our last Christmas was with Uncle John, Aunt Amy and Cousin Jake. We’ve always known Colin to be a bit of ham for the camera, but I think Christmas #3 turned him into a monster…

In any case, we really did have a wonderful time visiting family in Michigan. We will probably be quarantined for the first 48 hours the next time we visit, but hopefully it will be soon!

So Debra’s consolation for hitting the little 3-0 was to receive a very cool and creative 30-for-30 parcel from her mom and sister. They spent quite a bit of time amassing a collection of 30 goodies to celebrate Deb’s 30th birthday. They went so far as to even put 30 candies in several of the breast-related (ask Deb) objects. And, no, neither Deb nor I were observant enough to notice that (I’ll say it is because it was breast-related, not sure what Deb’s excuse is)… they had to point it out for us.

In any event, I’m sure the pictures make it clear she got some cool stuff and she was very excited about it!

Thanks Mary Ann & Suzanne!