How to type with one hand (normal keyboard)

Maltron one handed lefty

Well it looks like there is already a booming one handed keyboard market so I'll stop prototype development. The other option is just to figure out how to get Madeline to type for me instead of crying for milk. With enough time I think I can get there.

Sarah isn't pushing the book but is reading it. She took some quiz that tries to give your baby a personality test and determined that Madeline falls into the categories of "Spirited" and "Grumpy". From what I can gather that is a tough combination where a "Lazy" and "Happy" baby would be very easy to care for. But given our own personalities it is only fitting to have a spirited and grumpy baby.

I also scanned through the book that Scuz and Erin got us that has quotes at the bottom of each page. I liked the following quote from Mother Theresa. She was very smart.

"The hunger for love is harder to remove than the hunger for bread."

I may have caused this insomnia inadvertently by going to the MIT Venture Capital conference today for a few hours. In general I heard a bunch of people talking about the future of wireless and their many investments. The woman from Intel said that we should expect more hardware products integrated with services, like the iPod or Tivo. I was tempted to pitch her on the laptop lo-jack but our patent has likely lapsed because of we didn’t want to pay the $1,500 in taxes on it. Why should an inventor need to pay taxes on a patent that isn’t making any money? I thought the cell phone always was integrated with a service but I guess her point is that there will be more types of hardware.

I then listened to Allaire talk about Bright Cove. The business strategy for Bright Cove sounded similar to a business model Chris, Peter, and I were talking about before we all went our separate ways as the ChannelWave management diaspora. But Allaire had done a far more competent job than we would have done including getting strategic investment from AOL/Time Warner and placing Barry Diller from Interactive Corp. on their board. Maybe it was a good thing we didn’t try to play in that space. We would have gotten crushed like a grape. But seeing an idea I had come to life and having little role in it left me with a feeling that I may just be doomed to become a sideliner in the whole information revolution.

So hanging out in bed with Madeline and Sarah made me wonder silently to myself about the future. I wondered about whether Madeline would be disappointed in me for not being a great Internet magnate titan or the molecular biologist that discovered the secret to everlasting life without aging. Will I ultimately be a disappointment to her? Where will the money come for this house we need to move into when we get bigger than the three of us if I can’t be the founder of the next Google? Sure, these aren’t things that should keep anyone up at night. But they do work there way into my head.

We had watched March of the Penguins earlier tonight. Maybe it is best to be satisfied that the chick makes it back safely into the water to form the next generation. It is getting colder outside and we felt it on our walk through Brookline today. Tomorrow will be the first Pats game where I will need the full winter treatment.

I don’t know if I received love for debate and being contrarian from frequent interactions with my grandfather or an intellectual gene put into place through years of genetic selection of rabbis and philosophers. Eddie’s family, the Wigdor’s, are descended from the Rabbinovich family, one of the longest lines of rabbis so it is likely that this is the case. Eddie was cynical. It may have been his age and often times it was just from having been a business person for his whole life with the experience to spot crap when he saw it. When I went into business selling products over the web with VirtuMall he was astounded by the value of Netscape and other free Internet services. He kept asking “How can you make money on the Internet if everything is free?” It took the crash of 2002 to see the wisdom in his cynicism. He also challenged me when I was dating Nadia, a rabbinical student. He knew I was an atheist so he would ask “How can you be an atheist and marry a rabbi?” Nadia and I broke-up over this issue a few years later. Like me, Eddie was likely an atheist. He was skeptical of what claims had been made about God. But that didn’t change how he felt about his culture, history, and religion. He lived in a house with two sets of dishes and ate Kosher meals every day of his life.

I don’t remember Eddie as much from his youth other than from what I could gather he might have been like from stories he told or stories told to me about him. I remember him mostly from my own youth. It seems that from the perspective of a child grandparents start out antiquated and are born balding with grey hair. My grandfather liked to say little phrases to me playing with words and numbers and would say them to me even when I was beyond the age to just giggle about them. I can still hear him say “ABC Goldfish. MNO Goldfish. SAR!” or “Why did six eat seven? Because seven ate nine!” He also would ask questions that could confuse a little kid like “What would happen if a snake ate it’s tail?”.

When I came to Toronto he knew that I liked to play baseball but wasn’t a sports fan himself. But he took me to the Toronto Blue Jays game when I came to town and marveled at the new stadium and how much it cost the city. He liked to give me updates on how well the Blue Jays were playing, especially when they were playing well during the Red Sox poorer years in the eighties. More than once I received a blue jays jersey that I wasn’t sure whether to wear or not. He would also, with my grandmother and aunt, take me to the science or art museum in Toronto to look and learn about the world. When I came to town he and my grandmother would look for an event that might entertain me during my stay. He always wanted to know how I was doing in school, what I was studying, and to talk and compare how different things were from the US and Canada.

We didn’t go out to eat very often when I visited Toronto. We would sit at the long table at 260 Heath Street Apt. 1004 and discuss matters of great importance like the origin of life, what the meaning of quantum physics was, the cause of the middle east crisis, the benefits of socialized health care. While at the dinner table he was always very fired-up to talk about something that had just come fresh from the newspaper or radio. It was a contrast to when I would call him on the phone to wish him a happy new years, happy birthday, or to thank him for a gift. On the phone he was a man of few words thanking me for the call and then saying he had to go. He probably never got into the habit of low cost calls to talk long distance on the phone. He likely remembered back to the days when you paid by the letter for a telegraph whenever I called.

We did go out a restaurant a few times. I recall one place that was specially designed for children. The restaurant was decorated like a circus like atmosphere with an organ in the center and fresh popcorn on the tables. While we were sitting there was a man at the table next to us who was smoking. While this was long before the days when smoking was disallowed in bars across America Eddie took offense to the man and challenged him by telling the people next to us to stop smoking. I could see he was protective of us and willing to stand-up to make it known what was and was not acceptable regardless of what was allowed by laws. I am a non-smoker as is everyone in my family and everyone I have ever dated. He was a non-smoker in an earlier era when people smoked in their offices and doctors recommended brands of cigarettes.

He liked fresh air like the kind he breathed while traveling through the National parks in California with a travel companion he met on the way. While looking through some old photographs I found a carefully annotated journal of this trip with photographs next to descriptions of the journey. I don’t picture him as a young man needing a large social circle so much as someone with an urge to explore and to do so predominantly alone.

I can’t remember my grandfather without my grandmother. They were only apart after she died and he was crying, lonesome, upset, and worried about what would become of him. He looked different than I had ever seen him before, vulnerable. Part of him, something that propped him up every day was his relationship with Evelyn, his wife and companion. I had traveled to visit my grandparents while looking to make a movie called “Manufacturing Attraction”, a documentary on the shift to more mechanized forms of people meeting, dating, and connecting. I wish I had taken a video tape of him telling the story of how he met my grandmother. He loved to tell it. He had met a girl in New York and been interested in going out with her on a date. When he went to find her she wasn’t there but Evelyn, her roommate was available and he fell in love with her. He had found a soul mate and they stayed married for the rest of their lives, taking many trips together in their seventies and eighties and then propping each other up and caring for each other as they aged once they could no longer travel.

Eddie was a lover of the world who posted an Atlas in his bathroom and would buy detailed coffee table sized Atlases to look at. He had during the course of a lifetime traveled to the many places he had seen on the maps. I remember as a young child getting presents from these travels like a small wooden boat he had bought in Fiji. Among the books he raved about was John Irving’s Son of the Circus, set in a foreign modern landscape of India.

He was an early traveler doing business in Japan and China as an importer looking for electronics lines to represent in Canada. Because he was an individualist he had set out to build his own small business, as a lone salesman pitching a unique bag of goods. I know of two product lines that he sold that were very successful. One was the take a number systems available in supermarkets, bakeries, and deli counters where you take a number and go to the front of the line when your number is called. He also sold the type of intercom systems that were installed in high schools to announce to everyone that homeroom would be five minutes longer, or at the airport that a flight had been delayed.

He had later in his business life gotten interested in some more esoteric lines like a camera that took 3-D stereoscopic pictures, and a pencil with a series of discardable plastic tips with short sharpened pieces of lead in them. Like many other men, he was a gadget fan, the remnants that I could see in the Toronto apartment when he was so fragile were multiple reading machines for the blind. He was trained as an electrical engineer and even went to work for the army to help fit fighter planes to work properly in World War II. Apparently planes built to American standards wouldn’t always work for the Brittish so they needed to make sure certain parts, like the part where they drop bombs through, was aligned properly so that the bombs would drop on their targets rather than explode in the plane. On one of his missions they were testing the bomb release areas using explosive flares and the problem did occur that the bomb wouldn’t release. So he was flying in a plane above a flare he had just dropped into the chute that was capable of blowing-up a large chunk of the plane where he was sitting to do the experiment. Luckily the flare was a dud and didn’t explode even after landing, but it was a close call for him and myself (born two generations later). When he told stories of his work I could tell that work and engineering was a real love for him.

He was an athletic man who enjoyed swimming throughout his life. I recall one story that he had gone swimming one morning in the Fjords in Norway in water so cold that the locals didn’t dare to swim in it. He was a good structured lap swimmer who, even as his health was beginning to fail, continued to go daily to the JCC for a swim. I heard that he also was a tennis player. When he turned 65 he made some new friends who were 40 at the time and gave them a run for their money when he played tennis against them. It was only a broken hip that slowed him down and even then he continued to walk in the halls of his building despite failing joints.

In his final years he still loved to work and was looking for products for people handicapped like himself with limited eyesight or progressing deafness. I wonder what he would have been involved with had he been an fresh entrepreneur in the internet age. For me, having followed a similar path as an Internet entrepreneur his first question to me whenever we would meet would be the familiar inquisitive version of hello to a business person “How is business?”

He died of shock in the hospital after asking for his daughter Nancy to bring him his transistor radio so that he could listen to the news. He wanted her to make sure there were batteries in it.

I am very much his grandson.

Saturday, the day that he died, was also Sarah’s 30th birthday, a major milestone of itself. For my 30th birthday I gathered together a large group of friends, including Sarah, for a wild trip to Vegas. For Sarah’s 30th birthday we went out on Friday night to celebrate with her friends from college and my parents had gotten their first taste of babysitting Madeline. Then on Saturday Sarah and I were sick all day with the flu and/or hangovers and debated going out for a birthday celebration at the Falks’ house where Lisa had procured an ice cream birthday cake to commemorate the occasion. When we finally decided we couldn’t go out the group celebrating at the Falks gathered around the phone to sing Sarah a Happy Birthday. About an hour later my mother called to let me know that Eddie had died.

On Sunday Sarah and I walked through Brookline to Matt and Kate’s to watch the Patriots get trounced by the Chief’s. Tom Brady had a career high stat, 4 interceptions. On the way we bumped into Gadi from ImprovBoston and we stopped to chat about the baby, Thanksgiving, Arizona, Boston, whatever. It took about an hour and a half to walk down Harvard Avenue to Allston. We always seem to meet people in Coolidge Corner. It’s one of the reasons that Sarah and I don’t ever really want to leave the city to move to the suburbs. We love bumping into random people we know.

At night we watched Layer Cake, an ok movie along the lines of Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The movie was mildly entertaining but what I was more than amazed by was that Madeline fell asleep on my chest with her face down. Her arms were wide around me holding me like she was trying to hug me but with such a small body I felt like underneath her I was her whole world and that she knew enough instinctively to enjoy embracing me. Although I should have moved her to the bassinet I preferred having her there on my chest because it was such a great feeling. Instead I asked Sarah to get some photographs of the event. I am not sure yet since it happened so recently but it will probably remain a major highlight in my memory.

I flew to Toronto on Monday morning on a small plane that made me a bit dizzy from the turbulence. Because we had been to Toronto less than a year ago for my grandmother’s funeral the chain of places and events were familiar this time. We were going to the same funeral home, the same grave site, and then see the same relatives and friends who were there to comfort us. It feels odd when a funeral becomes something familiar since death is such a singular event.

At the funeral I was the person with the six week old baby, the new hope and generation to contrast a sudden end of an older generation. People were congratulatory and interested in looking through the short stack of pictures of Madeline that I had quickly cut out from a printout on the ink jet printer at 4 am on my way to the flight. People had all heard that there was a great grand daughter that had just been born before his death. It made things at least a little more fair and mirrored the standard messages in the prayers for a funeral – Adonai giveth and Adonai taketh away or life is a journey and the journey itself is eternal even if the traveler is not.

This year has been a very major year for me. I lost my last grandparents, started a new job/company, got married, and had a baby. Those weren’t the exact list I had put down at New Years when one of the items that made my top ten list for annual to dos was to become a male exotic dancer and another was to appreciate Sarah more often. I didn’t actually go anywhere exotic like in prior years. This year all of the events occurred around me, some of which I could control and others where I was mainly a spectator. So I feel like an alien life tourist, inhabiting a human body for the period of one life, on a trip I bought in a sci-fi mall, to experience what it is like to be a human.

We looked through a number of pictures from older days. Some had the amazing look of being perfectly set in another era. One had the 1930s with young campers dressed in clothing from the Great Depression looking vaguely like the Little Rascals gang. Another picture showed great uncle Jack with a military uniform on and a rifle in his hand for World War II. He had been 26 but drafted for war anyways. The century has been a big one where at my grandfather’s birth the horse and carriage was commonplace and beginning to be replaced by the automobile. Now at his death I could take breaks from the relatives and friends to review my life by flying like Superman, through the satellite imagery of Google Earth first by looking from above at every address that I had ever lived and then to escapes to Mt. Kilimanjaro, the Grand Canyon, and Venice.

“Don’t take Thanksgiving too seriously.”

The basic challenge as I see it is that Thanksgiving makes each person answer a number of major questions in a social situation that tend to linger unanswered for a long period of time and once opened lead to a number of painful discoveries.

Tough question number 1: Who is in my family?

While this may seem to be a simple question there are a number of situations in everyone’s life that tend to make figuring out this question a sticky proposition. The first category of these is whether estranged people should be considered part of the family. Some families I know have to split Thanksgiving into the two estranged halves of a pair of sisters or a child and parent who no longer get along. When a father doesn’t approve of the lifestyle of their gay, drug addled, or politically contrary child Thanksgiving is the perfect time for the child or parent to express their distaste for the other’s lifestyle by not inviting them or refusing to come to Thanksgiving. If the invitation does get extended in a hope to patch differences then it is a good way to create some fun fireworks at dinner once the source of conflict is raised.

Single people in a relationship face the tough decision of evaluating their current boyfriend or girlfriend to determine whether they are ready or appropriate for provisional inclusion in the family. I have seen Thanksgiving break-up relationships because suddenly two people realize that their significant other is not really significant enough to make the transition from a cool friend to a family insider. One friend of Sarah’s made a realization about her relationship when neither she nor her boyfriend even discussed whether they would go to each other’s Thanksgiving meals.

For those people orphaned from home or orphaned from their whole family they need to figure out within their circle of friends which family they can latch onto in a pinch. At the same time families, who know who the orphaned roamers are can get competitive for the roamer to commit that their extended family is theirs. In general these orphaned roamers are the easiest component of Thanksgiving but they present an interesting wild card just in case everything looks like it is going to work out.

People also face the challenge that they are often in a relationship where they have more than one family to tend to. So if each person has a significant other with their own family to define then a family of 8 people can quickly balloon into expanding this question into 16 different families causing a massive web of conflicts when it comes to including all of the families in one place at one time.

Tough question number 2: What is an acceptable family dinner?

Every family that I know has a group of people who don’t agree on the ideal food. Vegetarians generally don’t like turkey and can be disturbed by the focus on killing animals either in general or in non-humane anti free-range fashion. So there is always the added stress of whether the whole family, once it has been determined, can sit in the same place and eat the same meal. Meat eating people like myself don’t want to be downtrodden by the vegetarians and vice-versa leading to some fun food related tensions around things like segregation of stuffing, gravy, and seating. Ethnic differences can often come into play. The movie “The Feast” shows some of the variability of conflict in action. People also make mistakes with the food. At one Thanksgiving, an Asian one, they accidentally purchased a smoked turkey instead of a plain one and it tasted awful to everyone there.

People also never can collaborate to pick an appropriate time for dinner. The party people want to go out in the early evening to see their high school friends who are in town to see their family for a few days. The general variability of eating schedules for a large number of people makes it tricky to schedule the whole family. Some people won’t eat before dinner time out of fear that they will throw off a carefully constructed diet conscious eating schedule.

The schedule challenge often gets complicated by question number one challenge of people being included into multiple families. In my case the basic issue is that you can’t be in two places at once so I need to go to two different Thanksgivings that by logic should be at two different times. This is doable if both families are in the Boston area but never worked too well when my girlfriend's family was in upstate New York. One solution to this is to move the holiday a full day or week away for one family which is often my preference.

I can imagine that a gigolo lifestyle or a couple of family divorces could lead to the split problem on a far larger scale. It isn’t just a logistical challenge because not appearing is an admission that one family half is more important than the other which also can lead to flying cranberry sauce.

Tough question number 3: Can we pull off the logistics?

The logistics of the Thanksgiving meal are already handicapped by the complexity of the planning process around the holistic questions of defining families and meals. But the meal itself involves a lot of timing on many people’s parts. The advent of cell phones may help to co-ordinate people who are late but it also has led to people trying to time dinners more precisely to come and go near meal times. I would like to see the cell phone usage chart on Thanksgiving. I used mine about twenty times this year because it always takes more time than expected to get the baby out the door and we had a little problem walking a Husky. I can only imagine, having seen Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, how complicated traveling during peak travel dates from a foreign city to see my family would be. Someone also thought it would be a good idea to have people cook things that take over seven hours to prepare like turkey in order to complicate the logistics so that while people are already stressed out about their complex web of interpersonal relationships they also get further stressed when the expected food to calm them down is still raw because it wasn’t placed in the oven soon enough.

So Thanksgiving is an anthropologists dream to study the American human getting stressed out over the simple task of eating dinner with the family. I have enjoyed it more than ever the past few years not just looking for trouble but seeing people together and having fun chatting with people in my family who I don’t get a chance to see every day. I also love complex logistics and enjoy watching a good fight every now and then.

So I used 11 out of the 12 credits on my card by not deigning to drink the 1 credit wine. I then proceeded to purchase four bottles of wine, two of which I had tasted, and the other two in an attempt to meet Sarah’s request for a Castlerock Chianti. When I arrived home it was time to make dinner with Matt and Sarah. He had brought asparagus and porterhouse steaks. This is when I discovered that we don’t have our own supply of tin foil. Every time someone comes over they look at us cross-eyed because we don’t have our own tin foil. Matt actually brought his own tin foil. I also discovered once again how crappy our oven is. When we turned on the broiler the burners at the top were mainly useful for putting out flames. Since the pilot lights and the electric clicker built into the stove don’t work I was using the bic long tailgating lighter. The lighter kept going out whenever it approached the burner and then after letting the burner build some gas the burner formed what looked something like a blue version of the horsehead nebulae and then died out. Later once the steaks and asparagus had been cooked the broiler decided that it would make it nearly impossible for me to turn the knob so I spent five minutes wondering whether I would have to shut the gas off on the stove.

To cope with this gas problem and because we were hanging out with a more professional drinker than myself we drank three bottles of wine between the three of us in less than four hours. This wouldn’t be too impressive, or the cause of this awful sore throat if Sarah wasn’t breast-feeding and only drinking a glass of wine. So I may have drank somewhere between one and two bottles of wine on my own and I was plenty lucid as we were chatting about whether Dick had ever posted a blog about his travels. Apparently he did but I still don’t have the URL for it.

So I was just getting over my Saturday night hangover and Madeline care taking activities on Sunday morning when I went to Foxboro to watch the Patriots try to trounce the Saints. I do feel empathy for the folks who were made homeless by the hurricane but I didn’t feel any pity or empathy for the Saints. I just wanted to see the Patriots get a clear and decisive win. That didn’t happen although the Pats were winning and in control until they worked hard to let the Saints nearly tie the game on the last play after having been up by three scores (two touchdowns and a field goal). We had a beer at the game and then a burger at the Funway. I couldn’t really drink my beer at the Funway as we watched the Bengals and the Colts play. The Colts look very difficult to beat this year. Hopefully we can meet them again in the playoffs and ruin their hopes for a Superbowl again. The Superbowl is nice but beating the Colts is like beating the Yankees. It means more than the Superbowl itself to me because I know them so well as the enemy.

So when I got home we had another little meat and drinking party. This time it was to crack open the 1996 champagne that we had gotten for our wedding from Jeff and Meredith and were waiting to drink all summer. Jeff and M had brought a thick stack of filets from Whole Foods that once again were cooked in the broiler from hell along with the leftover asparagus that we hadn’t cooked on Saturday night. We drank the champagne, two bottles of white wine, and two bottles of red wine. The steak was a great cut and I ate mine about as close to raw as you can before risking death.

So I awoke on Monday morning feeling like crap and still feel like crap despite drinking lots of fluids, OJ, earl grey tea, hot chocolate, coconut milk soup from the Thai place, whatever. I just feel like someone took some sandpaper to my throat. I did manage to buy Earl Grey tea, which Ami noted we never have, and tin foil at the Stop and Shop last night!

Yuval and Molly are teaching Gabriel to be bilingual in Hebrew so the apartment is filled with books that would look familiar children’s classics like the hungry caterpillar but the words are in Hebrew. Looking at them I was thinking about how I couldn’t even read or speak enough Hebrew to read those short children’s books. They made me feel the fear of being illiterate or as a late stage Alzheimer’s patient as I imagined what it would be like if every language were to be foreign to me. I also wished that I could speak another language with Madeline and had some vague dreams of filling our apartment with French children’s books and calling a phone pal via Skype to teach myself French as Madeline ages.

On the car ride out to the airport I listened to an interview with Joan Didion. I remember her as an essayist from my AP English class in high school. She wrote an essay or a book of essays called Slouching Towards Bethlehem that I remember were used to show us young incompetent writers how to write properly. Unfortunately it didn’t stick with me so I still write like a seventh grader, but I also never declared myself to be a premiere essayist. I would love to reread the High School books again. I’ll get my chance in fourteen years when Madeline is reading the modern equivalents. But I’ll have to get her to and through Goodnight Moon in a couple of languages before I can graduate back to the good stuff. Joan Didion won some major book prize this year for her latest book about coping with the death of her husband while she was nursing her daughter back to health from a coma. The book sounded a bit morbid but one line of the interview stuck out in my memory.

My rough recollection of her statement was “Most people who have gone through grief go through this - You keep thinking of things that the other person needs to know about and you can’t tell them.” People persist in memory as real. You can’t help it that when you find something that would interest them you want to talk to them and enjoy sharing a thought with them. But it hits a wall of reality that they are dead when you proceed to the next step to tell them and they aren’t there anymore.

But people appear and disappear mysteriously. While I was boarding the plane back to Boston I bumped into Wilson, Ron’s best man/woman, who is coming to Boston to spend the week of Thanksgiving with her family. Wilson and I collaborated to acquire the poor man’s first class seats in the exit row, shared pictures of Madeline, and synchronized our Pay Per View TVs to watch Wedding Crashers again. Now we are just cruising over Nebraska and I can’t wait to see my beautiful wife Sarah and my darling baby Madeline when I get home.

Whatever it was I managed to miss an exit that I would like to complain to the state of California about. The exit was for 237 and I need to get to Macarthur Avenue. When I reached the 237 exit and was about to get on the ramp I saw a sign that said “Macarthur Avenue – Next Exit”. I interpret next exit to mean that the current exit is not the exit to get off at since if it were the sign would say “MacArthur Avenue – This Exit”. This is a clear way to say get off now or you will spend hours spinning from California highway to highway until you finally spit out in Arizona or the Mexican border. Someone has to teach that muscleman governor enough English to get the signs right.

But the good news about being in San Francisco is that there are always some folks from my past floating around looking to enjoy an evening in a great city to cheer you up when you are feeling like crap. In this case the crew included DK, Falkoff, and Ilana. DK, as a longstanding food connoisseur chose a fabulous restaurant called “Tsunami”. The basic theme is to have a bunch of very attractive non-asian waitresses server you lots of top shelf Saki while some kick-ass sushi chefs work-up magical creations involving hyper-fresh fish and nifty things like jalapeno peppers. This was a meal to remember and up there with the Buddha bar in Paris in my list of must eat Japanese restaurants. We were sitting in a little dojo style lowered floor area where our lovely waitresses would kneel to pour our deep flowing Sake. The numbers on the meal came out to about $125/person but if that meal wasn’t what $125 then what is?

Our waitress Hana, “Goin’ down the road to Hana”, had a Hawaiian attitude and was having a good time serving and drinking the top shelf Sake with clever names like Satan’s girl, and sweet innocence. She had a tiny piercing in her cheek somewhere down and the left of her nose. We were all chatting with us and a neighboring lesbian couple that we absorbed into our group as the meal rolled forwards. We asked them where to go for trouble and they recommended a gay sex club where they have combined the peanut butter and the chocolate by allowing voyeurs to watch exhibitionists have sex where you pick which one you want to be and do your thing. We didn’t have a huge interest in that so after we kissed Hana goodbye and Ilana and Roc had arrived we stuffed the five of us into a cab.

The cab pulled in to the location of Larry Flynt’s Hustler club. Having recently watched the movie the people vs. Larry Flynt I thought I should drop a couple bucks in support of his cause. We had a nice odd time inside with our crew. Kilimnik got into trouble for asking an inappropriate question. Falkoff and Ilana started swing dancing in the aisle. Falkoff bought me a lap dance. A Russian girl came over so I bought Ilana a lap dance with her and Ilana got a twenty minute lesson on how to deliver a lap dance properly as well as the official stripper recruitment speech. We were continuing to drink, at this point tequila and beer. Ilana was hanging out on my lap because it was something good to do at the Hustler Club but the official tuxedo clad gentlemen with secret service ear jacks told us that we had violated the rule that each customer must sit in their own seat. At about 2:30 AM the place wound down and we wandered down the street for some Chinese food. I awoke with a mild hangover with Falkoff at 7AM this morning.

I considered avoiding the awful trade show blah but since I was already in town I give it a whirl. Things were going crappy and the hangover and lack of leads had me ready to slit my wrists with a PCMCIA card when I had a meeting with someone who actually wanted to pay Viapoint to do something strategic for both us and them. Hallelujah – the good karma paid off.

BTW: DOMC stands for dirty old men's club.

"The bird was shot by an exterminator with an air rifle while cowering in a corner."

Maybe I am a bit of an odd duck but it's hard not to empathize with the bird. I find myself imagining what it would be like to be a bird happily flying through a window into a giant hall and then suddenly finding that I had pissed off some obsessive compulsize dutch domino fanatics that would normally not hunt down a happy sparrow but due to circumstances beyond the normal expectations they needed someone to pay. It at least would make a great scene in a novel to highlight the futility of life at all levels.

It is difficult when she doesn't sleep but nothing is as bad as when she sleeps so deep that she appears to be potentially dead. Babies don't sleep like adults. If they are very asleep they don't just wake-up when you nudge them and ask them to awaken. We went to Stop and Shop on Friday night and placed her into the baby Bjorn for the first time. By the time we had reached the counter she was so fast asleep that both Sarah and I were wondering if I had suffocated her accidentally as we walked around. I have never been as terrified of something as the total terror of possibly suffocating my own child. We dismantled the Bjorn as we were exiting the parking lot and found after a few minutes that we didn't need to call an ambulance as she started to twitch.

So it is a lose-lose scenario. She keeps us awake when she cries and when she sleeps we panic that she might no longer be breathing. My theory on it is that people are supposed to feel post-partum depression, both mother and father, because it keeps the two depressed people closer to each other, fostering monogamy, that otherwise might not happen naturally. So Sarah and I are getting cozy with each other as we go through some tougher nights together.