Here in northeast Indiana we sprung forward for the first time since I was a little kid.

I worked all afternoon at the office, then went to my favorite "casual dining" restaurant, Bandido's. Then I had the opportunity to watch my 6-year old play Lego Star Wars on the Xbox. A little eccentric, but entertaining. She had a good time, anyway.

Happy April Fools Day!

My son wasn't too happy when his mom fooled him with a fake weather forecast. When she told him it was supposed to snow 6" tonight he had a mini-tantrum, complaining that it wasn't fair to start Spring Break out this way. Fortunately, she was kidding.

We had a nice time tonight celebrating April birthdays and my parent's recent anniversary at O'Charley's. The food and service were both terrific.

I recently read an article about one indirect effect of ever higher steel prices: theft and sale of used beer kegs to salvage yards. It seems that beer kegs are going for as much as $25 each at junkyards, no questions asked. With a replacement cost of $90, stolen kegs are a major inconvenience for large beer makers and distributors. But while the big guys consider it a cost of doing business, keg theft can be a matter of life and death for small brewers.

That's why some small beer makers have their own keg police forces to rein in this problem. They work to discourage theft by tavern employees by threatening legal action. They mark their kegs in obvious and unique ways to make them more identifiable. And they work with salvage yards to diminish the market for their kegs, and buy back their kegs on the cheap.

But here's a part that seems odd to me. Some of the salvage operations checked out by the reporter had hundreds of beer kegs stacked up ready to crunch. Yet nowhere in the article is there any mention of criminal liability on the part of salvage operators. Why is this?

After all, if you are a pawnbroker and you accept stolen goods, you can be charged as a fence; you certainly have no right to keep any items stolen from someone else regardless of how much you paid for them. And beer kegs belong to the manufacturers or distributors, the only ones who have the right to dispose of them.

So the lesson seems to be this: If you regularly buy stolen goods for resale, just call yourself a salvage company and you can get away with just about anything.

I'm a long-time broadband user. I started with both dial-on-demand and nailed-up ISDN services for my business. Later I switched to ADSL for my office - but I couldn't get it at home. So I got Comcast High-Speed Internet as soon as it was available in our area, and have had it for several years.

Just recently I had Verizon install FiOS, the fiber to the premises Internet service that's rolling out in a few markets. I got the "low-speed" option (5Mbps) and have been very impressed so far. For $10 more a month I can triple the speed, and more options are promised in the future.

This week Network World published an article about FiOS here in Fort Wayne, with emphasis on how the mayor worked to get Verizon to install FiOS locally. Interesting read.

Here's something a little different that ran recently in the local newspaper about a husband and wife team running a dog poop scooping business. The husband is the brother of an old friend of mine. Welcome to the service economy!

Here are my predictions for the NFL Divisional Round:

• Seahawks over Redskins, 35-14
• Broncos over Patriots, 24-21
• Colts over Steelers, 28-14
• Bears over Panthers, 17-14

From the December 2nd WSJ:

Paul McCartney has learned how dogs and cats in China are killed for their fur, and says he'll never perform there and will boycott the 2008 Beijing Olympics in protest. "This is just disgusting," the BBC quoted him as saying. "It's just against every rule of humanity." So is China's imprisonment, torture and murder of Tibetans and other human-rights activists. Just not disgusting enough to provoke Sir Paul.

I looked up the original BBC News story and found that I was repulsed by the description of the practices involved. So I guess you could say, I'm with Sir Paul on this as far as it goes. But the writer above makes an interesting point: When will the plight of millions of people around the world who live with horror every day be worth the ongoing attention of the media and of our rock stars (Bono excluded, of course)?

Here's a birds-eye view of Brest. It's especially colorful at night local time - about six hours ahead of us here in the Eastern time zone.

From the WSJ today:

Several relatives of Citigroup Inc. executives each were paid annual salaries ranging from $143,900 to more than $2 million in 2003, according to the company's 2004 proxy statement.

Doesn't this strike you as somewhat obscene, or is it just me? After all, I don't begrudge Citigroup executives their paychecks, but is it really necessary to pay their husbands, wives, kids, etc. on top of that? Whatever happened to anti-nepotism rules? Do they only apply to the rank-and-file?

Some tech blogs recommended by Lee Gomes of the WSJ:

• John Battelle's Searchblog focuses on new media and search technologies.
• Tech Crunch by Michael Arrington is focused on new web products and technologies.
• tech.memeorandum by Gabe Rivera is a weblog/news aggregator that Gomes calls a "blog-tracking service".

So I'm in my local Taco Bell this morning for my 9am Pepsi, and the folks inside are scrambling about as usual (i.e. I had to wait on them to setup the register). What wasn't so normal was the conversation I overheard between a management type (her) and one of the shift leaders (him). She was saying things like "unfortunate incident" and "unprofessional behavior" and "saving your job", while he was trying to explain ... what? I don't know, but I kept wondering if nobody could see me. I'm pretty large and fairly noisy, especially when dispensing ice. I don't envy that guy.

6-4, 285 - ding! (see Dan Patrick show on ESPNRadio for obscure reference)

Anyway, I'm back and hope to get back in the swing of things again. Thanks for reading!

Here's something to check out, compliments of Scott Bradner in Network World. It seems that Axis cameras use the same URL suffix wherever they might be: view/index.shtml.

Just go to Google and search on it this way: url:view/index.shtml.

One thing I found quite interesting is the number of European cameras I found, like a Finnish university, several with German city views, a British street corner, a number of small shops, etc. Granted, the images are low res and slow scan - at most refreshing 2 or 3 times a second - but it's still amazing to watch people 5000 miles away at work or play, oblivious to their Internet onlookers.

Another thing I found interesting was the number of computer cams. You can spy on datacenters or workshops that you might think would want to stay hidden - oh, well. Here are a few of my favorites from the technology realm:

• GNax datacenter


• Webcows


• European "Funkcam"


• Datacenter cabinets

Warning: You can get into some stuff you might not want to see, so use caution.

Patriots win 24-21. I got the Eagles score right, anyway. I had to root for the Eagles, though - I hate the Patriots.

SuperBowl Pick: I wrote before that if the Eagles don't score more than 27 points, they won't beat the Patriots. I still don't think they can do it. Patriots 31, Eagles 21.

Here's something we need more of - American Ingenuity!

Carl E. Person has a website called Law Mall. He's written a book called Saving Main Street and its Retailers, 20 Things You Should Know - and 3 Plans - to Protect Your Town, Local Property Values, Local Employment and Business Opportunities.

His premise is that, by establishing the office of Town Attorney General and going after corporate villains like Wal-Mart and Best Buy and Home Depot, small towns and villages can protect their "independent retailers" (and subsequent higher prices) while collecting cash (a.k.a. bribes or extortion) from the aforesaid corporate villains.

Sounds like interesting reading. Conceptually it may even be brilliant! Economically speaking it's unworkable on a large scale, but it might work for a small percentage of hamlets.