I thought this was a great quote:
"The truth is that wherever a man lies with a woman, there, whether they like it or not, a transcendental relation is set up between them which must be eternally enjoyed or eternally endured."
-C. S. Lewis

I'm in Baton Rogue and I'm still full. After our workshop yesterday, we took our customer out to dinner at Juban's, a famous Creole resturant out here. The people down here are very hospitable to us Yankees and wanted to make sure I tried all of their cuisine. I sat at dinner with my plate of food, surrounded by 8 other smaller plates from our customers who wanted to make sure I had a taste of what they'd ordered. Really tremendous people down here, not quite as laid back as New Orleans, not quite as much debauchery, but a great place. I'm flying back this afternoon.

I got up, worked out, had some meetings and then headed down to the French Market Area to go to Cafe Du Monde. It's a great area with some amazing architecture.

So I went to the original Emril's resturant tonight down here in New Orleans. The service was the best I've ever had and the food was phenomenal. Across the street, they were filming a movie - I can't remember which ones, but it was starring Kevin Spacey. I was with one of our local sales reps, Dee, who grew up in this area and knows everyone. She knows everyone down here, even spends Christmas with the Manning family (ie. Payton, Eli, Archie, etc). On the way out of the resturant, we ran into Wayne Huizenga, founder of Blockbuster video, who said hi to Dee by name. She used to date the guy.

Tomorrow, before we head to Baton Rouge for customer meetings, I'm going to stop by the infamous Cafe du Mond for a Beignets and Cafe o'lait. It's in every movie that takes place in New Orleans - I just can't remember which.

I'm in New Orleans today, Baton Rogue tomorrow. My hotel is right off of Bourbon Street. I had lunch today at one of the best oyster places around, Acme Oyster. I had a po-boy. Check out the menu. They actually have something called a poopa. We're heading to the original Emril's tonight for dinner. Should be good.

My brother Dan turned me on to a great new author, Lee Child. The books have the same character through out all of the - a really cool guy named Jack Reacher. I think there are seven books in all so far. These are books that you cannot put down once you pick them up. The guy reminds me of John Clark in Tom Clancy's novels, but a little more down-to-earth and a little less serious and less psycho. Anyways, very well worth checking them out.

My brother Jon and I were both amazed that Dan would actually reccomend a book, seeing how he barely reads. If you loan Dan a book, you'll get it back in 6 months - maybe. The only time he claims to read is if he's on a plane ride to Korea, and then he supposedly reads 9 books each way. I think he's getting the cliff notes to try and impress Jon and I.

We had our big Dodgeball playoffs tonight and we went from third place to last by losing all but one game! The last game, Will Brown and Jason Monstrola caught everything thrown our way so that we went out big! I think I've finally figured out how to throw the ball so that my arm is usable in the week that follows. Dodgeball starts up again in January, and the movie comes out on DVD tomorrow. Dodge, dip, duck, dive and dodge!

I just got a new Uniden TRU8885 cordless phone for about $20. About 10 years ago I bought my cordless phone at Sears for about $150. For some reason, I bought the product protection plan, which was about $25 and is good for 2 years. In my house, the average cordless phone is lucky to make it that long. I bring it back, get a full credit towards a new phone, pay another $20 for the new product protection plan and get the latest, greatest phone. It's one of the few times that the product protection plan has ever really worked for me.

Here are technologies I'm still using after a few weeks:
X1
DirectTV HD Tivo
Firefox
iTunes/iPod
allofmp3.com
Treo 600 (Although I now want a 650 with Bluetooth capabilities).

Great article about the need to know, which I think I suffer from. As I was reading this, I was thinking about all of the different information sources I digest regularly... I love the newspaper I subscribe to three: Wall Street Journal, Detroit News and the South Lyon Herald - and I try and read them cover-to-cover as often as possible. I subscribe to 7 different magazines (Mens Journal, Entertainment Weekly, Money and a few others I can't remember). On top of that, I my computer and my phone push headlines over to me constantly through various blogs and RSS Feeds.

Check out this video from Jeopardy. Ken Jenning's question to the answer is "What is a Ho, Alex?"

According to this article Jesus was spotted in this dental X-Ray.

I found this on Dan's blog regarding U2's new single Vertigo off of How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb:
According to this:

"The counting Bono does in the beginning is uno does tres catorce is spannish for one two three fourteen. According to several sources in the U2-Talk mailing list, the album is U2's 14:th album (including Wide Awake in America) and Lillywhite has been involved with U2's first, second, third and now fourteenth album. There have been some debate to which albums to include to get fourteen albums, if the "Best of" or "Wide Awake in America" should be included etc., but nobody knows for sure what Bono is referencing to yet. It might be so he just thought it sounded cool. "

Other sites list the lyrics as the numbers would be "en espanol" not in french. I wondered about the same thing myself and was just makng jokes to my roomie the other day about that.

I was dumping the pictures from the digital camera today and ran across this picture. Occasionally, Emily likes to grab the camera and take all sorts of crazy pictures. You can make up your own story on what Cathie's doing here.

Emily had been telling us about a boy in her pre-school class that she'd been playing with. Apparently the boy's name is cardboard. We got to class and she pointed out cardboard. Apparently, his name is Carter. Having a kid named cardboard seems funny to me.

As I lay sleeping on Saturday morning I heard the kids up and running around. I heard the door open and the kids proclaim "Hey, where did these come from? Let's play manger!" I heard the girls singing Away in a Manger as I faded in and out of conciousness. When I woke up, I found this collection of 2 foot tall figurines. I called the Niemi's and Girard's to find out which it had been. Turns out it was Dan Reynolds.

The three couples got babysitters at 9PM last night and exacted our revenge. It was really pretty elaborate. We decided to decorate Dan's house, in a bad way. We had pink christmas tree lights, huge strands of gaudy pearls and an entire nativity scene linked together by rope which we put up in their pine tree. The lights went over their doorway and bushes. I took part of the manger scene and used Liquid Nail to glue it to one of Dan's landscaping rocks. I'm just not sure that's ever coming off. The costumes? They just seemed funny at the time. Except the clown. The clown always seemed scary. Not funny. Can you guess who that is in the clown? One hint: It's not me.

Ya know, Justin looks pretty creepy here as well. Dan is probably the wrong person to start something like this with. I'm sure he'll have no problem escalating this out of control very quickly.

I went with a friend of mine in my neighborhood, Mark, to the Lions game yesterday. He has great seats. We were about 15 rows back from the field. It was interesting that at the beginning of the game they don't even announce a number of players to avoid the booing. Joey Harrington for one. John Navvarae (ex-U of M Quarterback) was in for Arizona. Did my heart good to see him fail miserably. How many U of M quarterbacks do we really need in the NFL right now anyways?

On Friday night, Brad, Ted and I took Will out for his birthday... At least that was the idea. For whatever reason, he ended up having to work until 9, which got him back to this area closer to 10. We ended up meetnig Will at Ted's house around 10 after the whaler's game and sat around watching Old School.

I just added a cool iTunes plugin that allows my blog to dynamically show what I've been listening to in iTunes. It's called Now Playing and it outputs my iTunes info to XML to which I've got a PHP script that puts both the song name, the image and a link to Amazon to buy the track. Heck, I'm just impressed that I was able to pull all of the pieces together to get this to work.

I've been messing with Audioscrobbler lately. It has plug-ins for both Mac and PC that work with every music player out there. The plug-in uploads a list of the tunes you listen to, compiles it with everyone elses and gives you some very good reccomendations.

A friend of mine, Kirk Vickers, was on the news on Monday night talking about the exercise aspect of the Dance, Dance revolution game. You can read more about it here. He was telling me that at one point during the kid's playing, his heart rate got up to 250/beats per minute... which is a lot.