Fortune magazine's eighth annual "Global Most Admired Companies" survey put Xerox No. 2 in the "computers" industry category, behind only IBM. Xerox achieved an overall score of 6.98, up from its 2004 score of 6.75 and No. 4 ranking:

To compile the lists, the Hay Group, a management-consulting firm, surveyed more than 10,000 directors, executives, and managers at 357 companies around the world, in one of 30 industries. Each respondent was asked to rank the other companies in his or her industry on nine attributes -- innovation, use of corporate assets, globalness, quality of management, employee talent, financial soundness, long-term investment value, social responsibility, and quality of products and services -- on a scale of 1 to 10.

I've just updated my blog roll with a few new blogs for your linking pleasure.

I've just updated my blog roll with a few new blogs for your linking pleasure.

Over the past 4 months or so, I've been working through Dallas Willard's book, The Divine Conspiracy. Every day, I'm struck by something in this book. The stuff that it's teaching is affecting me at a really core level of how I think about my faith, my world and what it means to live in the Kingdom of God. I read something today that flipped on end something I've always thought about 1 Corinthian 13, the chapter in the bible that gives us this huge, all encompassing definition of what love is. When I read this, I always felt like I need to strive towards all of these great qualities to be a loving person. Here's what I read:

People usually read this and are taught to read it, as telling them to be patient, kind, free of jealousy and so on - just as they read Jesus' Discourse (sermon on the mount referred to earlier in the book) as telling them to not call others fools, not look on a woman to lost, not to swear, to go the second mile, and so forth. But Paul is plainly saying - look at his words - that it is love that does these things, not us, and that what we are to do is to "pursue love" (1 Cor 14:1). As we "catch" love, we then find that these things are after all actually being done by us. These things, these godly actions and behaviors, are the result of dwelling in love. We have become the kind of person who is patient, kind, free of jealousy, and so on. Paul's message is exactly the same as Jesus' message.

This was probably perfectly clear to everyone else, but it struck me.

I got up at 5 to go to the gym, giving my self plenty of time since it was about 5 miles from the hotel. It was a beautiful drive, going along the St. Charles River, watching the rowing crews, right through Harvard Square - all as the sun came up. Would have been better if I didn't get lost again. I finally made it to the gym and back. I need a freakin GPS system. A friend of mine, Mack, has a GPS (can't remember which one) system that ties via bluetooth into his Treo 650 phone, so all of his maps and directions are displayed on his phone, as he's driving. The maps can be stored on your SD memory card. I'll put this one in the "nice to have" category, unlike the Treo 650, which is in the must-have-to-be-happy category. Like Will, I'm considering switching over to Sprint now that they've got some of the bugs ironed out of the 650. Yesterday's WSJ had an article talking about the different cell carriers and the number of complaints per user. Verizon had about 1/4 the complaints of all of the other carriers.

I was up at 4:30 this morning to fly out to Boston. Boston's my favorite city, but I hate having to drive there. I try and take a taxi, subway or train whenever I can. I found my way out to the customer site without too much of a problem, but it took me about 90 minutes to travel the 5 miles to my hotel. Needless to say i was horribly lost most of the time, with almost no maps. I finally asked for directions about 85 minutes into it. I checked into my hotel, the Doubletree in Boston, and they upgraded me to this pimped out two story suite on the top floor, complete with vaulted ceilings. Not sure I really need two floors. I can jump onto the couch from the upper floor.

I'm crashing early, and there's nothing on TV. I'm bored enough to watch American Idol. Never seen the show before, never wanted to. I quickly switched to watch MSU women's basketball. Not sure which is worse. I should probably just go to bed.

Project 311's Blitzfest web site is up. We're putting on this event for about 5,000 people, 75 bands, 7 stages, professional skate team. It'll be huge. E-mail me if you want to help out. We need about 300 volunteers.

We had a great Easter weekend overlaid with great basketball. On Friday night after our Good Friday service, Will, Brad, Jim and Joe came over to watch the game. What great basketball! I loved seeing us beat Duke. I know lots of Duke fans, and it was a pleasure seeing them lose. Mike Thompson gave me the run-down earlier in the day on why Duke would win, and why all of the analysts were wrong, and posessed by Satan. I gave Mike a call on Saturday morning about 7:30 to tell him he was wrong.

On Saturday, Nate, Will and I headed out to my parents to help them in phase 1 of their move. It was one of the hardest moves I've done, and it was only 2 rooms of their house. We moved stuff from their basement and garage, filling up a whole moving truck. Will, Dad, Jon, Nate, Matthew and I made hundreds of trips up the stairs, while my brother Dan "oversaw" the move. He's always been good at packing. I got back around 2 , napped, dyed Easter Eggs and hung out with Cathie, watching the movie Garden State. I loved it. Great Soundtrack.

Easter Sunday is one of two days out of the year that I don't wear jeans or shorts to church. The girls love getting all dressed up, and this Easter was no exception. We did pictures afterwards and Cathie cooked a huge dinner. Will, Brad, Joe, Jim, Mark and I watched the baseketball game while my two girls danced around in their cheerleading outfits, cheering, making signs and serving us drinks. It was such an intense game to watch! We went into two overtimes because of Will. With ten seconds left, I saw the players all locking arms so I figured that we should do the same. We all did, except for Will. I let him know ahead of time if we lost, it was his fault. Needless to say he locked arms at the end of the second overtime.

I thought this was fun to watch. It's a slideshow of different people's computer desktops.

Another useless but amusing site. This will take your text and create ASCII banner text out of it.

This is kind of a cool application called MusicBrainz Tagger. You can run it against your music library and it will look up missing MP3 tags based on the acoustic signature of a song. I'll let you know how it works.

Thanks to Will for this. If you know Mark Butler, this is a video of him a few years ago. Very funny.

They found my luggage! When I think about it, as much as I travel, I've never lost my luggage. Of course, I normally don't check it, but that's beside the point.

It's been one of those days. I was up at 4:45 to catch a flight, didn't get bumped to first class, and almost missed my next flight because this one was late. From there, they lost my luggage and based on the Low Tire Pressure indicator I had on my way to the airport Monday, I'm looking forward to changing a flat tire. One of those days. If only I had a time machine....

I want one of these!

Did you ever wonder what it would be like to pop a water balloon in space? Read about it here.

I was flipping through channels in my hotel room last night, and there on PBS was John Tesh. He was playing a concert at Red Rocks. It was called"Worship with John Tesh at Red Rocks". John doesn't sing at all, he just plays the keyboards. It was like a car accident - you know you shouldn't watch, but you do.

We've had the same person baby-sit for us over the past 6 years and she's become a part of our family. I'll refer to her here as Margret - I'm not naming names, because there are a lot of baby-sitter pimpers out there. You know who you are. The type of people who get a name and then start using that person, and making them unavailable when I need them. You know who you are.

My girls look forward to her coming like they look forward to anyone in my family coming over. She watched the kids Saturday night for us and an hour before, they were watching for her at the window. Emily told me I should go pick her up. I told her that Margret had a car and I didn't need to, and Emily explained that if I picked her up, she'd be there sooner. It's such a great feeling to know you have babysitters who care so much about your kids, and really like them. Nate dug her boyfriend, because he plays video games. I asked her if they should get married, and he didn't think so. He said that her boyfriend should marry another babysitter, who also plays video games with him, so they'll both be able to play video games with him. Okay, kinda tunnel vision, but hey, he's 8.

I'm traveling on and off over the next couple of weeks. Houston, Boston, Kansas City and Cinncinati.

Cathie and I sat down this weekend and put together a list of everything that needed to be done in our house to get it ready to sell. We have a really big list. I'm outsourcing most of it to a friend.

Take this Typing Test and report your score. I scored 120 WPM on three different tries.

Cathie's parents took the kids for the weekend, and we appreciated every minute of it! With a whole bunch of peripheral craziness going on with friends of ours, we'd been putting a lot of energy into everything but our relationship. This weekend gave us 3 days to accomplish nothing but spend time together and reconnect. It was great. We had a good balance of hanging out together and getting out of the house and doing some fun stuff with friends.

On Friday night, we had our big vision night for Project 311. We had about 50 people there to hear the vision of where we're going with this and gave them the opportunity to sign on as part of the team. After that, Cathie, myself, Ted, Brad and Will went out for dinner. We went to Gus O'Connor's in Novi. The atmosphere is great, just like an Irish pub, but the food blew. Will
has been to Ireland and made the mistake of thinking he was back there. The waitress was taking our drink order and Will ordered "a Pint." I looked at him strangely and asked "a pint of what?" to which he responded knowingly, "oh, they'll know." A second later the waitress looked strangely at him and asked him, "a pint of what?" Will had to explain that in Ireland, you just have to say "a pint" and they know you want a pint of Guinness. I kindly reminded Will that he's in Novi. I think he appreciated the feedback....and me laughing about it the rest of the night.

On Saturday, we slept in and went out to breakfast around noon. We started off by heading out for drinks at a resturant/gay-bar in Royal Oak called Pronto. Half of the place is a gay-bar, the other half is a resturant, and an apparent favorite in the Royal Oak gay-community. Our waiter was pretty flamboyent and pretty hilarious. When we walked in the door, I found the above sign to be pretty funny... "We may not be Irish, but we speak gaylic".

We went out to Tony and Tina's Wedding that night out in Sterling Heights. The idea itself was cool, but the execution sucked. Tickets were $70/each and they had peopled packed in this place like sardines, to the point that you couldn't move or get out of your seat... or see very well. In spite of that, there were times that you forgot you were at a show and not an actual wedding. The bridal party would mingle, get into fights, cut in line at the bar and dance. There was even a chubby little 12 year old as part of the thing getting blitzed on hampagne and doing funny stuff as part of the show. The best part of the night was hanging out with Justin and Lori, the other stuff was just icing on the cake. We've all been in the middle of some junk going on with some mutual friends and it was nice to have a break where we didn't have to talk about that stuff and could just kick-back and have fun.

Emily was sick with the stomach flu last week. She came down and announced that she'd put a band-aid on her belly-button because her belly was sick and that would make it feel better. Remember when you were a kid and band-aids could heal all? Emily is famous for almost always having 3 or 4 band-aids on her at any given time.

My HD TiVo had been acting wacky for the past few days. I talked to Tech Support and they had lots of dumb suggestions as to why it was periodically freezing up. They wanted me to reset it and delete all my shows to see if that would fix it. The tech support gal asked me if there was anything important I needed to watch. I responded that it was TV, so in the big scheme of things, it wasn't life or death stuff, but I didn't want to nuke it. She responded that I should take a day or so, watch whatever I need, and then we could try it. I'm not sure if she knew I was joking when I told her I'd try and take a week off of work to get caught up on my TV. Anyways.

Last night as we were watching Survivor, I was on my last straw. I finally said, "Next time it freezes, I'm going downstairs to get my other Tivo (which I'd taped it on) and we'll watch that." It froze. I jumped up, went two steps, and it came back on. I sat down. It froze again. I jumped up, went two steps to the same spot, again it came back on. Few minutes later, it froze. I stomped on the ground, it came back on. Turns out, I had a loose power cord. Working fine now.

Cool Technology
This is a new (for me) application I've been messing around with called Desktop Sidebar. It gives you a lot of desktop funcitonality on the side of your screen - I've got a stock ticker, weather, clock performance status and pictures all going on at once. Great for an ADD guy looking for reasons to be distracted. It hasn't passed the three week test yet, but I like it so far. If I'm still using it after three weeks, I'll let you know.

Here's a list of some apps you've gotta have:
1. Firefox - Better internet browser than Internet Explorer. Say goodbye to spyware.
2. Bloglines - A much better way to read blogs, this is a free web site that gives you a single source to view all of the blogs that you're reading, telling you automatically which ones have been updated.
3. Microsoft's Antispyware application - They wrote the buggy code that gets infected, makes sense that they're giving away the application to clean it up.
4. X1 - The greatest desktop search engine ever. This is worth the $75. Google's desktop search is nice for casual use, but X1 is good enough to make me look smart. It can instantly search across my 10GB e-mail archival and 30GB of documents. Makes it nice when I'm on a conference call and someone brings up either a name or a subject that I have no idea about, and I can instantly pull up all of the reference info I need. Only downside is that it doesn't support Microsoft OneNote content.
5. Picasa - The best photo album, sharing and viewing software on the market, and it's free as part of Google's push to own the digital content space. This app blows away Mac's much touted iPhoto software.
6. Anapod Explorer - iTunes lets you hook up one and only one computer to your iPod. This app lets you control, access and manage your iPod repository from a secondary computer.

Cathie and I took the kids to go see the movie Because of Winn-Dixie last night. What a great movie! The movie deals with the daughter of the local preacher, she's new in town with no friends. She meets a dog, and in turn learns about community and and connections to others as she comes to understand her past, especially her mom. It's a tear-jerker in parts, maybe it's just stuff going on with friends of ours that made it especially poignant. The amazing part was that Dave Matthews was in this movie playing a slow guitar playing vagrant. It's a good role for him. He fit really naturally into it. I was try to explain to Nate how much my friend Jason loves Dave Matthews. I came up with this, "If that man were a woman, Jason would've probably married him instead of Jess."

Cathie and I were playing the game "find the weirdest item on eBay". We'd take turns searching on goofy things, each trying to top the other. These were at the top of the list:
1. Used Lotion
2. This:

3. This:

I posted this earlier without providing the link. Here's the post with the link.

This is a great article that captures a lot of why guys play video games at the deepest level. It's not just about shooting things or zoning out, it's about something a lot deeper. My wife may think I'm just rationalizing here, but I think this article is dead on.

BananaBunker® pretty much says it all. Purchase one for just $5.00 or 5 for $20. This is the perfect companion to that dumb bannana hanger you received for your wedding but didn't really want.

Watch this... John Stewart talks about Blogging....

Sony has announced their 2005 consumer electronics product line, and they've got some cool stuff coming out. I'm a huge fan of Sony components across the board. I've never gone wrong with their stuff (well, ok, I did go wrong with a DVD player that died after a year). Sony is normally cutting edge at a good price with tremendous longevity.

My workouts have become fairly monotonous so I've decided to try a this new power-lifting routine out of Men's Journal. I'm hurting after day one. If it doesn't help me physically, the humility that I'll gain by doing an exercise like this will be great:

I guess the joke's on me. A while back,I thought it would be funny to correspond with one of those "I'm a long lost relative trying to get a lot of money out of my country" SPAM e-mail guys. It went back and forth for a while as I played the idiot, and I thought it was a load of fun. Apparently, I've now been put on the "Big Fat Suckers" list, because I receive about 5 of these e-mails a day, none of which my spam filter catch. Yahoo's filter normally catches 99% of everything, so these are just that much more annoying - yet slightly creative.

We're going to see Tony and Tina's Wedding on Saturday with our friends Justin and Lori. It's a dinner theatre, kind of. Your a guest at an Italian wedding. The wedding is interactive and going on all around you as you have dinner. It's supposed to be a great time. Cathie's parents were kind enough to take the kids for the weekend! They're taking all three of the kids to the circus on Saturday while their there.

I was out with a 24 hour stomach flu yesterday. Madeline and I both woke up with it. I'd been joking with a friend that with all of the busyness, I'd need to take a day off work to get caught up. Guess I got my wish. I got a chance to catch up on about 10 hours worth of TV yesterday. The sad thing is, I actually feel like I accomplished something.

Will and I watched the movie Kaena: The Prophecy. The movie is all Computer Generated Animation and the images and textures are just amazing in this flick. It looked phenomenal on my HDTV. The plot is so-so, but it's got some big names in it: Kirstin Dunst, Angelica Houston and Richard Harris.

This is akward. I was at a grand opening event for a customer last week with a couple of co-workers. Apparently, I came out of the bathroom with part of my shirt hanging out of my zipper. My friends were kind enough to tell me after they snapped a quick camera phone picture.

Interesting article comparing cheap PC's vs. the Mini Mac.

If you're using Firefox as your browser, check out the new the new GoogleSugget Extension for Firefox. It integrates in Google's latest functionality for suggesting searches.

Here's a picture of my niece/nephew to be, Special K:

The fact that you can't make out any distinguishing sex characteristics doesn't mean that it's not a boy... Remember, this is Jon's son.

I saw this while driving down the road. We pulled up along side the car and saw a big white guy driving it.