New software, etc.

My Office 2003 and FrontPage 2003 and Visio 2003 all arrived. I had been using the beta of most of it for a while but it's nice to be kosher and stable. For anyone interested, changes to Word and Excel are nearly non-existent. Access has a couple of new things. I hate Visio and only use it for our org chart and it still fights me when I want someone to report to someone else. Publisher is pretty much better but the real winners are FrontPage and Outlook. Both of these took giant leaps - all good.

I'm still looking around for a good answer to online news. Google has a good news page but their alert system is pretty sucky.

It dawned on me this morning for some unknown reason that my trip to Mom's is less than a month away. I love my Mom and enjoy her immensely, but from 3,000 miles. Face to face, I am good for about an hour. I'll be there from Friday morning until Friday morning the week of Thanksgiving. I'm so not looking forward to it.

A lot of it is because she just isn't who she was. She was a sharp, smart, rules-based, open-minded and very thoughtful Democrat. Now she is a slow, prejudiced Republican who makes me crazy. She lives with a bunch of old people who all believe the help steals from them and "Orientals are taking over". While she knows better than to voice either of those thoughts out loud to me, I know she has adopted them and that makes me nuts.

But, I think the thing that probably gets to me the most is that in the back of my mind I see me and I don't want to be like that.

Years ago, I lived in Charlotte, NC and had a job that had me on local TV a lot. Mom lived about 2 hours away but still in the same TV market. She said that every time she saw my face on TV she did a double take because it was like "looking in the mirror 25 years ago."

I think I don't want to look in the mirror 25 years from now and see her.

My stock is going up again and that makes me very happy... up $80.66 to $3,270 today.

New software, etc.

My Office 2003 and FrontPage 2003 and Visio 2003 all arrived. I had been using the beta of most of it for a while but it's nice to be kosher and stable. For anyone interested, changes to Word and Excel are nearly non-existent. Access has a couple of new things. I hate Visio and only use it for our org chart and it still fights me when I want someone to report to someone else. Publisher is pretty much better but the real winners are FrontPage and Outlook. Both of these took giant leaps - all good.

I'm still looking around for a good answer to online news. Google has a good news page but their alert system is pretty sucky.

It dawned on me this morning for some unknown reason that my trip to Mom's is less than a month away. I love my Mom and enjoy her immensely, but from 3,000 miles. Face to face, I am good for about an hour. I'll be there from Friday morning until Friday morning the week of Thanksgiving. I'm so not looking forward to it.

A lot of it is because she just isn't who she was. She was a sharp, smart, rules-based, open-minded and very thoughtful Democrat. Now she is a slow, prejudiced Republican who makes me crazy. She lives with a bunch of old people who all believe the help steals from them and "Orientals are taking over". While she knows better than to voice either of those thoughts out loud to me, I know she has adopted them and that makes me nuts.

But, I think the thing that probably gets to me the most is that in the back of my mind I see me and I don't want to be like that.

Years ago, I lived in Charlotte, NC and had a job that had me on local TV a lot. Mom lived about 2 hours away but still in the same TV market. She said that every time she saw my face on TV she did a double take because it was like "looking in the mirror 25 years ago."

I think I don't want to look in the mirror 25 years from now and see her.

My stock is going up again and that makes me very happy... up $80.66 to $3,270 today.