This is from an email chain going around. I don’t usually post stuff like this but these responses are very funny (even if they they may not true)

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These are from a book called “Disorder in the American Courts”, and are
things people have actually said in court, word for word, taken down and now published by
court reporters who had the torment of staying calm while these exchanges were actually
taking place.

ATTORNEY: Are you sexually active?
WITNESS: No, I just lie there.
____________________________________________

ATTORNEY: This myasthenia gravis, does it affect your memory at all?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: And in what ways does it affect your memory?
WITNESS: I forget.
ATTORNEY: You forget? Can you give us an example of something you
forgot?
___________________________________________

ATTORNEY: Do you know if your daughter has ever been involved in voodoo?
WITNESS: We both do.
ATTORNEY: Voodoo?
WITNESS: We do.
ATTORNEY: You do?
WITNESS: Yes, voodoo.
____________________________________________

ATTORNEY: Now doctor, isn’t it true that when a person dies in his
sleep, he doesn’t know about it until the next morning?
WITNESS: Did you actually pass the bar exam?
____________________________________

ATTORNEY: The youngest son, the twenty-year-old, how old is he?
WITNESS: He’s twenty, much like your IQ.
___________________________________________

ATTORNEY: Were you present when your picture was taken?
WITNESS: Are you shitting me?
_________________________________________

ATTORNEY: So the date of conception (of the baby) was August 8th?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: And what were you doing at that time?
WITNESS: getting laid
____________________________________________

ATTORNEY: She had three children, right?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: How many were boys?
WITNESS: None.
ATTORNEY: Were there any girls?
WITNESS: Your Honor, I think I need a different attorney. Can I get a new
attorney?
____________________________________________

ATTORNEY: How was your first marriage terminated?
WITNESS: By death.
ATTORNEY: And by whose death was it terminated?
WITNESS: Take a guess.

____________________________________________

ATTORNEY: Can you describe the individual?
WITNESS: He was about medium height and had a beard.
ATTORNEY: Was this a male or a female?
WITNESS: Unless the Circus was in town I’m going with male.
_____________________________________

ATTORNEY: Is your appearance here this morning pursuant to a deposition
notice which I sent to your attorney?
WITNESS: No, this is how I dress when I go to work.
______________________________________

ATTORNEY: Doctor, how many of your autopsies have you performed on
dead people?
WITNESS: All of them. The live ones put up too much of a fight.
_________________________________________

ATTORNEY: ALL your responses MUST be oral, OK? What school did you
go to?
WITNESS: Oral.
_________________________________________

ATTORNEY: Do you recall the time that you examined the body?
WITNESS: The autopsy started around 8:30 p.m.
ATTORNEY: And Mr. Denton was dead at the time?
WITNESS: If not, he was by the time I finished.
____________________________________________

ATTORNEY: Are you qualified to give a urine sample?
WITNESS: Are you qualified to ask that question?
______________________________________

And the best for last:

ATTORNEY: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check
for a pulse?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for blood pressure?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for breathing?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you
began the autopsy?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: How can you be so sure, Doctor?
WITNESS: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
ATTORNEY: I see, but could the patient have still been alive,
nevertheless?
WITNESS: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and
practicing law

Where was this when I was in High School? This could be the single greatest Shakespearean play ever written. “‘Thou speakest rightly, sir. No man misdeals with Joshua Quince, by Jesu”

Two Gentlemen of Lebowski.

I great article from Wired Magazine. If you ever wanted to see where (and how) your data gets around this article is a great overview.

Netscapes: Tracing the Journey of a Single Bit | Magazine.

This Thanksgiving we decided that we would make the trek to Annapolis, MD to be with V’s parents. The whole family is descending on Annapolis so it is bound to be a Wii-filled, overeating, football watching, new baby cuddling good time. I also decided that it would be a good chance to look at some datacenters in the Virginia area because, well what’s a vacation without some quality datacenter tours? Reston, Virginia is home to AOL and at one time the datacenter capital of the world (AOL is to Northern Virginia as DEC is to Boston: It’s hard to go anywhere in Boston that doesn’t have some connection to DEC). So I will be looking at some old AOL places today and if all goes well I should be leaving with a trunk full of free AOL trial CD-ROMs…Christmas will be good to some of you!

Because V has to work it was decided that I would drive down to Annapolis on Monday and she would take the Acela to Baltimore. I could bring the dog and every piece of clothing we own and go rent a car as to not put any more miles on a leased Touareg. Luckily for us Avis still thinks I work at Yahoo! and gives me a generous corporate rate so that was a nice bonus. Avis was kind enough to give me a luxury Dodge Caliberwhich is, as they say, hot. The car kind of looks like something out the Transformer movie but I can’t imagine what it would transform into. Maybe a better car? Maybe an oven? Needless to say this was going to make my 441 miles, 6.58 hour trek special.

Well thanks to some heavy rain and miles and miles of stimulus roadwork the trip actually took 10 hours and felt like 700 miles but in that 10 hours I was able to make the following observations:

1) My Garmin Nuvi 360 GPS, while providing sub-par directions, proved to be a very good speakerphone when connected to my iPhone over Bluetooth. Who knew?
2) I think New Jersey is just messing with people when it comes to tolls. I mean c’mon?!?! Is there anything that expense on the stretch of road that it justifies that many tolls? Do people in NJ have to pay income tax?
3) Merritt Parkway to the Delaware Memorial Bridge all normal road rules are abandoned. This is no such thing as a left hand passing lane. The breakdown lane is just another lane. It’s a free-for-all and at times felt like I was in a Mad Max movie.
4) The Dodge Caliber proved to be a worthy vehicle. Yes, it’s bright orange and clearly designed by people that had never seen other cars but it worked and got me here. I wouldn’t buy one but I wouldn’t tell other people not to buy one.
5) Satellite radio was a HUGE bonus. A very nice and expected surprise that made the trip substantially better. That said Satellite radio is death for those of us with ADD and I must have changed the channels 300 times. In the end The Standup Comedy Channel, The Willie Nelson Channel, The Alternative Rock Channel and the Coffee House Rock Channel proved to be the winners.
5) The Playboy channel on Satellite radio is highly overrated. Yea, I know, what did I expect?

Now I’m off to collect those AOL CDs. I heard that traffic in the D.C. area is fun.

A roller coaster of a week is quickly wrapping up. In our last episode you may recall that my dog had what appeared to be a broken foot but what turned out, instead, to be Lyme disease. Not to be outdone by my sick dog, my 1997 Jeep decided it was a good time to rid itself of all bodily fluid. I was positive-based on my extensive career as an auto mechanic-that I had a cracked head casket but once I researched what a head gasket was on Wikipedia I realized that I had probably not done that. Nonetheless my Jeep was still light a couple of gallons of something so my attention turned to the radiator (again based on all my auto knowledge). Well I was wrong on the Lyme disease and I was wrong on the head gasket/radiator. My water pump was shot. It turns out that what started out as a miserable week was completely rectified by some doxycycline and a new water pump (dog and car, respectively). After two doses of doxycycline the pup has returned to his fully furry fury plus two days of pent up energy.

But just in case the week was looking dull we played host to relatives (not really but as close as you can get) from Denmark. Luckily they were/are very self-sufficeint and had no problem making their way around Boston and to a local grocery store where they stocked up on food to make us an authentic Danish dinner. It did not make me skinnier.

Stay tuned for the next episode where the car decides what will break next and planning for The Great November Ice Backpacking Trip gets into full swing.

Today’s update: My dog was diagnosed with Lyme disease and my 1997 Jeep started draining itself of radiator fluid as I was pulling into the Vet’s office. Believe it or not this made my day better. I thought the dog had broken his leg and I was sure my car had a cracked head gasket (I don’t even know what a head gasket is). How’s that for a roller coaster of an afternoon?

Last weekend we spent the weekend in Burlington, VT.  We went up for a big AKC dog show in Essex and because Mally’s breeder lives close by she was nice enough to offer to take him overnight while we were there.  This allowed us to have a mini-vacation in one of our favorite cities.  Add to this the fact that I have a boatload of Hilton points and we were talking a vacation in a nice hotel, overlooking Lake Champlain, kind of dog-free (at least at night) and all for free.  Huzzah!

While Mally didn’t do that well in his competitions it was of little matter as we had a great weekend.  Burlington is a great mix of outdoor activities (Shelburne Farms) , great food (Leunig’s is an absolute requirement), and a bunch of eclectic, friendly people.  The people-watching highlight for me had to be a guy dressed in full technicolor rainbow attire riding a bike adorned in the same colors that carried huge glittering banners.  Not being able to read the banners from a distance I shrugged it off as just another liberal Vermont wacko.  However when I got closer I saw that the banner read (in sparkling letters), “Impeach Obama.” Wow.  A crazy conservative Vermont wacko.  I didn’t even know those existed.

After eating our way through Burlington (Lake Champlain chocolates and Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream don’t suck) we wrapped up a great weekend.  Below is a picture of me at the Shelburne Farm cheese making barn.  Mmmmm, cheese.

While I was searching for a desktop client for my Wordpress blog I came across some good reviews of the “Social Media” browser, Flock and while I was skeptical at first that this was just a skinned version of Firefox with some weighty add-ons I figured I give it a try.  I had actually abandoned Firefox a few months ago in favor of Safari (Mac) as Safari seemed much faster in all respects and the recent Safari 4 upgrade was impressive in my opinion.  Nonetheless I installed Flock and much to my amazement the damn thing is just as fast as Safari (in my limited experience) and I found the ability to add all of the “social” networking profiles to be both easy and useful - a rare combination.  From Facebook to Flickr, Twitter to Wordpress Flock is now the one-stop shop for all interactions.  This is extremely useful. In fact I’m writing this post on the Flock-supplied desktop Wordpress plugin!  Maybe this will be the ticket to get me to update my blog more frequently than every 4 months.  Now my only problem is dealing the massive amount of social data being thrown at me everytime I open my browser.

I am now officially one week into my new job and by all accounts it was a great first week. I’m impressed with the level of talent and the magnitude of their operation at the new company. I’m also fascinated by learning all about the model (this is the first consumer-facing company I’ve worked for) and I think it’s great when friends from around the country call or IM me because they just heard or saw an ad. Besides all the new challenges of the new gig I think the one that will take the most getting used to is the commute. The new company is downtown and while I could drive and park I’ve opted to take the train. This allows me to feel self-righteous about my new, small carbon footprint AND allows me to play “who smells like urine?” on the Green Line. It’s win-win for everyone expect the guy that actually smells like urine. The whole train experience is worthy of it’s own post so I won’t go into too much detail here other than to say how nice it is to be able to get so close to people so early in the morning. Besides the humanity the biggest issue with taking the train also means my life is on much more of a schedule and this is what really takes getting used to. In order to get to work a reasonable time I need to catch the 7:20 am train which means I need to be out of the house by 7:10 am. 7:10 am seems like a fine time except the dog still expects his one hour walk in the morning so this means we need to be out walking by 5:30am in order for this new schedule to work. Have you ever seen 5:30am? More importantly have you ever walked through the woods at 5:30 am? It’s really dark the only things that are awake in the woods at that hour are generally things I prefer not to hang out with. In fact there are no normal people walking at 5:30 am in the morning and it’s hard to not feel like a complete crazy person out walking in the pitch black with a lamp strapped to my head. But sanity is no match for me and so with an eager pup and head lamp into the woods we go and I’m proud to say that not once were we attacked by bears and not once did I miss my train.

For those that don’t know I am leaving Yahoo! and moving to a Boston-based start-up that focuses on consumer backups. Yesterday was my final day in the office and last night was my going away party (thank you Yahoo!). Yesterday was an extremely bittersweet day. On one hand I am excited for the scenery change and the prospect of new challenges and on the other it was hard to say goodbye to many people I consider very good friends. Over the past two-and-a-half years I have formed some extremely good friends: We have been to battle together, had the joy of toiling away our nights and weekends together and developing cool new products together. So saying goodbye, even “goodbye for now,” was harder than I expected and the goodbye party was extremely humbling for me. The fact that such effort was put into it (with gifts and all) left me slightly embarrassed and I consoled myself by thinking that everyone was there simply for the free food and booze. It is strange to think that as a group we averaged roughly 50 working hours per week conservatively, and there are 47 weeks in a year counting vacation time, so in two-and-a-half years I spent 5875 hours with all these people. Wow! Almost 6000 hours my our lives spent together and then just like that the paths change and I am off to spend many thousands more hours with a new group. Like I said, exciting and sad at the same time. One thing that was less sad and more astonishing was the amount of crap that I managed to pile up in my office over that time. Seriously, if you saw the stuff I was packing and throwing away you’d think I hobo with a passion for hi-tech had been camping out in my office. I have to work on that at the next gig.

So to all you from Maven/Yahoo! that might be reading this let me just say thank you!! I was serious when I said it was my honor to work beside you and I will never forget everything we accomplished and how we accomplished it.