My thoughts are a jumble today, so rather than select any specific item to share, I thought I’d make it a pupu platter.

• Fall colds suck. We’ve had one circulating our household now for about a month. When one of us seems to recover, another goes down. Ah the joys of having a little bio-terrorist freely sharing her germs! Since I know that her Grandparents read this reasonably frequently, she’s healthy – it’s her parents who seem to bear the brunt of the recovery.
• Apple’s Leopard Upgrade is really nice. I updated my laptop last night, and really like it thus far. The only gotcha I’ve seen thus far are in dashboard widgets – those not developed by Apple seem to not work and play well in the new Dashboard environment. The best thing about Leopard thus far? It’s much faster on the same hardware. I’m sure there are other features (like Spaces) I’ll come to love, but it’s worth the upgrade for speed alone.
• Is holding still a penalty? As I watched two defensive linemen being blatantly held while the Wisconsin quarterback completed a big play, I have to wonder, what are refs enforcing in terms of holding? Admittedly, if they hadn’t held, Wisconsin wouldn’t have scored and the game wouldn’t have been interesting. Also worth noting is that even with blatant holding, their quarterback was sacked 10 times during the game. Perhaps the refs decided to save the quarterback’s life by ignoring the infraction? I watched a few minutes of the Patriots vs. the Colts yesterday, different league, same problem with holding, though to a lesser extent. And what’s with the penalties on pass interference? A ticky-tack call yields over 50 yards on a single play? That ought to be reexamined by the league… Oh, and the NFL is still unwatchable.
• Interesting interview technique. Last week at a large Silicon Valley company I had an interesting conversation with an HR representative. She asked me all sorts of “fluffy” questions which individually didn’t seem very interview like but collectively probably yielded a good psychological profile. I liked it, it ended up more as a conversation and after a week of more or less cookie cutter conversations, it was a nice way to end the week.
• Shallow temperature surveys. We were scheduled to be out in the Sou Hills doing some survey work on the prospect. But, real life intruded and we’re now postponed until December at the earliest. That was a pretty disappointing development, I was looking forward to a few days of driving long, hollow metal tubes into the desert pavement and taking temperature samples. We hear that a large geothermal company hit a resource a mere 5 miles to the north-east last week and we know there is a functioning 60MW plant 5 miles to the south-west…As Andy would say, we’re in elephant country!
• A good day trip. Yesterday my daughter and I headed into San Francisco to the Ferry Building. Our objective was a boat ride since she hadn’t experienced that yet. We booked a trip on the Golden Gate Transit ferry to Sausalito back. We returned and had lunch at the Ferry Building and then proceeded home. She seemed to really this adventure and the weather was outstanding.

Well, that’s probably enough random information. Back to the grindstone….