Good Morning

Today is one of those days where everything seems fresh and new. I am moving to a new work place and am very much looking forward to that. After doing well in my old, new place another reorganization has taken place. One thing I didn't realize is that I have the shortest tenure with the company than anyone working in these "top tier" places. I kind of knew that but the past year and a half seems more like 10 years - so to fully realize that I come pretty far, pretty fast is nice. It sure has not been easy and I am so impressed by those who have been doing this for 6, 7 or more years. It is an all encompassing, life dominating career and for someone like me - whose attention span means most jobs are 2 years and out - I have a huge amount of respect for the people who do this day after day, year after year. I hope that I can show everyone that I deserve to be where I am and that I can be a strong member of a truly professional team.

St Patrick's Day was fun. I went out early in order to get home in time to detox and be in good shape for my first day's work. Had some beers in a variety of Irish pubs early yesterday afternoon. Even at 1 in the afternoon the streets were overfilled with party-goers. It looked like Saturday at 1 AM! I can only imagine what it was like at night. I was home by 5, ate, watched TV and had one of my famous (and now too rare) sleep-a-thons.

The stock markets are on the rise and my feeling last week that things might be turning around could be right. I noticed more people coming in a couple weeks ago looking. They weren't buying yet but the fact that people were shopping was new and encouraging. Since then actual buys have been creeping up very, very, very slowly. This may not sound that good but compared to the free fall over the past 5 or 6 months it is a trend change that I heartily welcome.

Almost a year ago I found twitter and wrote about it. Well, it has really taken off now and the other day I signed up to get "tweets" from about 50 famous people. That was a mistake. I was getting texts or tweets non stop. Some people do it right - Rain Wilson (Dwight from the office) sends 2 or 3 a day and they are usually funny. But some, like John McCain's daughter, who has been doing the talk show circuit and seemed reasonable, becomes a ditzty 20 something on twitter. So many messages, 20-30 a day I had to delete her. Others, like from the Washington Post or the Newshour on PBS, use twitter to send links all day to their news stories. A waste, in my opinion, because I can go to the news sites on my own - deleted. I'm down to about 20 of my favorites - those who seem to be able to avoid the temptation to tell me everything they are doing. As always, if you want to get my occasional twitter messages you can follow me at my twitter account named Mark The Blogger.

I have also become a huge fan of Facebook. You all will remember my reluctance to further fatten the wallet of Rupert Murdoch, so I rarely went to my MySpace account. Well, Facebook is much better! Especially using my iPhone, Facebook is neater, more organized and not overwhelmed by ads. I have connected with some old friend because the search tools are better than ever possible with MySpace.

Here is an interesting poll measuring popularity of people from Barack Obama to Oprah Winfrey and from Rush Limbaugh to George W. Bush. Hint: Oprah is NOT the most popular and Rush is NOT the least popular!
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