Next time you’re shopping for a new smart phone and the salesperson at the counter tries to sell you brand X... ask them to pull their own phone out and show you what they use every day.

When I was doing a little Christmas shopping this weekend I couldn’t help but giggle when I saw the Google “Android Specialist” checking his e-mail on a Blackberry.

In retrospect I should have stopped and quizzed him. Perhaps I’ll go back this weekend to throw stones at him and brand him an heretic.

My favorite Muppets were always the Swedish Chef, Beaker, Animal and the yip yip aliens. Three outa four ain’t bad.

Up & Up is Target’s new generic brand. I find, however, I can’t stop looking at the logo upside down as Down & Down.

Does that make me a pessimist?

It takes a very cute kitten to make me write like a teenage girl.

When weather, traffic or other conditions delay my packages it’s all good and well. The shipping companies can’t be penalized when a package gets delayed due to outside influences.

If my package were to arrive early, however, that’d be great. FedEx, though, has decided that it’s too early to deliver my package. Turns out that if a shipper pays for three-day shipping it doesn’t mean that a package will be delivered in three-days-or-less, it means three days. We wouldn’t want anyone to get two-day shipping for the price of three now, would we?

Taking off my cynical, the man’s out to get me hat for just a moment, I could imagine there’s a perfectly reasonable, logistical business decision for this move. If you have too many packages to handle on a given day (perhaps we’re getting into holiday shipping season) it may be a good idea to hold back packages that won’t be late.

It really comes down to this: it’s MY package and I want it! GIMME! FedEx must realize that, other than my wife, I’m the most important thing in their world. Apparently the memo hasn’t circulated yet.

Yesterday we released the public beta of Office 2010, you should go download it right now.

There’s a bunch of new stuff, so it’s really hard to predict what’s going to be exciting to you, but here’s the top feature for me: ignore. Yep, ignore. Outlook has built in a big, beautiful chunk of anti-social awesome. You know when you get added to that really long e-mail thread that won’t go away? The one people keep replying to, dragging it on until it sucks the air out of your office through your monitor. Now you can just right-click, select ignore and the thread goes away... even future mails to the thread.

Another of my fav Outlook features: the Quick Steps. They are, at their heart, macros. Select a message and click a quick action to create a task, mark the message read and dump into into a folder all in one button press. I’m currently working on giving my quick steps the GTD treatment.

It’s the nature of my job, I live my life in Outlook. There is, however, a ton of goodness in all the apps. Go checkout the beta site for a run down of what’s new in each of the Office applications. There are features to make your life easier (e.g. multi-user editing of docs) and features to make you look good (e.g. spark lines in Excel).

But can you really use it? Absolutely. I’ve uninstalled Office 2007 on all my machines and only run Office 2010. Sure, it’s a beta, it’s not perfect. But it never stops me from getting my job done. So, If I can live using only the beta, you should feel comfortable at least trying it out for a bit.

Tonight I watched three hours of television, and two hours of it were in reverse.  It seems more and more TV writers are using the flashback episode as crutch.

By flashback episode I mean those episodes where at the start of the show you come in at the end of the action.  So, after ten minutes of "look, here's how the show ends!" you have to sit through 30 minutes of review explaining how you ended up where you started.

Here's my request to TV writers out there: either learn how to develop tension through foreshadowing and character development or go back to film school.

I was checking out some tracks on Rapsody. Evanescence was playing and a vampire movie was the the sponsor.

I’ll wager I’d get the same advert if I were listening to Liberace (who is not quite as goth as John Tesh, but close).