So bad it's good

This is undoubtedly the least convincing phishing scam I've ever had.

It'll never catch on

Missing the Sunday Times today, I decided to read it on the web. And it's instantly obvious how unsatisfactory it was: all the text is there, but the surrounding visual cues aren't. No separate sections that let you narrow down your choices, discarding half the paperwork (appointments and sport for me) until what you've got what interests you. No full-page spread of headlines - the screen hasn't been built yet that can handle two pages of broadsheet - and no opportunity to create your own buzzz 'around' what you're reading, spreading other parts of the paper around the table so you can dot around over a tea. On paper, the Sunday Times is a weekend feast. On the web, it's content without context.

Listing in triplicate

The list of things I need to do, book, or check before a Triathlon is up to 60 items.

First there's the travel stuff. My chunk of the Tube network doesn't allow bikes, so even getting to a mainline station is far from trouble-free: there's nominally a simple route between my 'hood and Euston, but in actuality much of that route is one-way. The wrong way. All with a pack on my back.

And when I reach the station there are more items to check. In addition to engineering works between London and Manchester, I hit an unusually pedantic train manager who absolutely positively isn't going to let my bike on his shiny new Pendolino, and I have to take the next one instead with a 'fake ID' (i.e. a 'bike requested' label which happens to look exactly like a reserved label. Train going to Stockport, less pedantic train manager: I'm in like Flynn, and the only problem then is that I end up in the wrong city, relying on the kindness of a rail replacement bus driver to let my steed on board.

Off the train, it's time to rack and register. This weekend's fun is in Manchester, a city I don't know at all, and it takes a while to wheel to the venue. Do I have ID? BTA membership? Cash? Clothing? More items to check. Then hotel (find the place again.) Arrange a taxi for very, very early the next day. I even have to carry a packed breakfast, since no hotel's going to open its kitchen at 5am. Shower, food, check list again. Sleep. Wake. Then there's the race itself.

And later, the hassle of doing it all in reverse to get home.

There are distinct moments when I wonder why I'm doing it - the moment I enter the water (needless to say, open water in the North of England at 7am on a cloudy Sunday is COLD) and the moment I start the run (when your legs are still trying to turn pedals.) But when I cross the finishing line, it all seems worth it. Somehow.

'We only wanted to scare people'

Hmm, so one arrested London bomber is saying they never expected the bombs to go off - wanting only to 'scare' not 'kill'. Pull the other one. (Suicide bombers never were the smartest of people.) He got one thing right, though: the attacks were inspired by Britain's involvement in Iraq. Surely even the delusional fanatics like Blair can't deny this now.

Stony as a Washington Neocon

Stony broke. Partway through the best quarter of the year, and I suddenly realise I've got £50 in the world and am facing £250 in overdrawn fees just to make my mortgage next week. How can this happen when the calendar's full to bursting?

Here's how. Plenty of people book you up for plenty of days early in the month, so you relax slightly where your credit card's concerned. You pay for a client's sandwich, or a coffee or two. A golden rule of budgeting is 'avoid small nonessentials' - but the £20 a day they're adding up to doesn't matter when you're billing. Life is good.

Three projects. Two of them grow. Billings for a copy project turn into extra billings to whomp up the interaction model, then further billings to scare up the entire information architecture - both leading to increased scope of copy and upping my copywriting days. The single spreadsheet which describes your whole business starts to sing sweetly to you in the night. You go out to dinner, two nights in a row: the slip reads £60 each time. Hardly matters that you're maxing out one credit card, there are two others in your wallet. Just roll.

The work gets done, but the feedback phase is delayed, so you can't bill the extra days until next month. Doesn't really matter; it stays on the Sales, after all. No problem. A week later, the mortgage is due. Oops, there isn't enough in your business account to draw your salary yet, so you have to pay it by withdrawing cash on your credit card. But you've billed enough in the last two days alone to cover it, and £700 isn't really much, is it? Well, a girlfriend's flying in from Japan next month too, so you'd better put £200, £300 in her bank to cover her travel costs, all cash withdrawn from Mr Visa. £21 in fees plus added super-interest. Gotta clear that. Next week perhaps.

Halfway through the month, you take on a little extra project that includes a project management aspect. You can do it; why not bill for it? The £1000 you've got to pay upfront for campaign production doesn't seem that large when the project pays double that. In late afternoons heading home, you know you've got nothing in the fridge, so you stop off in town and head for a restaurant instead. Mmmmm. £31 buys a really good hamburger.

Rest of the week, you work frantically so you can enjoy the weekend's fun: a countryside Triathlon far from the seething crowds of London. You enjoy the hotel, dinner, even the comfortable train (take the upgrade to First, why not?) On Monday morning, a voice on your phone tells you there's a problem with your card for the energy gloop you bought on Sunday before the race. Oops. You pay the credit card with a business debit card, which increases your business liabilities due end of month. Still, no sweat. You've got lots of billings.

You enter the month's second half. One account turns into two: whoopee. The client's client you were ultimately working for wants to book something outside your immediate client's core competency; he asks if he can work with you directly. No problems. Whoooo. Ten seconds on the phone book another £500. You're approaching the absolute maximum of days it's possible to book in one month. When monthly debits peel off your personal account, you don't notice them, because you're not starting each day with a look at your financial situation. When the pure heroin of billings is coursing through your veins, the downers of daily cashflow don't get a look-in. But it doesn't matter, because your horrendous personal overdraft is smothered by the ever-increasing figure on your Sales Ledger Outstanding.

Last week of the month. You never notice how close to the edge you're skating, because your billings this month will be four times average UK household income and you feel wealthy. What you neglect is that the actual cash won't hit your business account for several months, and in the meantime you're saddled with someone else's debts as well as your own. Same applies to the VAT you've charged out (which the Revenue wants next month, even though it won't arrive with you for a month after that) and the two months' PAYE tax and NI you owe. (Of course, as a limited company you pay NI at double rates, employers' contribution in addition to personal.) You pay two months, that still leaves this month's demand lying on the desk. You'll deal with it later. There's always a later.

Oops, You notice that over a thousand pounds of your billings are just rebilled costs, not gross profit: money you've paid out for a client's project, that won't be paid to you until September. Revise the figures a bit. Try to confirm the two extra days' booking a client mentioned last week. Hmmm, it's only one day. Oh well. I take it. It's the 27th; soon be time for the mortgage to come out again. With three days to clear any payment in, and another three to transfer my salary to my personal account, I need six clear working days to make sure there's enough cash to keep a roof over my head. I have... nine days. Including a weekend. Cutting it a bit fine.

End of the month. The billings figure stays constant on the Sales Ledger; its growth from the previous month exactly matches the month's billings total, which means NOBODY HAS PAID ANYTHING AT ALL for the work I did in June, with most of May still outstanding too. So after one of the most profitable months on my books, I end the month with a few tarnished coppers in my pocket and a Himalayan pile of credit card debt. My bank fees for the month of July will be approximately £278, not far off a full day's billings. One day a month, I'm working for my bank. I persuade some pals into an at-home get together instead of dinner out tonight.

That's how it goes, sometimes, in business. The harder you work, the poorer you get. And it's happening to me now.

Diagon Alley

There's a tiny street in London's West End, not far Leicester Square; it's full of old bookshops and poster stalls selling arty bric-a-brac, like yellowed tearsheets from 1929 AA Milne editions framed as pictures. It's a magical little place, without traffic and hidden from the noise not ten metres away, but - while the street isn't hidden at all, and appears on maps - I can never find it when I want to.

I was there today, for the first time in a year or so. Hit it by accident on the way between appointments. Wandered its length, enchanted as usual, in a magical little break from reality. As if I'd somehow stepped into the Harry Potter universe and taken a wrong turn into Diagon Alley. Within minutes, it was behind me.

And now, I've forgotten where it is again.

But I don't think I'll look for it, or note its name when I do. Instead, I'll keep the street as a secret from myself, so whenever I find myself walking down it, it'll always be a surprise.

Clarkson gets it right

Politically incorrect Jeremy Clarkson gets it right in this Sunday Times piece. If communities don't want to integrate, what's wrong with just living separate lives in the same land?

Cruise in the Tour

Well done, Lance! The greatest cyclist in the history of the world goes out on a high note.

'Fantastic Four': a two-hour trailer

I've never seen such a blatant ad for a sequel as the 'Fantastic Four' movie. Much as I like the cinema experience - I'll watch any crap as long as it's on a big screen in a darkened room - I didn't enjoy this overlong trailer one bit. Definitely the worst superhero flick since 'Hulk'.

That's all the film is: one long trailer. No story there; the most heroic thing they do is save a firetruck. And how fantastic can they be if it takes four of them to subdue someone who got his powers the same way?

Sad, since it explores the origin myth reasonably well, despite the usual problem of characters and situations conceived in an age where technology was all rocketships and rayguns instead of barcodes and Blackberries. And the craft - in both FX and scripting - is excellent. 'Fantastic Four' always seemed the most exotic of the superhero comics during my childhood, not because of their powers but at the way their human personalities and American settings were explored. (It wasn't superpowers that made Marvel heroes exotic to a British audience: it was the wisecracking meter of their speech and the way they drove big cars in their teens.)

But as a film, it just isn't that good. It's a bad idea for a film to think itself such a sure thing that a sequel is automatically forthcoming.

Something about Britain dies

I thought there was something odd about the police's silence over the shooting. They got the wrong guy.

Now I'm not making any judgements here - except to say the cops were plainclothes, and if four scruffy guys start pointing guns at me on a London street, I'd run too.

Something important about Britain.... died this week. What the terrorists couldn't destroy on 7/07, the police have started doing for them. Sad.

Health and wellbeing

A major event occurred in my life last night. I opened a bottle of wine, and.... didn't finish it.

Not an earth-shattering occurrence, you might think. But I'm a 'finisher'. Any job of work, newspaper to read, movie I'm watching, I'll always stick it out no matter what a bad decision that may be. And the same's always applied to wine, which is why I never keep more than one bottle downstairs.

But last night, I really didn't want it. Two glasses was fine. It seems that after a year of training, my mind/body gestalt is finally paying off. After two duff Triathlon finishes (in the bottom 20%) I've recently adopted a morning exercise routine in addition to swimming, biking, and running: 3 x 33 ab crunches, 3 x 11 pressups, 3 x 11 one-legged squats on each leg, to build strength. (In case you're wondering, I like things that come in threes.) And I've got better concentration, faster thought processes, and more ideas because of it - among which is a reduced craving for mind-altering substances.

Makes sense. Your brain's just part of your body, after all. And reaching some sort of peak means my body's telling my brain that I don't need to finish a whole bottle of wine to bring closure to the working week. My body's been screaming for years, and my brain's finally listening. Awesome.

Telling whoppers

Politicians have always lied; they need to balance so many interests that they can't help it. But one thing worries me about the current state of British politics: the sheer scale of the lies.

The Iraquagmire, of course, is the big one - first the ghost WMDs, then the denial the war was being lost, now the incredible claim that it's reducing terrorism (with the first homegrown suicide bombers appearing twice this month.) That's a big lie.

But there are others. What about Brown's missed target of keeping the country's budget within his 'golden rules' - conveniently buried under other bad news? HE MISSED IT THIS WEEK! Yet unbelievably, Brown redefined the criteria of 'economic cycle' 24 hours before his announcement - moving the goalposts by 2 years. The £13bn this put back on the spreadsheet let him claim he was keeping to the rule. NO YOU'RE NOT, GORDON!

And it's not a New Labour disease, either. The Conservative Party is still congratulating itself on a reasonable election back in May, gaining sixty seats or so. But Labour's remaining majority - 66 seats - is still just as big as Margaret Thatcher's after her landslide victory, which happened when the public sector was on a three-day week, currency controls were in place, and garbage was piled high in the streets. Conservatives are FAILING TO FACE REALITY.

It's out in the wider world, too. EU leaders are congratulating themselves on agreeing $50bn of aid to Africa, while subsidising Europe's farmers by many more billions a year - not only failing to balance the aid, but choking off the one economic activity Africa does well: grow cheap food. Letting Africa export could solve its troubles inside a decade, and add less than one percentage point (at absolute max) to Europe's unemployment figures. Yet this dish ISN'T EVEN ON THE MENU.

And across the Atlantic, the whoppers are even bigger and better. A President gets elected by voter fraud for the second time; only a few brave journalists investigate. An American correspondent recently 'wondered' if the war on terror was doing any good. Good? With Iraq providing legitimacy and a training ground for suicide bombers, IT'S ACTIVELY MAKING IT WORSE!

Perhaps, though, the ultimate blame lies at home. In my spruce new London townhouse, with a busy business to run, I delude myself into thinking I'm affluent. Yet with a vast mortgage and enough credit cards to play poker with, I'm arguably POORER THAN ANY AFRICAN!!!!

Shootouts in Stockwell

A man's been shot dead on the Tube. Now there are any number of justifiable reasons for doing this - eating a hamburger, listening to an iPod too loudly, reading an unfolded broadsheet, taking up both armrests - but in this case it looks like he was one of yesterday's failed suicide bombers trying to escape from police.

It further confirms these lame-duck terrorists' monumental stupidity. You're trying to get away from police, and you duck into a tube station? Some of the most intensely surveilled and controlled places in London? He even got onto a train; surely even in the heat of the chase he couldn't have believed it would pull away with half a dozen H&K'd cops chasing him down the platform. Oh well - assuming it's the right guy, that's one down, three to go.

Squeeeeeeze!

What part of 'max headroom' does this truck driver not understand? (Yes, the roof of the truck is touching the arch.)
The funny thing is that the truck is riding low - so even if he gets it through the gate and unloads successfully, he'll never get it out again.

What a bunch of al-amateurs

If you want to be a terrorist, the golden rule is: TERRIFY PEOPLE.

Two weeks on from 7/07, London entertains a bunch of wannabe fanatics whose bombing atttempts were a bit of a damp squib. In addition to having minds too feeble to negotiate life beyond the vision of a few Muslim fanatics, they can't even set off an explosion without making a hash of it. I think I'll give the only reaction such lightweights deserve: I'll laugh at them.

What do we call guys who desperately want to be big-bad terrorists but aren't? 'Scareists' perhaps? Worryists? Apparently the guy left holding his smoking backpack had 'an unusual expression on his face'. Hardly surprising - at that point he expected to be in the company of 72 virgins, not 72 annoyed commuters. (By an amusing coincidence, 72 is also the capacity of a Routemaster bus.)

Indirect what?

Charles Clarke isn't quite as bad as Blunkett - but he's getting there rapidly. 'Indirect incitement to terrorism'? Sounds like something Mao or Stalin would've written into law. Of course, Clarke will claim it'll only be used against certain well-defined groups of people. And of course, within three months of being passed it'll be used against a trio of students or something. Just as current Anti-Terror laws passed post-911 were used three months later to arrest peaceful students outside an arms fair. And current US extradition laws designed to fight terrorism are used in over half of cases to extradite those accused of false accounting and other white-collar crimes.

Just as the Iraquagmire passed some kind of 'tipping point' on Monday - it's no longer a containable situation, and is now certain to become a civil war - 7/07 killed off any chance of real freedom of speech or right to privacy remaining in the UK. Some of us tried, but... we're doomed.

51% of Americans want to attack... someone

Apparently 51% of Americans believe military strikes are the appropriate response to 7/07. Against who?

Subway: something that should be under the ground

I'm at a loss as to why Subway is expanding in the UK. If the Guardian's figures are true, it means their triumph of presentation over substance is working, just as it's worked in the USA.

I mean, I'm a sandwich fan. The right floury or malty bread with lots of seeds... a good cut of prime beef, the competitive boxing of bacon and avocado between ciabatta halves, homemade mayo mustard, salad leaves bursting out the sides, freshly ground black pepper adding a buzz, balsamic vinegar that soaks into sourdough... summer evenings during this 'recovery week' (after yesterday's hilly Triathlon) just don't get any better than this. Every night this week I'll be on my balcony with a glass of New Zealand white and a plate of sunshine between two slices.

But Subway? Four kinds of indentically artificial bread, twelve reconstituted fillings, four generic sauces mixed in giant vats and frozen? Even the salads look plastic. And what's worse, the sandwiches just fall apart when you try to eat them; the bread's so full of air it crumbles when picked up. I've ventured into Subway twice recently when I felt like a lunch instead of a coffee, and left feeling angry both times.

Americans and most British are easy to fool when it comes to food - without much choice in their own Main Streets, they're just not accustomed to fresh or edgy flavours. But London? With its organic obsession, Fresh & Wild supermarket, Borough Market, trains that'll get you to France in hours and low-cost airlines that make it possible to visit Spain or Italy for dinner?

But nonetheless, the Subway network is fast digging deep into the UK economy. The shops are clean, the smells are seductive, and the range on offer makes it look like a real sandwich shop. But it's not a patch on any local Greek or Italian one-off where the owner cuts his meat straight from a homecooked bird every morning. And never will be.

Four wheels good

Triathlon involves a swim, a bike, and a run, yet perversely it's really hard to do without a car.

For a sport that celebrates the diverse abilities of the human body, there's one hell of a lot of extra gear to carry around. And since I don't have a car (330 days a year it's just be a chunk of metal depreciating in my driveway) I have to carry that gear on my back, along with 10kg of bike when I can't ride it. Which limits what I can carry for the weekend. With a wetsuit and running shoes already in my backpack that's two-thirds of the space already gone.

Of course, my Tube line doesn't take bikes, so just to get out of London I have to trundle to a mainline station at daybreak. I have an appalling sense of direction, so the need to consult an A-Z every km means an 8km journey takes 45mins. And the troubles don't stop there. Many British trains only take the first three bikes to arrive, or make your steed ride in the guard's van, or something else specially formulated to yank your chain.
Then when you bowl up after two changes in a part of the country you've never seen, you need to get back on the bike and find a) where the event is and b) where you're sleeping that night. Naturally, sleep is all you do there: my race Sunday starts at 8am, so I have to pack breakfast too.
Triathletes joke about a 'fourth discipline' of transition; Ironman maniacs mention a fifth, of nutrition. How about a sixth: getting yourself to the event?

But I'm starting to feel a masochistic fondness for the precision planning involved. Enjoying it, even. Makes a Tri more than an event: it becomes an expedition.

Gotcha!

Aha! So speed cameras aren't so safe after all.
It's been obvious for years that speed cameras - personifying Britain's surveillance-obsessed, control-freak government - are more about raising money than safety, but some new figures suggest the safety angle is based on some very dodgy stats.
The general rule: if a stretch of road has a spate of crashes, that's the main 'driver' for installing a speed camera on it. Since a spate of crashes is statistically unusual, OF COURSE the crash rate will go down afterwards - whether a cam's been installed or not. And when the £60 fines start rolling in, a proportion goes to both the camera operator and the local authority. In other words, cameras are installed by statistical anomalies and kept there by sales commissions.
Speed cameras hit a roadbump about two years ago, when local authorities misjudged the mood of motorists; there wasn't any sudden realisation, but somehow during 2003 it dawned on the UK that these cameras weren't being put there primarily for safety reasons. Now, it seems the network of cams is contracting a bit - and good riddance. How much safer can a road be if every motorist on it is looking down at his speedometer every two seconds?

7/07

I've taken to calling last week's terrorist attacks '7/07'. New Yorkers got a poignant three-digit buzzword: London needs one too.

Why did the chicken cross the road...

Entertainment channel Fox News reports on 7/07 bombing:

But Ted Wright, chairman of the British Poultry Council, said he was taking a taxi to avoid the subway system. "In light of what has happened, I have decided to take a taxi. It will probably cost an extra six pounds ($10.70), but should hopefully put my wife's mind at rest," he said.

Well, what else would you expect from a top chicken?

new information has come to light

OK, I meant except for Mikail Bakunin's anarchists, the Shining Path in South America, the Red Brigade in Italy, Basque separatists in France and Spain, and Marxist guerillas in Colombia. Thanks to everyone who knocked holes in my theory.

It's all down to belief

A thought. Has there ever, anywhere in the world, been a single terrorist incident not carried out by religionists?
Islamic fundamentalism. Christian neo-conservatives. Irish Catholics and Protestants. Israeli Jews. Hamas. Hizbollah. Sikh separatists. There may, somewhere, be a 'Buddhist People's Front'. But no terror group called 'al-Atheist' or the 'Real non-Churchgoers'.
It's easy to understand why. Without the sense of entitlement and self-righteousness that religionists tend to claim as justification, atheists don't do terrorism. Those who see religion for what it is - a need for comfort, a means of gaining power, a control system for the masses - don't regard it as reason enough to start chucking bombs around.

London shrugs

The Times says London is 'reeling'. What's odd is that it's really not.
Seven scenes of emergency, carefully chosen to bring major transport routes and financial hubs to a standstill, haven't stopped the city in its tracks - the Tube may be paralysed, but the scenes on the streets are calm. Police, fire, and medics are working together smoothly and efficiently; they've been training years for this. Hospitals swung into action, and booked in 180 patients and a truckload of blood without problems. People realised the situation, and hung out on street corners or strode home.
Well done, my fellow Londoners - the fundamentalists think they've struck a haymaking blow, when in fact it's caused no more trouble than a brusque jostle. Do your worst, guys: this city can take it.

Terror wins again, as it's done in the USA

Yup, London is under attack. Now up to 3 buses and 6 stations ablaze.

What's concerning me now, though, is the far more corrosive attack that the British government will carry out on its back. ID cards will now go through without a whimper. Satellite tracking for every car, financial profiling of every bank account. All the privacy-invading
(LIVERPOOL STREET'S JUST BEEN WHACKED AGAIN)
legislation New Labour wants will now pass without complaint. Despite the security measures since 9/11 not stopping whatever this is today. And Blair will gloss over the fact it's due to his Bush-pleasing decisions that led to it. (Anyone like to take odds this is Islamists? I can't imagine even the Real IRA being this organised.)
(NOW IT'S BRIGHTON)
And all this new legislation will do is dial up the same fear and paranoia that already exists in the USA. That's it. Just as they did on 9/11, the government will do precisely what the terrorists want.

And for an encore....

And one day after London won the Olympics, the Tube has put on a network-wide show for your entertainment.

When big bangs happen in six places at once, they stop thinking it's a power surge and start thinking bombs. If you had to cut me off personally, there's no better way to do it - Aldgate shuts down my local line, I was heading to where I'd be cut off by the Edgware blast, and my alternative by bus goes to Russell Sq, where reports are coming in that a bus has also done the big firework. Think I'll work from home today.

What the Olympics really mean

On any project I like to put in the numbers; everything comes down to money. And now the shouting's over in Trafalgar Square, I'd like to see what the £3.8bn cost of the Olympics will really do for the UK economy. A few back-of-envelope calculations...

Two million people live within 5km of the Games' ground zero. Let's say 300,000 of them use public transport. Several new Tube stations and a lot of roadwork will knock some minutes off their journey. The average journey from Stratford into town is around an hour all in, so let's take a guess that it'll take those people six minutes less to get to work.
At minimum wage (a conservative way to crunch these numbers) that results in 51p per person per journey going into the economy instead of reading 'Metro'. And they do it twice each day. That's £306,000 a day. Five working days in a week, 48 working weeks in a year. So each year our smiling straphangers add £73,440,000 to Britain's GDP. Over the 25-year lifespan of the infrastructural improvements, that's over £1.8bn saved right there.

And that's just the start. Today, Stratford suffers from the Canary Wharf effect: it's a long way from town and hard to get to. But just as Canada Place is now buzzing even on Saturdays, a lot of businesses now have an incentive to start up in Stratford - the shiny new station's already there, and European services start in a few years. Let's say 2000 new businesses that wouldn't otherwise exist start up around the new 'city in the east' by 2015. At an average £350,000 turnover, that's adding £0.7bn a year - £17.5bn over our 25-year arbitrary amortisation.

Just two scribbles have added £19.4bn to the British economy - against a projected cost of £3.8bn (let's say this is amortised too, costing a total of £9bn with interest over the 25 years.) So our Games put £10.4bn into the UK economy with two partial guesstimates.

On balance, these games are going to be worthwhile. We just won't notice it.

A very British coup

IT'S LONDON! The 2012 Olympics are coming to my 'hood. Thank you, Mr Chirac, for tipping the balance yesterday.

A year ago, Britain's support for the war and a disorganised campaign put it among the also-rans. Credit to Seb Coe for getting things back on track - and in the end, it came down to a very British tiebreaker: I'm sure it was down to one Finnish IOC member and a couple of Anglophiles, who took exception to the French leader's 'Only Finnish food is worse than British' comment yesterday.

I was divided on the Paris/London competition, two cities I adore in equal measure. It means lots of activity in Stratford - an area which sorely needs new investment - but it'll be expensive; few Games make a profit. But on balance - now we've won it, I'm going to support it. Wonder where the Triathlon course will be?

Busy as a Blairite spin doctor

Whoa, now this is what I call stacked. 2 interaction models to create, 2 IAs to flesh out with text for another project, and three mailings of some sort on the way somewhere. Which means I'm really busy for once. While business is great right now, I rarely get 'busy' in the way most people think: a razorlike focus on time management means I usually complete a day's work in two stints of four hours. But not this month, I think. In fact, what the hell am I doing blogging at a time like this? Bye!