The 2007 List
Presenting the fourth installment in a continuing series dating back to 2004: the 2007 list. Best Parenting Moment: Son Benjamin’s Bar Mitzvah, celebrated with lots of friends and family. He made us cry, he made his hockey coaches cry (something I hadn’t seen before) and he played a mean guitar solo with the band. Best [...]
Bad Santa
I’m a bad Santa, and that’s “bad” as in “bad imitation,” not “bad” as in “good” or “ill-behaved.” But I love being Santa, even if it’s for 20 minutes in our office holiday party, and this year marked two full decades of wearing a red carpet, itchy nylon beard and someone else’s idea of winter [...]
Microloans and Information Capital
On a sweltering June day in 1999, a few of us local engineers attended the Rising Tide Summit, hosted by Silicon Alley Reporter editor and bubble boy Jason Calacanis. It was intense, even for an event in the frenzy of the dot-com boom. I have only two memories that have survived the post-boom memory contraction: [...]
Sopranos Finale: All The Ducks In A Row
Plot spoilers follow, in case you’re one of the 0.0005% of HBO viewers who didn’t see the last episode of The Sopranos. If you don’t follow the show, only half of this may converge to make sense. Even if you are a Sopranos fan, prepare to wade through a morass of heavy symbolism and interpretation. [...]
Private Tag, Public Confessional
I was tagged yesterday so I get to present five fun-filled formerly faintly fanned-out facts about myself, excluding my love of alliteration or anything I’ve blogged or podcasted about previously, greatly limiting the source material. Warning: this post contains references to nudity, lingerie, and anatomic correctness, and it got really, really long. And in case [...]
The 2006 List
I feel morally compelled to complete the hat trick of annual lists, as part of a continuing pseudo-tradition of checking off the year just completed. My little life snippets pale in comparison to some of the accomplishments regaled in the pile of holiday cards, paper and electronic, that we received in the past weeks. But [...]
Another Day, Another Blog
At the suggestion of Claire Giordano, I created a WordPress blog for the Snowman’s web site. Turns out that most of what I want to be doing with my personal site looks, feels and smells like a blog anyway, and it’s far easier to publish this way than to hack HTML all day long. So [...]
Here Comes (Jamaican) Santa Claus
My cast of alter egos grew by one over the holiday break. I was Jamaican Santa, accompanied by my “elves” as we prepared to make landfall on the beach in front of the Hotel Riu Ocho Rios. Backstory: On Christmas morning, the head of the entertainment crew at the hotel asked if I’d step in [...]
The 2005 List
I accidentally started a tradition last year by making a list so I’m compelled to do one this year as well. Best Parenting Moment. Watching my daughter read from the Torah outside of Robinson’s Arch at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and my son blow the shofar in the same spot where it’s been used [...]
Frosty’s Back (and Fuzzier than Ever)
This is what makes the holiday season fun for me: I get to be Frosty The Snowman. At our Somerset, NJ office party I had the pleasure of making about a dozen new friends all under the age of ten. Only two kids were terrified of me, possibly confusing Frosty with the Abominable Snowman in [...]