I'm on a trip today and did my customary stop at McDonalds for breakfast. They're in the middle of a massive Shrek the Third promotion.

I didn't really pay much attention to it until I went to go put my straw in my orange juice.

It was Ogre Green.

I guess if it weren't orange juice, the straw wouldn't have looked so bad. But with orange juice, well, it looked like Phyllis Diller with a bad hair day. Nasty.

I decided to forgo the straw this morning....

Ever since purchasing my Mini Cooper S Convertible about 18 months ago, I've often felt a little guilty over spending so much money on a fun car that I never drive much of anywhere. In 18 months, prior to this week, I hadn't even broken 8000 miles on the car.

This week, I got to do some work related business up in New Jersey. The weather forecast looked nice, so I took the Mini up on the trip. Getting home that night after spending about 7 hours on the road total, I was happily reassured that the car really does do long trips well. I arrived home with no back aches (a testament to the well designed seats) and a grin on my face (mostly because I drove with the top down most of the way). Music blaring from the stereo fed by the iPod, and a nice breeze blowing through the car - a great drive indeed. It helped to take the edge off all the other events of this week.

31.7 mpg for the entire trip didn't hurt either. And to use a quote from another co-worker of mine who has a BMW, "I didn't drive it to maximize fuel economy either."

I attended the memorial service today for one of my mother's cousins. At the sign in table, the family had made little cards from my second uncle's drawings, and had a quote on the back of each (what he used to call SWOTD (Special Wisdom of the Day)).

This is what was printed on the back of mine. I found it quite profound, especially given my second uncle was quite the musician.

"after silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music" - Aldous Huxley

The memorial service itself was quite beautiful, and also a bit sad. It's always touching to see how much a person is loved and how different people from different stages of ones life reflect on the same person. All very heartfelt and all very sincere. It was also a beautiful day with a cool breeze and light scattered clouds.

Poor Declan. This last week has been a tough one for him as he was suffering from the Hand, Foot, and Mouth disease thing.

This is one of those cases where you can't do much to speed the illness on its way. All you can do is feed Tylenol and Motrin and keep the pain under control. And try to convince the little one to keep drinking.

It hurts to watch - probably as much as it hurts the child to deal with the sores that often accompany this virus.

Hopefully, now that he's gotten it he won't get it again.

Yesterday, Verizon's contractor went down my street marking cable locations and hanging fliers on the door to indicate that they were about to pull the remaining infrastructure required to get Verizon's new FIOS service. I can't wait. It will finally be a decent alternative to the cable company and my cable modem.

http://www.verizon.com/fios in order to read more about it.

It's not so much the additional speed I'll be happy about (though it certainly doesn't hurt). I'm hoping that Verizon engineered FIOS like they have all their other telecommunications services - with over engineered infrastructure that will hopefully be more robust than that of Comcast. For all the good things about Comcast's service, I'm now tired of the 1-2 hour outages I experience every few weeks or so as the service mysteriously goes down in the middle of the day. These events have become frequent enough that I've gotten a DSL line as a backup to the cable modem. So I can keep working through these outages.

Check back here as I provide updates. As much as being first usually means being on the bleeding edge, I'll probably be first (yet again) to get some sort of new internet technology to my house. (I was first in my neighborhood in California for ISDN. I was first in my neighborhood in Pennsylvania for DSL. Why not be first in the neighborhood for FIOS?)

So this blog entry probably isn't news to some. In fact, to most outside the US most likely.

I recently went down to Costco to buy a new cordless phone set for the house. I settled on a nice unit by Panasonic KX-TG1034 -- one base with cordless handsets and 3 additional handsets. I was intrigued because of the advertised battery life (approaching 17 hours of talk time).

This phone came with something called DECT 6.0 which claimed to be the latest in privacy and interference prevention technology. Hmmm. That's a challenge in our house with two wireless networks, baby monitors, and a bazillion other electronic devices to contend with.

I got the box home, set it up, and have been really impressed with the performance of these phones. But reading the technical specs was the kicker.

This thing is nothing more than a short range cell phone.

DECT (Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications) 6.0 runs in the 1920-1930MHz spectrum (close to US cell phones) and utilizes TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) which is the same technology used by GSM cell phone to multiplex calls. This is great! Technology that we know works pretty well in cell phones, and operating on a frequency that nothing else is (supposed to be) using. My 2.4GHz wireless networks are safe and so are the 900MHz baby monitors.

And even with a full day of con-calls, I've yet to even get the battery to drop one status bar. So far so good.

Highly recommend the phone.