eggnog + Capt Morgan's Spiced Rum = A very pleasant Christmas Eve

For me, checking the clock actually helps. I will fall asleep for some period of time and not know it unless I've been checking a clock. Once I realize that I have been asleep, I calm down a bit and that helps me go back to sleep. I wear one of those watches that glows in the dark all the time for this very reason.

I travel a lot and I use Google Maps constantly. It's probably the most reliable way to find a restaurant even in a city you are fairly familiar with. You might have to poke around a bit to read menus and perhaps cross reference with "TripAdvisor" but overall, it's one of my most useful apps.

It's a lot easier than dual booting.

Get the best of both worlds, download VMware's Player and build a little Linux VM to use as a second Desktop. You can flip back and forth between the two Desktops very easily. It also has something called Unity that lets you display your Linux terminals on your Windows Desktop.

A compass works too.

MA's got lobstah, clam chowdah and fried clams to die for.

An Oppo Blue Ray Player. You won't believe what you been missing.

I've found just the opposite to be true. If I don't look at the time, I don't know that I've been sleeping and I get worked up over the fact that I'm not sleeping. If I check the time, I'm almost always pleasantly surprised to see that it is two or three hours later than I thought, so I must have been sleeping. I…

I'm not sure if it was corporate wide or not but my division of Lockheed required that all meetings have a published agenda and published notes.

I'm an admin and I haven't actually touched a machine besides my laptop for three years now.

I've often thought that rich people are rich because they do things like buy really nice cars and keep them for twenty years. Check around the parking garage of a luxury condo. You'll be surprised how many cars need a paint job because the are so old.

Twenty years ago it was quite common. When you got on the airplane, the attendants would just take your suit bag and hang it up for you. I don't know if planes now even have a place to hang a suit bag.

My experience has been that you get much better deals at no-haggle places. The only minuses I've seen with no-haggle dealerships is that the sales people aren't very well informed and you might not be able to test drive the car you are interested in. They tend to be low margin operations all the way around.

I have a "sit down" job that is causing health problems. I thought a standing desk would help but my doctors told me it would be fine to use a standing desk but I shouldn't stand at it for too long. They said that people with jobs where they stand all day have worse problems. The advice I've been getting is…

"aside from an internet connection" - that's a big aside. You're not really "cutting the cable" if you're getting internet from a cable company.

I've been trying to get by lately with just a Kindle Fire HD, a Logitech keyboard and an iPhone. I'm a UNIX guy though, so I just need a VPN app and an SSH client and I'm pretty happy. For notes, I use Evernote. I can only open one SSH session at a time so I can't do any serious work but for overnights or…

I don't need to, it's working just fine.

Having more than one cat is a sign of mental illness.

Where I live, laundry chutes fall into the same safety category as elevators. When I remodeled a bathroom, we had to take a basic laundry chute out because it would have been so expensive to get it up to code.