Take the funny and run
Interesting review of how jokes are stolen and recycled in the comedy world. Denis Leary, Dane Cook and Carlos Mencia do not come off well.

Alert waitress at a restaurant
Inspirational story of a waitress who notices a guy slipping something into his date’s drink.

Circuit City fires thousands after deciding they earn too much money
Firing your best salespeople is the best way to grow sales at a dying retailer.

How car dealerships try to rip you off
Another insider report from Consumerist. If you aren’t reading Consumerist each day, you should be.

Entwistle Trial
I snarfed up this domain thinking I’d be able to cover the trial as it was happening. Unfortunately, with so much else going on, I’m not going to be able to do that. So, the domain is up for sale, if anyone wants to make an offer for the good type-in traffic.

Odd: Justin.tv.

Justin has a webcam over his ear. And he never takes it off. Ever. It’s always transmitting whatever is happening in his life. It’s really weird (and a little creepy), but compelling nonetheless. It’s like being dropped into Being John Malkovich.

We finally had a nice spring weekend day yesterday, after all the months of slush and snow.

Sadie’s not much of a morning person — perhaps a few too many milk shooters on Friday night.

She eventually got her act together, so we went out in the backyard to play. We started with baseball, to get ready for the Red Sox opener. Here she is doing her “Kevin Millar in Right Field” impression.

Then, we switched to the playground ball. I would roll it to her and she’d carry it back. This went on for half an hour.

Sadie is very happy that spring is here. We’re going to spend many afternoons outside this summer.

I can’t remember if I linked to this before or not, but I threw together a quick site for some of my elephant photos. Click on the thumbnails below to see the full picture.

Since I haven’t traveled for a while, I need to refer to the memories

Wow, so an hour or so after posting my last post, I find out that Tabblo has been acquired by Hewlett-Packard.

Massive congratulations to Antonio, John, Dan, Liesel (all ex-Abuzzers) and everyone else on the Tabblo team.

Tabblo just launched a super-simple way to make a photo cube. I just went and did it, and it took 45 seconds to create and print out the sheet. Incredibly easy. Incredibly cool. Take a look at my quick photocube (.pdf).

More product information from Tabblo. Antonio’s launch announcement.

If you put a frog in cold water and then start heating it up, the frog will jump out when it gets uncomfortable.

Let a million “enlightening” anecdotes get cut from bad presentations. Hallelujah.

A review of the Tufte class
Here is a review of the recent Edward Tufte presentation here in Boston. Jay, Russ, me and several other Abuzzers went to this in 2000. It will change the way you think about presenting information. If you haven’t already, you should buy The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, Visual Explanations and Beautiful Evidence.

The trouble with private police forces
Be very afraid.

How has the Big Dig affected commuting?
My commute from MetroWest to Fort Point has improved greatly. I take the South Boston exit and it drops me 500 feet from my parking garage.

Whose bed is it anyway?
I’m so glad we haven’t had these problems. (Knock on wood).

38 pitches
Curt Schilling blogs.

Do parents make better managers?
Forbes says they do. I just don’t want Sadie to throw this line back at me in a few years: “Those who didn’t mind sacrificing for their children did better in the performance reviews.”

Our Tom may have gotten himself into a little more trouble.

My search dashboard lit up with Brady searches this morning. My team writes the content spotlights (the “Our picks” at the top of some search results), so we needed to figure out what links would be most useful for folks. For this one, we pulled the original Brazilian site that broke the rumor. Unfortunately, none of us speak Portuguese, so we ran it through Google’s automated translator.

I’m not sure Google’s automated translator is all that accurate:

It will be that it would from there come the so great discomfort with the pregnancy of former-namorada of Tom the Brady, current boyfriend of Gisele?

The next Boston BarCamp is coming up in a couple of weeks (3/18-19). I learned a lot at last year’s BarCamp, and I hope another Saturday invested will be worthwhile.

I love listening to hardcore web folks enthuse about their work, especially those working on projects on their own. Maybe I’ll talk a little bit about the joys of local search. Regardless, I’m glad we were able to kick in a few bucks to sponsor.

p.s., if you are one of those hardcore web folks, we’re always hiring — drop me a line