Okay, I've started playing catch up on my Kabacklog, but something happened last night that I had to share with everyone. As regular readers of this blogazine or viewers of my lists, comments, etc are probably aware of by now, I commute by bike, about 20 miles round-trip every day (plus another 120 miles by train). Well, on the last leg of my commute last night, riding from the train station home, I was cruising along just a couple blocks from my house and this guy made a left turn right into me!

There was a moment that I saw him start to turn and thought, "I hope he sees me," and the next moment I thought, "nope, he doesn't and a collision is unavoidable. How do I want to do this?"

My life did not flash in front of my eyes, I just concentrated on minimizing damage to my body. To that end, there was something of a conscious decision to go over his car instead of under it. The front of my bike went right into his front bumper and snapped my new fork (less than a year old) in half (first picture). I kept going across his hood and my helmet went right into his windshield (second picture). I made an effort to not tense up, because that just compounds injuries. I rolled off and collected my wits: yes, I was still alive. No severe pain. Still feel all my extremities. No bones sticking out. Was able to sit up -- not paralyzed. Able to stand... just some bad road (hood) rash that still hurts like the dickens.

The guy that hit me was just 18 -- said to the nice officer who came to fill out the report that he didn't even see me there (which, with my headlight, means he wasn't even looking at the road). I think he was more shaken than I was, given that seemingly out of nowhere he had this bicyclist flop off of his windshield. He probably thought he killed me at first.

Given all the riding I do, getting hit by a car kind of seems like an inevitability, so I'm glad I ended up as well as I did. My bike, of course, is another matter, and my new road bike isn't ready to go yet (posting on that in the near future). I'm on my way home to take the remains into the bike shop to get a repair estimate, assuming it's not a total loss.

In any case, the key point is that I'm bruised, but not broken. That's something to give Thanks for.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

This will be my last blogazine posting for a while -- at least until I can catch up on most of my other Kaboodle activity, but I couldn't let this auspicious occasion pass without mention. To all my Kaboodle peeps: Happy Anniversary! Yes, today marks the one year anniversary of my joining Kaboodle. It seems appropriate, at this juncture, to tell everyone how I came to be here.

On 1 May last year I was waiting for my train home as usual when up walks this very attractive blond. She was wearing silver ballet flats. If you hadn't heard, when I'm checking out a woman, I look at her shoes. I thought she was intriguing -- yes, mostly by the choice of shoes. Beyond the shoes, she was altogether good looking. Still, I'm not one to talk to a woman just because she's attractive.

I got onboard the train and sat down with one of my friends and she came over and sat down directly across from me. Eye candy the whole way home -- it was going to be hard to be a gentleman and not stare. So I concentrated on my conversation with my friend, which was more idle chat than anything deep, and she chimed in on one of our points, quickly becoming fully engaged in the conversation. She and her family just bought a house about 10 miles from us, and it turns out she worked just a couple miles from my office, which is actually pretty close when you consider my office is a mile from the gate alone. When we got off the train, I gave her some pointers on how to avoid traffic on the way home.

After that we chatted a good deal on the train for a few months, eventually getting our families together for dinner. As the months went on, we became close friends. My wife even started to call her my girlfriend. Not only were we so much alike, but she really reawakened my artistic side, including my interest in fashion. We talked about clothes and shopping a lot. She told me about this Kaboodle thing and introduced me to one of the employees who rode the train with us.

On November 14th last year we were texting back and forth, as we often did, when she just stopped responding. I had a very bad feeling, which I couldn't quite explain, because it wasn't uncommon for one of us to get caught up in something and not be able to respond for a few hours, but I just knew something was wrong. I tried calling her, but no answer. The next day my emails and texts went unanswered, and I got really worried. I called her office, and they said she had an appointment and wasn't in the office that day. After a week of being incommunicado, I stopped by her office and she explained that she was in a bad car accident that totaled her car, and she was just really upset about that and some other stuff going on, and just didn't want to hang with her friends. I later learned that while she appeared alright, she had actually suffered bad neural-muscular damage that was causing her severe pain and required rehabilitation. In retrospect, I realize that she was probably texting me while driving, and I can't help but feel partially responsible for what happened. In any case, with the accident, she slipped out of my life.

This left me in a major funk -- here was someone who had reminded me of this major piece of myself that had gone ignored for so long -- and they were just gone. A few days after the accident -- before I even found out what happened, I decided to check out this Kaboodle thing. My initial impression was not that good. Trying to find products in it was difficult, at best. I saw they were really pushing the "Add to Kaboodle" button, bookmark, or whatever, so I tried that and I was really impressed with how well it worked -- just as a professional software engineer I thought that what they put together there was amazing. I started to use it to manage my wish list.

My first friend here was my wife's brother's wife, who I thought would like the site based on what I had seen. She and I have a special relationship based on the notion that both of us were somehow crazy enough to marry into that family.

Since I kept coming back to Kaboodle to work on my list (at that time I think it was just one), I started poking around some more and voting on some polls, which I thought was really cool -- having someone ask for my opinion and be able to give it with some explanation. After voting on a bunch of polls, I got a friend request from princessheather001. This baffled me -- did I know this person? Why were they adding me as a friend? I did some digging and saw that I had voted on one of her polls -- I guess she liked the feedback, so okay, I'll try being her friend.

This was a new concept for me: on all the other social networking sites I'm on, I only add as friends people I know in real life. A few days later, the same thing happened, in this case lavabunny, who I think deserves the most credit for bringing me out of my Kaboodle shell, because now I was starting to see real activity on my activity feed, giving me things to look at, comment on, and people to meet.

Very shortly after that snowymountain added me as a friend. Now this request actually worried me. I hadn't voted on a poll of hers. I had to dig deeper to find that we had actually voted on the same poll -- the same way, I believe. Okay, so that explained that, but what really worried me was that it was obvious from her profile that she was in high school. I mean, I might be twice her age. I had this image of innocently adding her as a friend and suddenly having my door busted down by the police followed by the six o'clock news documenting their bust of the latest Internet preditor. I don't think that most of you ladies think about that sort of thing, but allow me to say that at least many of us guys do. Well, I did add her, and since her a number of other young ladies as well, at least one of whom has become a good friend. So far the police haven't come busting down my door.

Well, from there it just kind of sprialled. Kaboodle is really the first site where I've come to understand the attraction of social networking: meeting new friends through existing friends, chatting about interesting things, and this really interesting positive reinforcement cycle where someone sends me something, I look at it, comment, they say thank you, so I send them something and they look at it, comment, and I say thank you. Everyone (well, for the most part, as one recent blogazine post addressed) is so polite, and puts so much effort into what they're sharing, it's really quite impressive.

Beyond just social networking sites, one of the interesting things about Kaboodle is that I've been on the Internet for 16 years (there, that should date me), and most of my friends made friends with other folks over the Internet. Heck, I met my wife through mutual friends who she met through the Internet, but Kaboodle is the first place that I've really made friends with people I've never met in real life first. So it's kind of bittersweet that it was one friend disappearing from my life that brought me here and led me to meeting many more friends, so Happy Anniversary to you all!

Well, I didn't get as much done on vacation last week, at least with respect to catching up on email and Kaboodle. Then I had to cut my vacation short to fly out to Kennedy to meet with -- among other folks -- the Space Missions Operations Directorate, who does crazy stuff like send 4.5 million pounds of people and cargo hurdling at 18,000 miles per hour out of our atmosphere. We were about four miles away, and when the shuttle got a few miles up, the shock waves started to hit. The noise and vibrations were unreal. Have I mentioned that I love my job?

For the occasion, I'm wearing my Brooks Brothers suit with a cornflower blue shirt, and my Jerry Garcia tie (definitely my favourite tie).

Off to more meetings to protect the country from (imagine a big echoing voice) HACKERS IN SPACE, Space, space...

As some people have apparently noticed, I haven't been around this week. I've just been crazy busy. I'm certainly far behind everything I have here, and have been for some time. Generally, I check my inbox first, then try to whip through notifications, and then get to requests. At that first step, I found this in my inbox this evening from one of my friends:

"my sister tired to add you and you ignore her how rude.u suck."

I presume that's one of the three friend requests I have, plus 54 lists, 52 polls, 103 styleboards, 74 blogazines, one product, and eight others. The order I go through requests may seem a bit haphazard. For starters, much of my Kaboodling time is on the train where I don't have net access, so I'll download a bunch of pages, respond to them on the train, and upload the responses when I'm on the net again. That's why you might see a big burst of activity from me. I might also not get to some of those pages, so future Kaboodling sessions tend to focus on looking and responding to those tabs rather than new requests that come in.

When looking at new requests, I do tend to look at friend requests first, but I don't just automatically click accept -- I check the person out first. I make sure that the person is someone I want as a friend. Most people around here are really great, and I usually accept it, but there are some I ignore. This evaluation takes time... and a net connection.

For the other requests, I try to take the time to look at anything people send me. I try to make my comments informative and thought-out, as opposed to just hearting and saying that something's cute -- there's nothing wrong with doing that -- it's just not me. At least one of my friends here has told me that she always looks forward to my comments because they are detailed like that.

Kaboodle is something I do for fun. Okay, that's true of most people here, but I don't have much time for fun. My job is really three full time jobs: I'm the manager for our contract, as well as both the architect and senior engineer for a multi-million dollar project (paid for by your tax dollars). I work a minimum of 50 hours a week, sometimes up to 80. Add onto that an hour commuting on my bike everyday, my cycling club on Saturday, the Passenger Advisory Council for my train, and running a household. When I started here, I could just leave Kaboodle up in a window in the background at work, which I know many of you do as well. That's a luxury I don't have anymore. I can't even keep up with my work email at work (hey, I'm down to 87 unread messages there!).

So I ask all of my friends and prospective friends to understand that if you send me something, I might not get to it right away. It might even take a while. That's not because I'm ignoring you or trying to be rude, I'm just that busy.

I will get to those friend requests, but I need to go get the five hours sleep I get most nights.

Well, I wasn't sure I was going to do anything for Halloween -- especially for work today -- but in talking to a friend on the train yesterday (@lork), we came up with the idea that I could just wear my tux and be any number of characters: Bond. James Bond. The groom. MC at a nightclub. Or just a cooler and more suave version of myself. I really liked the concept, and I've really been looking for a reason to wear my tux to work, just because I'm weird like that. It is Friday after all. So here it is.

This is actually the second tux I've owned. The first I had custom made for our wedding. It was the single most expensive item for the wedding -- even more than the Vera Wang wedding dress (but that's another story). It was an awesome tux, and I eventually wore it out, generating a rip in the pants that I tried to get repaired, but the repair made it even worse. This all came about just a couple weeks before the wedding of one of my buddies from work. It was an evening wedding, so of course I had to have a tux. I was also in the market for some new suits, so I went to a local store that advertised three suits for $300, and that's what I got, the tux being one of them. The tux is adjustable, so it didn't require any alterations, but the shop made another $200 altering the suits (like anything fits me off the rack). The bow-tie and cummerbund are done in a dark red and black pattern, the pleated shirt is fairly standard, as are the cuff links and studs. The shoes are my very comfortably soft Bostonians that I bought in Vegas one trip that I arrived and discovered I forgot nice shoes to wear out clubbing (@dreapuff ;-) .

Surprisingly, most people at work didn't immediately assume I was wearing this for Halloween. Actually, less people dressed up this year than last. I had some fun with it though. One of the guys asked me if I was going to a wedding, so I said, "Sure, that's the character." After I handed out raises to my group, they asked if I had an interview, so I told them that after seeing my raise I decided I needed a second job, so I had an interview as an MC at a nightclub. I ran through the supermarket, and the checkout girl asked if I was the best man, and I explained that might be it, but I might also be Bond. James Bond. She said I need to carry around a martini glass.

So after cranking hard for a couple weeks, we had our design review Thursday and yesterday. I talked for about seven hours over the two days. It was grueling, but I survived and finally have a weekend to enjoy. I'm trying to make the most of it, because next week we have to deal with the follow up to the review.

One of the things I've been putting off while working on it was a haircut. It was starting to get pretty unruly, so today instead of going to my normal place, I decided to try the local cosmology school, which offers haircuts for $7, paid in advance, with a waiver that you won't sue them if a student cuts your ear off or something. I think they're really worried about people being upset over a really bad haircut, but my style is simple enough that I figured it couldn't be too bad. Besides, it grows fast enough that I could get it fixed in two weeks anyway. Apparently today was the first day of class for a number of the ladies there, and I was the first subject for my particular stylist. As it worked out, the instructor ended up doing pretty much the whole thing, so I was essentially a model to demonstrate how the different parts were done. The end result is what you see here, which I think turned out great for $7. I really shouldn't take my own picture though -- it puts the camera so close that my nose looks huge. I mean, okay, I have a large nose -- it's a family feature -- but it looks even bigger when the camera is this close.

Beautiful sunset here today -- that's the second pic from my backyard.

I'm caught up on my Kaboodle inbox and notifications. Now I've got some really interesting mail to catch up on (AP ;-), and a ton of requests.