On the evening of Monday, March 1, a poor guy in Montesano Washington crashed his car into a power pole, but escaped without injury. After he called his friends for a ride, he decided to relieve himself in the ditch when he accidentally urinated on the downed power line he didn’t see on the ground, electrocuting himself in the process.

The more I thought of how many unlucky things had to happen in sequence for this to happen, I came up with image:

It has since been determined that the man only touched the power line, causing the fatal electrocution, and only happened to be urinating at the time. That latest information would, of course, proportionally increase the size of the Murphy’s Law circle while decreasing the size of the Darwin’s Theory circle. That is, if this were in any way scientific.

I have no idea what happened to me during the night. Whatever it was, I woke up with a strangely-deep appreciation for the simpler things.

Saturday’s time was spent in between a second birthday party for the child of a family friend, an organic, humanely-raised turkey tasting at Whole Foods, a nap, and then a viewing of Food Inc., the new-ish food documentary. Nothing groundbreaking I guess, but maybe it was just a day spent at a low-enough intensity level that my brain had a chance to recharge.

Maybe it was the fact that I was only on a computer long enough to figure out what I had done to hose this rarely-updated blog, time on the iPhone Twitter application notwithstanding. Perhaps it was that I managed to get about twice as much sleep yesterday as I normally do. Or maybe its the delightfully low-tech Moleskine pocket notebook I bought the other night that have been itching to start using.

Whatever it is, I feel like I have a new perspective on things, a much simpler one.

I went to a coffee shop and didn’t immediately plug in the laptop and get online. Rather, I sipped my coffee, enjoyed a danish and talked to the people sitting around me. I noticed with an abnormal acuity the stress level of the folks around who were having problems getting online, or finding a seat near a power outlet. Yes, I’m on my laptop now, but using WriteRoom, it’s retro green-text-on-black singularity almost calming.

I changed my default web browser back to Safari from Firefox. Sure, I’ll still use it for web testing, but for personal browsing, why shouldn’t I use the one that gives me the best personal experience? Do I really need fifteen plug-ins and a host of add-ons to read the web sites I go to? Not really.

Perhaps the rest of the day will be set aside for a drive in the beautiful Phoenix Fall weather, or a good healthy meal and time spent in the yard.

Either way, I’ll leave my list of work projects for tomorrow.

While on our recent summer vacation, we decided to add an impromptu visit to Disneyland to the end of our trip. It had been several years since we’d been, and wanted to try out some of the new attractions: the revamped submarine ride converted to the Finding Nemo theme, the new Monster’s Inc. ride, and the Aladdin Musical Spectacular. Even though Aladdin is entertaining, a large chunk of the show’s time was eaten up by technical difficulties, allowing attendees a rare chance to bail out of the show before it completed.

As we wandered around, and, more specifically, stood in line for rides, we discussed the idea of what Walt Disney would think of the 2009 version of Disneyland. My opinion is that I’m sure he would have enjoyed the newer attractions, driven by technology that he could only have imagined in the sixties, although I’m not sure he could have gotten on board with the removal of the classic Disneyland features.
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Today (or tonight, as this is quickly turning into an all-nighter), I learned the hard way to back up my stuff. Again. This lesson, of course, comes with the requisite “hindsight is 20/20″ disclaimer.

So, yeah. Make sure you back up your stuff. Either locally or on a back-up drive or on the web. And it probably wouldn’t hurt to have a back-up of your back-ups, either. I’m just saying.

Personally, I use Dropbox for an off-site online storage, a Western Digital portable drive for on the go, and a Maxtor 500GB drive to back up at home.

And yet somehow I still manage to lose my stuff.

Is it just me, or is this unnecessarily creepy?

I guess it is Friday the thirteenth, though.