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<sfx: kvetching about webmemes, doing them anyway>

So the Wikipedia Birthday meme: List (at least) three events, two births and one death from the page for your birthday on Wikipedia. Here’s mine for April 26^th:

Events

• 1933 - The Gestapo, the official secret police force of Nazi Germany, is established.
• 1954 - The Geneva Conference, an effort to restore peace in Indochina and Korea, begins.
• 1986 - In Ukraine, a nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear plant explodes, creating the world’s worst nuclear disaster.
• 1994 - South Africa holds its first multiracial elections.

Births

• 1564 (baptized) - William Shakespeare, English writer (d. 1616)
• 1711 - David Hume, Scottish philosopher and historian (d. 1776)
• 1963 - Jet Li, Chinese martial artist and actor

Deaths

• 1865 - John Wilkes Booth, American actor and assassin (shot) (b. 1838)
• 1984 - Count Basie, American musician and composer (b. 1904)

Observances

• Intellectual property - World Intellectual Property Day (since 2001) (Ironic, isn’t it?)

Today is the second toughest day of the year, eclipsed only by tomorrow. Hooray for daylight savings time?

“I hear you have a killer break room up on nine.”

For the record, it’s more bitchin’ than it is killer.

The charts that Krider built and I extended are better than Google Finance’s charts. That’s for damn sure.

Today is my first day of glorious unemployment. What am I doing with this momentous occasion, you ask? I took my dry cleaning in. If this doesn’t cement in your mind the notion that I am in fact the most exciting individual ever to walk the earth, I’m not entirely sure what will. I totally am, though. Just ask the folks at the cleaner’s.

So the upshot of this is that last Friday was my final day with Yahoo!. I started there a little more than three years ago in what was at the time called Overture Research. When Yahoo! purchased Overture, we became “Yahoo! Research Labs” and were later re-branded as “Yahoo! Research.” A few months back we moved from Pasadena to Burbank, and the commute has turned out to be too much for me to deal with on a daily basis. That, and the creamed spinach at the corporate cafeteria has started to disappoint on the regular, so it seems that it’s time for me to move on.

What’s next? Well, for the next two weeks, absolutely nothing. I’m taking some time off to relax and hang out with Stephanie and The Kid. This pleases me greatly. There are a few personal projects I’d like to get some traction on, a couple of books I’d like to read, and of course the aforementioned dry cleaning. After my little break I’ve got my next gig all nice and lined up; I’m excited to hit the ground running there.

So for all you ‘Hoos out in ‘Hooville: thanks, it’s been fun, and I’ll almost certainly see you around. For all my peoples in Pasadena: Chippy Friday — Choppy Friday if you’re hep — starts 3/10/2006.