$1600 plane tickets

Yay, I've finished moving over all my old archives, which means that everything is searchable and in Movable Type format. I added the search function on the lefthand navigation sidebar more for my own use rather than other people's, though you're all free to use it as well. :-) I love having all my archives in one place. Sometimes it's fun (and often enlightening) for me to see what I was doing a year ago.

As I moved over archived entries, I sometimes did a quick scan of the contents out of curiosity to see what was going on. Very weird to be reading over the entries from early 1999, when I got "major life event" phonecalls from both Writer's Digest and Barnes and Noble in the same week...but didn't want to say anything about it in public yet.

Ditto for my visit to New York shortly after, when I saw the offices of BarnesandNoble.com and had a breakfast meeting with Steve Riggio, who was recently promoted to CEO of Barnes and Noble. Riggio wore brown corduroy pants, I remember. He arrived late, left early. I remember being in a relative state of terror during the entire meeting, though Jeff told me later that I didn't show it (maybe he was just trying to reassure me :-)). I didn't eat anything, of course.

My brief mention of a business meeting in Seattle in May the following year referred to one I attended at the offices of Amazon.com. I remember being horrified by the price of my first class plane ticket (which someone else booked and paid for), about US$1600. I saw some of the legendary door-desks, which was pretty cool. I also remember the beginning of the meeting, where everyone (as if at a signal) took out their business cards and set them in a neat pile on the table in front of them. I was the only one with no business cards, having opted not to bring my cheapo perforated-edge homemade cards (plus I didn't have a lot of warning about the Seattle trip). There were a lot of things like the ritualistic displaying of business cards at the beginning of the meeting, unspoken rules of the corporate world with which I was completely unfamiliar. The whole Seattle visit was somewhat of a blur to me, mainly because a favourite aunt had died on the day I left; I found out while waiting in the airport after checking in :-(.

More on my dot-com adventures at a future date. My Dad just arrived, so I'd better finish this up...








News/Updates

Jeff and I saw L.A. Confidential last night and both loved it (with some reservations about the ending).

Fox is going to air the new 2 1/2 minute trailer for Episode II: Attack of the Clones on March 10th between 8:30-10 pm EST. Source: USA Today. Hopefully it will be better than the last trailer, and show more of Ewan McGregor.

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Today's Blatherpics:

	Sara and Annie playing Barbies with their cousins Taavo and Markus. It was pretty funny contrasting how the boys' Barbie play differs from Sara's and Annie's. More on this in an upcoming Blathering (I started writing about it here but it got way too long :-)).
	Sara practising blowing bubbles in front of the mirror.
	More of Sara practising blowing bubbles in front of the mirror.
	Success!