Thus do trends happen.

A while back I bought a neat little device for my own personal use, a 'USB pen' that stores data on Flash memory embedded in a plastic shell the size of a tube of Chapstick. When I showed it around the office, the men were enthralled by it; the women seemed polite about it, but not much more. I assumed it was because most of the women in the office worked in areas that had less to do with IT than the men, but I don't know for sure.

Anyway, shortly after I explained the device and showed off the review of the product in Maximum PC, several of the men ordered or bought USB keys/USB pens/whatever of their own. Mine scored an 8 out of 10 in the review, narrowly missing the criteria for a Kick Ass! award. (Creative Labs' Nomad MuVo got a 9 out of 10 and the Kick Ass! stamp, but that's becuase theirs is not only a storage device, but an MP3 player.) It works well, and it's pretty cheap per megabyte, plus it's got a decently smooth shape and is just bulky enough that I won't inadvertently mistake it for a pen cap or something similarly ridiculous. The disaster services director got one that's barely larger than the actual Flash card inside. One of the other disaster services people got a different device that's somewhat bigger, though not by much. One of our fundraising people bought one from Best Buy that fits on his keychain - technically they all fit on keychains, but his seems to have a better design for that sort of thing. And one of our Educational Services volunteers bought one from macally.com, and is planning on buying another one, because he needs to transfer files from his wee-bitty Sony Vaio to our networked computers and back and the thing has no cards for doing so otherwise. Now the Chapter CEO wants to buy one, so that he can transfer five-megabyte presentations to a different laptop without having to go to the bother of buying a network hub or switch so that he can plug it into the network jack in his office at the same time as his main PC.

I haven't actually used mine in some time. Mom's computer started having hissy fits and screaming about the hard drive being bad a while ago, so my pen was pressed into service as a backup device - I wasn't about to buy her a tape drive, although at some point I may suggest a CD burner to her. In the meantime, however, I have placed an order for a pen of her own, the 32 meg model. When it comes I'll copy her files onto it, tell her to save everything to the C: drive and to the pen, and take mine back. All will be well.

You know it's really snowing when

you turn your head to the left and see the flakes whizzing past, reflected in the glass wall directly opposite your window.

There've been ploughs on Highway 46 today. The bosses don't seem to think the roads or the snow are bad enough to justify sending everyone home. I'm going to take the drive home at 4:30 as slowly and carefully as humanly possible - I already lost a headlight last year to a snowstorm and I don't want to do it again. Not to mention that the last snowstorm that came while I was in the office left me briefly perpendicular to the flow of traffic and feeling like a turtle on its back at an eagle convention.

Now if I can just get past the first page of the latest segment of Iron Dog.

Still working on Iron Dog part 4,

and probably won't finish until tomorrow, but I just thought I'd share a line with you because it makes me smile to have written it:

"It's harder to ram a stick through a decapitated lizard than you'd think."

Thenk yew.