I am cold and tired and very wet. Apropos of nothing, here are my deadly sins, ranked from first to last.

1. Pride
2. Sloth
3. Lust
4. Gluttony
5. Wrath
6. Avarice
7. Envy

To be honest, I am very rarely envious of anyone. But I'm definitely on top of the other six. How would you rank yours?

I cannot discuss money matters around my friends. So let me just say that charging a 3% "transaction fee" for a check which counts as a "cash advance" (meaning that interest begins to accrue right away) is what I would label "highway robbery".

Also, two other small coding points. The search engine, which has been down, is now back up again.

Finally, as many of you have noticed, you don't have permission to delete your own posts. Some have complained about this. My logic is this: if you really need to delete a post, get in touch with Helena, Brad or myself. We have the rights to do so. But posting and then removing is a weapon of last resort. It's the sort of thing the White House does all the time.

Information, once placed on a website, is historical. Removing it doesn't get rid of the information, it just moves it to different areas. So next time, think before you post that juicy bit of gossip about your boss.

On that note, I love my job.

Damn.

This is one cool trailer.

Makes me almost forget Fox slapped Firefly with a 6 month delay...

This ruling totally stinks. We need to make access to unions easier, not tougher, especially for the growing temporary worker class.

Temporary workers will no longer be able to bargain for job benefits as part of a unit with permanent employees, the National Labor Relations Board has ruled, reversing a Clinton-era precedent.

In a 3 to 2 vote that was issued Friday, the three members appointed by President Bush -- Robert J. Battista, the chairman; Peter C. Schaumber and Ronald E. Meisburg -- said there is a difference between temporary and permanent workers. "Thus, the entity that the two groups of employees look to as their employer is not the same. No amount of legal legerdemain can alter that fact," their ruling stated.

Look for most businesses to continue to try to reduce permanent workers and replace them with temps, allowing them to slash benefits and cut costs. The long-term problem? Put simply: a workforce made up of temps contains numerous overhead that will eventually drag a business down. The lack of institutional knowledge alone is something difficult to quantify, yet the repercussions on the bottom line are significant. Each time a new temp worker is hired, time must be spent to bring them up to speed, and certain bits of information (the password to an old router, the location of an old bill, the vendor one uses for a particular need) are certain to be lost during the transfer. Over time these little bits of loss become larger until an organization can no longer function properly.

I've worked in an office with extremely high turnover...tons of time was always being wasted when someone said "Oh, we already did that last year...where did we put it?"

werkz advice: worth seeing.

The latest non-bond brosnin flick: "After the Sunset" is ostensibly a jewel-heist caper. In reality, it's a somewhat quirky comedy, filled with a bizarre shark shooting, men sleeping together and suntan lotion weirdness. All with a caribbean accent. And a remote controlled car. And Salma Hayek building a deck.

Trust me, you should see it. It's not great, but it's memorable.

werkz advice: go see it!

Bruckheimer's latest production, "National Treasure" is a fairly decent action comedy. Having Nicholas Cage in it lets me complete the following logical statement: Con Air is not as good as National Treasure which is not as good as The Rock.

With that said, NT was actually a fun time. So go see it.

Kerry is off the list of titles. Gerry is on. Go figure.

So Howl's Moving Castle is in the process of blowing apart the box office records in Japan.

Happy Turkey Day, kids.

I'm stuffed at the moment, or rather, have been, since noon.

The luxury of being able to sit in a warm house and type these words is more than enough to be thankful for.

That and water chestnuts wrapped in bacon cooked in a special marinade...mmm....I think I'm hungry again.

I've always loved maps and globes. The mixture of pure information and imagination (I wonder what it's like over there) is a killer combo. A while back, Helena scored me a great globe with a depiction of the world as it was thought in the past. In many ways, this is even superior to an up-to-date map as if you put two maps together, you can see a visual representation of history, of wars, of the effects of colonization. I always wanted to have a house one day with a giant map on the wall or a huge table, perhaps an electronic one, that I could zoom in or pan around on.

In that spirit, I present the coolest globe ever. It's another stephensonesque object, in the spirit of The Confusion Globe.

Of course, the brand-spanking froogle wish list doesn't have it available to link to. Yet.

Snow Crash is here.

Living last year at Economy Storage in Waldorf, Lawrence said, were a young couple, the man in construction and the woman working odd jobs; an older couple, a minister and his wife; and a woman who owned a car and had a membership at a nearby gym. After what amounted to a neighborhood dispute took them to court, the judge asked the county to look into the situation.

The people had to move out immediately, since living in a storage shed violates housing codes.

"They just want a place to sleep at night where they're not wet, not cold," Lawrence said. Most people who stayed there went to work every morning and came home at night and didn't bother a soul, she added.

Ah yes...those court orders upholding housing codes. Perhaps our government could actually build more houses that were spec'd to code, and then the problem wouldn't force people into rental lockers. I'm sure tons of kids right out of college would pay $100 a month for an super tiny efficiency that was government subsidized. Maybe it's time for better Projects...

Okay, I've uploaded about a month's worth of new images to the website.

This one is from arizona and was taken the morning after.