CleverDonkey.com …Musings, Commentary, Opinions, and Drivel

I’ve decided I’m a vegetabletarian. I might be the first and only. You see, I’ve been in a bind for a couple of years. I am an animal lover, and lately I’ve been feeling flat-out odd about eating them, as I’ve done for all of my life up until now. I’m sure in a post-apocalyptic world I could become hungry enough to kill an animal for food, but as the child of a comfortable and genteel age I am uncomfortable at the thought of a living, breathing creature dying for me to eat its flesh.

But until recently I haven’t seen a practical alternative to being a regular, card-carrying member of normal, meat-eating society. Veganism is, like other religions, a form of deluded zealotry I cannot connect with; even more moderate vegetarians can be a general pain in the ass — the pariah of the group lunch, the impromptu dinner with

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One of the wonderful things about a friendship and relationship is the glorious dance of discovery and compromise that comes about as you mix and match your preferences, likes, and dislikes with those of your mate. Often, your similar likes are what bring you together in the first place: a shared reverence for the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique album, the ability to quote from The Princess Bride, a fondness for wry humor and a well-turned phrase, a love of technology.

Then, as you get to know each other better, you find that some of your tastes don’t always match up. I remember being a bit taken aback when I first learned Scott found my morning staple of NPR pretentious and tedious, and instead revealed that he had been a Howard Stern listener. I was surprised by his look of pained endurance (much like a faithful hound dog getting a medical procedure)

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Da Marco
1520 Westheimer Rd
Houston, TX
(713) 807-8857

It’s easy to miss Da Marco: the small converted house is set off the street right at the most harrowing narrow-laned portion of the Westheimer curve; the sign is well-lit but competes for eye attention with the nearby tattoo and body piercing joints. Those eclectic surroundings, sprinkled with top-notch food choices is, of course, a major part of the appeal to this section of Houston. This gracious Italian eatery fits right in.

Last night was our first trip to Da Marco; we wanted an upscale (but not outrageous) dinner treat before heading over to the SkyBar. The entrance to the restaurant leads you into a tiny 3′ curtained area, and from there the hostess escorts you another three feet to the small bar. Jacketed waiters efficiently weave through the small non-smoking dining room — the feeling is intimate but not overly cramped. The place was very

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We purchased the NordicTrack CX 995 Elliptical Trainer (aka CX995 or NTE1392) recently, directly from the NordicTrack website. The online experience was smooth, and the product was delivered within the promised time frame. Here are our impressions of the unit, so far:

If I Were Already Hercules, I Wouldn’t Need This Thing!

Please note that their delivery company only delivers curb-side, and will not bring the unit inside. They clearly state this in the shipping section, but the full impact does not hit home until the delivery guy leaves you with a 260 lb. cardboard box, secured with straps, sitting on a wooden pallet in your garage. You can take about ¼ of the weight out of the box by schlepping in the smaller bits and pieces, but the main unit, with the attached elliptical ramps, is all in one piece. In our case we were installing the unit in our upstairs

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Dude, You’re Getting a Career!

Through dumb-luck, I fell ass-backwards into a computer career when I aced my first college computer class back in the dark ages, where I learned Fortran programming using punched cards. I promptly changed my major from Business to Computer Science, and never looked back. When I hit the job market in the early 80′s it was just in time for the blossoming of the Personal Computer (PC) market, which was the Boston Tea Party of the Technological Revolution, and kicked off one of the most explosive periods of technological advancement since the Industrial Revolution.

I rode the first swells of this wave throughout the 80′s, never fearing for my career prospects, and worried only about being able to work with the really cool emerging technologies instead of the old, stale, well-known ones. But as good as I (and my compatriots) had it in the 80′s, nothing could

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