[](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000I5XDUQ?ie=UTF8&tag=mhsvortex&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B000I5XDUQ)On Friday, Jenn and I went to see the new traveling Cirque du Soleil show, Corteo.

Wow.

I’ve seen several of the Cirque shows:

• Mystère (twice)
• KÀ (twice)
• Alegría
• Dralion
• Saltimbanco
• Varekai

Each show has its own feel and I have liked all of them. Mystère holds a special place in my heart for being the first Cirque show I ever saw. KÀ struck me with its size and story. Dralion had a very original style. All of that given, across shows you will generally see some acts reused. The hand-to-hand, amazing as it is, shows up a couple of times. The aerial straps, beautiful to watch, also show up in a few places. Not so in Corteo.

Corteo felt so fresh, so new, that I couldn’t help but leave the show feeling happy and invigorated. Everything was so amazing, so crazy, so cool, I’d have to say Corteo is my favorite of all the shows I’ve seen. It was easily worth the price of admission and I’d see it again in a heartbeat.

I had never seen any of the acts before (with the exception of the aerial straps, which still felt very new) and it included one of my favorite acts, “Crystal Glasses and Tibetan Bowls,” a sampling of which you can catch on the Cirque TV show, Solstrom. I liked them all, but if I had to choose, I think I liked the chandeliers and the helium dance the best.

If Corteo comes to your city, go, and feel alive again.

I’ve been going over my RSS feeds this morning and I found a bunch of cool things that I’ve been forwarding to my team. Helpful tools, articles that explain tough concepts… good stuff. As I was doing that, I kept thinking, “Oooo, I should bookmark this so I can find it again later.”

That’s when it hit me, and I’m sure I’m not the first to arrive at this one:

Bookmarks are worthless.

I was thinking about it and with some very small exceptions I can’t actually remember the last time I visited a site based on bookmarks. Generally speaking, Google is my bookmark anymore (and not in a “Google Bookmarks” way). If I need to find something, I just search for it. Chances are the resource I would have bookmarked before has been superceded by some better, newer resource anyway. If it’s really good, I might blog it so I can tell people about it, but even by doing that, I’m contributing to the PageRank of the resource so if I go search for it again, it’s still on Google. Or, barring that, I can search my own site for the link I posted and get it there.

The only real exceptions to this are internal sites - stuff like the expense report system or the PTO request form that I might use a lot but aren’t in Google and aren’t right on the intranet home page. Other than that, I think I’m going to clean out my bookmarks - I don’t need ‘em.

While working on some Windows Workflow projects I was having some trouble getting ExternalDataExchangeServices to raise events. In searching for an answer, I came across this wiki that has the beginnings of some good material. I think the Windows Workflow community might want to contribute to efforts like this because, frankly, WF can be hard.

Incidentally, the reason my events weren’t getting raised was found right on the wiki: I was raising an event from a service where the event arguments were serializable but the sender was not. Everything has to be marked [Serializable], even the sender. Sounds obvious now, but let me tell you what a pain that was to try and track down.

I started feeling the onset of getting sick toward the end of last week, but it wasn’t really bothering me until Friday night when I started getting a pretty fierce fever. By Saturday morning, I had a full blown case of whatever has been going around work the last few weeks. Upper respiratory issues, stuffy head, fever, headache… ugh.

I spent Saturday in bed most of the day, and barely upright on the couch the rest of the day. Sunday was only different in the proportion of bed-time to couch-time: I made it out of bed a little earlier. I didn’t even really do much but watch TV. I tried to play some video games but my need to shut my eyes every few minutes sort of blew that out of the water and having to track all that movement on the screen made my head hurt.

I went to the doctor on Monday and told him all my symptoms.

Me: …fever, too. And I’ve got this headache behind my right eye that sort of hurts if I - Dr: Let me see your glasses. Me: [Handing over my glasses…] My prescription hasn’t really changed in years. I just had my eyes checked in - Dr: They’re crooked. Me: My glasses? Dr: Yeah, they’re crooked. See how this arm isn’t straight and the lenses aren’t even? Me: Oh, wow, yeah… I didn’t even notice that. I wonder how long it’s been. Would that cause my headache? Dr: No, but it makes you look funny. Take those in and get ‘em fixed.

So, you can see, that was helpful. Actually, he confessed that there really wasn’t much they could do for what I’ve got, that it’s common, and basically I just get to wait it out. I got some Tylenol with Codeine to manage my cough and was sent on my way.

I felt a lot better Tuesday - no fever, not much cough - but worked from home to ensure I wasn’t bringing this thing back to work to perpetuate the vicious cycle.

I’m feeling way better even today, but my back is sore from sitting on my not-remotely-ergonomic couch all day yesterday so I’m glad to be in my chair… even though my work chair is also not really my favorite. Looking forward to getting rid of this cough - it’s getting old.

OK, conference organizers, listen up:

You never get the box lunch right. Ever. Even when I was in grade school and you were the field trip organizer, you still never got it right.

Not everyone wants a pre-made meat sandwich, and not everyone who doesn’t want meat is a vegetarian. Giving me the choice between soggy ham, limp turkey, or sprouts-on-rye isn’t a choice. I might consider the ham, but you made it six hours ago, threw a really moist tomato on there, and wrapped it tight as you could in plastic, thereby ensuring the tomato juice permeates the bread and makes it entirely inedible.

Normally I wouldn’t even complain, except you make the assumption everyone’s going to eat the box lunch so you don’t give me enough time to go somewhere and get something else - I eat your lunch, or I don’t eat at all.

I am tired of eating a lunch that consists of an undersized apple, a small bag of greasy chips, and a cookie. I’m tired of having people with lower food standards look at me with that pathetic gaze and offer me another bag of greasy chips.

There are ways you can fix this and still keep your precious box lunch. Seriously.

• Stop pre-making the sandwiches. Put the individually packaged ingredients for each sandwich in the box instead so I can assemble it myself, ensuring the bread isn’t soggy and that I can entirely ignore that overripe tomato slice.
• Offer the peanut butter and jelly option. Yeah, I know there are nut allergy people. I think they can figure out not to eat the PB&J.
• Actually ask me what I want during conference registration. Not just a checkbox for the “vegetarian option,” but actually a menu of four or five different things you could package up that maybe aren’t sandwiches. Or let me select which ingredients go on my sandwich from the menu. It can’t be that hard.
• Buffet.  I get a plate, I walk down the line of available items, I pick up what I want. Wow.
• Give me the money you’d have spent on the box lunch and enough time to hit the Burger King down the street. I’ll come back happier and probably have change left over.

Conference organizers everywhere, heed my call! No more box lunches!