Happy Birthday to me!    It's my big 3-0 today.    Folks keep asking me if I feel different -- not yet.   Perhaps at my 3-1.   It is, however, a pretty convenient excuse to get taken out to dinner, to throw a huge party, and to assemble a bunch of friends/family who don't normally get together from across the country.

I bought myself an early present - a Casio EX-Z3 Exilim camera.   This baby is SWEET and I highly recommend it.  It's credit card sized + a 3x zoom lens + a huge, bright 2" LCD screen on the back.   DPreview rated it pretty highly.

It's also perfect for the party a bunch of friends & I are throwing this Saturday night here in SF.   A select few blogging buddies have been invited to join the mayhem as my on-line, work, and social lives collide before my eyes.  My friends & I have a few different evites floating around for the shindig and, geek that I am, I've been tracking the RSVP stats carefully for future reference (total number of invitees is deep in the hundreds).   I've always wanted to collect some empirical data on what % tend to RSVP=yes;  what % of the Yes's flake out;  for every one person you invite, how many friends do they bring along; etc.  I'll gaurantee a blog entry to share the wealth  ;-)

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The History Channel's website has a pretty good index of what happened today in history -- Skylab, for example, launched on my actual birthday back in '73.

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