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We’re off on a four-day mini vacation this weekend to visit some friends and family up north. Thursday night we’ll be in Boston visiting my friend and gracious web host Scott. Then it’s across upstate New York to Syracuse, where we will be visiting family through Sunday evening.

The Washington Post has recently started running Sudoku puzzles. I hadn’t heard of these until recently, so at first I stared at one for about a half an hour, unable to get my pea-brain around a solution. So I hit the web and found some great tips on the aforementioned site; and now that I actually understand what’s going on I am able to get through most of the “easy” puzzles on websudoku.com. Combine that with my daily crossword puzzle and you get one angry boss. Oops.

A week or two ago, we were randomly selected to take part in Arbitron radio ratings. This is actually proving to be somewhat fun: we get to keep a daily “diary” of what we listen to, including which station, time spent at that station, and where we physically are at the time (car, work, home, etc.). They have also asked that we include any time spent listening to my XM Satellite Radio and even any random Internet streams! I initially thought I’d mess with the ratings and say I listened to the Washington, DC Spanish station all the time, but I figured I should be good and record my listening habits properly. So far today my attentions have been focused on classic rock, XM jazz, and a “morning zoo.”

Everybody knows cat people are weird. Personally, I’d much rather have a dog, but for now Stephanie and I are stuck with Ella. With all this in mind it was with tremendous glee that I stumbled across stuffonmycat.com, a website devoted to photographing the process of stacking household objects on your sleeping cat. We haven’t done this to Ella yet, but she’s such a fool I’m sure she’d still be all snuggly with us even after subjecting her to such cruel and hilarious punishment.

We’ve been all giddy in the office this afternoon playing with Google Earth, a desktop (and world-wide) version of their popular Google Maps online app. This is so scary it’s fun – just download and install the Google Earth program to your PC, and in minutes you’ll be flying over the Grand Canyon or walking down a street in Paris. Amazing functionality for free software.

Stephanie introduced me to one of her favorite movies last night, Baraka. I don’t really know how to describe it beyond the great editorial review on Amazon.com. But it’s impressive filmmaking, and a piece that undoubtedly has the ability to bring forth different thoughts and emotions from the viewer. Two thumbs, up – check it out.