We are about to enter the BBQ season. Therefore it is important to refresh your memory on the etiquette of this sublime outdoor cooking activity.

When a man volunteers to do the BBQ the following chain of events are put into motion:

Routine...

1. The woman buys the food.
2. The woman makes the salad, prepares the vegetables, and makes dessert .
3. The woman prepares the meat for cooking, places it on a tray along with the necessary cooking utensils and sauces, and takes it to the man who is lounging beside the grill - beverage in hand.
4. The woman remains outside the compulsory three meter exclusion zone where the exuberance of testosterone and other manly bonding activities can take place without the interference of the women.

Here comes the important part:

5. THE MAN PLACES THE MEAT ON THE GRILL.

More routine...

6. The woman goes inside to organize the plates and cutlery.
7. The woman comes out to tell the man that the meat is looking great. He thanks her and asks if she will bring another beer while he flips the meat .

Important again:

8. THE MAN TAKES THE MEAT OFF THE GRILL AND HANDS IT TO THE WOMAN.

More routine...

9. The woman prepares the plates, salad, bread, utensils, napkins, sauces, and brings them to the table.
10. After eating, the woman clears the table and does the dishes.

And most important of all:

11. Everyone PRAISES the MAN and THANKS HIM for his cooking efforts.
12. The man asks the woman how she enjoyed 'her night off.' And, upon seeing her annoyed reaction, concludes that there's just no pleasing some women...

Ok, I admit that I like statistics. Numbers are interesting to me. Take the number 4 for instance...ok, nevermind. What I really want to talk about is the Google Zeitgeist from 2008, especially as it relates to Canada. For the uninitiated, Google Zeitgeist is a collection of information that Google makes available regarding what is popular according to search trends. Shown below is a list of the top 10 most popular searches made by Canadians in 2008.

Most Popular

1. facebook
2. youtube
3. lyrics
4. weather
5. games
6. google
7. hotmail
8. yahoo
9. map
10. canada

Source: http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist2008/#top

Interesting, eh? I'm actually quite fearful of what this tells us about ourselves! Can it be that there are that many Canadians that still need to SEARCH for facebook? How about Google...there are a whole lot of people out there using Google to search for Google. Sigh... Some may find that depressing, I call it job security. :)

Another day year, another blog attempt. I would really like to get in the habit of doing this more often (writing on a blog, not creating a new one :). For me the key is to make is easy to do and perhaps I can bring myself to find the time to do it more regularly. Also being a control freak I don't like using hosted services like Blogger because I hate the limitations that they impose (I guess that could be a topic for a whole other post eh?) In addition I have been looking for a .Net blogging platform that had all of the functionality of the major LAMP platforms such as Wordpress. I finally came across BlogEngine.Net which I am quite impressed with so far, so I will give this a shot and see how it goes. Fortunately it provides import/export functionality so if I turn out not to like it, I can always move the content to some other platform. :)

So what is this blog about?

Well, given that the majority of my readership (thanks Mom) are mostly interested in our family, I expect that the majority of the posts will be family related, but I intend to occasionally post interesting information that I glean from my work-life as well. The purpose for this is more as a way of documenting things that I spend too much time trying to figure out. Perhaps in the long run I will be able to help someone else as well as save myself some time when I have to repeat the task and can't for the life of me remember what I did. (Yep, I'm in my mid-30's now so the mind's not as sharp as it used to be.)