Five hours on the road yesterday, a stop overnight at the Holiday Inn in Uniontown, PA and five hours today brought Cici to her grandparents in Greenville, Ohio.

Happy Holidays everyone.

- mike lee

It's fun approving over a million dollars worth of purchase orders with a few mouse clicks.

- mike lee - washington, dc

- mike lee - washington, dc

It turned out to be a perfect end to my work day when I walked from my office across the snowy street to Starbucks to test out the new bug fixes in the XO laptop for accessing T-mobile WiFi Hotspots. This is significant because when you spend $399 to donate the XO laptop to a child in a developing country, you get a laptop to keep AND T-mobile throws in a year's worth of WiFi access. That's a $349 value. Plus you write off $200 on your taxes.

I got the laptop surfing the web on a $9.95 daypass (I don't have my production laptop yet). As is usually the case when I pull out the green and white laptop, people came by to ask about it. Some Starbucks district managers were there for a staff party, and they said they had seen the 60 Minutes story. They would have loved to have done some kind of Starbucks co-promotion. I suggested they give a free cup of coffee to anyone who comes in with an XO to use the WiFi. I was given a free cup of coffee.

Then, some staff gathered to sing Xmas carols. A lady named Barbara sat down next to me to gush about the laptop and all the philanthropic projects that could be designed around it. Being an energetic 60, she said she would love to have a version with a bigger keyboard for older people. I told her I'd work on that. I'm also pretty sure I sold a couple more laptops.

Some more pix are on Flickr.

- mike lee - washington, dc

I edited some of Saturday's photoshoot with Trixie and Monkey, and posted some to Flickr. I thought the photos came out great.

We were on location with Nikki V doing make-up and hair at the second floor lounge of Waterfront Hotel Bar in Fells Point, Baltimore. The theme was old money, preppy, fox hunt.

It was a treat to see the two (and Nikki of course) because they've been away for a while at circus school. Sadly for us, they've decided to stay on at the school until June 2008. But happy for them. They'll be back to Baltimore periodically to do shows and have started a blog so their fans can track their progress.

Here's a funny, risque, not-safe-for-work video on YouTube of one of their recent skits.

The two hurried off at 5pm to drive to a gig in NYC that evening. Nikki and I went to dinner to catch up on life.

- mike lee -

Hanging out at Daily Grind in Fells Point, I had the XO out and ran into, Jerry Jerome, a professor from Towson U's Dept. of Kinesiology. We had a great chat about mobile devices for health.

- mike lee - baltimore, md

Friday a week ago, Dan Ariely visited our offices. Dan is a professor of behavioral economics at the MIT Sloan School of Business and also has a research appointment at the MIT Media Lab. But currently, Dan is a visiting professor at Duke.

His first book, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, will be released by Harper Collins in February 2008. Dan gave a talk on "Behavioral Economics 101" to various people from our communications and strategy groups. While he acknowledged that the discipline of economics itself is deadly boring, it gets really interesting when you look at it through the lens of human psychology. Dan has studied not only how people make financial and health decisions, but also online dating, gambling, procrastination, cheating and more.

I'm pictured here with Dan in our company cafetria grabbing coffee before his talk. I was showing him the new ASUS Eee PC, which his dad was raving about. Dan explained to me that the reason my 17" Powerbook feels huge after I've been using the Eee PC for a while is due to perceptual adaptation.

- mike lee - washington, dc

Lunch today was at Centre Market in Wheeling. The place was pretty busy with customers, but the selection of substantive food was limited to roast beef and fried seafood. I went with a roast beef sandwich. The area around the market was relatively devoid of people, but there were a few nice antique shops open.

Later in the afternoon, we made a first visit to a Cabelas. This is a massive 185,000 sq. ft. hunting and sporting goods store complete with a fiberglass mountain, large aquariums and big walk-in diorama of animal replicas. I'm not into hunting, but did appreciate the seemingly infinite array of equipment. What caught my eye was the aisle full of digital trail cameras. I had no idea so many models were available.

After dinner, we all took the trolley tour of the Festival of Lights. The driver's monologue of the story behind the various light displays and park landmarks was interesting. But our consensus was that the view would have been better from a car.

- mike lee - wheeling, wv

- mike lee - oglebay, wheeling, wva

The girls left before me in the family car as I was driving a rental so I could come back a day early to do a photo shoot. The five-hour ride from the DC area to Wheeling, West Virginia was pretty easy. I did hit the cold front near Cumberland. The little standard rental car got buffeted by some wind and rain. The Oglebay Golf Resort was at the top of a mountain near Wheeling. Cici and her mommy had already met up with her grandma/pa and auntie. We all sat down to a late lunch at the massive buffet before checking into our rooms.

- mike lee - wheeling, wva