Christopher Mackay's Blog

Boy, he covers a lot of ground in this 6-minute bit, but he speaks the truth.

Awesome animated ad for Google Chrome:

(Via Official Google Mac Blog.)

100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do (Part 2) – You’re the Boss Blog – NYTimes.com

Follow-up to part 1.

100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do (Part 1) – You’re the Boss Blog:

These are excellent suggestions. I constantly see violations of:

5. Tables should be level without anyone asking. Fix it before guests are seated.

12. Do not touch the rim of a water glass. Or any other glass.

17. Do not take an empty plate from one guest while others are still eating the same course. Wait, wait, wait.

20. Never refuse to substitute one vegetable for another.

23. If someone likes a wine, steam the label off the bottle and give it to the guest with the bill. It has the year, the vintner, the importer, etc.

This one goes for coffee, water, etc., not just wine — especially in this day of H1N1 hysteria concern:

30. Never let the wine bottle touch the glass into which you are pouring. No one wants to drink the dust or dirt from the bottle.

Looking forward to the next 50…

(Via @zeldman.)

I’ve always had the most amazing ability to lose things.

I once lost my wallet for three days — and it was gone for two days before I noticed. It turned up at a restaurant, where the waitress had found it and turned it in.

I once lost my watch. A few months later, I lost its replacement. I put off buying another, expecting it would show up, but it didn’t, so I replaced it, too.

A year later, I found the first missing watch in the pocket of a jacket at a friend’s house .

A couple of months after that, I was cleaning the couch, and found my second missing watch deep in the crevice between the back and the seat, bringing my current watch count up to three.

Detecting a pattern here?

A few weeks ago I was helping a friend adjust the seat on his new bicycle in front of my house.

A week later, I was looking for a screwdriver, and couldn’t find my toolbox anywhere. There are bigger toolboxes, but it’s not so small that you could walk into a room and not see it, especially if you were actually looking for it.

After searching every room in the house — twice — I reached the sad conclusion that someone had walked off with my toolbox full of tools after I’d helped my friend with his bike.

The thought of buying all new tools, while attractive at the reptilian-brain/shiny-new-stuff level, seemed premature given my history, so I resisted.

Sure enough, the toolbox turned up, under the sink in the basement, right where I now remember putting it.

By the way, has anyone seen my wallet…?

Apple’s Canadian iTunes store has this show, Christianity: The First Two Thousand Years. Haven’t seen it, don’t want to. I’m sure it’s great. Really.

But the description of the first episode helpfully points out that “Jesus died at Calgary“. I’m a little rusty on my Canadian history, I’ll admit, but this could be huge for Alberta tourism.

Nice to see someone making the extra effort and going beyond the traditional typo, in which Jesus dies at Cavalry…