Wish it were so

The West Wing had a live presidential debate as part of its format with weekend.

Saldy, we won't get to see it until the new year. By then we'll probably know the winner. Wouldn't it be great if the real thing was like this.

I was home for the weekend, I had intended to travel home the previous weekend but sis wasn't home so I postponed. I try to travel where possible when she is home. As my being about is as much for her to enjoy as it is for me.

Can't say I'm much of a brother. I read her a story when she goes to bed, which she seems to like. I'd never read Roald Dahl as a kid so this is a treat for me too.

Pat's dad was Kerryperson of the year for 2005. Apparently, it was a good night and there were loads of photos of various individuals in the Kerryman last week.

Steve and Peig were about for the weekend too, well the Saturday night. We had a few scoops in Kingston's and went home relatively early, well the weather was miserable and we are all old.

I was looking at some projects that IBM Watson in Cambridge have and there is this visualisation thingy that was used by a baby name company, the baby name wizard and they had used it to track baby names in the US over the last 124 years or so. It's great fun, just type in names and see how they've gone up and down. The speed is quite snappy, it looks just the type of plug-in that PMs would love for tracking bug fixes rates and check-ins etc.

On the baby name side of things, though I'm legally obliged to use Daniel at some point in the eldest wee one's name (and again with the eldest male), I'm kind of easy on names. It doesn't have to be the first or commonly used name, just so long as it is there somewhere in the list.

Anyway, what makes the wizard so much fun is to look at cultural (tv) influences on names, like Angel as the 44th most popular boys name in 2004! though it didn't exist before that, and the explosion of Xander, and Willows. No one seems to be naming their girls Buffy thankfully and Cordelia died a death in the 40s and hasn't come back, nor has Giles.

Oddly enough Daniel appears to have lost popularity after I was born. Actually, quite a few names like Rod and John appear to drop off after people of that name came to promenience.