The other day my little sister had her first professional modeling job. It was a photo shoot for a print ad for Microsoft Encarta. They shot the whole thing in the Powell street BART station, and the roles in the shoot were: Spaceman #1, Spaceman #2, Spaceman #3… and Girl. I think we’re all going to have to trust that those ad wizards at Microsoft know what they’re doing.

Anyway, I’m naturally very proud of Sarah, and it looks like she will soon be appearing in a major Magazine Near You. As for how my life is going, I got a flat tire last night. Maybe there’s only so much karma to go around in one family?

I had been talking about blogs recently, and I thought I would mention one here that I really like: Good Morning Silicon Valley, by John Paczkowski of the San Jose Mercury News. It’s one of those “mostly-links” blogs — the commentary is essentially the titles and the links themselves. I have to give Paczkowski some credit for creativity in this department. You would think he would get bored — after all, how many variations are there on saying, “Company X lays off Y people”? Well, let us count the ways:

• IBM layoffs actually “job resource action”
• HP messes with Texas
• Reason for leaving last job: “workforce rebalancing”
• It’s raining SBC employees
• 7,000+ careers to be claimed in freak IBM workforce rebalancing
• 1,100+ Genuity employees released into wild
• 2,000 JDSU employees to adapt to challenging marketplace
• Sun to 1,000 employees: “What color is your parachute?”
• Third prize is: you’re fired
• Worldcom to declare employee surplus

And that’s just in the last couple of months.