There is much that could be said about the hundreds of miles of driving to see family and then a houseful of family and good times before during and after Christmas. I won’t bore readers of the blog about that but there is one thing I would like to share about one special gift I received. It is called Open It!
Some will immediately be thinking of Open IT as in “Open Information Technology”. For example, Open IT Works is based on a simple concept borrowed from Open Source, and is about sharing of IT solutions, best practices, projects, and product and vendor reviews. The Open It I received for Christmas has nothing to do with any of that. My Open It is to open things that come packaged in blisters, clamshells, boxes DVD cases, and numerous other things unopenables that are packaged with the vendor in mind — and with no thought about how the consumer might open the package without injuring oneself. The Open It is made from hardened and plated precision alloy steel, has has honed, angled, and offset jaws, and an ergo-comfortable handle. It has a built in retractable utility knife and an interchangeable Phillips & slotted screwdriver. (You can click to get a complete product data sheet). If you have ever suffered “wrap rage“, suffer no more. It really works. The only catch is that the Open It comes in one of those packages that you need an Open It to open it! Hopefully, I will not become the technical support department for this product like I did for the PepperBall.
Holiday time also allowed me to finish a couple of books. Indian Summer was an excellent history of India, Pakistan, Kashmir, and Bangladesh. The Iranian Time Bomb is a wake up call to what has been going on for thirty years. Good investigative reporting went into this. It was a special pleasure to finish Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Prepare yourself for 944 pages. I learned many things I did not know about the civil war and about Abraham Lincoln. He was quite the political strategist and a superb manager. A very long read but worth it. Several new books in the read queue for January. The quarterly update on favorites is here.