Still here; an end to this crazy work period is finally in sight.

• First things first. The holiday card photo is of ice on the Hudson River, a rare treat. It is not, as one person guessed, a town in Siberia vacated by communists.

• Derek Jeter will not be in centerfield after all (and neither will Bubba Crosby). Welcome to NYC, Johnny Damon. It seems like you couldn't pick a better good guy to join the Yankees. This should be fun. It's the most excitement at Yankee Stadium since the House that Ruth Built was made into a makeshift Metro-North stop.

I've been busy with some general, ongoing projects.

• Ongoing project #1: home improvement. With some smart strategizing, I've been making my place far more comfortable with not that many new things. The console table in the entryway, with its framed photographs and a storage basket on the shelf for my scarves and hats, adds warmth. The bookshelf now won't be here til January 5th--the truck couldn't get into Manhattan yesterday. Jensen Lewis is a great store and it feels less standardized than Pottery Barn or Crate & Barrel (although those two places have nice things also).

• Ongoing project #2: 2005 playlist. After lots of iTunes searches and lots of consultation with a DJ I know in Fort Lauderdale, by the end of the year I will have the ultimate playlist of 2005 music. I can't wait. I cheated by listening to the half I already have, and it's unbelievable. But the best stuff is yet to arrive.

• Ongoing project #3: fun with squats. A few weeks ago, a gym staff member came up to me while I was on the squats machine and said it was time for me to graduate to the real thing. He proceeded the next week to give me a complimentary introductory lesson, loaded with picky but important pointers about form. (You don't want to screw around with weight on the top of your back.) Now that I've done it a few times, it feels much more natural and is a nice new twist about once a week to the workout routine.

• Finally (for now), congrats to the guys over at EveryoneSmile, which was acquired several weeks ago. EveryoneSmile was my first client; I started working with them in 1999. In an age when everyone was running to file for an IPO with a few scribbles on a whiteboard, they wanted to work on building a viable long term business. It's nice to have seen firsthand the six years of work leading to this conclusion.

I had a rare large chunk of free time this weekend, so it was nice. So was the snow, and more is on the way tonight.

• Eatery has been one of my favorite brunch places, but now it looks like you can put it in the same category as Isabella's and Popover Café; that is, in the category of places just not worth an hour's wait because there are other excellent, less popular, places nearby. I think what did Eatery in was its mention on Rachael Ray's "Tasty Travels," judging from the crowd. We reverted to Arriba Arriba for a terrific brunch with a Mexican twist, without a wait and in a fun setting.

• Dinner at Nooch was great, as expected. The wholesome tofu salad only suffered from two minor defects: (1) the awkwardness of eating green pepper rings with chopsticks (they should have been diced or chopped into smaller pieces), and (2) lettuce that should have been richer and greener. But the chicken ramen was scrumptious, and the ambience is modern and bright. We would have preferred music other than the standard Chelsea soundtrack featuring Reina, Kylie, et. al.

• I upgraded to Firefox 1.5 for about three minutes before running back to 1.0.6. Usually I wait several weeks or months to upgrade to anything new, but previous Firefox changes have been smooth (from 0.9 to 1.0.6). Firefox 1.5 had some really bad flaws on my system, though--an inability to handle any Javascript (and the resulting dreaded "spinning pizza"), for starters. The problems probably stem partly from my own old system (10.2.8) and, judging from various Mac Web sites, sloppy QA on Mozilla's part, but it will be awhile before I try the upgrade again. I've learned my way around the quirks of 1.0.6 and see nothing compelling on the 1.5 feature list.

• My favorite sentence in today's Times: "What are the reasonable expectations of the rights and responsibilities of companies and workers these days?" Nothing like kicking off the week with some good, hard business news.

Today is my first anniversary with Verizon Wireless after switching from AT&T Wireless (now Cingular).

How good has it been? I have found nothing to complain about in a year. For me, that's pretty remarkable. I have not called or emailed customer service once.

I don't understand how anyone has anything other than Verizon Wireless. As the company's advertisements say, "it's the network." Who cares about a cool gadget or huge buckets of "whenever" minutes if you can't place calls?

Verizon Wireless is fantastic.

A friend's birthday gathering was yesterday evening at Splash, a nightlife venue that illuminates some very interesting branding issues.

For years, this venue had been known simply as "Splash." Then, about two years ago, after an extensive renovation, the owners changed the name to "SBNY (Splash Bar New York)."

This didn't stick. Over the next several months, nobody ever said "I was at SBNY." Everyone continued to say "Splash." It was like the FedEx Kinko's problem where nobody calls it "FedEx Kinko's;" they just call it "Kinko's."

To ownership's credit, they reversed this branding decision and now call it "Splash" again. You can see some remnants of the "SBNY" attempt in some of the video promotions, but the primary name is clearly "Splash."

Lesson #1: If you have a good business reputation and your customer base likes a name better than your suggested change, it's good business to reverse the change.

Lesson #2: If your customers know your business by one syllable, a change to four syllables is unlikely to work.