For the past seven weeks, save the week of Thanksgiving, I've been on the road. Sure, I stopped home occasional to "freshen up," but that's still seven weeks of hard. In that time, I've been to five states, more cities than I have fingers (I have all of my original fingers, by the way), started a new relationship, shown Vegas to my sister, gone blind, had a three and a half week bout of bronchitis, taken part in an A&E documentary, made an ass out of myself at a poker game at Chris's house, pissed everybody off with The Post That I Will Not Mention, done about forty crossword puzzles, and slept nary a wink.

Tonight, for the first time in a long time, I am spending a Saturday night at my apartment, and I'm spending it by myself.

To celebrate this brief respite from the action, I went out today and bought myself some fruit.

I came home and used my opposable thumbs to peel the outer layer from a seedless tangerine. I learned tonight that the reward for being an intelligent primate is the tart, pulpy innards of seedless tangerines in December.

"Great," you're saying to yourself. "What does that have to do with DataSets?"

Nothing.

What I wanted to say about DataSets is this:

Mixed in with the Vegasing and tangerine-peeling was a lunch with a fabulous man by the name of "Stuart Celarier." He recently started a blog [update: it looks like Stuart just moved his blog here in what seems to have been the fastest blog startup/switcheroo ever, even beating out Jim Blizzard who has had about 16 blogs over the past five months], and he posted about the lunch that we had. He's a Portland geek with a penchant for juggling, a love of Stupid Human Tricks, and a gray-matter repository of a little too much coding information (he knows his stuff cold).

If you have ever wondered about what it is that I have against exposing DataSets at the end of web services, then you need to read the post about our lunch (here's the link again in case you're to lazy to go back and click the first one).

What I have against DataSets and web services isn't even really a problem that's specific to DataSets - it's simply that the DS/WS combo is indicative of a much larger problem that I lack the eloquence to describe. Stuart, on the other hand, nails it and tells the story in a way I couldn't.

Anyway, tangerine time. I'm going to go eat more tangerines. You should, too.