For now, hopefully this new one will curb any design notions I have and instead provide a clean, well-lit space for me to write some words.

After countless years of wondering who my biological parents are, I finally decided to get serious about my search and hired a private investigation agency that specializes in people searches. The firm guarantees within a year I’ll have the names of my birth mother and father, along with other pertinent information such as marital status, financial standing and current residence.

Or so I’m told.

When you’ve had a question like this go unanswered for almost 30 years, it’s easy to be a little skeptical of firms that make these big claims and promises. But what’s the alternative? On my own, my feeble search efforts were always tiring, demoralizing and frustrating even before they ever really started.

Having never gone through this process before, most people are unaware and frankly surprised to hear the few birthrights an adoptee has. At birth, you are completely stripped of your right to know who gave birth to you and are legally barred from knowing this precious information. And this isn’t just a Pennsylvania thing. There are only six states in the U.S. where adult adoptees have unrestricted access to their own original birth records.

I don’t have the time or energy to deal with hiring a lawyer and going to a court that will decide whether I find out who my birth parents are. Can you imagine standing before a judge who has the power in his hands to grant or deny access to this information? No thanks.

Instead, I’ve turned to what I’m envisioning are a team of moustached-men who will be digging through microfilm and maybe following someone’s tail. I will even be getting email updates from the investigators who are handling my case.

I have no idea how any of this will turn out. I could be sitting here a year from now with the same information I have today. But I hope not. All I really want to uncover is the answer to the long-standing question of where I really came from.

(P.S. I would be remiss if I didn’t give props to the very helpful and very nice people at Catholic Social Services in Scranton, PA. Your refusal to return my calls or respond to letters of simple inquiry showed the class and sophistication your organization possesses.)

Casting aside exercise and healthy eating for a day.

No, I didn’t eat them all.

Personally for me, it’s interesting to see where Neiman Group falls in the mix. Despite a slight drop in revenues, we still are in the middle of the pack, coming in at number 257 in 2007.

What’s next for the former Adaptive Path co-founder? He’s not specific, other than saying he’s got a couple of small projects in the works.

While on the topic of hiring, if you’re a back-end developer interested in a new gig, let’s talk. We have an immediate opening and are looking to fill it with someone who’s smart, hungry and desirous of a unique opportunity.

This is precisely what happens when the creative and technical folks fail to sweat the details. It would require a bit more work on the back-end to parse out the order number and present only the appropriate tracking link, but it would be worth it.

Take away: don’t make your customers work.

This is why you don’t see Apple routinely making product sales predictions.

(Update: I was mistaken in what Apple’s publicly stated sales goal was. It’s not 10 million during the June - June timeframe. It’s 10 million for 2008.)

Mac sales continue to be the big story here, as unit sales were up 51 percent from the year-ago quarter. How does this compare to the overall PC industry? Gartner forecasted last month that the industry would see 10.9 precent growth this year, which means Apple is currently out-performing the competition by a factor of five.

Good luck in getting this to work well. Apple has been trying to do this with .Mac for years, and even though Microsoft’s dev team likely dwarfs the resources Apple is throwing at .Mac, it’s an incredibly difficult thing to pull off.

And frankly, nothing Microsoft has done software-wise in recent years makes me believe they’ll be able to make this a compelling or functioning solution.

As of this writing, CNN has three homepage stories that can be made into shirts, including “Dad mistakes young son for prey, shoots.” Can’t wait to be wearing that one out and about.