Musings and Meanderings

Well what do you expect I'm going to say.... I seriously thought about writing a piece yesterday mimicking all the absurd platitudes that the talking heads will be saying the next few days about the debates. Then the Daily Show trumped me last night, so I guess "Great Mind's Think Alike". My point being that in this era of sound bites, and style over substance, what the candidates fully said tonight will buried by the talking heads. I don't believe that most American's make up their own minds on things. At least not the ones I talk to. Instead they speak in the same talking points they hear on Fox, or CNN, or MSNBC etc etc. And just because I find them so offensive, I tuned in Fox News cable to see the reaction from the Right. Their well-balanced staff included such "moderates" as Billy Krystal and Fred Barnes. Unsurprisingly these mouthpieces just filled in what the President had kind of "left out" of his talk. As for my opini...

Da Raida's Well well.... After prognosticators put my Raiders down at the bottom of the barrell... I think that Sports Frustrated said they would be lucky to be .500 by the end of the season... A funny thing happened on the way to the forum. I saw two the last three games and the end of the Pittsburgh game. They don't look like a 5 and 11 team this year. They won 3 of 4 in the preseason and are tied for first in the divsion after going 2 - 1. Now this is NOT a season. No where near a season. But let us put Mike's fearless prognostication skills to the test for the rest of the year. Keep in mind that Gannon is out for eight weeks now. (This is not a bad thing). Here are my predictions., remembering I may be a fan but I'm not out of my mind. Sun 9/12 at Pittsburgh L 21-24 Sun 9/19 Buffalo W 13-10 Sun 9/26 Tampa Bay W 30-20 So we are now 2 - 1. Lets look at the rest of the Season W-----Sun 10/3 at Houston 1:00 pm L-----Sun 10/1...

Make the move to FireFox. I will make this short as possible. Years ago the first web browser was created by the Mozilla company. This is a non profit open source organization dedicated to the furtherance of an open web. Along comes Godzilla (Microsoft), rewrites a bit of code here and there and copyrightes it. Lo and behold you have your Internet Explorer. In fact if you look at the "about IE" in Help you will probably find the credit to Mozilla. Anyway lets see if you qualify for using FoxFire instead of Internet Explorer: Do you use internet explorer consitently (vs Netscape); are you tired of hacking and spam fears?; if you still run windows 98 or 98se are you tired of IE just crashing?; do you find the Microsoft monopoly just too difficult to swallow?; do you have memory concerns on an old laptop finding that IE 6.0 runs way too slow? Then you should use Firefox. Click on the logo above and download it. It is FREE. Imagine that in this world of corporate ba...

Blue Oyster Cult!! First I want to share with you the most amazing picture, which I took accidentally last night. It was supposed to be a closeup of just one of the guitarists. However one of the other guitarists' guitar went sweeping through the frame as I took it, AND the drummer was hitting the gong in the background. Not in a million years could I have planned this shot. Myself and a few hundred of the faithful saw the boys tonight at their annual visit to Northern Lights in Clifton Park. The concert was a big success, the crowd very appreciative. All age ranges were in attendance as usual. It is possibly the loudest concert I've been at in many years however, not helped by the fact that I saw it from standing in front of the stage. In contrast I stood in the exact same spot for a band called STS9 a week earlier and had no appreciable "tinnyness" that night or the next day. This am my ears are still ringing...... The boys were dressed in their usu...

The big 43 So yea its another birthday. Yippee. This is the big 43. September 23 1961 I was born to Kay Marianne and Samir Jamil. This was actually right early, 12:44 am and I was 7 lbs and 15 oz. Born in Beautiful Santa Monica California no less. So far I have gotten calls from (separately) the aforementioned Kay Marianne and Samir Jamil, brother's Greg and Andrew, Sister Laurie, and spoke to Grammie and Aunt Birdinia. The aforementioned Kay Marianne came to visit two weekends ago (see the blog below for that) for a combination birthday and anniversary dinner. I got emails from a few people as well, internet friends etc. So what is the state of the person . Lets have a State of the person address. I'm 5 8 and 210, and after smoking on and off for more years than I wish to admit I went cold turkey close to a month ago. I can acutally breath again but I have gained 5 lbs from before I quit. Overall the 5 lbs is less unhealthy than the smoking and I should be able to ta...

Finally a perceptive judicial ruling Thanks to Prjt2501 for this story Judge Strikes Down Anti-Bootleg Law By ERIN McCLAM, Associated Press Writer NEW YORK - A federal judge Friday struck down a 1994 law banning the sale of bootleg recordings of live music, ruling the law unfairly grants "seemingly perpetual protection" to the original performances. U.S. District Judge Harold Baer Jr. dismissed a federal indictment of Jean Martignon, who runs a Manhattan mail-order and Internet business that sells bootleg recordings. Baer found the bootleg law was written by Congress in the spirit of federal copyright law, which protects writing for a fixed period of time — typically for the life of the author and 70 years after the author's death. But the judge said the bootleg law, which was passed "primarily to cloak artists with copyright protection," could not stand because it places no time limit on the ...

Signs Its a sign that you should go see a concert. Picked up my coffee and a NYTimes at the Mobil Station near the office. They guy said I could get a Albany Times Union instead for free with the coffee. I said I dont READ the Times Union, but I'd take it any way as One it was free and Two I could give it to someone at the office. Lo and Behold in the Preview Section, whilst checking on the BOC show for next Friday, I discovered that one of my fave new bands Sound Tribe Sector Nine was playing TONIGHT at Northern Lights. So I went. GREAT show. Danced my ass off. Few observations. No question the youngest Jam band crowd I had seen. This was definitely the High School and College Crowd. Now you must understand that STS9 is not pop music. It is very complicated, Jazz, Funky, Urban instrumental Jam music. I was one of the very few people there who were over 40. Maybe one of 5 that I saw. The first stares in line were "what the hell is that old guy doing here...

First Day of Training Mom left at 7am this morning, giving me the time to the half hour rush to get showered (!) and dressed (!) and out the door to go to work (!). First of all I took Alex to LaSalle of course, and checked in with the powers that be on the Cafeteria situation. Not being a publically funded public school, Chartwells food service is full boat, or a whopping $3.25 per lunch. Annualize that baby. So Alex will be doing the old bag lunch this year, though he will be able to eat in the cafeteria. (This is important to him). So off to the first day of training. My co trainee is an older gentleman named Bruce, and my boss is Rob. Training started at 9:30 and we did paperwork, and then got through part of the presentation by lunch. From 1 to 3:30 we worked on more of the presentation. Tomorrow we start working the phone scrips. The whole thing seems very well thought out and well done. I am so far very impressed with this operation, and although we are all independen...

Mom Visit Well we spend the late morning and early afternoon doing the final Fall Cleaning touches just in time for the Emmy Unit to arrive around 5:30. Ironically the Sunny Unit called right as she walked in the door, so it was a Mom kinda moment. Sunny had found this cool job opportunity, unfortunatly it is in Keene NH, and we are just not able to relocate at this time. So MW arrived at 5:30 and we had a nice chat, showed her Alex's new paint job and then trundled off for a late Anniversary early birthday (9/10 & 9/23) dinner at Koto Restaurant near the Airport. This is a Hibachi cooking table type Japanese restaurant. Two pictures are below. The cook created an Onion Tower and the made it into a Volcano. Pretty cool. MW, Alex and I had Chicken, and Liza had Shirmp and Steak Hibachi's. These three were our table companions, the middle one had a brazillian accent, and they said there in town on business. Liza guessed a Retail meeting...

Three years today I was working for the CableShoppe when the jets hit the Twin Towers. I saw the second one hit Live so to speak. Just horrid. Same with the falling towers, saw the second one go down live, the first happened when I was back at my desk. Its been a long three years. Last year I asked if we were any safer. This year I'm not going to do this, because the answer is really not negotiable to anyone in America. Half of the US thinks we are, the other half thinks we are not. The one half will not agree with the other no matter what is said. This country is sick and divided, and neither political party are helping. We are along way from recovery and are not even on the right path to get there. So instead we should remember the thousands killed in the Twin Tower tragedy. And remember the thousands of Irish killed in sectarian terrorist activities in Northern Ireland. And remember the thousands of Spaniards and French killed in Basque sepratist terrorist activi...

16 years ago today I married my lover, best friend, the woman who would be come the mother to my son, and my life long compainion. In 16 years we have had some pretty big highs and very serious lows, but we have always strived to work out the lows and celebrate the highs, and to learn from each. So here we were in 1986. Maid of honor Jenny, Liza, Mike, Best Man Greg.

Issues we are not hearing about........ .......because we have spent so much time talking about television advertisements: Millions of jobs lost in the last four years; Unbearably expensive health care; A total loss of confidence within the international community in our moral leadership; The underfunded farce that is the Department of Homeland Security; The underfunded farce that is the No Child Left Behind bill; The fact that military assault weapons will soon be making a perfectly legal return to a neighborhood near you; The deeply illegal outing of a deep-cover CIA agent by Bush administration officials, who did it because they wanted to silence a critic; The rape and torture of men, women and children in the Abu Ghraib prison, horrors that were sanctioned in writing by Bush's own lawyer and the Secretary of Defense; The allegation by Senator Bob Graham of Florida that Bush torpedoed any aspect of the 9/11 investigation that came within spitting distance of his friends in...

Labor Day Weekend Fun. In the ongoing quest to make Alex's life as wonderful as possible, I have finally stopped putting off painting his room. Due to L's great connections, we got a bunch (ok well a room's worth) of paint at cost. We went with such splendorific color names as Unicorn Pearl for the basic wall color, and Lady in Red, Blue Grass Meldoy and Sapphire Ring for the trim. Basically off-white, Red, Green and Blue. Basically. So yesterday I washed down the walls with Spic and Span diluted. Then this am I spackled with dry wall compound. Then came the painting. Using a roller and two brushes, this Latex paint went on very nicely. Actually it didn't take anywhere near as long as I thought it might, about 140 min (the time of a String Cheese Incident concert I had just gotten). I painted the walls, ceiling, and tried not to paint the floor... ;-) Tomorrow I put on the second coat, as it's latex, so it is pretty much dry now, but I decided to wait 24 ...

Nominally Employed Unless something else comes up in a big way, I will begin training for an outside sales job with a company called Transworld Systems , an OSI corporate division, on Monday the 13th. Transworld was created in the the 1970's to better service bad debt collection in the banking business. They are a mulitmillion dollar company spread out over the entire US, with offices in every major region. Now before you freak and think I'm going to be calling debtors and screaming at them I want you to go to this power point presentation it will open a fresh window in your browser. You can click on the presentation itself to page through it. Transworld utilzes a flat rate per account program to keep the collection costs as low as possible for business'. My job is to sell this service. Pure and simple. I prospect. I set appointments. I sell. It's what I've been doing since I graduated from College. This is one of the types of position I have been loo...

the RNC Day 4, or.... Dear Mr. President: I watched your speech last night with some hope and anticipation. After three straight days of watching your party denigrate and disrespect the Democratic Party and their nominees for President, I wondered what you would say. From Mr. Cheney to Mr. Miller your minions spread their twisted facts and outright lies about your opponent and what he stands for. But you know what? I think in the end you think you are a pretty good guy. A man of the people. Though markedly anti-intellectual this is not a horrid thing. You come from a patrician, but very nice family, and I actually liked your Dad, though like you he was not the greatest President. You may recall I sent you an "open" letter after the Supreme Court gave you the election in 2000 regarding your cutting of all funding for any sort of family planning in the third world. This was right after you had run as a "compassionate conservative", and a moderate. The...

The RNC Day Three As I thought it would be, today was a difficult pill to listen to. Admittedly I only caught the last hour of the convention. Unfortunately the first speaker was Zel Miller. Look I don't mind that this guy has an opinion on John Kerry. This is America, we all have our opinions. But he is no Democrat. He is a turncoat. "He is offended by how cynical, narrow minded and partisan the Democrats in Washington are. Everything he believed about his party was "destroyed" when he came to Washington." (This all direct quotes from his good friend Newt Gingrich). So his response is to go to the other party's convention and slag off his own party in a cynical, narrow minded and partisan way. Way to go keep up the Moral High Ground Zel. Dear Senator Miller, we don't want you. Go be a Republican. Thanks. You are welcome to your opinions, but they do not reflect the Democratic Party. I did not get a chance to pick out the lies from Dick Cheny...