Musings and Meanderings

Some fun Links Thanks to SJ's Daily Illuminator Turns out the mammals weren't the wimps we thought they were. We live-birthers have been giving lizards what-for for 130 million years. That, or the Repenomamus giganticus has traveled back through time to alter history. If so, New Scientist has those parts of the story that the timeline has promulgated forward. Plasma lights are neat . . . but in the past 20 years they've gone from museum pieces to dime-store novelties, getting smaller and cheaper rather than bigger and more beautiful. But here's something different. Aurora Studios is fusing art and technology to get past merely "neat" and head toward "breathtaking." Technically it's not a robot, because it's tele-operated, but it's got a gun and it's on its way to a place where it can shoot and be shot at. Read the Yahoo story . Booz Allen Hamilton is looking for a teleport test engineer . What does the job entail? All ...

A bit of funny Got this from MW via Judy via Priscilla via.. Happy Inauguration Day Bush is my shepherd; I dwell in want. He maketh logs to be cut down in national forests. He leadeth trucks into the still wilderness. He restoreth my fears. He leadeth me in the paths of international disgrace for his ego's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of pollution and war, I will find no exit, for thou art in office. Thy tax cuts for the rich and thy media control, they discomfort me. Thou preparest an agenda of deception in the presence of thy religion. Thou anointest my head with foreign oil. My health insurance runneth out. Surely megalomania and false patriotism shall follow me all the days of thy term, And my jobless child shall dwell in my basement forever.

The Big Storm Dropped about 8 to 10 inches around my house. The wind overnight Saturday to Sunday was amazing, and left channels in the show around the house. A couple of kids from the neighborhood got paid 10 bucks to do the initial shoveling, the walkway and the sidewalk, but I was left with the odious task of digging out my car and clearing the street to the curb for the cars. Took about an hour, and my back is sore needless to say. The Big Games I use the Digital Video Recorder we get from Time Warner to record an entire football game and then I FF through the waits, the commercials, time outs and all the other stuff that causes a 60 min game to take 3.5 hrs. Actually just watching only the plays, you can get through a game in like 45 min becuase the clock runs between downs a lot of the time. Anyway kudo's to the Eagles to finally getting to the SuperBowl. Hope they do better than when the Raiders beat them up 27 - 10 back in the 80's. As for New En...

End of the week Well the week is finally over. What's the longest week in the year. Trick question. It's the one after a vacation. Well I've been on a 10 month vacation. This is by the way a back-blog as I call it, being written on Sunday night in order to keep my resolution of posting at least every other day. Just didn't get to it on Friday..... Anyway the week ended well with me in Randy's office discussing marketing and the "Bill Factor" till about 6pm. They hooked me up with one of their existing laptops yesterday and today they got it all fixed up so I could access their servers from the internet where ever I was, as long as I have an internet connection. However when I got home it didn't work... Otherwise it's very nice, a compaq, big screen running Windows XP Pro. The gist of the after work discussion was that he is grudginly giving Bill enough rope to hang himself. He will let him run some appointments, with the forgone conclus...

No closure. If you are reading this a few days at a time and didn't read the Monday piece, drop down to that and read it. Ok did you do that? Good. No closure in the situation with the "other guy". In all fairness Randy is doing all he can to keep the guy from bolting, but it goes down wrong for me personally. I think he should be sat down and told the facts of life for the immediate future. The longer it goes on I feel the less good it looks when the reality sets in. Anyway, spent some time on appointments the last two days. We have done a remote backup presentation, a phone system presentation, and had a couple of duds. The duds were set by the telemarketer, so that does not bode well. If Randy is running his personal leads, and I run mine and Bill's, and if Bill's are not good, this will cause some problems as well. I have been spending the rest of the time in the office cramming my head with information. We have some presentations tomorrow as w...

First Day, New Job. Here is a cursory blow by blow of my first day at Technical Business Systems. It snowed two inches last night so I got up at 6:30 to get showered and dressed and clean off the car etc. Went ahead and did the shoveling as well as I knew it would be after dark by the time I got back. Thank god it was MLK birthday because the roads were garbage. But because of the low traffic I was able to get to work in about 35 min, allowing me to psych up for the new job in the parking lot. The more "techie" partner arrived just after I did so I got out of the car and went into the building and the more "sales" partner was there already. His name is Randy, so it's good to remember that. Most of all today was the beginning of what will be a huge info dump regarding networking, phone systems and other products that we sell. But we did go over other things like marketing strategies and the like. I sat down with Randy and spent the morning beginning ...

10 reasons I love my new Palm Tungsten E One of the coolest gifts I got this Christmas was from my Dad and Step-Mom. As you can see from the picture I have moved into the world of hand held "PDA's" with the gift of the Palm Tungsten E. This runs on the Palm OS software, the older of the two companies in the hand held business, still out performing the Pocket PC software of Micro$erf. I was very excited to get it as it was part of the good Karma that was being laid down by everyone for the job I was still waiting to get. Of course it will be very handy in the day to day affairs of work, but up till now it has just been a personal info bundle that really rocks. The biggest selling point of a Palm is it's handwriting recognition software. You write in the dark area you see above and it translates into typed text. If you are none to good at this you can even pull up a virtual keyboard and pretend type it in one letter at a time on the touch screen. So her...

Fact check before exclaiming: Darfur and The Tsunami I've been recently thinking some pretty "un PC" thoughts regarding the relief effort in South East Asia. Don't get me wrong, I think it is unbelievable the help and relief aid that has been brought to bear from governments to private citizens across the Globe. But something has been irking me for a few days now. How come we can mobilze practially the entire planet to help out from a disaster that has claimed nearly 200,00 human lives, and will claim probably many more from disease, but we cannot bring our self to affect the latest genocide on the African Continent? The reason for my subject heading was that until I did the research last night I was under the false impression that the genocide in the Darfur reigon of the Sudan had claimed more lives than the Tsunami in South East Asia. I was wrong. The count seems to be around 50,000 dead and rising daily with a few million homeless..... But the point...

Is your day going by faster? According to Richard Gross at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Dec. 26 earthquake that caused the massive tsunami that devastated south Asia and east Africa also redistributed the mass of the planet enough to alter the rate of the planet's spin. By 3 millionths of a second.

It's S (n) o (w) Cool Well we finally got the first real snow of the season (no surprise for my local readers). We had a lovely snow / sleet / freezing rain storm on Thursday then it slowly snowed all day Saturday. In all it put down probably another 4 to 6 inches, making the base 6 to 9 in. Funny thing is that by Thursday it should be all gone, as we have predicted here a warm 36 hours midweek below freezing accompanied by rain. The shoveling was not too bad, as it is very dry here. I always love the first major snowfall of the year, everything nice and white, before the petrocarbons and street sludge blacken the snow, or it melts or sublimates away. We are blessed to have a great neighbor across the street who throws his brother's plow on his truck, so after the city plowed us in as per their contract (hee hee), he got all the immediate neighbors to move our cars around and got the snow pushed over to the curb. My cup runneth over I cannot express my deepes...

I can't believe its over. At noon I accepted the offer from Technical Business Solutions in Schenectady NY. My new company sells business to business marketing a variety of products and services encompassed by the concept of Networking including business phone systems, designing implementing and executing network systems physically as well as monitoring services. I will be reporting directly to the partners, and eventually creating a sales force of "my own". The company has also put on the table possible partial ownership if goals are met and exceeded consistently. We are still not out of the woods, but at least we can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and I'm confident it's not a freight train coming on..... Thanks so much to all the family members and friends for their support in my last 10 months of unemployment and underemployment and thanks for allowing me to share this good New Years news with my friends, family and loved ones. Now I ...

Been a long time! That it has. Last entry was way back on Dec 21st. I'm not going to go too deeply into my mindset of not writing. Most of it is still the extended break from the intensity of the last year or so regarding the political arena. Needless to say I was extremely disappointed in what transpired not only at the Presidential level, which to be honest I was not surprised at, but also in the tilt in Congress as well. My personal life has also been antithetical to writing. The lack of a "real" job can create a very deep and profound malaise torwards the world in general, hence the lack of social or political commentary. It is also reflected by the personal front, with nothing to really say, I have just not said it. The Christmas Experience That being said however we did have a wonderful holiday this year. A quick recap may be in order here so bear with me. About 18 months ago or so, when I heard for certain that my Father and step Mom were fin...