25 years ago today

I have strong feelings about politics and religion, among other things, but I have tried to keep those opinions off of this blog. For one, more than half of the people will disagree with them, and for another, it serves no purpose than to start an argument, since you will never convert anyone to your point of view just by writing something on a blog.

That being said, I think some may find this to be political, but I don't believe it is. Regardless of my political affiliations, I am an American first, and our President is my President. Read this account by Ronald Reagan of the day 25 years ago when he was shot by John Warnock Hinckley Jr., and think about not just President Reagan but all the folks that were involved or affected by the shooting. See what an eloquent and engaging writer and speaker he was, even after being shot; who of us could expect to behave the same way with a bullet in his chest?

Foop! by Chris Genoa

Foop! by Chris Genoa.

Motley Crew

I went down to meet some friends from high school this afternoon, there were some guys in town for the Mötley Crüe concert last night. Apparently, the band is just as "cool" [Note from Drew: these are "ironic" quotation marks, I'm using irony like all the kids are doing nowadays] as they used to be.

I hung out with James Hudson, Kevin Maloney, Craig Steury, Maci McDaniel (née Cash) Deana (née Smalley), Laurie Zarzour (née Hatfield), Kenley Musch and his wife Zoila, and some friends of James from New Jersey and Minnesota.

It was a lot of fun catching up with old friends. They've changed so much, and yet they're exactly the same. Needless to say, we know so much about each other's past that none of us could ever run for public office unless all of us were elected. Too many skeletons. Literally.

Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb

Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb.

What's the best thing that happened to you today?

One of the NACE marketing guys, Treavor, was writing in his NACE blog, and he asked me "what's the best thing that happened to you today?" And I struggled to think of what it was. I could have easily listed the top 20 worst things that had happened to me today off of the top of my head, like spilling ketchup on my pants at lunch, getting bitched at in a meeting, calling someone by the wrong name, lots of little things that are mostly embarrassing, not bad in the sense of biblical proportions. But it is so wrong that I can't as easily come up with good things that happened. I'm not a whiner, when he asked, I thought "well, nothing really bad or good happened to me today". But I am sort of a pessimist, I feel like if you expect the worst, then you’ll never be disappointed, and you might be pleasantly surprised. But here are some of the good things that happened to me today:

1) Being in San Diego, a beautiful town
2) Nice weather, 50's in the day and a little cooler at night. It's a nice change from the 90's in Houston.
3) Having all my work for my committees done a week ahead of time
4) Receiving an award tomorrow
5) Getting special treatment
6) Buying some folks lunch for no real reason
7) Seeing my friends at conference
8) The most comfortable bed I have ever slept on
9) Getting to sleep in because I didn't have any meetings first thing this morning
10) Being named chair of a committee I am working on by a bunch of folks that I really respect
11) Having a great sushi dinner
12) Paid for by the company
13) Finishing a really good book
14) Starting on a technical paper due in a week and realizing I would have plenty of material to complete it
15) Not having to shave this morning (I'm alternating days, now)
16) Free high-speed wireless internet access at the convention center
17) Being mentioned by name in a presention of a very technical paper
18) Not feeling compelled to blog every day
19) Sticking to my Lentan sacrifice
20) Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, health, wealth and prosperity, total consciousness, intact faculties, true friends, contentment, professional satisfaction, hobbies like this blog, etc. etc. etc.

So, what's the best thing that happened to you today?

Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashita

Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashita.

On blogging

Well, my New Year's resolution of blogging every day has fallen by the wayside. I had hoped to post one good post each day for a year, but the last week was just too hectic to allow me to do that. I started teaching a NACE CP 1 course last Sunday (March 5th), and the week following (March 12-16) is the NACE conference in San Diego. I would get home between 6 and 7 pm, have a quick dinner, and then put in a couple of hours on the computer to keep up with my email, finish up the preparations for committee meetings at conference, and take care of other odds and ends, like laundry, dry cleaning, selling my Land Cruiser, and paying the bills. I had to have everything done by Friday morning, including packing, since I was flying to San Diego immediately after the class was done. So I haven't had a full night's sleep until last night, and then I only got one extra hour because I sat in an exam-writing workshop from 8am to 5pm today.

So, what's new? The guy who bought my Land Cruiser decided he didn't want it, canceled the check and returned it. The lady who hit my car after Christmas still won't respond to her insurance company, and they won't pay me until they hear her side of the story. The guy who's working on restoring my GTO still hasn't done anything on it yet, except to get it running. More of the same. I did turn around and sell the Land Cruiser to the second highest bidder, but for less money. Overall, I got a little more than I thought I would, and the guy knows exactly what he's getting, so I'm satisfied. I wrote a letter to the insurance company saying that their failure to contact their client didn't indemnify them, and that I would take them to court, and I wrote another letter to the lady who hit me, at another possible address. And I'll give the mechanic a call when I get back home. Nothing is easy anymore, you can't accomplish anything without having to follow up and follow up and follow up.

I'm going to try to finish the computer buying article this week, I have at least one more part to do. And from now on, I'm going to post when I have both something to say and the time to say it. That may be daily, but more likely it will be 4-5 times a week. Looking back at the last two months of posts, I was very satisfied with the content, much more so than the posts from when I started this blog almost three years ago.

Gridlinked by Neal Asher

Gridlinked by Neal Asher.

How to Buy a Computer (Part 2)

I've been thinking about buying a new computer for the house, see Part 1 of this article.

Now that you've decided on desktop or laptop, you know what you want to use it for, and you know about how much you want to spend, you're ready to start picking out the specs you're looking for. Shopping for a computer is like buying a car, except you have to pick out your engine first, then decide how big a gas tank you want, and seats and a steering wheel cost extra.

The first decision is the processor, or to use my car-buying metaphor, the engine. Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon 64 systems are the top end of the heap right now. For the highest performance, you can buy a system with a dual-core processor, which will allow for faster multitasking. For the best value, you should always buy one or two levels down from the top - you really won't gain more than 5 to 10 percent in performance by paying for the top of the line, and that extra 5 or 10 percent is very very expensive.

Looking at Dell, the lowest cost dual-processor package is an XPS 400 with a Intel® Pentium® D Dual-Core Processor (3.00GHz, 800MHzFSB, 4MBCache) for $999. Gateway has a DX-300S with no monitor with a Intel® Pentium® D Dual-Core Processor (2.80GHz, 800MHz FSB, 2x2MB cache, non-HT EM64T) for $699 after a $50 rebate. HP has a d4100y with no monitor that has a Intel® Pentium® D Dual-Core Processor (2.8GHz, 800MHz FSB) for $799 after rebate. And Big Blue (IBM, oops, no, now it's Levono) has a ThinkCentre (sic) M52 with no monitor with an Intel® Pentium® D Processor 820 2.80GHz 512 MB for $1079.

So, if I want the Pentium D 820, I'm spending at least $700, and with add-ons probably close to $1,000, but still doable in my budget. I really didn't expect to spend less than $500 for a high-powered computer anyway. It's hard to tell which of these vendors will offer the best deal, the devil will be in the details, but I think IBM is really out of the running.

More decisions next time.

How to Buy a Computer (Part 1)

I've been thinking about buying a new computer for the house, the computer I have (the one I'm using right now, in fact) is starting to become noticeably slow. I got it from my previous employer, who offered a free computer to every one of their employees back in 2002. I added a hard drive about two years ago, but the hard drive is about full. I upgraded the monitor a couple of months ago, I bought a Dell widescreen flat-panel LCD monitor which is ever so super nice. So, how do you go about choosing a new computer?

The first thing you have to decide is desktop or laptop. I definitely want a desktop, they're cheaper, faster, and since I already have a laptop for work, I really have no need for portability.

The second thing you have to decide is what you want to use it for. I mainly use it for browsing and, you know, general computing (duh). I'm not really a gamer, but I have started to get into the whole multi-media thing, with music, web design, digital photography, and playing and recording video. So I think it would be cool to have a TV tuner and decent graphics stuff. And plenty of hard drive space.

So, what's the damage? I want to spend less than $1,000, and maybe less than $500, if I can swing it. I'm comfortable enough with what I want to order a custom computer from one of the mail-order shops like Dell or Gateway or HP/Compaq (maybe I'll look at IBM, too), and I don't see any reason to try to build one from scratch, my needs are pretty similar to a lot of folks so there's probably a package already put together that will suit me, maybe with just a little tweaking.

You may be screaming at the monitor right now that I side-stepped the biggest decision of all, and that is PC or Mac? Wrong, no decision, it's PC all the way. I bought the Sony Super-Betamax HiFi VCR back in the day, because it was a better machine, period. When's the last time you saw a Beta blank tape? Five years from now Apple will be selling their little MP3 and video players and licensing OSX to Microsoft. For PC's. And that's all they'll be doing.

More decisions next time.

The Rosetta Codex by Richard Paul Russo

The Rosetta Codex by Richard Paul Russo.

Quadragesima (no, it's not the new Who album)

Quadragesima is the Latin term for Lent, meaning "forty days". The Lentan period starts today, as you may know because it is marked in many places by Mardi Gras celebrations. For early Christians the rules of fasting during Lent were strict: just one meal a day, in the evening, and no meat, fish, eggs, or butter is permitted. Eastern Orthodox Christians still follow these practices today, but most religions have relaxed these rules, for example, since 1966 Roman Catholics only require strict fasting on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.

Traditionally Lutherans aren't required to fast or sacrifice something for Lent as some other denominations require (see here for a brief theological discussion), but Aaron [my youngest brother] has been giving up something for Lent the last few years, at least, and I will be doing it for the first time this year. Lately I've been developing a sweet tooth, so I'm giving up desserts and sweets. No cookies, cake, pie, ice cream, etc for 45 days (the Sundays in the Lentan period don't count towards the 40 days).