Randomblings from Rich

Forgot to call TicketMaster to reserve tickets for the Washington Monument on Saturday....so I'll have to go wait in line for tickets early in the AM. They've reopened it, you know. I hear they've replaced the observation deck glass and it's much better view now. The outside looks like they did a lot of work on it. We put in a new switch at work tonight...Everything went well, but I have to update the mgmt software next week using a TFTP daemon...yuchola. You would think that they wouldn't use such historical techniques in today's equipment...and this from 3COM no less.

If you haven't visited WonderClick.Com yet, I would suggest hopping on over to there...and you too could win a NEW CAR, as Bob Barker's announcer might say. With nothing to risk, load or fear, it's a great way to start off my browsing day (or end it..). With all sorts of sweepstakes offerings, and simple entry and re-entry each day, I think it's a wonderful opportunity to enter into a raffle without paying for the tickets.

Just in case I haven't mentioned it before...win prizes for free at http://www.wonderclick.com. I don't get anything out of it...but I want to recommend it for those of your interested in winning a NEW CAR (as Bob's announcer would say). With free chances every day to win stuff from household furniture to elecrtonics, and NEW CARS, I think it's a great way to sign on every day.

Well, I gave our briefing at NMIMC this morning. Things seem to have gone well. The only difficulties were that I spoke too fast (20 minutes instead of 30), and I stumbled through the last part of the last slide because I forgot what I was going to say.
I found that I wasn't nervous once I got up and began speaking, and I believe that I kept most of the people's interest through the briefing. They asked some good questions at the end, which I had ready answers to, being technically knowledgeable, and knowledgeable about our business areas. I think that we may be rated rather well and may end up bidding on proposed work coming down the pike.

Well, we were invited to give our oral presentation to NMIMC today. I am not sure what I am going to say. I wish I had more time to prepare the slide presentation that we handed in to them, because I can see some problems with it right now. Nowhere do we talk about who DRC really is, and there's no good ending on the presentation. Wish me luck. If we get good marks on our presentation, we'll be invited back to do proposals on work for them.

Here's an irritating thing I've seen... On the east coast, there's a chain of barbershops called The Hair Cuttery. They had these advertising posters all over the metro train stations and local advertising boards, that said "A good haircut is still just $10." Shortly after, they had changed all the signs to say "still just $11". Am I the only one that strikes as odd? I've noticed that this particular ad campaign is now no longer running, and I just had my hair cut there today. Guess how much it was? 'still just $12'

There are some VERY interesting things going on in science these days, like this news article from the BBC News: Scientists claim world cloning first. Apparently, a team in Australia has cloned a mouse and harvested embryonic stem cells from the mouse and transplanted them back to the original in order to prove that it could be done. The interesting bit of this is that recent studies have shown the possibility of creating specific cells, such as nerve cells from stem cells. As this article points out, these two techniques together may mean treatments for Alzheimers disease in the future. And at the rate that biotechnology is ramping up, I think that it will be a very few years before this type of application becomes a reality. As I grow older and have more problems, I appreciate more and more the solutions that people like this are working on.

One of my favorite things to read is the daily briefs from Wired News. For example, here is an article entitled Spy Game Intrigues Techies. Now, this sounds like a BLAST. I think it would be great to be on one of these teams, and I think the participants would have LOTS of fun. This is a life experience type of thing. Then, there's scary stuff like this: Hacker Hoax at Safeway with the included scary line of "Up to 1,000 customers telephoned to complain Saturday after a hacker appeared to have accessed a Safeway database containing details on 25,000 shoppers, the Sunday Times reported." Privacy advocates have been scared of this event for some time. It looks like they had every reason to worry..

I just loaded up IE 5.5 and was trying to access Blogger to show to someone. In case you didn't know, Blogger technology is what makes this website so easy to update. Just type in your thoughts and hit publish, and it just slips right into that cell on the ole web site. Well, I couldn't log into Blogger, and what it turns out happened was that the Blogger cookie was now no longer valid. So I went into my cookie directory, and deleted all my cookies....All 385 of them!!!! WOW! I mean, I knew that cookies were in use all over the net, but it was kind of eye-opening to know that I myself had 385 tracking tags attached to me. I've put them into a temporary directory, and intend to see how much information I can glean about myself from looking at them.

I don't know how many of you readers have access to Usenet news. But if you do, some of the best stuff pops up on alt.humor.best-of-usenet. This group is filled with submissions from other newsgroups and posted when the moderator thinks they're funny. I think to qualify, they're judged on a sarcasm-meter. Occasionally, one will make me laugh so hard I have to go find the Tums to quiet down that acid reflux o' mine.
Well, we got that white paper out today to NMIMC. I hope they are really serious about looking for companies to do web work for them. DRC is just PERFECT for the work they're doing, and it would be nice to have an even broader range of customers where we could strut our stuff. I hope the paper I put together shows them how qualified we are.
I rented a game from Blockbuster yesterday, a Playstation game. I got it home and even though the disk seemed to load fine, I couldn't start a new game due to scratches on the disk. The game freezes up during the opening sequence, and there's no bypass capability. Blockbuster is sure to refund my rental fee, but I'm pretty angry at the programmer for not coding enough error detection into the game. After all, the error is just during the display of a cinematic sequence that I could do without. The wonderful thing about analog media is the forgiving nature of the media, whereas in digital media, improper error detection can cause these glitches to stop a whole process. There's something to be said for imperfection, after all...
Good night....don't let the bed bugs bite....I'm going to go read my Premium This Is True.

I had read about Apps.com in a recent LockerGnome. It's a neat little web site that offers free applications that run in a browser. Some examples? Calendars, Virus Scan, Loan computers, Maps, Games, English and Math learning, Hobby (Amateur Radio RF Safety Calculator, for instance). There's so many applications that I couldn't possibly name them all. The nice part is that the Internet really makes this possible. Forget all this download and install and uninstall hassle. Forget having to check for updates. You're assured that when you go to the app, you're running the latest version..this is just plain neat!

OK, I admit it, I get hooked. Hooked on Bingo, Lotto and other games of chance. On the Internet, gambling with real money seems kind of pointless to me. When there are so many places to go to win money without any stake. Well, ok, no monetary stake. All they want is your time and eyes, so they can burn brands into your brain. I figure that if I'm going to watch TV and have brands pushed at me anyway, I may as well play Bingo at the same time. The odds are unbelievably against you in Bingo and Lotto, but people do win. With the way I play Blackjack, I wouldn't want to put my money on the table anyway. This way, if I do get too involved playing Blackjack, I don't lose anything but the time I spent playing it. And if you're going to play, there's no way around that unless you hire a robot to play for ya! With the myriad of Lotto games on the 'net', you could just pick the same numbers in all of them every day and just wait till you win 1,5 or 10 million bucks. Don't hold your breath, though..

Do you remember what Kurt Vonnegut supposedly told graduates at MIT in 1997? (He didn't really). But the point made in the speech/article still goes. Wear sunscreen. Today my very angry shoulders and neck are screaming at me. Of course, I remembered the sunscreen, but someone else 'thought' it was in the car. (It wasn't.) Ouch!
I watched Saturday Night Live last night, now in its 25th season. There's a new sketch they've been doing, which people are raving about and I've caught once. The computer help-desk sketch. The help desk technician makes fun of the other employees, berating and belittling them for not knowing anything about computers. The sketch wasn't on last night, darn it! The terrible thing about good satire is how true to life it can seem. I try to teach our junior personnel that the customer should be their focus, not the technology. I hope I get that across enough. I've had my share of temporarily brain-dead users. But no matter how much someone lacks the ability to apply common sense when sitting in front of the keyboard, I don't think that it's right to treat them with discourtesy. Especially not in our business.

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