Happy Thanksgiving all.

It was jsut the four of us today. One of our favorite retaurants had a dinner package available for just about what I would have spent at the grocery store. We picked it up last night, and just heated it according to instructions today.

Tonight, I have had too much good food and too much good wine. It has been a great day. I hope your day was great too.

It just continues. My sister, who is 63, went in for some tests. It was determined that her carotid arteries are plugged up. One is 90 percent blocked, the other 60 percent. Further testing found the need for a quadruple heart bypass. She will check in monday for the coarotid arteries, and stay in the hospital. Wednesay they will do the heart bypass.

Someday soon, I will post something upbeat........

Good morning friends,

I guess I am just getting to the age when we realize that we are not immortal. My friend Duane died yesterday of heart failure. Duane and his wife Pam have been friends of ours since our oldest children entered Kindergarden. We coached Little League with and against each other for years. Pam was a teacher's aid at the elementary school. One afternoon she held and comforted our oldest daughter, who had been injured on the playground until we were able to get there. Our familys have been joined by good times and bad.

Duane was a young auto shop teacher at the high school. On a field trip, he was discovered in a compromising position with one of the senior class girls (Pam) and fired. They were married a month or so later, and went on to thirty five more years together and five children.

He had heart bypass surgery a couple of years ago, but has been in failing health for a long time. I am glad he is at peace.

Good morning friends.

It would be great to have interesting and amusing stuff to post in my blog, but it just ain't happening. My trip to Fike last week to learn the Cheetah and Vesda systems put me a little more behind on my projects at the University. When I got back, I found that we have a new apprentice in our department. He seems like a nice enough kid, and he is willing to work. He knows nothing at all about what we do, do we can teach him from scratch.

It also proves that we do not profile our employees. He is in his early twenties, Arabic and his name is Jihad. Well, he will at least sty put. I am sure the Department of Homeland Security would not let him get on a plane,,,,,,

My brother Eddie died tonight.

Sunflower called me a few minutes ago. Eddie died of Lukemia. He was not actually my brother, but I have known him most of my life. He was the same age age my older sister. When he was sixteen, his mother got a job as a live in housekeeper. There was no provision for a teenaged son in her job, so Eddie was on his own. My sister brought him home, and Eddie slept on our couch for the next three years. This was forty five years ago. All these years, he has just been one of the family. I am stuck here for the next couple of days, so I am hoping the funeral won't happen until I get back. i'll sure miss him....

Good afternoon friends,

I am on the road again. I will be spending the next few days in Blue Springs Missouri at another programming school. This is for a type of system I have been working on for a few years with no training at all. So far, I haven't broken one, but I will be much better off with factory certification.

I have been pretty busy at the University. My esteemed competitor installed a system in a section of a building that was remodeled. It is incompatible with the rest of the campus, and I have been brought in to rectify this at my competitor's expense. Since this has begun, we have been given two of the other buildings to completely renovate. My competitior has been removed from the approved bidder's list.

A short trip to Blue Springs will be a nice break....

Good evening friends.

This weekend wil be one of the good ones. It is payday, i have a few extra dollars coming in overtime and commissions, and the best part: It is not my turn to take calls. we have tickets to Man of La Mancha at the local university, and plan to have a lovely dinner at our favorite restaurant.

The first Broadway show I ever saw was Man of La Mancha. It was on tour with Richard Kiley as Cervantes/Quixote and started my love of theater. Sunflower has never seen this play. it has been great to take her to various plays that she is seeing for the first time. Sometimes i envy her. wouldn't it be great to be seeing Damn Yankees, or West Side Story for the first time?

I hope you all have a lovely weekend too.

Good evening friends


The mac thing didn't work out. This afternoon I plunked down $2k of my hard earned cash and took my mac home to get started just like the commercials promise. right out of the box, step number 4 is to connect to the internet. Mac was able to see my home wireless network and prompted me for a password. Ten digits and click. fifteen seconds later, connection failure. I opened up my IBM thinkpad on the table next to mac and connected without a prolem. Five more failures, and I boxed mac up and took it back.

The store manager was sincerely trying to help and hooked me up with someone from the "genius" bar. He fiddled around about forty five minutes, and told me that I was good to go. Back home, mac would not even see my network until I forced it to. I entered the password, and recieved connection failure for my efforts.

My daughter's friend was around, and he tried with his mac to connect. Yet another connection failure. His mac dual boots in mac and windowsxp pro. He booted up in windows and was able to connect with no problem.

I boxed mac up one more time and returned it for my hard earned cash.

I guess my network just speaks windows. So much for mac advertising......

good afternoon friends, just a quick test post to make sure i remember how to do this....

it has been a long time between posts. when i came back from florida, we were a little behind on the work. shortly thereafter, we found that a competitor, who had underbid us for a project at the university, had ignored the portion of the contract requiring them to use the same technology as the rest of the campus. they have no one there who knows how to program this stuff. after a couple of rounds of meetings, the competitor refused to fix the problem. the contractor cut me a purchase order, which led to three weeks of pretty intense work to convert the new system to the older technology. now i am waiting for the program data from their system to be able to finish.

see, this blog can be just as boring as it always was.....

road trip!

sorry for the delay between blog posts. we have been working shorthanded, with much to do in a short time. we found a replacement for matthew yesterday. so far so good.

we have picked up a rather large account from a competitor. the drawback is that it is a product for which i have taken only the the hardware class, which is available as a "self study" course. this course is a prerequisite for certification, but will not allow us to properly serve this new large customer. i will be heading to the sarasota/bradenton florida area for a two week programming and network class june 5 to june 16.

eight hours a day in class plus homework hardly makes this a working vacation, but i plan to make the best of it.

good afternoon friends

lately, sunflower and i have been spending our saturday mornings going to estate sales. we really enjoy looking at the houses more than the stuff for sale, but once in a while we fid great stuff.

the first book i ever bought with my own money was a ballantine paperback edition of the beasts of tarzan by edgar rice burroughs. it was printed in 1963, and cost fifty cents. i still have it. over the next few years, i bought all of the burroughs stuff i could find, and i still have most of them. they are all rather battered and worn.

at one of todays sales, i found a complete set of the tarzan novels and about half of the martian novels (including two that i no longer had) from the 1972 printing and in pristine condition for fifty cents each.

i am looking forward to re-reading these. it will be like visiting an old friend.

good evening friends,

i have been pretty busy lately. we have yet to hire a replacement for matthew. this means that i am doing all of my job and at least half of matthew's. tommie (my remianing coworker) has been pretty tied up with his projects, leaving the incoming service to me. we have had a few applicants with no viable candidates so far.

the last guy we interviewed had been fired from one of our competitors because he was arrested right off of a job site for outstanding traffic warrants. this had resulted in a suspension of his driver's license. it is difficult to test and inspect fire alarm systems unless you can drive to the buildings they are protecting.

the polls for the governor's race that prompted my change of parties have had the candidates trading the front position by narrow margins. it will be close. maybe my one vote will tip the scale....

second attempt at publishing this. does anyone else use firefox? i had to go back to internet expolrer to publish this

good evening friends


After thirty four years as a registered independent, i stopped at the county election office today and registered as a republican. Over the years I have voted for the best person for the job regardless of party affiliation. I have never voted against my better judgment just because of the political ideology of the candidate. as an independent voter, i have never been allowed a vote in the partisan primaries.

The democratic candidate for governor has no chance of winning. Our next governor will be one of the three republicans currently running in a close primary election to be decided in a couple of weeks.

Our current governor was the lieutenant governor when mr. bush made mike johanns secretary of agriculture. Since then he has done a fine job.

Second on the list is a local business man. He is running third in the polls and is having some difficulty getting his message out.

The man with the best chance of winning right now is our third district congressman. He won his two house terms in landslide elections due to coaching our college football team to three national championships.

Our primary election is may ninth. While my one vote will not stop the coach from winning the election, I can not stand idle and let it happen with out trying to prevent this travesty from coming to pass.

My second issue is the senate race. Our senate seat up for election this year is currently held by a conservative democrat. While our senator will probably get my vote in the general election, it is possible he will lose his seat to the republican challenger.

One challenger is a business man running a very clean and positive campaign focused on the issues. The other is the former state attorney general who ran against our senator last election by one of the dirtier campaigns in recent memory. If our senator is to lose his seat, I would prefer the honest business man running the positive campaign to represent me in the senate rather than the mudslinging former attorney general.

As for our house seat, I will vote for whoever is running against our current republican sock puppet currently occupying the seat.

good evening friends,

it has been a couple of busy weeks. since matthew 's departure, i have been doing all of my job and at least half of matthew's.

spring seems to have really arrived here. we set a record high temperature today, and the trees are greening up nicely. it is a lovely evening to sit out on the porch and surf the net. tomorrow will be back to the grind, but tonight is wonderful weather, a lovely glass of spanish crianza and wireless internet....

good evening friends

well, we are back to two people in my department. matthew has some issues that have led to his dismissal. with as busy as we are, absenteeism really puts a kink in our customer service. mattew missed eight out of the first fifteen work days of the year. the boss was all set to fire him, and the service manager stepped in and gave him another chance..

we have been having some difficulty in seeing just what he has been getting done lately. monday, he skipped a service call to start on an installation, then bailed on the installation. tuesday morning he called me to ask a tech support question. that was the last we heard from him. he did not do the repair he had asked me about, and stopped answering his phone. i finished tuesday by catching the appointments he had made.

wednesday, he did not show at all, and did not answer his phone. we sent a couple of guys over to his apartment to see if he was there, and o.k. they could hear his phone ring, and someone moving around, but no one answered the door. the company truck was in his parking stall and unlocked. the guys brought the truck back.

thursday night, the service manager called the authorities. they found matthew at home, and seemingly o.k. the manager called after the police had been there and told matthew to come in this morning.

i missed the meeting, but heard later that matthew did not seem concerned that he had lost his job. he was very amused that the guys had been knocking at his door and that they did not know he was on the other side just laughing at them.

i hope he can get some help.......

all those years of sobriety, down the drain!

many years ago, when i realized how stupid i got when i was drinking too much, i gave it up. a couple of years ago i started drinking a glass of wine once in a while. i am partial to the spanish reds. a couple of glasses is about my limit.

last night, in an experiment, i exceeded the two glass limit. considering i was not behind the wheel or out in public, and that everyone else in the house had gone on to bed, it didn't go to badly. about halfway through the fourth glass, i dozed off in my chair.

i guess my capacity diminished over the years......

good evening friends

the refurbished "mint" condition thinkpad arrived today. it is even nicer than advertised. it is pristine. i was able to install my hard drive, battery and ultra bay floppy drive and start right up. not bad for sixty one bucks.


my next project is to take the other two laptops and tear them down and reassemble a nice working laptop from the parts. this will give me a back up machine for my critical applications. i should be able to do this with spare parts left over.

good morning friends

and happy saturday! this is one of the great weekends: it is payday, i have a nice chunk of overime pay and commissions on the check, i handed the on call responsibility off to matthew, and the used thinkpad i bought on ebay seems to be working fine. it is a little rougher in appearance than i am happy with, but performance is the important part here.

to solve this appearance situation, i have been watching ebay carefully. yesterday, i won an auction for another thinkpad. this one has been refurbished rather than listed as used. it carries a warranty and a return gaurantee. if delivered as advertised, this will give me a nice looking, functional laptop for work.

i can then take the rough but working laptop and the nice looking but non functional laptop and build a second machine to use as a backup.

some kind soul also auctioned off a set of technical repair manuals for these thinkpads.

happy computing!

good evening friends,

today, the ibm thinkpad i bought on ebay arrived. it started up fine, and seems to be working pretty well. this should allow me to just shift the hard drive from my broken thinkpad and get all of the programming i need at work to return to full operation.

not bad for 127.50

good evening friends,

today has been tax day at our house. i spent the afternoon with three sets of federal returns and three state returns. thank god for turbotax!

yesterday, it was a beautiful day. it hit sixty degrees and sunny. sadly i wasted six hours in a class i needed for the continuing education requirements for my electrical license. the guy who used to teach these classes retired and we had a new guy. he had copied a great deal of n.f.p.a.70 code into a power point presentation then spent most of the class time reading it to us as we followed along in the handouts he printed up from the slides.

great phrases like "the power sources of non power limited fire alarm circuits shall comply with chapters 1 through 4 and the output voltage shall not be more than 600 volts, nominal. these circuits shall not be supplied throug ground fault circuit interrupters (gfci) or arc fault circuit intrerrupters (afci)"

the challenge is not to understand the nature of non power limited circuits. the difference between power limited and non power limited circuits is a common discussion among fire alarm technicians. the real challenge is to stay awake while that guy reads this to us.