This link is for Dad in case he forgot the address I read to him over the phone.

The Brookings Institution

It is 12:30 in the morning and I am still going strong on my school work.

I think I have the map the way I like it. I just finished up the spreadsheet. I am getting ready to write up my executive summary. I think I will get some basic thoughts down, not worrying about grammar, and then finalize it tomorrow.

Christopher Walken is one of my favorite actors. He plays the best bad guy.

I just ravaged a smoked turkey leg. Unbelievably good. Quite possibly the best turkey I have ever had. If not, it is easily in the top three.

The dark meat on the legs is the best. It comes off the bone and separates from the tendons very easily. It is the smokiest part of the bird too. Nice texture.

The white meat is moist and has a delicate smoky flavor. It also separates from the bone easier than the meat from a normally prepared turkey does. Maybe it has to do with the long slow cooking time used in smoking.

Half of the turkey has been eaten. I have not even touched the other side. I will start carving that side tomorrow. I am thinking about making stock from the carcass when we are done eating the meat.

A month or two ago a Girl Scout and her mom stopped by the house selling snacks to raise funds. I ordered a tin of spicy nuts and sesame sticks. Today the doorbell rings and it is the Girl Scout standing on the porch with my snacks, and her mom in the idling van in the street. She says they are $7, so I give her a $5 bill and two $1 bills. She says thanks and leaves; I go to the kitchen, pop the top and try them. As I am standing there munching on them and reading the label the doorbell rings again. It is the Girl Scout and she apologizes and says the snacks are only $4 and has the three bills in her hands with a confused look on her face. I give her two more $1 bills and take the $5 back. She seemed to like that it was an easy problem to figure out, said thanks again and went skipping back to the van. How cute.

The snack mix is pretty good. It was manufactured for the Girl Scouts by a company called Dayton Nut Specialties located in Dayton, Ohio.

In the Chicago documentary I was watching, they interviewed a guy that said his dad bought a brand new car in the 1940's for something like $800. His dad was very proud of it and loved it. Someone told his wife they could make a tank out of it for the war effort, so she sold it behind his back for $5.

It was cold and windy this morning during our dog walking time, so we didn't spend much time with them outside; just long enough for them to do their thing, and then took them back inside and got the next one. Because of that, and because there was another volunteer also walking dogs, we got all of them done in about an hour. So we went back to our favorites and spent some quality time inside the runs with them. As usual, Sheri has some pictures she will post later.

I came home, took a shower, started watching a local PBS documentary about Chicago in the 1940's and 1950's, and then fell asleep for a couple of hours. I am now awake, iced tea in hand, and ready to try and finish up my Walgreens project that is due Wednesday.

I want this digital zen travel alarm clock. It strikes a metal bar tuned to make a single B note. If you don't switch it off, it stikes it again in 3 minutes and 48 seconds. And then again in 2 minutes and 21 seconds. And again in 1 minute and 28 seconds, and so on until it will ring every 6.5 seconds.

You can also set it to strike a single note every hour on the hour. I like that.

If anyone finds a radio controlled clock (i.e. sets itself to the atomic clock in Fort Collins, CO) that also plays Westminster Chimes every 15 minutes, please let me know where I can buy it. I have looked everywhere and can not find one.

Sheri's drive from our house to her job at DFAS was about 16 miles, one way. We thought that was a long commute

My job at KDOT will be almost exactly double that, one way.

I guess it is all what you are used to. People around here don't think a 32 mile commute is unusual.

Our friend Beth in Columbus is not even 10 miles from the sniper shootings on I-270.

Stay safe!

Official: Al-Qaeda plans something big

A top counterterrorism official says al-Qaeda operatives...
focus[ing] on plotting a "more spectacular" assault comparable to the Sept. 11 attacks.

"It's clear that al-Qaeda wants to strike here" and that it continues to seek opportunities for "a catastrophic attack,"...

...[Al-Qaeda] think[s] that an attack using chemical or biological weapons could be a way to top the 9/11 attacks...

The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security told law enforcement agencies last week to be particularly mindful of security around cargo jets and chemical plants.

[Full Story - USA Today, 11/27/03]

I was up late last night, which means I woke up late today, which means I am up late again tonight. We have to get up and walk the dogs in just eight hours, and I feel wide awake. I guess the dogs will have to settle for Sleepy Brad.

I just received this addendum to our car insurance policy:

There is no coverage for loss to any vehicle that results from:
1. Nuclear reaction.
2. Radiation or radioactive contamination from any source; or
3. The accidental or intentional detonation of, or release of radiation from, any nuclear or radioactive device.

Now what am I going to do? And what do they know that I don't know...

Here is my project map closer to being finished. The ten colored circles are potential sites for a new Walgreens store. The more green a dot is the better choice it is. The darker blue, the less of a good match it is. The score (higher is better) is the number inside the circle.

The black circles are areas within one mile of an existing store.

The red triangles are competing stores.

The score takes into account:

1. Estimated prescription demand within one mile.
2. Traffic volume.
3. Number of competitors within one mile.

These are the rating factors. For close calls or ties, I also have data to consider about:

Current population and growth
Current household counts and growth
Average household income
Average age
Current business population

This is a link to a map highlighting the area I would sail the small club sailboats. It also shows the location of the club house.

When I was growing up the sailing club we belonged to, the Jolly Roger Sailing Club, had these small plastic sailboats for sailing lessons. Members were free to use them whenever they wanted. They were called 320's and made by a French company. I think the name was from how long they were; 320 centimeters is equal to 3.2 meters, which is roughly 10.5 feet, which seems about right.

When we would go out to the club on the weekends, but not take our boat out, a lot of times I would launch a 320 and just sail up and down the Ottawa River. I had almost a mile of river to sail up and down on and still be in sight of our club. The narrowest part of the area I sailed on was about 300 yards across. At the widest it was about ¼ of a mile across.

If I got hot I would just tip the boat over in the middle of the river and swim for a bit. I made a friend at the club one summer named Bob. Sometimes we would both take a boat out and just goof around. Sometimes playing bumper-boats.

One time I was out there so long, probably five or six hours, that I got sick. I don't think it was motion sickness because I didn't get sick until I was done for the day and was putting my boat away. I think I was dehydrated or maybe had some sun sickness. Those were fun days.

Looking back, at the time I took that for granted; like everyone grows up sailing boats. But now I realize I was lucky to be able to do that.

Having two monitors connected to my PC is making this project so much easier, and has probably shaved at least an hour from how long it will take me to do.

I have a bunch of demographic data to enter into a spreadsheet that I am getting from my map application, so I have the map application on one screen and the spreadsheet on another screen. I can enter spreadsheet data directly from the other screen.

If I did not have two screens, I would probably print out a blank grid, and then write the information down on paper first from the map, close the map, open the spreadsheet, and then key all the information from my handwritten notes.

I have about ½ of the heavy grunt work for the project that is due on Wednesday done. I should be able to get the rest of that done today. Then I just have to write a two page executive summary, pretty-up a spreadsheet, and prepare a presentation-quality map.

Then I have three projects due on Friday. None of them are too bad, and I am not worried about them, but I have a final project due the following week that I am a little concerned about that I have not started on yet. So I have to get those Friday projects out of the way so I can get going on the big one due next week.

The following week is also finals week, so I will have exam studying to do as well as working on the final project. It will be nice to have it over with and back to work again.

I just found out that the Indian city Bombay was renamed to Mumbai in 1995.

It is on the western coast of India. I would like to visit there once the region is stabilized.

I would also like to visit the Ukraine, Moscow, Beijing, and all over western Europe. I don't have any interest in Africa, South America, or Australia. I don't get why people want to spend a lot of money to go to Australia. I think there are a lot of other places that have the same things, or better, to offer as Australia does for a lot less money.

Our vacation plans are for Washington D.C. next, and then the U.K. We were going to do D.C. in the spring of 2004, but with my job situation now, that will most likely be put on hold. Once I am at a place permanently I will be comfortable scheduling a week off for a big vacation.

The U.K. will be a good vacation to cut our teeth on international travel without a tour group. I want to go on our own, not with 30 other people in a bus. I want to blend in with the locals and get a feel for the culture. It will be easier in an English speaking country to do that.

We had a nice relaxing Thanksgiving. We got up, dressed, and drove-through White Castle for a little snack to hold us. We then went to the Humane Society to spend an hour with the dogs. We were not scheduled, so we didn't feel the need to get all of the dogs walked. We spent some lovey time with our favorites, and walk just a few. There were other volunteers there making sure everyone got outside. It still breaks my heart when I leave Gemini and Hennah. I want them both so bad.

We then went to Meijer for a couple of last-minute Thanksgiving ingredients.

We got home and I immediately started working on the dressing. Chopped onion, celery, and mushrooms. Sautéed those. Browned some Bob Evan's Sage Sausage. Stirred six cups of chicken broth into two packages of Pepperidge Farms dressing bread cubes, and then the vegetables and sausage. Cooked it in a covered roaster for 30 minutes. I made too much.

We also had a delicious smoked turkey, Sheri's Asian salad, and crustless pumpkin pie for dessert. We also got some artificial fire logs for the fire place. First one of the season.

While we ate we watched the second Lord of the Rings movie. I couldn't make it through the whole movie. I had a tough time staying awake when we saw it in the theater too. I guess I will just let Sheri finish it tomorrow while I work on school projects.

Sheri mostly has chores around the house to do tomorrow, while I hope to get several good hours of school work in. I didn't do any today.

I have two fat-free crustless pumpkin pies baking right now. All I have to do tomorrow is make stuffing, and Sheri has to make her Asian cabbage salad.

Tomorrow we will go rent a movie or two, and probably stop by the humane society to say hello to our friends. I also hope to spend a few hours working on school stuff.

Four children have already died from the flu in Colorado, and a number of children in Texas with the flu are being kept alive with ventilators.

Get your flu shot!

For a project in on of my classes I have to propose 10 sites for new Walgreens stores. This map is what I have so far. It is my rough cut using only a couple of criteria.

A new store can not be within one mile of an existing Walgreens store. The heavy black rings represent the one mile buffer around these stores.

The stores also have to be on intersections that have traffic counts greater than xxxx per day. (I shouldn't say what the number is.) The large question marks are these intersections.

The small red triangles are competing drug stores. Proximity to them is not a deal breaker, but they get factored in at a later stage of my analysis.

Once I have all of my rough cuts, I analyze the Census block groups within one mile of each candidate for population, income, and a statistic that Walgreens calculates per block group called prescription potential. This is how many prescriptions they think an entire block group would need to be filled on an average day. I probably shouldn't say what their threshold number is.

The GIS guy from Walgreens came in and gave us a presentation and the data to work on this project.

I bought one of these new Sharpie silver metallic markers, and I love it. I bought it for two things:

1. To mark our address on our dark green plastic garbage can. It works great. It really stands out from the dark green plastic.

2. Our DVD player is a 5 disc carousel. The numbers for each spot on the carousel are just raised black plastic, so it doesn't contrast at all with its background, which is the same black plastic. You have to have the lights on to see the numbers, and even then it is difficult. I used the marker on the raised numbers, and now I can see them with the lights out, just from the glow of the TV. It looks good too; like it came from the factory, and not just me with a magic marker.

Every now and then I open our mail box and see a letter with my Dad's distinctive printing on it, and I know immediately what it is.

As he is reading newspapers, magazines, etc. and sees something that he thinks I will be interested in, he will clip it out, write a note in the margin, and underline any key facts he wants to bring to my attention. He then sets the clipping aside, and when he has enough saved up, he puts them into an envelope along with a little note and sends it off to me. I love getting these. The topics have ranged from the Toyota Prius and Highlander, GIS, and Chicago, to fossil parks in quarries, interesting things going on in Toledo, fishing, and recipes.

Thanks Dad!

Because I am a world class procrastinator, I just wrote a new function for my birthday page that lets me easily toggle back and forth from showing a person's age by either years or months.

So look at April 10. Instead of .4 years until Baby K. arrives, it now says 4.5 months. And Ensley R. is now 1.9 months old rather than 0.2 years old.

Once they are over 12 to 18 months I can just change which function I use to calculate their age, and it will then show up as years.

One of these days when I really feel like procrastinating, I will combine all of that into a single function that will calculate months if the age is less than 18 months, otherwise it will show years. I could even write an über-function that I could use for birthdays, anniversaries, etc. I would have to add an extra argument that indicates which type of event it is: "b" for birthday, "a" for anniversary; etc. It would then put the correct text after the data calculation. (i.e. " years old", "married for…", etc.)

Al-Qaida terrorists have developed a crude device designed to spread deadly cyanide gas through the ventilation systems of crowded indoor facilities such as subways, according to a closely held security directive issued to law enforcement by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security...

...the directive also warns of possible car-bombings in America...and advises security officials to take code-red protective measures to guard government buildings and gas and other chemical plants.

Despite the high-threat measures, the administration has decided to keep the public terror-threat alert at yellow...

Male bombers may dress as females in order to discourage scrutiny...

[Full story published yesterday (11/25/03) in WorldNetDaily]

We got a flyer today from Wal-Wart advertising their day-after-Thanksgiving sales. They have a pretty good deal on a PC that almost seems too good to pass up. It is an HP with a 17" monitor.

It also has:
A pretty big hard drive (40 Gb)
CD burner
OK amount of RAM (256 Kb which is just fine for surfing, e-mail, etc.)
Modem, and LAN port

The video is integrated on the motherboard, rather than a stand-alone card, which means you wouldn't want it for anything with a heavy graphic load, like GIS software or the latest computer games.

The price is only good from 6-11 AM. The flyer also says it is only good for their Illinois and Minnesota stores. Maybe it will be even cheaper in Ohio.

Half of me says go get it just for a back-up PC and a test-bed to try different things. See if I could turn it into a file server. Load Linux. But I won't.

When people find my blog by using Google, Yahoo, MSN, or other search engines, I can see what search terms they entered to find my site. I think it is interesting to see how someone, somewhere in else in the world, gets linked up to my page. Here are a few recent ones. Each line is one search.

flu shot locator lung association
ohio carol costello
british performance artist mark mcgowan performs his
panera broccoli soup recipe
making hummus
credit union
dog cook sterilize marrow bone
campbells chunky and football

I was excited to hear about the Medicare prescription drug benefit that was approved today, but after reading the details of the plan, I think it is a train wreck.

I just found out that I am two months older than Anderson Cooper! Who woulda thought? He anchors on CNN from
6-7 PM (CT), and has a very dry and funny sense of humor. Very smart and quick too.

Sheri is pressuring me, albeit lightly, to get another dog already. She occasionally whispers "Hennah" to me. She is the 7 month old Shepard at the Humane Society.

Sheri lit up when I mentioned that it might be possible for me to work from home. Although it is possible this could turn into a permanent gig, there are definitely no guarantees. And I got the impression that working from home is just for when the work load permits it. If I need certain applications that are only on the county's workstations, I would have to go in. There is also a benefit to me of face time with other engineers and technicians that make me want to physically go to work.

I would love a dog, probably more than she does, but I just would not feel responsible getting one now. If I did get a job where I would work from home most of the time, or found a job that was close enough for me to come home for lunch like in Columbus, I would probably get another dog without too much agonizing.

The agonizing would come from us not being able to really enjoy Chicago since we got here. When we were both downtown, we could never stay in the city after work for dinner, shopping, etc.

Doesn't Hennah have a beautiful face though?

I am really excited about reorganizing our office. Getting daybed out, and another desk in its place makes it seem more like an office now. I still have not moved one of the PC's to the new desk yet.

We didn't have room in the office for the printer, so it is sitting on an end table in the hallway with the printer cable running out to it! It will be nice to get that back in here.

I am way behind on my filing too. Once I get all of the paper clutter cleaned up, it will make a huge difference.

When we did a dry-run out to my interview location on the weekend, there was a six mile stretch of road that was hella-busy. [Randall Rd] There was solid retail on both sides, and we hit every stoplight along the way. Kind of like Sawmill Rd or Brice Rd in Columbus. It seemed like it took us over 20 minutes just to get through that stretch of road.

Not knowing how the traffic would be during the week at rush hour, I left early to make sure I would have enough time to get through it. It turned out to be nothing like during the weekend. I think I only stopped at two stoplights.

Before I get overly excited about my daily commute, there are a couple of mitigating circumstances:

1. I was on that stretch of road at 8:20 AM. The main rush could already be over by then because everyone is trying to get to work by 8:00 AM.

2. Today is only two days before a national holiday. How many people are just taking the entire week off?

On the bright side, there is a ton of neat retail I pass, with a huge Gander Mountain store being the main one I am thinking about. There are also a lot of good restaurants along the way, but since the six mile stretch starts about six miles from my office, I will probably just pack a lunch everyday and eat at my desk.

I did register my cell number on the do-not-call list about a month ago on 10/19/2003, but updates are published to the telemarketers only every three months. Oh well, I can wait two months. This is the first telemarketing call I have received on my cell phone since I got it in June.

I just got a telemarketing message on my cell phone. I hate that! I thought I registered my cell number on the do-not-call database, but maybe I just thought about it. I guess I will go check to see if I did.

I thought that there would be some field work in this position, but I must have been reading an outdated job description. All office work.

My interview went well. He offered the position to me! I have a lot of information, and I am not quite sure how to organize it, so I will just do a brain-dump.

He is a civil engineer with a degree from Penn State. He hates Ohio State; loves Michigan. That will be fun. He looks to be about my age. Married with a 3 or 4 year-old-looking son.

There are 312 miles of county roads under the county's jurisdiction.

I will have a very large office. It must have been designed for an engineer because I think I saw a drafting table in there.

Initially the road database was digitized using the right-of-way centerline, which is not the same as the pavement centerline. A project was recently finished that re-digitized the road database using the pavement centerline. It is mostly good, but there are some small things that need to be tightened up. One of my first projects will be to proof and correct this database. This can be a tedious process and he said he will try to keep that to just about 20% of what I do. I thought that was a sign of a good manager. This database tightening has to be done because they are going to use this data for a routing network; creating the most efficient path for snowplows; guiding rescue vehicles to emergencies, etc.

They are in the middle of a big expensive project to put their GIS data on the internet. Patrick Engineering is the main contractor for this project, and he said there would be a lot of opportunity to work with them.

He said I could work from home when it is convenient. At the office I will be in, they only have a T1 line, which is 1.5 Mbps, for the entire building (it is a small building). Our cable modem service at home is a 2.0 Mbps connection, and we often times go faster than that. They support VPN which means I could securely log-in to their network and see all of their data at home on my PC! He made a comment about how people that they let work from home have to be disciplined and trusted, but with my background and being bonded at two large banks for the last 12 years, he said no problem.

The current intern is a grad student at NIU and is working on some cartography, and that I would pick that up. Producing cartographic products is not what I want to focus on, but it will be fun, and it will just be a part of what I will be doing. It is good to have experience in all aspects of GIS.

I asked about a permanent position, and he said the county has had a hiring freeze for the last three years, but there are two impact analysis positions on the near horizon for another department. He wants to move that responsibility into his department; hire just one impact analyst; and then hire another GIS person. He said if that happens, that I might be able to have that position. But that is months away.

Everyone was very laid-back, happy, and joking around with each other. Always a good sign.

He needs to get final approval from the finance office, and put together a project plan for me before I start. Sounds like a couple of weeks, which is fine with me because classes will be over in a couple of weeks.

He said they are flexible with school, so I should be able to fit my last class at Northern in.

In the old days they would get traffic counts by laying one of those rubber hoses across the roadway. Each time a car ran over it, air would compress and click a counter in a box at the side of the road. The new way of doing it gives you traffic counts for each lane! There is a little black box that they dig up a little brick-sized hole in the road. It has some kind of sensor that can tell when a big metal object is over it. It even differentiates between cars and trucks. They will put one of these in each lane.

There is a company called Transmap, based in Columbus, OH, that is going to start doing some work for them. They have a van that has gyroscopes, GPS receivers, roll indicators, etc. and eight cameras mounted on top of the van that cover 360º. You specify how often you want a data sample taken. For example, every 50 feet. You then use this data to inventory, down to the foot, every asset in the field. Every road sign can be recorded in a GIS database. That sounds like a lot of fun, and he said I will be able to work with them. The guy that started Transmap used to be a geography professor at Ohio State.

All in all I am very excited about it. Lots of good technology to play with and learn. He really liked my experience with VBA and SQL. I think I might pick up a book on SQL.

The following is an e-mail that was sent to all Bank One employees from their IT security department:

This week several Bank One employees reported receiving an email from PayPal, the online payment service, claiming to need an update of personal information and threatening to shut down individual's accounts if the information is not given. The e-mail is phony and should not be taken seriously. Following the instructions of the e-mail puts both Bank One and the individual employee at risk.

Here's what the PayPal Web site has to say:

"Recently, fraudulent PayPal emails have been circulating that request personal information or ask you to download an attachment. These emails are not from PayPal and responding to them may put your account at risk."

This request for information via e-mail is an example of the latest scam undertaken by computer criminals. It's called "phishing" and here's how it works: You receive an e-mail that appears to be from a legitimate company, say eBay, PayPal or even Bank One. It has the company logo, and might even be designed to look like the real Web site. The e-mail asks for personal information such as your account number, PIN number or password. It directs you to click on an authentic-looking link to submit your information. But when you click on that link, you're actually going to a criminal's Web page, where he or she now has access to your information.

Make sure you're not a victim of these scams. Don't reply to e-mails requesting personal information. Legitimate companies, including Bank One, don't ask for personal data via e-mail. If you have questions about your account, you should call the company, or start with a clean Web browser and type in a known company address. Don't use the links provided in the e-mail. [my emphasis]

Thanks MB!

I am a little anxious about my interview tomorrow, and I will be happy when it is over. I think I will do OK, I just hate this kind of stuff. I don't know how morning traffic normally is on the route I am going to take, so I plan on leaving extra early. I can just kill time in a nearby parking lot listening to the radio if I get there too early.

I am going to print out a couple copies of my résumé; set out the clothes I am going to wear; dig up my leather portfolio; and then get to bed early.

After the interview I will have no more obligations the rest of the week. I am going to try and knock off one school project per day.

I got a 100% on my quiz/test today. The average was 79.7%.

We put our frozen smoked turkey into the refrigerator today so that it will be thawed by Thanksgiving day.

I got the daybed out of the office. Swept the floor where the dust bunnies had accumulated; and set up the folding table. A lot more room!

I am not going to move one of the PC's yet because I still have some organizing to do, plus it is getting late and I still have to study for my quiz/test tomorrow. I am not worried about it. It's going to be on very basic geographic stuff: projections, geoids, ellipsoids, reference systems, etc.

I think I will take a shower before I study. I got a little sweaty and dusty when I was rearranging the office.

The wind chill out in the corn fields of DeKalb is going to be 6º when I get there at 10:00 AM. I am going to be one cold geographer.

I think I want to try out a solid black dress shirt and a solid color tie. I saw it a lot when I was working downtown. That, with a nice crisp pair of khakis, looks really nice. The khakis can be either light or dark. It was a step or two up from business casual, but a little more comfortable than formal business attire.

Making that connection yesterday with the German Shepard and the Rottweiler was really difficult. I miss having a buddy always around the house, but I know if we got one right now it wouldn't be fair to the dog. I just have to keep telling myself that. Plus, when things get back to normal for me I want to start doing some fun things we have not been able to do. Go to Chicago for dinner and show. Take day trips. Not going home directly after work. Stuff like that.

Sheri has talked about getting a cat, and I wouldn't mind it, but I have never owned a house where fine pet hair didn't have to be cleaned up. I think a cat would probably drop more hair than Goliath did. I would like to enjoy a hairless house for at least a little while longer. There is also that issue of smelly litter boxes. I would always be worried of what it smelled like to other people coming into our house. You get used to smells like that when you live it all the time.

They have some very friendly cats at the humane society though. They actually have more of a dog personality than a typical cat personality. They come running over to you when you enter the room and demand attention! I love that.

I think you can leave a cat by itself for at least three, maybe four, days. That would not make us nearly as tied down as with a dog. I don't know. I am sure the feeling will pass, but I sure miss cuddling with Goliath in bed on a cold winter night…

I have one flu-shot-for-post-card taker. I hope that I will have to buy a bunch more postcards soon!

Find a flu shot!

On the way to find were my interview will be on Tuesday we passed Geneva Commons. Sheri and Greta stumbled on this shopping center a while back and thought it was a neat little area. They had a lot of neat little restaurants we had not heard of before, so we decided we would go there for lunch once we found my interview place.

We decided an a place called Red Star Tavern. Gorgeous interior. Very high ceilings. Dark lighting. Dark wood. Hard wood floors. Stone walls. Dark wood wide-slat blinds. Almost like a casual Ruth's Chris Steakhouse.

Menu looked great. Lots of good interesting combinations. They had a lot of neat sounding chicken themed dishes that sounded good, so I figured maybe they had a special rotisserie in the kitchen and went through a lot of fresh chickens. The prices on the menu led me to believe that something like that wouldn't be out of the question.

I went with their "slow cooked pulled chicken sandwich". The little description made it sound very good.

The waiter brought me my iced tea. Instant! Blech! I called him back over and had him bring me a Diet Coke instead. He also confirmed that it was a mix. (They wouldn't serve Folgers Crystals instant coffee, so why do some restaurants try to pass off instant iced tea?)

Instant tea in a restaurant is always a tip off to bad food. If they can't get something simple like their iced tea right, why would I expect them to be able to do anything more complex right?

My sandwich came and it was the barbecued chicken you can buy frozen at the grocery store in a tub. They might have added a very little bit of cinnamon for the Caribbean jerk flavor. Blech! The sliced onion and tomato that came with it had been sliced several hours previously. The little cup of coleslaw was very good, and the fries were excellent.

Sheri got their teriyaki chicken sandwich. It was a grilled chicken breast on a bun with a grilled red sweet pepper on top. The teriyaki part came from a little cup of sauce on the side. The sauce was very good, but I think it was just soy sauce and sesame oil. (I love sesame oil!) Her's also came with the coleslaw and fries.

For ten dollars a plate I expected a lot more than instant iced tea and microwaved barbeque chicken.

We are goig to drive out and find where I need to go for my interview on Tuesday, and then find a place for brunch.

Here is the latest flu map. Two states are listed as "widespread" and six as "regional". West Virginia is listed as "regional" and shares a lot of border with Ohio. Stay tuned...

We went to Office Depot and picked up the folding table for the office.

After picking up the table we tried an Indian restaurant very close to our house that we have not been to yet. Very good. Sheri had the lamb curry, and I had the lamb kurma. Both were very good. We will definitely go back. The menu only described kurma as a yogurt sauce. I looked it up on the internet when I got home. These are the ingredients to one of the kurma recipes that showed up:

Onions - 3 medium Yogurt - 1 cup Green chilies - 6 Ginger - 1 inch piece Garlic - 5 flakes Tomato - 2 medium Grated coconut - 2 tbs Red chili powder - 1 tbs

Coriander powder - 2 tbs Turmeric powder - ½ tsp Oil - 4 tbs Cinnamon - 1 small stick Cloves - 3 Coriander leaves - 1 cup Lemon juice - 2 tbs Salt to taste

It's all stuff you eat already. Nothing weird. Go try some Indian food!

After dinner we stopped at Trader Joe's. I have not been too impressed with them, but I always hear people going on about how great it is. It is starting to grow on me. We mostly got snack foods. Dehydrated bannas. Yucca chips. Blueberry muffins for tomorrow's breakfast. Stilton bleu cheese from England. Water crackers. Wasabi rice crackers. Dehydrated mango. Pomegranate juice. I think that is all we got.

After Trader Joe's we stopped by Wal-Mart to pick up a couple of things. Now we are home. We don't have a movie, so we are just going to watch TV in bed, and I will do some surfing on Sheri's laptop.

I fell in love with a couple dogs at the Naperville Humane Society today. One was a Rottweiler-mix named Gemini (stupid name), and the other was what appeared to be a purebred German Shepard named Hennah. Hennah was only seven months old. I think Gemini was only about a year old.

Sheri took pictures of them and will post them soon.

Yesterday I stopped at Office Depot and bought a really nice floor lamp for our office for only $19. It has three movable light sockets that can each accept up to a 60 watt bulb. Each socket can be individually be turned on or off. That is up to 180 watts of light if we need it.

Today we are going to go back and get a six-foot folding table for the office. Right now we have both computers set up on just one six-foot folding table. We will take the day bed out of the office and put the new table in its place, and then put one of the computers on the new table. When we just had the one computer, I would lie on the bed and read or watch cable while Sheri was on the computer, or vice versa.

The folding table we have now I got during the summer between my sophomore and junior year at Ohio State to use as my desk in my campus apartment. I prefer using a folding table as a desk for a couple of reasons; tons of legroom, and lots of surface area to spread out. Also, since there are no modesty-panels or drawers to get in the way, it makes it a lot easier to crawl around underneath to run computer cables, power strips, etc.

The water heater is still leaking. It seems to be a small leak right now. When I came home yesterday there was probably two or three cups of water on the floor. I checked today and it looks like maybe a cup of water was on the floor. I am hoping it will last until after classes are over in a couple weeks. That will give me time to research which hot water heater I want to get, and have a plumber come out. I am thinking I will buy the tank myself and then have a plumber come out to install it. I think if I just called a plumber and let him bring a tank of his choosing, the quality of the tank might not be as good.

I checked Consumer Reports on-line and they said the annual operating cost between a 40 gallon tank and a 50 gallon tank is almost zero, so go ahead and get the larger one, especially if you have a Jacuzzi tub like we do.

Looking at Sears’ web site it looks like the main options are size and how long the warranty is. As a matter of fact, in the product name it indicates whether it has a 6, 9, or a 12 year warranty.

Speaking of Consumer Reports, I don’t know why anyone would subscribe to the print version of Consumer Reports when the web version is available. If you subscribe to the web version you instantly have access to all of the past reviews, as well as continuous updates.

I remember hearing debate about whether or not the public had the right to be in the court room for the O.J. Simpson trial, and I am already hearing this same discussion about Michael Jackson if he has to go to court.

People have this concept all backwards. The idea originates in the Sixth Amendment:

"In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury…"

This part of the Sixth Amendment was added to avoid secret trials where the government could abuse its power. This has nothing to do with the public's desire for good theater. It is all about protecting the accused's rights.

Crap! I just went to the basement to get something, and I noticed a puddle of water coming from the water heater. I guess Sheri and I will end up buying ourselves a Christmas present this year after all.

I now have Sheri hooked on wrist watches that beep on the hour.

I hate it when I am near someone else that has the hourly chime activated on their watch, but their watch is not set to the correct time. Correct time to me means within 5 seconds.

Sitting in a quite movie theater you start hearing watch beeps a few minutes before the hour; my watch ON the hour; and then more beeps a few minutes after the hour.

Can you tell by my posts when I am procrastinating? If you can, then you know I am procrastinating now.

I find it very useful to use this bit of HTML code in my posts:

 

It stands for non-breaking space.

I might go back on put one in if a date separates, so it doesn't look like this: November 19,
2003.

I would replace the space between "19," and "2003". I would also put one in between "November" and "19,". This way the whole date would get wrapped around to the next line.

If you look at my previous post about plasma TV's, I put one in between "15" and "minutes" in the third paragraps. I didn't like how the first line ended with just a "15", and then "minutes" started the second line.

I also like to do this for hot-links that break to two lines. When it does that, you don't know if it is one link or two.

And I do all this for you, my gentle reader.

If you want to buy a thin, hang-on-the-wall type of TV, don't buy a plasma set now. Plasma is just an interim technology until they get the kinks worked out of manufacturing large LCD sets.

Plasma sets only have a rated life of 25,000 to 30,000 hours. Once it burns out, it is done; throw it away. An LCD set actually has fluorescent backlighting bulbs that are rated for 50,000 to 75,000 hours. The cool thing is that when these bulbs burn out, they can be replaced!

A static image on a plasma set can burn-in in as little as 15 minutes. What if you watched CNN all the time with the crawl at the bottom of the screen. You would get a nice band burned in along the bottom. Or how about watching a football game with the little score box at the top of the screen for three hours.

LCD's sets use half as much electricity and generate half as much heat as plasma sets.

The higher your altitude, the more power a plasma set requires. This extra current causes an annoying buzzing sound. They also have internal cooling fans that will kick on if it gets hot enough. These cause extra noise too. Altitude will start to have this effect at 6,500 feet.

The things that they still have to work in order for LCD to overtake plasma are:

contrast
color saturation
viewing angle
cost

Limited Time Offer:

Every one that lets me know they got this year's flu shot, gets a Chicago postcard from me!

Here is the link to the on-line flu shot locator in case you don't know where to get one in your area.

British performance artist Mark McGowan performs his artwork entitled 'Sausage, Chips and Beans' at the House Gallery, London in this photo taken November 14, 2003. McGowan intends to spend 100 hours sitting in the bath of baked beans with sausages strapped to his head and two chips stuck up his nose in support of the traditional fried breakfast which he views as an important part of British culture. REUTERS/David Bebber

Copito de Nieve or Snowflake, the Barcelona Zoo's albino gorilla is fighting a losing battle with skin cancer(AFP/File/Dominique Faget)

Ouch!

Hossein Barkhah of Iran dislocates his elbow attempting to lift 157.5 kilograms in the snatch category in group A of the men's 77 kilogram weight class at the World Weightlifting Championship in Vancouver, British Columbia, November 18, 2003. REUTERS/Lyle Stafford

Yeah! They might bring back "Family Guy"!

So you might know that the British call a car's trunk a boot; an elevator a lift; and French fries chips. I just learned that they call cars motors.

As in "I parked my motor two blocks over."

I hope everyone has a very nice GIS Day!

I am entering latitude and longitude coordinates into a spreadsheet for landmarks and physical features on campus that I acquired last week via GPS for a school project. (I dare you to diagram that sentence!) I had just typed the first number of longitude for the Martin Luther King monument on campus, and at the same time a Public Enemy song came on that starts with a clip of a Martin Luther King speech. How weird. It took my little brain a few seconds to recover from that.

In case you want to know where the monument is, here are the coordinates:

N 41º 56' 06.84"
W 88º 45' 59.46"

I have an interview scheduled for next Tuesday. In the e-mail I received, he said:

There are three buildings located on our campus. I am in the administration building which is the shortest and northernmost building on the campus.

So I go out on the internet and find an aerial photo of the area, and sure enough, three buildings. (How did people survive before the internet?)

I like to have a mental image before going to unfamiliar places. I might even do a drive-by before Tuesday just to make sure I don't get lost on the day of the interview and panic.


Actually, it looks like there are five structures from the picture, but those are probably sheds or garages.

Our oscar loves this fish food we got called Cichlid Gold. The brand name is Hikari and is made in Japan by a company called Kyorin Food Industries, Ltd. The plecostomus loves it too. How do I know? Because the plecostomus is a bottom feeder, but when I put these floating pellets in, it swims to the top and eats them from the surface! I don't get it. The ingredient list has more plant product than seafood:

white fish meal
wheat flour
wheat-germ meal
brewers yeast
soybean meal
shrimp meal
alfalfa meal

The rest of the ingredients are vitamins and minerals.

I thought he would like these other pellets I bought called Omega One and are made in Alaska. They have no cereal fillers, just all kinds of fish, algae, kelp, and vitamins and minerals. He almost won't touch them. Weird. These are the first six ingredients:

whole salmon
whole herring
halibut
krill
shrimp
octopus

Heck, it sounds good enough for me to eat, but he totally ignores them.

He will eat these cheap shrimp pellets made by Wardley, a division of Hartz. I bought them a long time ago when we had a couple of frogs. They sink, so I have to drop them so they pass directly in front of him and within about three inches of his face. If they hit the bottom he won't eat them. He will go after these about 70% of the time. These are the first nine ingredients listed:

shrimp meal
wheat flour
fish protein concentrate
meat meal
soy flour
corn gluten meal
dried beet pulp
poultry meal
dried brewers yeast

Remember a few months ago I posted about a toll-free number you could call to have the credit card companies stop sending credit applications and "convience checks" to you. Well this post is just to report that the service has worked very well. We used to get three or four mailings per day. We now only get one or two per week.

This is the text from the original post I made about it on August 13:

This is more important than the do-not-call database I wrote about a few weeks back. There is a toll-free number you can call to stop credit card companies from sending you unsolicited credit card applications and "convenience checks".

These unsolicited credit card applications are gold to identity theft criminals. They use your information to get credit cards in your name. It can take years to clear your credit history if this happens.

The number to call is 1-888-5-OPT-OUT. It is completely automated. You don't have to talk to a person. You can request to be taken off the list for two years, or permanently. Each person in a household must call to be taken off the list.

What will happen by calling this number is that the four main credit agencies will not provide your credit information to credit card companies looking for pre-screened addresses. For example, right now a credit card company might pay for a list of names and addresses that have a credit score between 22 and 36 with an annual income over $50,000. (Totally making these numbers up.) By calling this number, your name will not be included in the results of these types of queries.

These unsolicited credit applications is the main reason I have a document shredder. Here is a link to a story on CNN Money about identity theft that mentions the opt out number.

Do it today! Do it now! Let me know once you have successfully called the number so I won't have to keep bugging you.

Sheri said my beef mushroom barley soup is the best one I've made so far.

When we were at Target this weekend I became instantly intriqued with this small travel alarm clock. It is tiny. Only about 2¼ inches tall and wide, and only 1" deep. The best part, it only cost $4. I am trying to find a good place to put it now. I love clocks.

The Center for Disease Control reported today that the flu season this year is going to be worse than normal. Texas and Colorado are already getting reports of widespread cases (see map), and the season has not even started yet.

An unexpected strain is also showing up that has been associated with more severe disease and higher death rates. Normally, 36,000 people die from the flu in the United States each year.

They are urging as many people as possible to get vaccinated. They consider this to be very serious, especially for infants between 6 and 23 months, and people that care for children in this age range. People planning on having surgery should get the flu shot to avoid complications. (Sheri) The hospital is a great place to catch the flu.

The American Lung Association has an online flu shot locator. Unless you are allergic to eggs, there is no reason not to get vaccinated.

I turned on the back burner when I was cooking today, and I heard a little pop, and then some electrical smelling smoke came out from behind the knob. The rest of the stove works fine though.

It has a flat top glass range top, but it is not an expensive one. The brand name is Roper, which is Whirlpool's economy line of products.

I don't want to put any money into having it repaired, and there is a gas outlet behind the stove, so I think we will be getting a gas stove. But probably not until late next year. This year has been way too financially difficult:

Lose my job
Tuition - $3,000
Florida - $3,000
Sheri's surgery - $3,000
Goliath's vet bills - at least $2,000

Yikes!

I am still on a soup rampage. This afternoon, while walking through the grocery store, I decided I wanted to make a pot of beef mushroom barley soup. I picked up a nice meaty beef marrow bone, a pound of mushrooms, barley, and a bag of onions.

When we got home I put the bone in a shallow roasting pan and roasted it for 30 minutes at 450º. I flipped it over half way through, and sprinkled it with a little garlic powder before I put it in the oven too. It made the house smell wonderful.

When it was done in the oven, I put the bone in the soup pot with water and some bay leaves and started that boiling. I added a cup of cold water to the roasting pan to deglaze it, scraped all of the good browned bits from the inside of the pan, and added that to the pot.

While the bone was roasting I cooked ¾ of a cup of barley in 4 cups of salted water for about 40 minutes, and then set that aside.

I sautéed onions, garlic, and the mushrooms in a pan with a little soy sauce and some ground black pepper.

When I was satisfied that my beef stock was done, I added the barley (along with its cooking water), and the pan of sautéed vegetables. I also added a little arrow root powder and some gumbo filé to thicken it up and give it some body.

I added about a tablespoon of chicken stock, and it is now simmering. It tastes and smells wonderful.

For my next batch of soup, whatever that will be, instead of adding cubed potatoes, I want to try some root vegetables, like turnips, parsnips, or rutabagas.

We have registered a new domain! It is www.bsw96.com.

We don't have any immediate plans for it right now besides using it to store pictures. We have 500 megabytes of space now.

I will be able to experiment with web databases, CGI scripts, PHP, etc.

It might take 24 to 36 hours before the name gets into the system and becomes usable.

I am posting this in a near-by Panera Bread restaurant. A lot of their stores now have free wireless internet access. Sheri had half of a Bacon Turkey Bravo sandwich and a bowl of broccoli soup, and I had a Coronado Carnitas (pork) panini sandwich.

I am doing some internet research now, and Sheri is making some phone calls she has been meaning to make. After this we will go to Target and get Sheri a new watch (she broke hers), and then go home and watch either Finding Nemo or The Matrix Reloaded.

We heard some really good stuff on the police scanner today. They called in a sniper squad from another municipality. We heard them taking their positions. Traffic control. Paramedics. Very cool. This is the only story I have been able to find on the web about it so far. They left a lot of things out, but I can't say what because there is a law that says you can not relay what you overhear on a scanner. If you are curious I will tell you in person.

Most banks now offer their customers free on-line bill payment. This lets you pay all of your bills by logging-on to their website, entering the name, address, account number, and amount you want to pay. Once you enter in an address , you do not have to enter it in again. The following months you just click on the name, for example Chase credit card, enter how much you want to pay to that person or business, and click "send". How easy is that?

Besides time, you will also save on postage. We have on average about 12 recurring bills each month, which is 144 stamps per year, which would cost $53.28. That is not counting the non-recurring bills we might have to pay; tuition, lawyer, medical not covered by insurance, home repair, etc.

With on-line bill pay you also eliminate the chance that the payment will get lost in the mail. The bank routes your payment directly from your account, through the Federal Reserve's Automated Clearing House, and to the account of the company you are paying. Of course that is just for large companies. If you send me some money via on-line bill pay, the bank will actually cut a check and mail it to me. If it gets lost in the mail though, the bank takes responsibility for it, not you.

So what is the catch? What is in it for the bank to give you this seemingly too good to be true service for free? It saves the bank a huge amount of money. It is very expensive to route all of those cancelled paper checks around. I don't have an exact number, but I remember it being something around $2.00 per check! Of course that is not an incremental cost, but an average of all the overhead they have to maintain: buildings, staff, loading docks, expensive check sorters, etc. With on-line bill pay they have a few computers, a programming department, and some internet connections to maintain. The fewer checks they have to process, the more money they save. It's the perfect win-win situation!

This links to a demo site for a credit union's on-line bill pay site. It is fully functional, except that it won't actually cut a check. Once you open the link, click the "Add New Payee" button and go through the process of setting up a payee.

After that you can click on the "Schedule Single Payment" option and see what it is like to schedule a payment. You just select a payee from you list, enter the date, enter the amount. (The test payee you entered from the previous paragraph will not show up in this demo.)

If you are nervous about trying something new like this, why not sign up and just send one payment to get the feel for it. Maybe set up your credit card and just send and extra $5 to them, in addition to the traditional snail-mail way, so you can see how, and that it will, show up on your next month's statement.

Once you get the 20 or so payees set up that you write checks to each month, you will be surprised at how much time you save writing checks. It makes the process so much easier.

Remember too that you can also pay a bill from any internet connection. If you are at work and forgot about a bill, or are on vacation and forgot to pay the mortgage, no problem. Just find an internet connection, log-in, and voila! Your bill will be paid.

We have been using on-line bill pay for probably close to 6 years and have not had any problems. (Which also means we have probably saved over $300 in postage!) Very safe and secure and idiot proof. Actually, more safe and secure than the way you are doing it now.

Do it!

Campbells Chunky Soup will donate one can of soup for each click they get. Go to their Chunky Soup site and click on your favorite football team's helmet. You can only vote once per day. They will donate up to 5,000,000 cans of soup, and they are currently at 603,263.

If you want to pass the site on to friends, the address is:

www.chunky.com/click_for_cans.asp

I scored a 95% on Dr. Greene's "Land Use Planning" midterm last week. It counts as 40% of my total grade for the class.

I just finished the last of my vegetable soup for lunch. I hate it when I make a big batch of something with the intent of having it for a few meals over the course of a week, and then end up throwing it out. Not this time.

I have a two page write up on a project that is due tomorrow morning. It involves analyzing data from the 2000 Census to find out if and where there is a shortage of doctors in Illinois at the Census tract level. We were given physician data down to the ZIP code level, and population data down to the census tract level.

I have been having intense cravings for, of all things, soup. Sheri has today off for Veteran's Day, and I normally don't have classes on Tuesdays, so I thought having a nice pot of soup simmering on the stove all day would be good.

Last night we decided to first watch the movie we rented (Willard), and then go out for a late dinner. During dinner is when I got the idea to make a late night Meijer run and pick up soup fixings.

I picked up a pound of already cubed stew meat, and a one pound bag of Freshlike® frozen soup vegetables. I was really happy to find the soup vegetables. It has:

carrots
potatoes
peas
celery
green beans
corn
onions
lima beans

That is all I picked up for soup. When I got home, at about 11:00 PM, I browned the meat, with a little oil, in my 8 quart stock pot. I then filled the pot about half way with cold water, and added some garlic powder and a little ground black pepper.

I then covered it and let it simmer for about 30 minutes. Then I skimmed off the foam and added a 14 ounce can of diced tomatoes with green chilies. If I had just a can of regular tomatoes I would have added that instead, but that is the only can of tomato I had on hand. I also added some dried oregano, parsley, and a couple teaspoons of commercial chicken stock concentrate. You can get this at Gordon's in a one pound tub. It is my favorite and I always keep it on hand. You have to refrigerate it once you open it, and it is a soft paste. Not nearly as salty as the bouillon cubes you get in the grocery store, and much more flavorful. When I can, I use this instead of salt in recipes.

I let that simmer on low overnight. About 9:30 AM I added the bag of frozen vegetables and a ¼ cup of Kashi pilaf. I didn't have any barley on hand. The Kashi pilaf only has:

whole oats
long grain brown rice
whole rye
whole hard red winter wheat
whole triticale
whole buckwheat
whole barley
sesame seeds

All of the grains are unmilled, unrolled, etc. Just the entire grain berry. It actually added a very neat texture to the soup. Because the berries are whole, it also didn't absorb as much soup stock as just rolled barley would have. Try it.

I let the vegetables and Kashi cook for about an hour, and then brought a bowl for each of us upstairs for a nice hearty brunch.

I have always struggled with soups until now. I think the best advice with soups is restraint. Because all of the flavors of anything you add are released from long cooking, it is very easy to overpower the final product. My last two batches of chili and this batch of beef vegetable have turned out very good. I think I finally have conquered soups!

I don't like to cook soup from a recipe. The ideal, to me anyway, of soup is to use whatever you have on hand.

Vegetable soup is my all-around favorite. Sure, there are the luxury soups or special occasion soups like "cream of's", bisques, chowders, etc, but for day to day subsistence, nothing beats beef-vegetable-barley.

Back in college, I had a crush on Carol Costello when she was a news anchor in Columbus. Now she is the early morning anchor on CNN.

What Americans call Swiss cheese, the rest of the world calles emmental. I happened to go to a McDonald's web site for the British market, and it said their Big 'N Tasty sandwich is topped with emmental.

We are thinking about starting a new Christmas tradition this year:


A Vodou believer pours hot pepper-spiced homemade alcohol on her genital area, one of the key rituals during Gede, a Vodou holiday dedicated to Baron Samdi and the Gede family of spirits of the dead, while other believers, one clutching a miniature coffin, look on in the National Cemetery in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on November 1, 2003, which is All Saints Day and is also the first of two days devoted to the Gede, who are feted for most of the month of November.

One of the most important Vodou holidays in the country, but especially in the capital, Vodouists go to cemeteries to pray with food, coffee and peppered alcohol, to light candles and to put fresh flowers on graves, and then dance all night at 'peristyles' or Vodou temples. (AP Photo/Daniel Morel)

I just added a few cool things to my wish list.

I think I did OK on my midterm. If I had to guess, I think I got a solid B, with maybe a 35% chance at an A. I pretty much knew everything on the exam, I just don't know if I explained it well enough. It was 18 essay questions.

I just got the adaptor to attach a second monitor to my computer, and it worked the first time! It is so cool. No software configuration, crashes, etc. It just worked the way it was supposed to the first time. I can drag a window from the main monitor to the second monitor. It is almost like the desktop is now just twice as wide.

Why would I want this? I have been working on papers for school, and I do some research on the web, and then have to print it off so I can look at it while I write. Now I can have the research on one screen, and be working in MS Word on my main screen! No need for printing.

Enough screwing around. Time to go finish studying the last two chapters for tonight's midterm.

Daedalus Books is a great place to get high-quality overstock books for almost no money. We ordered quite a number of books from them when we lived in Columbus, but have not lately because we never requested a new catalog be sent to us in Chicago. (I just requested one.)

I am on the mailing list of a great company called The Duluth Trading Company. Their target market is professional contractors, so lots of tool belts, work shirts, tool bags, etc. One of their new products that I loved right away was this pocket utility knife. I would have ordered it right away, except that it is $25, and I don't need it that bad.

Anyway, this morning I spent about 1.5 hours studying for tonight's midterm at White Castle, drinking coffee and Diet Coke. I got through four chapters and needed a break. For fun I thought I would stop in Menards on the way back home and see if they had anything like this knife. I went to the utility knife section and no luck. Oh well, I didn't really expect them to have it, I just wanted an excuse to kill some time in Menards. I remembered that I wanted to get a cheap pair of 99¢ jersey gloves for Saturday dog walking at the shelter. I also picked up a $1.99 bottle of Fisher dry roasted peanuts. Basically just wandered around looking for cheap things to buy because it is fun.

I round the corner, and on a huge aisle-end display, are these pocket utility knives! Yeah Brad! And better yet; they were only $9.99! So I do my little happy dance, grab one, and run to the check-out. Waiting in line, I do some quick addition in my head; knife $10, peanuts $2, gloves $1, plus tax, bill should be about $14 or $15. It's time to sign the charge slip and it is only about $10. I look at the receipt and the knife only rang up for $7! I might have to go back and buy a bunch more. Back-ups, Christmas gifts, stocking stuffers, etc.

It folds up to about 3.5", and folds out to a full sized 6". It has a lock-blade so it will not collapse back on your hand and cut you. It has a little knob on the blade to you can unfold it with just one had. It has a very nice comfortable heft to it. It uses standard inexpensive replacement blades you can find in any hardware store, so you can always have a razor sharp edge.

In short, it made my day. As you know, I like to carry around small pocket knives, and I have not added to my collection in a long while, so this was an enjoyable addition. Also, my studying went well, and I am not as apprehensive about my midterm tonight, so that made me happy too. I should also be getting my adaptor via UPS this afternoon so I can run two monitors from my computer. Happiness all around!

A very sophisticated political message on a number of levels.

1. Appeals to kids and pop culture. Starts off entertaining.
2. Conveys a number of points quickly and efficiently.
3. No graphic images, yet gets the mental image in your head they are trying to convey.
4. Offers an immediate action for the viewer to take.
5. Easy to remember URL is easy to share with friends.

Whether you agree or disagree with the message, it is worth watching if only for a good example of an effective short political film.

www.themeatrix.com

I almost ran out of gas on my way to DeKalb this morning. I meant to fill up yesterday but forgot. I was waiting for the engine to start spurting at any second.

I normally have two soy burgers for lunch when I am on campus. Today I had a bowl of vegetable soup that was very good. Very very similar to Mom’s. I also had what they called a Delmonico, but I have always called a Monte Cristo. Ham, turkey, and Swiss cheese on French toast. I asked for a few tomato slices too. Delicious.

I woke up this morning with a slight sore throat. It feels better now, but when I swallow I can tell I had a sore throat earlier. Does that make sense?

I also woke up with a back ache this morning. I spent a minute in the inversion table before I left, and that helped, but it still hurts. Dealing with the constant pain all day really wears me out. When I get home I will want to just lie down and go to sleep, but I still have a lot of stuff to get done. I have another midterm tomorrow night to start studying for, and I have a map to finish up for Friday’s lab.

The map is mostly finished. I just have to proof it, and then create a flow chart of all the analysis steps I preformed to create it. It is a map of loggable forest areas. A loggable area had to be within 5 kilometers of existing roads; at least 1 kilometer away from rivers and lakes; at least 10 kilometers from an existing shrine; and only on land that was below the 1,000 foot elevation line. I then had to produce a table about how many square kilometers of pine versus oak were in the loggable sections, and then calculate the project income from logging.

I had a midterm this morning that I think I did pretty well on.

I have another project I am working on to create a map of campus from an orthophoto. I am almost done with that too. I think I have everything digitized. I have to enter some building names into the attribute tables, and then work on formatting.

I have always wondered what "meat by-products" are. Now I know:

The non rendered, clean parts, other than meat, derived from slaughtered mammals. It includes, but is not limited to, lungs, spleen, kidneys, brain, livers, blood, bone, partially defatted low-temperature fatty tissue and stomachs and intestines freed of their contents. It does not include hair, horns, teeth and hooves.

The comments are not showing up on my Blog, Sheri's, or Tim and Lisa's. The comments are provided by www.blogextra.com. I went to their website to see if they had a status. Their site was not found.

So, they are either having some major network problems, or they closed shop and took my $10 annual fee and are living it up in Israel. That is were I think the company was located.

Update: I was just about to post this when I happened to find their cached web page from Sunday night. They said they were going to do some maintenance, and the service might be down for a few hours. I guess 48 hours counts as a few.

FKI Security Group acquired Meilink Safe Company in 1991. They still make Meilink safes.

When I see something with a patent number on it, I like to look it up in the US Patent Office’s data base to see what makes it "patentable".

There was an old steel table with caster wheels that I took from Grandma's basement when she moved into her apartment. I think she used it for either a typewriter stand, or maybe just for a phone stand. We had it in our basement in Columbus to hold laundry items; soap, fabric softener, etc.

I brought the table upstairs to our office to hold the second monitor I am going to attach to our computer.

There is a little tag on top of the table that says:

Business Machine Stand
Meilink Steel Safe Co
Toledo 6, Ohio
USA
Patent No 2,644,192

I looked it up, and the patent is actually for a way of attaching a detachable hinged shelf. The patent was filed on September 4, 1951, and issued on July 7, 1953. The inventor was Ralph E. McClellan.

I looked up Ralph, and he still lives in Toledo near the intersection of Bancroft and Holland Sylvania Road.

I wonder how he would react if I gave him a call and told him I was still using a table that his company made 50 years ago.

A market planner from Walgreens talked to our class last week. He said that the number of prescriptions will almost double from 2000 to 2010.

In 2000 there were on average, 11.5 prescriptions filled per person per year. In 2010 he estimates there will be 19.6 prescriptions per person filled per year.

This is because of:

1. The baby boomers are aging and will require more medications.
2. More and better medications are being developed.

The holiday catalog season must have begun. We have received about two pounds of catalogs per day the last few days.

The term "township" actually comes from the Federal Land Survey System. Early in the history of the United States, there was a lot of land that no one was using and the government just wanted to get rid of. The first thing they had to do was catalog what they had, thus the survey system.

• A township is 36 square miles.
• It is divided up into 36 one square mile squares called sections. One square mile is 640 acres.
• A quarter of a section, or a quarter, is 160 acres.
• A quarter of a quarter section, or a quarter-quarter, is 40 acres.

You can also put together two quarter-quarters to make an 1/8th of a section which is 80 acres.

The video adaptor I ordered on-line that would be available for shipping by November 21, and then could take 3 to 7 days to arrive once it did ship, has already been shipped and will be here on Thursday. Yeah!

This is for Mom and Dad to see where Kane county is in relation to DuPage County. (DuPage is in the center, grayed out, and unlabled. It was one of my first maps.)

County Map

I had a more difficult exam in my OMIS class today. I only got an 81.6%.

On the bright side, the class average was only 62.1%.

I wonder if Coors intentionally marketed Coors Light to the female market, or if it just became a "chick beer" on its own.

When I was installing the new video card last night, I stopped for a sip of iced tea, and while I was taking a break I picked up the old card that I had already removed. The card has a fan directly attached to it to keep it cool, but when I looked at it, there was no propeller! I looked in the PC case and, sure enough, there was the little propeller sitting on top of another circuit board. That is probably why the card pooped out on us. The propeller fell out and the card overheated and burned itself out.

I don't have to worry about the new card fan burning itself out because the new one didn't come with a fan. It just has a really neat looking heat sink with a lot of intricate fins.

We went to four different stores (Best Buy, CompUSA, Circuit City, and Office Max, in that order) looking for the video adaptor, and none of them had it. So I just got done placing my order on-line with Amazon.com. The adaptor is only $10.95, but the shipping is $8.64!

Oh well, I had anticipated spending $15 plus $1.05 tax ($16.05 total) if I found it at a store locally. So my cheaper on-line price plus the expensive shipping works out to only $3.54 more than if I had found it locally. I guess that's not too bad after all.

If I just would have ordered it on-line to begin with I would have saved several miles of gas, wear-and-tear, as well as more than an hour of my time. The only thing is, if I had found it at a store today, I would be using it now. They say it will be "available to ship" by November 21, and once it ships it will take 3 to 7 days. I think their "available to ship" date is just to give them a big cushion if something goes wrong, and will probably ship much sooner than that.

I looked at the video card on the back of our newer computer, and it already has two ports on it! One port is the traditional VGA port, and the other is a newer DVI (Digital Video Interface) port. DVI ports are for flat panel monitors. All I should need to do is buy a $15 adaptor and I should be able to have two monitors running.

This is a picture of both sides of the adaptor. The top port is a VGA port, and the bottom is a DVI port.

I successfully installed the new video card. Works great. The monitor that we had in the basement is also a 19" monitor, and the one we were using was a 17" monitor, so we also have a bigger monitor now to boot.

Windows XP lets you hook up to 10 monitors to one computer. You can have a web page open on one monitor for reference while you type information on the main screen. I might take the 17" monitor that we were using and attach it to our newest computer which is running Windows XP.

A few weeks ago the monitor on our older computer got a little darker, and started to produce ghost shadows across the screen. Any dark object would make the rows that it was on dark as well. I just assumed the monitor had finally worn out. It is the one we got when Sheri was working at Checkfree!

We had an extra monitor in the basement, and today I finally tested it to see if it even worked. Guess what? It has the exact same ghosting characteristics that the old monitor does. So that means that the monitor is fine, and it is the video card.

I just got back from Best Buy and picked up the ATI Radeon 9000. I have a nice cold iced tea; a long screw driver; my work shorts and a t-shirt (it gets warm in the office); and I am going to brave the dusty innards of the computer to get it back up to snuff.

I have been going nuts for the last month or so trying to figure out how to make the status bar at the bottom of the browser appear by default when I open a new window. Tonight I found the answer:

1) With (only one) IE open, click View, select: Status Bar
2) Right-click on IE's Toolbar and select: "Lock the Toolbar"
3) Hold down the Ctrl key and click the close button (upper right)
4) Open Windows Explorer, click View, select: Status Bar
5) Right-click on Explorer's Toolbar and select: "Lock the Toolbar"
6) Click Tools | Folder Options | View tab
7) Click the "Apply to all folders" button.
8) Hold down the Ctrl key and click the close button (upper right)
9) Open IE to any page, right-click on a link and select: "Open in New Window" to make sure the above steps worked.


(The status bar is the little space at the bottom of the screen that displays what the web address of a link is before you click on it.)