Sunday, April 29, 2007

Oops!

My wife had a little accident earlier this week. Fortunately her SUV is still drivable and she wasn't hurt. As she was pulling into our driveway, she accidentally pressed on the accelerator instead of the brake, landing her right into our front porch.

Since the pictures were first taken, I have straightened up the stones on our porch and I put her grill back together so it wouldn't look quite as bad. Other than being a little embarrassed (the neighbors were out when she did it), she's pretty much over it now.

I'm just glad it wasn't me that did it. Whew!!





Saturday, April 28, 2007

An Educating Tulsa Seminar by Joan Veon

An Educating Tulsa Seminar

Everything you need to know about the United Nations and how to resist its encroachment upon our Constitutional liberties at the local level.

The seminar video above is comprised of three individual files which I have combined into one play-list for convenience. The first two segments are approximately 1 hour in length, and the last segment is about 24 minutes in length. Between segments you will experience a short delay while the next video segment has had a chance to start streaming.

Viewing this video will require a high-speed Internet connection. Also, if you are a Firefox user you may want to right-click (use the zoom feature to %200) in the center of the video to enlarge it for easier viewing.

If you are having trouble viewing the video, then you may right-click on the individual links provided below and choose "Save Target As" in order to download and view them on your hard drive.

Download Disc One
Download Disc Two
Download Disc Three

Please consider supporting a worthy cause by purchasing your own high-quality DVD discs of this seminar from: http://www.operationinformation.com/
And you can visit Joan Veon's web site here: http://www.womensgroup.org/

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

The Illusion

Here's something neat you can entertain yourselves with. A friend emailed it to me today.

This is another example of an amazing illusion!!! (The last sentence is so true.)

If your eyes follow the movement of the rotating pink dot, the dots will remain only one color, pink.




However if you stare at the black "+" in the center,
the moving dot turns to green.

Now, concentrate on the black "+" in the center of the picture.
After a short period, all the pink dots will slowly disappear, and you will only see only a single green dot rotating.

It's amazing how our brain works. There really is no green dot, and the pink ones really don't disappear. This should be proof enough that we don't always see what we think we see.

Saturday, April 21, 2007

My Messy Desktop


Here it is, Ladies and Gentleman - my messy desktop. Yes, I know. I need to do some spring-cleaning on it.

Other things I need to do today:

I really need to cut a piece of Plexiglas I brought home from work for our front storm door because our German Shepherd destroyed it the last big storm we had. She jumped the backyard fence and frantically tried to paw her way into the house, smashing the bottom Plexiglas in the process. Fortunately for me I work in maintenance at a hospital and if I wait long enough, eventually I can get materials like Plexiglas without having to pay for it. I was hanging a new eraser board for our E.R. department yesterday and asked them if they really needed the Plexiglas backing they had behind their old eraser board. They said no and the rest is history.

Change the oil in my Jeep. Drudgery but a necessary task.

Attend our daughter's soccer game. I may take some video footage since it's a team she really wants to beat.

We may go shopping for a surround sound system for our T.V. (tax money came back), and a new computer monitor while we're at it because this old one is about to give out. There are lines at the top, which means it has a short. I've put up with it as long as I can. Time for a new one.

Question: Do you think a CRT (cathode ray tube) monitor gives a better picture or are the new LCD monitors the only way to go? I've looked at both and still can't decide which gives a better display.

Friday, April 20, 2007

An FYI worth passing along

Know people like this in your email list? I know I have them in mine. :)

This was forwarded to me today, and the person who forwarded it to me broke the BIGGEST rule in the list, the Bcc: rule. :)


I know I already sent this out to everyone, but for some reason I keep
getting emails with the senders list visible. And our address is right there
for anyone/everyone to take. Please help protect everyone's info. you have
in your address book by following these simple steps! Thanks



Someone who is a computer expert received the following directly from a
system administrator for a corporate system. It is an excellent message
that ABSOLUTELY applies to ALL of us who send e-mails. Please read the
short letter below, even if you're sure you already follow proper
procedures.

Do you really know how to forward e-mails? 50% of us do; 50% DO NOT.

Do you wonder why you get viruses or junk mail? Do you hate it?


Every time you forward an e-mail there is information left over from the
people who got the message before you, namely their e-mail addresses &
names. As the messages get forwarded along, the list of addresses builds,
and builds, and builds, and all it takes is for some poor sap to get a
virus, and his or her computer can send that virus to every E-mail address
that has come across his computer.


Or, someone can take all of those addresses and sell them or send junk
mail to them in the hopes that you will go to the site and he will make five
cents for each hit. That's right, all of that inconvenience over a nickel!
How do you stop it? Well, there are several easy steps:

(1) When you forward an e-mail, DELETE all of the other addresses that
appear in the body of the message (at the top). That's right, DELETE them.
Highlight them and delete them, backspace them, cut them, whatever it is you
know how to do. It only takes a second. You MUST click the "Forward" button
first and then you will have full editing capabilities against the body and
headers of the message. If you don't click on "Forward" first, you won't be
able to edit the message at all.

(2) Whenever you send an e-mail to more than one person, do NOT use the
To: or Cc: fields for adding e-mail addresses. Always use the BCC:(blind
carbon copy) field for listing the e-mail addresses. This is the way the
people you send to will only see their own e-mail address. If you don't see
your BCC: option click on where it says To: and your address list will
appear. Highlight the address and choose BCC: and that's it, it's that easy.
When you send to BCC: your message will automatically say "Undisclosed
Recipients in
the "TO:" field of the people who receive it.

(3) Remove any "FW :" in the subject line. You can re-name the subject
if you wish or even fix spelling.

(4) ALWAYS hit your Forward button from the actual e-mail you are
reading. Ever get those e-mails that you have to open 10 pages to read the
one page with the information on it? By Forwarding from the actual page you
wish someone to view, you stop them from having
to open many e-mails just to see what you sent.

(5) Have you ever gotten an email that is a petition? It states a
position and asks you to add your name and address and to forward it to 10
or 15 people or your entire address book. The email can be forwarded on and
on and can collect thousands of names and email addresses. A FACT: The
completed petition is actually worth a couple of bucks to a professional
spammer because of the wealth of valid names and email addresses contained
therein. If you want to support the petition, send it as your own personal
letter to the intended recipient. Your position may carry more weight as a
personal letter than a laundry list of names and email address on a
petition. (Actually, if you think about it, who's supposed to send the
petition in to whatever cause it supports? And don't believe the ones that
say that the email is being traced, it just ain't so!)


One of the main ones I hate is the ones that say that something like,
"Send this email to 10 people and you'll see something great run across your
screen." Or sometimes they'll just tease you by saying 'something really
cute will happen.' IT AIN'T GONNA HAPPEN!!!!! (Trust me, I'm still seeing
some of the same ones that I waited on 10 years ago!)


I don't let the bad luck ones scare me either, they get trashed... could
be why I haven't won the lottery.. except that I haven't bought a ticket
anyhow!)


Before you forward an 'Amber Alert', or a 'Virus Alert', or some of the
other ones floating around nowadays, check them out before you forward them.
Most of them are junk mail that's been circling the net for YEARS! Just
about everything you receive in an email that is in question can be checked
out at Snopes or TruthorFiction. Just go to www.snopes.com or
www.truthorficton.com. It's really easy to find out if it's real or not.
If it's not, please don't pass it on.

So please, in the future, let's stop the junk mail and the viruses.

Finally, here's an idea!!! Let's send this on to others (but strip my
address off first, please). This is something that SHOULD be forwarded.

Have a Great Day!

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Oops!

Well, what can I say? Things just get slippery when wet!

The youngster is my step-brother.

Google Reportedly Purchases Land At Pryor Industrial Plant

This is some exciting news for our neck of the woods. We were just talking about this in my shop today. I guess the word on the street is that Google is interested in our area because we have good, stable power; something that Google in their present location doesn't have. Apparently they routinely experience brown-outs, not a good combination if you're trying to maintain thousands of web servers.

There is even talk that our power company, GRDA, will build them their own sub-station as an extra incentive to build here.

Pryor is a small town just fourteen mile east of Claremore, where I live.

Saturday, April 07, 2007

Internet Connection Speed



These are the latest speed-test figures for my DSL connection. Back when I had dial-up the fasted download speed I could attain was 52 kbps, quite a difference from the connection I have now, which to me is blazing fast; however I do understand that there are cable broadband users who routinely clock in at 10,000 kbps or better for download speeds. I guess cable is still king for the fastest connections in most instances, but from what I read it can slow down appreciably when lots of people in the same neighborhood jump online at the same time, not that that happens very often though.

DSL doesn't have that problem.

We'd probably have a cable Internet connection too if it weren't for the convenience of our Internet charges being tacked on to our monthly phone bill.

Here's the link to test your connection. But be sure to choose a server closest to where you live. I'd be interested to know what your results are.

Friday, April 06, 2007

The Burger Brothers


These two brothers were good childhood friends of my brother and I and we would never have guessed that they would have been capable of the acts they committed. Naturally my brother and I were shocked and saddened when we first heard the story on the news back in '89. We spent a lot of time together as kids and did all the things boys normally do: Ride bikes, camp, fish, hunt, tell spooky stories, play hide-and-seek and so forth and so on. There was no obvious indication of the deviant behavior that led them both to the prison terms they now serve.

We lost contact with the Burger brothers after 1977; we just grew apart as childhood friends sometimes do and didn't hear anymore about them until they were in the news.

You just never know.

Sunday, April 01, 2007

William Lundigan

Ever hear of this actor?

Here's some of my hometown history regarding a visit by actor William Lundigan.