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Do you ever wonder what might have happened to people who are essentially strangers to us?
Next door to my office building is a retirement & assisted
living place - it used to have the word "Alzheimer's" in the name and
we joked about just trading one place for the other as our minds went; usually with the assumption that too much work was going to cause such a decline.
Anyway - over the last couple of months every morning, as I've walked past, an elderly man has been outside hiding behind a pillar enjoying a cigarette. Every morning I would say "good morning how are you?" and he'd respond with a loud and cheery: "Good morning to you and I'm great"
The last few mornings he was not there and I wondered if he had died or been caught. It crossed my mind that I might never know - I don't think I would've gone inside to enquire about the health of a man having a forbidden cigarette.
I was so relived to see him back this morning that I almost said "oh thank God you are ok".... I really had been quite concerned about someone whose name I don't even know.
*******
The bike below used to appear near the office during the day and
then be gone by evening. Then it arrived and stayed. And stayed and
stayed. If this had been anywhere near I live, it would've
been stripped within a few hours. After more than a month the rear
tyre is flat but no-one has stolen the helmet or attempted to steal spare parts from the bike.
So, where is the owner? Did they die at
their desk? Did they walk to the shops at lunch time and get run-over
crossing the road? Or perhaps they developed Alzheimer's and forgot they owned a bike.
I hate not knowing..... and unlike the missing elderly man, where I
could've enquired if I'd wanted to, there is no-one to ask about the bike's owner.
November 6th
Carrie Prejean, the Miss California USA with a sex tape, was on "Larry 'Inappropriate' King Live" last night, and she refused to answer any questions. This is pretty much one of my favorite television clips of 2009.
I find it strange that this woman would want to be on a talk show only to avoid talking about every issue and controversy in which she's involved, deeming everything Larry said, "inappropriate." Why even go on the show to begin with? I suppose even bad publicity is good publicity.
I feel bad that Larry King was left in the dark on what questions he could ask her, though. Although, I'm pretty sure he probably is always in the dark.
P.S. With January Jones from "Mad Men" hosting "Saturday Night Live" soon, I hope they include her in a skit where she plays Carrie Prejean. Don't they look alike!
Yep, my prescription. 800mg each.
Here is an Ohio Scientific Challenger 4P (C4P). It used the faster version of the 6502 processor (Apple and Commodore used the standard version) had lots of RAM (for the time) and all sorts of ports built in. Nevertheless, it had no expansion slots. Hence no 3rd party add in cards. It was released in the Fall of 1979 and the Apple II+ was released a few months earlier in the Spring. It never could catch up.
This one was a friends first computer (he also had the Black Apple). He had used it for years before upgrading to the Apple. I would imagine the upgrade was actually the diskette system of the Apple and RAM as the specs on the C4P were better otherwise. But the C4P did have the nifty wood sides.
Unfortunately while in good cosmetic condition, BASIC will not come up. It did last time I had it powered up. I guess time for troubleshooting.
Remembering Mary Kay Bergman, one of South Park's premier vocal talents, who died ten years ago today.
Most recently, I decided to take a stab at reading Ayn Rand's Atlas, Shrugged. But once I took a look at the length of the book (clocking in around 1,000 pages in my paperback 70's edition), I realized it was going to be a challenge for my reading stamina. I find it a struggle to read a long book, unless of course it's remarkably written (I haven't yet been able to judge Rand since I'm only about ten pages in).
I've realized I simply love short stories. I believe that short stories capture real life more than any novel ever could.
I think that's why I like misterab.com. Each video is a short little tale that makes you think and doesn't require more than two minutes of your time.
They post a new video every Wednesday! Here's the latest!
It's hard to believe that, ten years ago, we were making preparations for the Y2K cut-over. As an IT professional, this was something we had to plan for, prepare for, and test.
We spent lots of money on remediation. I know that more than a few companies chose to replace the systems outright. At the time, my office specialized in implementing such systems. After Y2K, everyone had a shiny new system--it took a while before things picked up again.
As this article notes, the use of off-shore people started with Y2K. Once companies realized the benefit, they realized they could continue to send work overseas.
At the end of the day, was disaster averted, or was it a waste? Overall, I think that the remediation effort served its key aim of preventing lots of annoying little problems from causing not a global collapse, but months and years of lost productivity after the fact, sorting it out piecemeal.
Y2K came at an odd time in the world of computing. It was at the heels of the first internet wave, when such technology became a key part of day-to-day life. Over the course of the nineties, what was something that tended to be part of big business was being pushed to smaller and smaller organizations. Y2K, I think, was the capstone event for this shift, leading to a few years until the next phase.
