Hi There Sports Fans,

Like always, it's been a while since I've blogged. Today I thought I might spend a few minutes describing something I did last night that was, at best, a pretty useless waste of time.

Over the last umpteen years, we've had this big plastic coke bottle that, I guess, is supposed to be some kind of bank. I hate to carry change and never do. So anytime I have change in my pocket I put it on the bedside table at night and then drop it in the big plastic coke bottle in the morning on the way downstairs.

I've been wondering lately how much was now in the bottle. A few years ago, my wife actually counted it and found that it contained about $400.00 and it was only about a third full. Lately it been getting closer to the top and I've been wondering what's in it now. So I decided to count it. I told my wife and she understood cause she had been wondering herself. I asked her for an estimate. She said $1,200. I guessed it was a little bit lower, maybe $1,100.

So here's the numbers.

First of all, it weighed about 88 pounds. If you knew something about the statistics of change, like how often you got quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies in an average financial transaction, you could probably calculate how much was there. But I can count better than I can do statistics.

So I set about separating out the coins. I worked on it about an hour and then had to go fix supper. I do supper on Saturday night. Burgers on the grill. After supper I went back to work with help from my daughter. She'd just had an argument with her mother and found separating coins to be therapeutic. As we separated the coins into piles of pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters and a few Sacagawea dollar coins, I stacked the quarters into a box in 20 dollar (40 coin) stacks. Basically, I count one stack and make the rest match the height After about 3 hours we were finished. I then stacked up the dimes in 5 dollar stacks and the nickels in 2 dollar stacks. I didn't feel like stacking the pennies so we weighed them and divided their weight (22 pounds) by the weight of a penny (2.5 g) to get a count.


Final count:


coin_______________total val_______number_______weight g
Sacagawea dollars_____8.00___________8____________64.8 Quarters____________790.00_________3160________17917.2
Dimes_______________230.00_________2300_________5216.4
Nickels______________70.00_________1400_________7000.0
Pennies______________41.00_________4100________10250.0

Total_____________$1139.00_____________________40448.4 g = 89 lbs.

The total value comes from adding up the values of the stacks, except for the pennies. The number comes from dividing the total value by the value of the coin. The weight comes from multiplying the number by the weight of each coin (which I got from wikipedia). The total calculated weight is close to the experimental weight of 88 pounds so I guess the count is fairly accurate (1-2%).

So then I tossed them back in the bottle till the day when we fill it up. And now it goes back in the closet. It looks like this:

Hi there,

It's blog time again. Actually, what I really want to do is put in a link for anyone who wants to look at the pictures that I took at the Thanksgiving. There's also a few other pictures from backstage at Whitney's play at school.

We had a great time. The weather was very good though it has been warmer on Thanksgivings before. We did the traditional turkey on Thursday and on Friday we had some old and new friends by for some oysters and other stuff. There's a few pics from the Bird Island walk and the last pics show houses falling into the sea over on Ocean Isle. It was good to see everybody again and we're looking forward to going back this summer though that will be a while.

So here's the link:

Pictures from Thanksgiving 2005

Enjoy!!

Last night I fixed supper and decided to photo-document the event. However, I haven't gotten around to doing it yet. Just to remind myself how all this works in the Blogosphere, I'll show a shot or two of the meal's creation.

Here's a bit of the meal's ingredients.











Well, I gotta go now. It's time for Desparate Housewives. I'd hate to have to buy it from Steve Jobs if I missed the episode.

Hi there fans of Philip's Blog. I haven't written in my blog in a couple of months so I'm going to try to start back up. I don't think the world can stand to go so long without bits of wisdom from yours truly.

So today I'll start slowly. My wife is taking me furniture shopping today. I tried to arrange some major surgery and a root canal but I didn't have enough advanced warning so I guess it's shopping for me instead.

Well shucks!

So long for now.

Good Morning! It's been about 2 weeks since school started back. As I mentioned earlier, my wife has started teaching seventh grade math, a new career at the half century point. Well, we're still into it 24/7 but I think she likes it OK. I'm dealing with it right now. Hopefully, in the coming weeks, we'll get some of wife and mom back into our lives as the new becomes more routine.

I can tell you one thing for sure, teachers aren't paid much for the work they do.

Good Morning!

School has started back and life takes on a new sort of pace. I'm trying to adapt. This year things are going to be a bit different. First and foremost, my lovely wife has gone back to work. When we moved here from New Jersey, she was pregnant and decided to take a year or so off with our new baby. Well a year stretched into 14.

With my son off to college and my daughter getting a bit more independant, my wife was getting antsy to do something. The fact that I was out of work and not making much money with my little business venture may have also have influenced her thinking. Anyhow, she decided that she didn't want to be a scientist anymore, which was what she used to be, and that she preferred to return to her roots in math. So she decided to get a teaching degree and teach math to hormone addled middle school students. She entered a program called NC-Teach, a state program designed to allow people, primarily in the math and science fields, to quickly get teacher certification. Good math teachers are hard to come by apparently. It's a total immersion teacher training thing where you go to school at all kinds of irregular hours and do lots of homework.

Anyhow, she did the whole banana and got a job. I may talk about that at another time. I sure the travails of teaching will make for some interesting stories. The reason I started writing this blog entry was to explain why I have time to write this today. The job she took requires her to get up at about 5:30 in the morning. She tries to be quiet when she gets up but I started slamming the Snooze every 10 minutes to try to get a bit more sleep and eventually, I decided it wasn't working. So now I get up. But I have to take my daughter to school at 8:00 so that gives me two and a half hours to kill. So first, I go for a fast walk in the dark. My walk takes about 2o minutes. Then I have some coffee and a poptart. Then I wake up my daughter and then I log onto the computer and check email and the web for news and other things and then I shower and shave and then I take my daughter to school and I go to work. Today I tried to insert a blog session and if I write a bit less than today it might just work. But Today, I'm out of time and need to jump in the shower.

So bye for now!

We just got back from taking my oldest son off to college. For reasons that I don't fully understand but will learn to accept, he decided to attend a small Quaker school about 10 hours from home. Let me just say that saying goodbye was one of the hardest things I've ever done. I'll get used to it eventually, I guess. But it won't be easy.

I think he'll do well and I believe that the school will be good for him and also, that he'll be good for the school. It's small enough that he'll make an impact and I think it will be a positive one.

And he'll also get good grades or he's coming home.

Hi there,

It's blog time again. Actually, what I really want to do is put in a link for anyone who wants to look at the pictures that I took at the beach. I used Picassa to export them into a bunch of web pages and I uploaded the whole thing into my web site. The pictures don't have anything to do with my web site but it's a good place to post them so that anyone can get to them quickly.

So here's the link:

Pictures from the Beach 2005

Hey, that was pretty easy. Enjoy!!

Hi there. It's Monday. We went to Sunset Beach last week and had a really good time. Sunset Beach is a really nice beach in NC. Some say it's the best. One of the reasons is that for some cause or another, sand is piling up on Sunset while it's washing away from all the other beaches. This leads to a very wide flat beach with very fine sand (at least by east coast standards). So it's good for building sandcastles, spreading out without being on top of other people and letting your kids run loose. That allows you to relax and drink beer all day while you talk with old friends about other people who aren't there.

This year we had a bigger crowd than usual. We had some friends down from Pennsylvania for a few days who stayed with us. My cousin from Chicago stayed next door. Her brother-in-law and family had another house. My sisters and another cousin had another house and an old friend from my home town got another house. I was particularly glad that my buddy from Tabor stayed for the week. When he visited in past years, I was always worried about him driving home at night after too many beers. Also, his wife, an avid NC State fan in a sea of Carolina fans, always adds spice to any discussions of ACC athletics.

I may say more later but for now, I'll post a couple of sandcastle pictures. The timing of the tides made this a good year to build sandcastles. Low tide occurred about 11:00 AM on Monday and moved up about 52 minutes each day. The result is that after you build a sandcastle, you get to watch the tide destroy it rather than going in for supper, knowing that some unappreciative pre-teen jerk kid was going to kick it in. I build my castles for God to destroy, not some some unappreciative pre-teen jerk kid. Plus, I like to watch the destruction myself.

Bye for now.

Before
After

Hi there! A couple of days ago, I decided to try out the new picture posting feature they've added to Blogger. I'm going to the beach in a couple of weeks and while I'm there I like to build sandcastles. So I decided to post a picture of one of my castle creations from the past. But when I navigated away from this blog editor, I lost my blogging for that day. So here I am back again to try to put that picture in my blog. Here goes:

Whoops! It showed up on the side. Oh well. That's me in the middle with various family around and one of my masterpieces in front of us. Pretty soon that ocean behind us will compete with pre-teens roaming the beach to see who can do in the castle first. The pre-teens usueally win.

Well, gotta run. Bye.

Short post today. It now appears that you can easily add a photo to your Blog without having to host it somewhere like I've done with other photos. In other words, Google has some room for you if you don't send in too many. They probably get that from all that unused 2 gig allotments that they give to G-mail customers. I know that I'm only using about 2% of my 2 gigs. So here's a photo:

I got it from Slashdot. Putting it here is probably some sort of violation of something but maybe not since it comes from the open source everything should be free crowd. Bye.

Hi, I'm back again. I just looked at the photo and it looks like crap. I think the photo has one of those transparent backgrounds. I think I need to change my template so that everything is white in the background so I won't have to worry about whether the photo posts are transparent or not. I'll do that later.

I'm back again. That's better but it still has a box around the picture. I'd like to get rid of that but I'll leave it for now.

Bye.

Time for a new post. This post has nothing to do with my life in a big way. It's just a rumination on what I plan to do the next time I buy a computer.

OK, here we go. Over the last 21 years, I've always had a computer. When I finished by PhD and went to work at a crappy company, I figured it was time to indulge and buy a computer. I thought about it a lot but my wife (new wife at the time) didn't seem too hot on the idea. She worked as an x-ray crystallographer at another big crappy company and looked at a computer screen all day and didn't seem too interested in looking at one when she got home. Eventually she even had a VT-100 terminal (a real one, not an emulator) hooked up to a 300 baud modem so she could work from home. Besides personal computers costs a lot of money back then. Around that time the Mac came out and I was enthralled. I played with them a few times and I was hooked. But she said no.

Imagine my surprise when some friends were visiting from our old school and lo and behold, delivered an original 128K Mac for my very own. It was an anniversity gift from my wife purchased at the academic discount by our friends. ($1300 vs. $3000). Happy! Happy!

Unfortuantely, reality soon set in. It was a cool computer but it was next to impossible to program if you weren't gonna do it for a living. I wanted something like Turbo Pascal for the mac. And I wanted it free. Unfortunately, we'd already spent the money budgeted for home computers for the next seven years.

Over time, I acquired some software and did a little programming and played with my Mac as I watched it slowly but surely become almost useless. Still played games and things but it was becoming uber underpowered quickly.

After seven years, my wife had changed jobs and was working for a University as a crystallographer and I was getting sicker of my company all the time. So I started looking for a new job in a new place. When I found a new job in a new place, I convinced my lovely wife that seven years was enough time and that when we moved we wouldn't have that lucrative academic discount so now was time for a new computer. We got a IIsi with a 13 inch color monitor. I know that 13 inch sounds really bad, but that was one nice looking monitor and Apple tended to call a monitor by it's viewable size whereas the PC world called a monitor by the size of the truck used to ship it.

After seven years, it was still doing OK but some apps were a bit slow and the internet was starting to come on board. The real kicker happened when I upgraded our copy of Office to the newest version and it took 50 seconds just to load Excel. My wife used Excel to do the budget and that was intolerable. Of course, that was my plan all along.

Our timing was actually pretty good. I'd been eyeing a new mac for a long time and couldn't figure out what to buy. We finally decided to take the plunge just after the 233-G3 had come out. This was a good thing. The G3 was probably the biggest speed jump in the Mac line and by waiting, we got a computer that has served us admirably for the last seven years and still seems to be running strong. But there are a few things that are starting to break. A few years ago I tried OS X on a G3 and it's a non starter, so we can't take advantage of any of that iStuff. The old browsers (there are no new ones) are starting to break on some web sites. The 233-G3 was pre-USB and the PCI cards don't work with a lot of things.

So we bought a Mac in 1984, 1991, 1998 and now it's 2005. Any student of linear algebra knows that it's time for a new one. What to buy? It's become very clear to me that any machine today is probably fast enough for most everyting we need and the only reason that hardware doesn't last is the software/hardware conspiracy that requires continous upgrades so that they can continue to make money.

So what is it? iMac, PowerMac, MacMini or a laptop. Somehow, I've never been crazy about that all in one model that Apple has sold over the years though I liked the original. Monitors and CPUs seem to break and become obsolete at such different rates that I kind of like them decoupled. Do we wait for Mac on Intel? I don't think so. I still have a lot of software that runs on System 9 that I'd have to replace. I couldn't possibly justify repurchasing hardly any of it but I like to know that I have it. So I'm thinking a mini might be nice. Takes up a lot less space. Still runs OS 9. Doesn't costs an arm and a leg though it costs a butt-load more than Apple would have you believe. Looks cute and might even make it's way into the living room. The PowerMac is just too big and pricey for our usage. And I don't really like a portable for the house. So a Mini it is. We'll probably wait for a speed bump or a price drop and I'll try to get as much of that sexy stuff as I can when I buy. Sexy stuff is the superDrive, 1 gig of ram, airport and bluetooth, wireless keyboard and mouse and maybe a really cool LCD monitor. Like I said, it won't be cheap.

So those are the plans. Now I have to figure out how to make our old G3, really start looking like the dog it needs to be to get my lovely wife on board.

A couple of things worth mentioning. I have bought a Dell PC laptop in the last year for my company that is going out of business. I needed the PC because I was planning on selling some automation that was driven by VB-6. I'm trying to make this one not count as a computer. I also bought some Apple stock about 1990. After 15 years, it's only a fair investment and that's been true only because of the run up of the last year. But it's been fun to watch.

Well, gotta run for now.

bye

Good Morning,

Today I'm going to write something just to keep it looking like I'm using this blog. That's in the event that Google has some kind of auto-bot that scans the blogs and checks to see if you actually write something in your blog. One day I might become prolific again.

I want to figure out how to post pictures easily. I have Picassa on my machine, so I've covered the first step to letting the big G take over my desktop. I wonder if the big G will ever come to represent the evil that the big M now represents to many computer users. If they do it's gonna be a much easier slide into dependency given that little that they've given me so far has cost anything (I did use Adwords for my company). I think they see the advantages of cheap disk space. Time to go to work.

Bye

Again, Long time, No post. I'm going to try to start up again with the daily postings but it will probably be difficult. I mean for these post to be mainly mundane crap about my life with occasional opinions that will get me in trouble. It's Memorial Day weekend. Went to my sister Carolyn's house for a little family gathering last evening. Turns out that last weekend she was at a party and mentioned that she was having a party and invited a bunch of other friends so it was a pretty big party. There were some of her old friends that we hadn't seen in a while and a few new friends, mostly neighbors. Nice people and a few kids and some dogs running around. Real American.

I had a couple of beers over the course of the evening. That's 2. Could be a sign of getting old that I'm perfectly satisfied to drink only 2 beers over an entire evening. I did eat a lot.

Work is going OK. I wouldn't say it's the most exciting thing in the world but, with a bit of work and patience, it can get better. Patience is key.

I've got to do some work in the yard today. Spread some mulch and kill some weeds. I kill weeds with Roundup. I bought a plastic bottle of the concentrated stuff about 17 years ago. I think it was about a pint for maybe $30. Amazingly, it's still pretty potent. A half capfull in a squirt bottle and you can wipe out all the weeds in your yard. And if you're careless, you can also wipe out patches of grass like I did a few years ago. Actually, I think someone else, whose name will go unmentioned, was responsible for the grass killing but I accepted the blame for reasons of domestic tranquility. I need to go easy with the stuff. It's half gone and I want it to last till I die or at least till all the weeds acquire resistence to it.

This is the first Sunday since the church choir has taken off for the summer. So we're skipping today. Haven't done that for a while. Hope the Lord will forgive me.

Enough for today. Time to kill weeds and spread mulch.

Long time, no post. Today I start a new job. I've put my company on a low hum to sell out my inventory. Could be an interesting day. Later

There was something on the Daily Show tonight about bloggers. They're changing the world or something. I guess it's kind of cool to have a blog. So I have one, but I don't feel all that cool. I wish I could find something interesting to write.

I'm staying up late so I can pull some shirts out of the dryer when they get dry. If I leave them overnight, they'll be hard to iron with the industrial strength wrinkles that set in around 3:00 AM in the morning.

I got a request from some Russian dude to put a link on my web site (www.innovasyn.com) to his company. It's a chemistry company that provides compounds to other companies. They can make them cheaply because they employ chemist in Russia that don't have anything to do and will work for peanuts. That's why I don't have a job now. I've got a list of about 3,475 companies and he asked that I add his company to that list. He's got a list of 6 things and I asked that he add my company. So he did. It didn't seem like an even trade to me but he seemed satisfied. Then he asked if I could also post a friend's web site. It's more of an informational web site rather than a company. So it got better billing in a different link place. But I get so few hits that I don't know if there's any difference between the two.

I recently checked out the new MSN search. I did a search for "parallel synthesis" which is the realm in which I'm trying to do commerce. My company was listed around 14th. It's about the same on Yahoo. On Google, it's about 365th.

In the catagory of "all good things come to those who wait", I bought 100 shares of Apple stock for $35/share, about 15 years ago. It's been an interesting ride. Lately, it's actually turned into a reasonable investment. It's increased in value by about 5-fold, about 11% a year for the last 15 years. I could have bought about a year ago and gotten the same return, just a lot faster. But I wouldn't have enjoyed those exhilirating roller coaster-like drops that I experienced when the dot com bust came.

Well, enough of that. Time to go hang shirts.

Hi there!

For all of you out there anxiously awaiting my each and every word each day, relax. I'm still alive. It's just hard to find something to say each and every day. But it's time to try to start again. Well that's all you get for now. Bye.

Merry Christmas! It's Christmas morning and we've opened our various presents. I think everyone's happy. We've gotten old enough and we're comfortable enough with life that we're happy just to be together, though nice things were given and recieved.

As I walked out this morning to get the paper, I saw my neighbor doing the same and we wished each other a Merry Christmas. I mentioned that this was the first Christmas morning that we got up before the kids. Time passes.

Went to church a couple of times yesterday. At the 7:00 PM service, my wife and I sat in the congregation and our kids were in the choir. The preacher had a good sermon that basically said that if Jesus came back today, he might visit a truckstop first. But that after a short while he'd get around to all of us.

We came home, built a fire in the fireplace and read the "Night before Christmas," did the Advent Calendar and sat around feeling warm and fuzzy. Then I left to sing at the 11:00 PM service. It was a more subdued service with fewer people and communion but the sermon was the same. That's OK, it was a good sermon. Afterwards, everybody wished everybody else "Merry Christmas" and I came home and helped my wife wrap the last of the kid's presents. Then I sent her off to bed and wrapped her gifts. I got to bed around 1:00 AM on Christmas morning.

Basically, like every other Christmas morning for all of time, the world is a mixture of hope and despair. Here's praying for the people in the messes in Iraq and Darfur and Palestine and all the other not very happy places on the earth to find some measure of peace in the coming year.

Time to go fix breakfast.

God bless you, each and every one.

Darn. Looks like I forgot to write yesterday. Yesterday was my birthday. Fifty-one. It's a wierd age. I never thought I'd be here, with two kids and a wife and out of work. The company I started when I got layed off isn't making enough money to support much of anything, let alone a wife and kids with college looming. So I need to find a job.

I started working on a presentation, in the event that I get an interview somewhere. I've decided that I need to sell myself as a medicinal chemist and not as some gadget head. The problem is that I'm a pretty good synthetic chemist and a reasonable medicinal chemist but I have a lot of interest and a fair amount of expertise in science that go beyond that. What's the problem? Well, I think that most people only give you credit for having a limited amount of sense and if you show a bunch in some other field, you must have had to give up some in the area they're interested in. So if I give an interview seminar, I better put in a bunch of chemistry, just to keep people entertained.

Actually, I think that what I really like is building things. Or maybe I like designing things that have 3 dimensional shape. Synthetic chemistry is really good that way. You have a really different kind of toolkit that you can use to construct all kinds of little itty-bitty things. And there are lots of neat toys that you can use to examine and manipulate them, the little itty-bitty things that you make. I find that to be a lot of fun. What I don't really like is the mindless making of things by following a recipe. No fun.

So much for now. Time for bed. So long.

Must write every day! Must write every day! But I got nuthin' to say.

good night

Hi. It's another day and again it's time to go to bed. Not a very exciting day. My wife has the flu and is running a temperature of 101.6 C. I'm going to go sleep in the same bed with her and she's going to give it to me. Merry Christmas. I hope she get's better soon. And I hope I don't get it.

They gave Scott Peterson the death penalty for killing his wife and unborn child. I'm not sure I understand why he might get it when some others (like that Ann Miller Kontz) don't. The jurors said that he looked detached and unemotional. Nobody likes that lack of remorse. A good bit of contrition will save your ass if used properly.

The Dow and my portfolio were a up a bit today. I've been trying to figure out if I can retire now and have enough money to live to be 100. If the market give 10% a year and I live cheaply, I can make it. There's a guy in my neighborhood who nobody knows very well. Worked in computers but may be retired. You never see him except when he drives by or when a real hurricane knocks down a few trees in his yard and he comes out for a few minutes and saws a few of them up. He has occasionally talked to another of my neighbors who knows his name. Apparently, he's figured out how to live on $15,000 a year. I don't know how you do that in Chapel Hill. Taxes alone will run about a third of that. Maybe I should visit him and get a few pointers.

Unfortunately, I don't think I can live in a manner to which I've become accustomed at $15K/year. But with a 10% return, I wouldn't need to be that frugal.

I'll keep working on it. The harder part will be convincing my wife to give it a try. Retire at 50. What a concept!

Getting slack. Have to make time for blogging. But not tonight.

Sang a lot today. Sang with the UPC church choir at both services as part of the lessons and carols program and sang with the NC Boys Choir in Southern Village tonight at the Methodist church. Had a big crowd.

One note. Job scene might not be hopeless yet.

Good Night.

Slow day. Rang bells for the Salvation Army in front of the Bank of America building in downtown Chapel Hill today at noon. Went to choir practice tonight. Beginning to get worried about making a living. Former coworkers getting jobs. I don't even get calls for interviews. What's happening?

I'm gonna get more sleep tonight. Got a dentist appointment tomorrow.

Good night.

It's blog time again. What happened today? I went to lunch with some of my former coworkers. Got a little info on what was happening in their lives. I could talk about it but it would be depressing. The upshot is that two jobs, that I thought I might have a shot at, have been scarfed up by two of my former coworkers. The more bothersome aspect is that I never even got contacted about either of them. Not a buzz. Not good. Depressed my wife even more.

I did get a call from someone at a company that was interested in some of the products that we sell at InnovaSyn. Again, I'll spare the details but it was a little odd. They might buy a lot of them or they might buy none. It probably won't be anything in between.

I do want to put in a picture that I took the other night at our concert at the First Baptist Church in Henderson. Our new robes have a special feature that allows the wearer to quickly become nun-like. I talked a bunch of the younger guys into demonstrating.





Enough to make any mother proud!

Damn, it's late already and I haven't blogged yet. Not much happened today. Gave blood at 3:00 PM over at the Red Cross in Durham. This is the first time that I have given blood since the Dean Dome donation drive back in June. I usually give more regularly (every 60 days or so).

Last time I gave, I got a letter from the Red Cross that said that my blood was part of a group of transfusions that caused an adverse reaction. There was something about a rare white cell antigen and they needed to test all the donors in that group for cooties or whatever. I hope nobody died. So I went in about a month later and gave a few tubes. It took freekin forever to get the results back. I called the office in Charlotte where this was being handled a gazillion times and nobody ever returned my calls. Eventually I got a call from the Durham site asking for blood. I told them what had happened with the rampant incompetance in the Charlotte office and they were able to rattle the cages and finally get an answer. It wasn't my blood that caused the problem. So I could give again. They screwed things up so bad in Charlotte that somebody decided to send me a little metal 1935 model Red Cross blood hauler. It's real nice.

So I've given around 39 pints since I started giving again after we moved back to NC. My BP was a little higher than usual today. It was 127/79. It's usually around 114/65 or so. Maybe I should check it again sometime soon. Maybe when I give blood again in February.

By the way, if you give blood regularly, good for you. If you don't, maybe you should try it. It's not bad, even for a baby like me, as long as I don't look. If I don't look, there ain't nothing to it. If I look, it's "lights out" for Philip. So I don't look anymore. Not even tempted.

I going to bed. See you tomorrow.