It's blogging time again. Tonight I'm going to talk about my new computer.

Recently, I needed to use a computer to get on the web and do something useful. Well, actually, it probably wasn't something useful that I needed to do. Maybe I just needed to surf the web to feel like I was connected to the world. They say it's like an addiction, where if you don't get on the internet at regular intervals, you go into withdraw and start twitching and feeling helpless and lost.

So I went upstairs to connect. My wife was working away on my Dell laptop on something important, maybe video poker or a Sudoku puzzle. My daughter was also doing something equally important on the old mac. She might even have been writing a paper for homework, otherwise, I'd have tossed her off. I was twitching pretty bad by this time. There was no way I was going to get on my son's computer. He was locked in a battle to the death with some pretty evil looking beasts in one of those online multiplayer games.

That's when I summoned up the courage and announced that I was getting a new computer so I could get on when I wanted to. And guess what? Much to my surprise, my accountant, I mean wife, said "Sure, what kind are you gonna get? A Mac or a PC?" What a silly question. Of course, I was getting a Mac. I've got one of those white Apple decals in my car window and I'm a major Apple stockholder. OK, I'm a minor stockholder. Anyhow, It's been 8 years since we got our last computer, which was our third Mac. I don't count the Dell since that was purchased by my business strictly for business purposes.

To make a long story less boring, I bought a Mac Mini, one of those new Duo Core, Intel Macs. I also bought a wirelss keyboard and a wireless mouse. Cool!! But I'm not crazy about the wireless mouse. It's heavier than a regular mouse and the response isn't as crisp. I also needed a monitor. I could have bought a nice Apple monitor. They look real good and go for something between 2 and 7 million dollars. I ended up buying a Dell monitor from Costco. It was rated high by Consumer Reports but not recommended because it listed for almost $400 when they tested it. I could get it from Dell for $309 but Costco had it for only $259. I went for it.

Of course, I have no software for my new computer besides all the stuff that comes with it (which, by the way is fairly substantial). But these days, who needs software? All you need is a browser and a Google account and you can still figure out how to waste endless hours on the computer and never spend any more money. Except, of course, for that monthly bill from Time-Warner for high speed internet access.

OK, time for some pictures. I'll get a little help from a couple of my business partners, who will stand next to each computer so you can judge the sizes better.

Here's the old Mac with the ViewSonic monitor perched on top.

And here's a close up so you can see my business partners better.

And here's the new computer. Notice that there ain't no wires connecting the computer to the keyboard or the mouse. That gives you the freedon to have incredibly poor posture as you surf the web.

And of course, a close up with my business partners standing on top of the computer. As you can see, it's much smaller but it's much more powerful.

OK, that's all for now. I'd write more and put in some more pictures but it takes so long to upload the pictures. You have to watch this silly spinning forever.

Goodnight.

Boiled Peanuts

Recently, my wife moved the portable computer down to the living room so she could play poker on line while she watched TV. She would generally play two tables at once and surf the TV channels. Talk about the need for mental stimulation. Recently, she's been slacking off the 'puter a bit so, since the computer is sitting in the living room already, I can blog while I'm vegging on the TV.

Today I want to talk about boiled peanuts, or more specifically, how to use science to cook them. If you look in a thousand books and on the internet, you can get lots of history and a bunch of recipes. After perusing them for a bit, I discovered the secret. A lot of recipes tell you to boil them for a couple of hours in salt water and serve. Well, I can tell you that don't work. The peanuts aren't even close to being done. The secret is to get the juice into the nut so that they taste right. "Right" being salty and juicy.

OK, here's the science. It's mostly physics or maybe chemistry if you believe that the behavior of liquids and gasses is the domain of chemistry rather than physics. But because there is little or no bond breaking, I, being an organic chemist, tend to think of this as physics. So, the problem is to get the juice into the peanut.

You start out with a peanut that is filled with air inside sitting in a pot that has water outside the peanut. As you heat the liquid, the air (gas) inside the peanut expands and builds up pressure which does a great job of keeping any water out. As you boil away, some of the gas escapes through the shell into the water, but for the most part, a positive pressure remains inside keeping the water out. This is not what you want.

So what you do is heat the peanuts in water for a while, say about an hour. During this time, some gas escapes from the inside of the peanut. Then you let the peanuts cool. Because much of the gas escaped through the shell, when the peanuts cool back down, the gas contracts to occupy less space than originally needed. When this happens, an actual vacuum is created inside the peanut which sucks in that succulent salt water infused with all the flavoring of the peanut shells. Then you heat the suckers back up again and this time the peanuts inside the shell are bathed in a salty solution. As they heat up, they cook inside the little pressure cooker of the shell. Of course, the shells are somewhat permeable so the peanuts leak out a bit of the air and juice to avoid exploding.

So here's my recipe.

Get a bunch of fresh peanuts and wash off any dirt that's on them. A quick rinse will do. Don't get anal about this step.

Get a big pot and pour in a bunch of water and a bunch of salt and a dash or two of winegar. Then toss in the goobers and heat for 1 and 1/2 hours. Turn off the heat and remove from the burner and let the brew cool off for one hour. Then return to the burner and boil for another 1.5 hours.

You can eat the peanuts now.

Peanuts are best eaten with your hands. Squeeze the shell and the secret opening reveals itself. Pry the shell apart with your fingers and place the peanuts up next to your lips. With a loud slurping sound and a great sucking motion, the peanuts will fly out of their shell into your mouth. Munch them down quickly so that you can get another one up next to your lips before the flavor fades. You should repeat the process as fast as you can till you reach a state of life altering euphoria. If you're fast, you'll also eat more than the other fool slurping away across the table.

Hope this helps. I know it still takes 4 hours, but if you leave out the cool down step, the peanuts will still be hard as a rock after 4 hours and you will be abondoning science when you need it most.

So till next time.

It's been a while since I've posted so I thought I'd give it a go. I'm sitting here watching the Canes (short for Hurricanes) play the Oilers for the Stanley Cup. Normally I don't give a flying phooey about ice hockey, but every once in a couple of years a local team makes it to the latter stages of the play-offs and all of a sudden the whole Triangle is into hockey like a bunch of canucks.

It's just before the start of the third period of the second game. The Canes are up 3-0. They won the first game 5-4. Both of these games have been in the RBC center over in Raleigh. I'm a bit curious about this 3 period thing that they have in hockey. All the other sports seem to go in halves or quarters, there's a definitive half-time so you can sell some kick-ass advertising time. But not hockey. I guess I forgot about baseball. It's got nine innings. That's pretty odd too, I guess.

Well the third third has started and I have to go back to watching. Hockey is a low scoring game so you have to watch it intently to have any chance of seeing something happen in real time. Most of the time you just watch a lot of guys do a whole lot of random stuff. I think there are some rules but there doesn't seem to be any good reason have any. You can't watch and see any rules having any effect.

Crap. I missed it. The Canes just scored again. Oh no! They disallowed it. The guy kicked it in. Oh yes! They just allowed it again. You can't kick the puck into the goal but you can use your foot to deflect the puck into the goal. The consensus was that it was a deflection and the goal counts.

The Oilers are pissed and beginning to act nasty. Being down 4-0, they don't have much of a chance of pulling this out. So all they can get out of here with is a bit of flesh. One of the Oilers whacked a Cane up side the head and got put in the penalty box so the Canes get to play with an extra player for a couple of minutes. It's called a power play. Whoops! Carolina just scored again on the power play.

5-0

Back to full strength. Looking bad for the Oilers. I'm gonna quit writing and go back to watching. Oops. Those nasty oilers just whacked another Cane with a stick. On the replay it didn't look intentional. Back to another power play.

Gotta run. Go Canes.

Hi there,

For those that occasionally read my blog, I started a new job on Monday, April 10. I think I will like it but it will take a few weeks to work out the kinks. The name of the company is not very different from the name of the compan that I left. I believe there will be more difference than there is in the names.

Here's a new post for those that care. I'm trying to put in a clock. How boring is that?

Hi There Choir Music Singing Fans,

Let's say you're in a choir and you like to sing and you prefer to sing well or at least you prefer to hit the right notes and you don't know music like that smarty pants that always gets the right answer when you don't even understand the question. Well, you can learn music theory and learn to play a piano and punch out your part and try to sing along.

Or you can cheat. For myself, I prefer to cheat.

Thanks to the internet, there are lots of ways to cheat these days. You really don't have to know anything any more. You just type it into Google and there it is, all the answers you ever needed for all of life's questions.

For learning choral music, I found a neat little crutch that's almost as useful as letting Dale Bailey learn it first and just copying what he does. It's called the

"Silvis Woodshed"

It's a site with lots of midi files of lots of the music that we sing from time to time. Midi files are just files of notes and not the sound files like ".mp3's". and the good thing is that they only have the vocal parts so you don't have to listen to a bunch of strings while you try to figure out what part belongs to you. It's got Durufle's Ubi Carritas, Brukner's Christus factus est, even Bernstein's Chichester Psalms and, of course, Handel's Messiah among many others.

If you click on a file, most computers will go ahead and play it for you. If you want to get a little fancier, you can download the file and play it in one of the many players that are available. A few are suggested on the Silvis Woodshed website. You have to download and install them.

I like Melody Assistant. It's written by some French people and has way too many features which confuse me, but it does allow one to read in a midi file and easily adjust the volume of the various parts. The program can do lots of things and if you send them $20.00, they'll send you a secret code that let's you do even more.

Have fun.

As an added note, one of my fellow choir members had asked me just how to adjust the volumes of the various parts in Melody Assistant. I can never remember how but I can usually figure it out. What you do is click and drag on the little volume control icon running down the left side near the bottom. When you click down, the panel shows up. If you then drag across the page, it won't disappear when you release the mouse button. Here's a picture of this in action.

There are a lot of other sites where you can find choral music stiff. You can try

The Classical Music Archives

Or I like:

the Choral Public Domain Library

I found a .pdf file of the score of Bruckner's Christus factus est along with an different midi file.

So enough for now. Hope this helps.

OK, time for another post.

I recently found this bit of video on Google video. If you want to watch it you may have to download the video viewer. But it's worth it. I haven't laughed so hard in a long time.

Whale of a Story

Enjoy,

Later....

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.