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.

Busy day. Sang "Lo, How a Rose 'er Blooming" in church this morning. Then came home, ate lunch, read some of the paper, put the Christmas decorations on the roof, went to Henderson, NC to sing a Christmas concert and came home about 10:30. It's after midnight and I'm tired and going to bed.

Well, another day.

I don't think that I mentioned that my wife, my daughter and I went to see Oklahoma at Memorial Autitorium over in Raleigh on Thursday night. It was pretty good. This isn't a review column so that's all I'll say.

It was a busy day. My daughter had two friends over for a sleep-over on Friday night. I had to get up and cook some bacon for them so that we could provide some semblance of hospitality.

Then at 10:30, my son and I had to be off to choir practice. We sing with the NC Boys Choir in the associated chamber choir. It's a variety of high school and college kids and a few older farts who have or have had kids that sing in the boys choir plus a few others. After practice, we immediately left for Pinehurst to sing in a concert. Pinehurst is a pretty neat little town. It's a golf/retirement community. What that means in this case is that it's an tony little town which requires that you have a lot of money to hang out. The concert went pretty well. We were getting a little weak at the end. We sing "Beautiful Savior" near the end and Bill, the director, sends the kids out along the sides of the church to sing this. It sounded real nice until the very last note, when you heard this horrible discordance in the pitch. Everyone said the sopranos, in this case a bunch of little boys, went sharp. It sounded strange. We finished with the Halelujah Chorus from the Messiah. It sounded a little rugged in places. Everyone's voices are worn out and we got a little separated in the middle. I'd rather not sing it. I like ending with the rather mellow Gaelic Blessing by John Rutter. Oh well.

Then we drove home.

Well, another day has passed and I'm writing in my blog. That's two days in a row. Good start.

I wrote yesterday about trying to learn to use the Eclipse IDE to, once again, learn java, the programming language. As usual, there was a nightmare involved in setting a path variable so the operation environment would know where something it needs is hiding. I finally figured out how to make it work. I gooogled "eclipse swt tutorial" (parentheses not used) and got a tutorial from some university in Manitoba that went into some detail on how to get around the problem that would certainly be encountered. Basically it all stems from the heavy Unix influence of all this stuff. I don't know if I could have ever gotten that variable laden string thing to work but I got it to work by pasting in the path to the folder needed. The trick, that was revealed in the Manitoba tutorial is that any space in the path has to be put in quotes. So (C:\Program Files\blah) has to be (C:\Program" "Files\blah). I think it was deliberate attempt to frustrate Windows users who would certainly put the program in a place that by default had a space in the name.

On another note, I got an email from someone in Germany interested in purchasing a reactor from my company. I don't know much about the how's of international sales so I called my local SBTDC office to schedule some time to figure out if there are any gotcha's that I need to know about. That's at 10:00 this morning, so I had better go take a shower and shave.

Bye for now.

Well, it's December 2, 2004 and I don't have a job and my company isn't making much money. For the thousandth time in my life, I've decided to try to write in my blog every day. It used to be that I thought it would be useful to keep a journal. It's the same thing now, only it's called a blog and it's public for anyone to see. Except that it's very private cause nobody really cares to look at it. It's like putting your credit card number in the middle of pi to 37,000 places and putting it on a billboard.

My topic today is short but hits on a recurring theme. Over the years, I've tried to learn to program. I've learned a little of a lot of languages. I got pretty good at Visual Basic. But I always wanted to learn Java. The problem is that every time I've gotten started it's always a hassle getting started.

The problem might have something to do with the fact that java runs on a lot of hardware using a virtual machine and for that reason there is some need to understand the generic glue that binds it to any specific operating system. The generic glue is setting the paths and this is where any tutorial goes from straightforward to bizarre.

So I was excited to try out Eclipse 3.0 as a new IDE, which stands for "something" develoment envoronment. It has some nice tutorials to help you get started. That's when it get humorous and frustrating. The tutorials work just like you want them too. They start with a very simple program and lead you through, hitting buttons and filling in a trivial amount of info. The first tutorial works fine and the program runs. That's great!

So you go to the next tutorial and you hit buttons and do trivial things and everything looks fine until they tell you to open a window and type in this:

-Djava.library.path=${system:ECLIPSE_HOME}/plugins/org.eclipse.swt.${system:WS}
_3.0.0/os/${system:OS}/${system:ARCH}

What the hell is this? Well it's a very cryptic way to set the path to the library they've used in the example, I think. Only you do it and it doesn't work. You can see one error already. You're using 3.0.1 not 3.0.0. So you change that and "nope."

So rather than typing in all the variables (which is what I think those dollar thingys are), you try the real path to where the libraries are. Nope. And you notice that the error says something about the path not fouud, but in the error statement you see that the variables get set to something reasonable but that every dot of the 3.0.0 (or 3.0.1) is turned into a slash and there are some forward slashes and backwards slashes. And you can't even figure out what the devil to do or who to turn to. So you go to the Eclipse site and the first thing you see is a link to some lecture by Eric Raymond, self-appointed god of open source stuff, on asking intelligent questions. And, god forbid, you don't want anyone to know you're an idiot so you are scared to ask why this stupid open source program can't just put in, by default, some mechanism whereby you can just navigate to the file and have the stupid path typed in like you can with software that you pay for. That's the problem with this open source stuff and in fact with the whole IT world in general. They want to make it just hard enough to do things, so that people who have a clue about how computers can be useful in other fields have to jump through hoops to get in the club and forget why they wanted to join in the first place.

Maybe I'll figure it out. I'll let you know.