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Sunday, April 9, 2000
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I want to be a kid
again!
I want to go back to the
time when...
Decisions were made by
going "eeny-meeny-miney-mo."
Mistakes were corrected by
simply exclaiming, "do over!"
"Race issue"
meant arguing about who ran the fastest.
Money issues were handled
by whoever was the banker in "Monopoly."
Catching the fireflies
could happily occupy an entire evening.
It wasn't odd to have two
or three "best" friends.
Being old, referred to
anyone over 20.
The net on a tennis court
was the perfect height to play volleyball and rules
didn't matter.
The worst thing you could
catch from the opposite sex was cooties.
It was magic when dad
would "remove" his thumb.
It was unbelievable that dodge ball
wasn't an Olympic event.
Having a weapon in school,
meant being caught with a slingshot.
Nobody was prettier than
Mom.
Scrapes and bruises were
kissed and made better.
It was a big deal to
finally be tall enough to ride the "big
people" rides at the amusement park.
Getting a foot of snow was
a dream come true.
Abilities were discovered
because of a "double-dog-dare."
Saturday morning cartoons
weren't 30-minute ads for action figures.
No shopping trip was
complete, unless a new toy was brought home.
"Oly-oly-oxen-free"
made perfect sense.
Spinning around, getting
dizzy and falling down was cause for giggles.
The worst embarrassment
was being picked last for a team.
War was a card game.
Water balloons were the
ultimate weapon.
Baseball cards in the
spokes transformed any bike into a motorcycle.
Taking drugs meant
orange-flavored chewable aspirin.
Ice cream was considered a
basic food group.
Older siblings were the
worst tormentors, but also the fiercest protectors.
If you can remember most
or all of these, then you have LIVED!
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[Sunday] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday]
[Friday] [Saturday]
Monday, April
10, 2000
I looks like I screwed up again. In fact,
you may not have seen the notes I posted for the last couple of
weeks. When I went in to change the auto forward tonight
because I had forgotten to when I posted yesterday I noticed it
was still forwarding to a notes page from March. No wonder
Bob Thompson was giving me a hard time when I saw him last week
for not posting. If you're interested, these are the notes
pages you missed.
Week of
April 2
Week of April 9 (this page)
Martinsville Speedway took the time to
honor two pioneers Winston Cup racing on Sunday, H. Clay Earles,
the founder of Martinsville Speedway and Lee Petty, winner of the
Daytona 500 and patriarch of the only four generation racing
family in NASCAR. Both men had reached the ripe age of 86 at
the time of their death. Earles dies last fall and Petty
left us last week.
I have fond memories of both men. Petty from
my days at STP where I was the senior coordinator of racing events
and Earles from my many visits to Martinsville Speedway. The
very first Winston Cup race I attended was at Martinsville 26
years ago and Earles and his family always made me feel
welcome. I waslucky to be on the inside and to have an
opportunity to know both men. Earles was ahead of his
time in the beautification of his track and in fan
amenities. I am proud his grandson, Clay Campbell has
continued the tradition of allowing the smallest track on the
circuit to really think like it was the biggest.
The speedway established the H. Clay Earles Award,
to be given to those who demonstrate the qualities of
honesty and hard work and who are dedicated to racing because of
their love for the sport. The first recipient was NASCAR president
Bill France Jr., whose father founded NASCAR 51 years ago.
If you want to use your internet connection to
skip around Ma Bell and make free long distance telephone calls,
there are a couple places on the web that claim they'll turn your
internet connection, sound card and microphone into a free long
distance telephone service.
Dialpad uses the java applet in your Internet Explorer or
Netscape Communicator browser to allow you to make unlimited long
distance calls within the US.
PhoneFree is similar, but requires you to download some
software to your PC.
There's news out there of another nasty virus
worm. The "911" virus has the reputation of
erasing files from your hard drive when it lands on your
system. In come instances it has started to make random
calls the the 911 emergency service. Symantec
has the scoop on this virus, known as BAT.Chode.Worm and has
updated its virus signatures to combat the nasty little batch
file.
The next turn in the Microsoft vs. the U.S.
Department of Justice ugliness may be to strip Microsoft of
the ability to market Internet Explorer, according to a story on
today's CBS MarketWatch. Supposedly, the ruling might be that Microsoft
has to grant royalty-free licenses to the product, opening its
secret underlying software code to customers and computer makers.
Microsoft is working on version
5.5 of Explorer and is already catching some heat on the beta
version of the new product.
Lee Iacocca, the man who saved Chrysler and
Dodge might be going online. Iacocca
is on the board of Online Asset Exchange and had an interesting Q
and A session with VARBusinessexecutive.
I
pulled out my mountain bike this evening...somewhat in an
attempt to get Suzy on the value I purchased for her at the
rummage sale, and found the gears are in some serious need of
adjusting. Naturally I went to the web to look for helpful
hints in making these adjustments, since I really don't understand
the gear and derailer mechanisms. Harris
Cyclery had some very helpful pages, including this very
informative page on derailer
adjustment.
[Sunday] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday]
[Friday] [Saturday]
Tuesday, April
11, 2000
City government never ceases to amaze me.
I accompanied Katie to her band practice at Old
Salem tonight and on the way there I encountered a full city work
crew working away on what appeared to be a water main break.
Of course after dropping her off I had to walk around the building
and investigate what was causing better than 20 city workers to be
out earning overtime. I thought it must be some huge water
main break. I was curious and had time to kill.
I was wrong. These men were out earning
their high dollar overtime pay, not to repair a broken water pipe
with gushing water, but were simply digging up the street to
replace an old 4 inch water pipe with a larger version. I
left the area shaking my head as I saw my tax dollars being eaten
up at night, wondering why this job couldn't be accomplished
during normal working hours. City government at its finest.
With the high flying valuations of dot com
companies on Wall Street today, here's a no brainer. Michael
Fleisher, President and CEO of the Gartner Group went out on a
limb to predict that "perhaps 95 to 98 percent" of all
dot com companies would fail within the next two years. Just
how long can these companies with no income or growth sustain the
inflated valuations that Wall Street has showered them with?
I agree, not very long. Invest your hard earned dollars in
companies with solid fundamentals like Microsoft, Intel and Cisco,
now that I am trying to give any investment advice.
The outlook for net retailers may be particularly
bad. Forrester, Inc. is predicting that many
will fail within a year.
[Sunday] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday]
[Friday] [Saturday]
Thursday, April
13, 2000
Winter has returned to Winston-Salem. It was
rainy today and down right cold. As Katie and I were driving
(actually I was driving and she was riding) to her school this
morning the radio weatherman forecast that we'd already seen our
high of the day (56º F) at midnight. He furthered our agony
by surmising the wind chill was somewhere in the 20's F.
It looks like I had picked an excellent day to
take my Fuji mountain bike in for a tune-up. I think I have
really screwed the gears up....or at least got them way out of
adjustment, so a trip to the bike doctor was in order. The
bike will be ready for pickup on Monday, so with a miserable
weekend looming, and Andrew off for a weekend sleepover and Katie
into who knows what, it looks like I have excellent timing.
Hopefully spring will return next week.
Here's an interesting link that accurately depicts
the cynicism of the American Way
There has been much debate about the 2000
census from and some of the questions asked on the form.
Enough of Big Government prying into our lives. Keep me out
of the databases, etc. However, the national census form did
not ask all of the questions that needed asking, at least in some
eyes, so the Southern Census
from was developed.
...and speaking of big government, how many are
burning the midnight oil preparing your 1999 taxes as the days
before deadline strike. My boss was talking about this chore
today. He's already completed his forms, but still has to
help his mother in-law and his two children. Thanks to Turbo
Tax, the chore was once again a breeze for me. I prepared my
return early, but waited a while before filing electronically.
Just as compact disc readers progressed over
time, the same thing is now happening to CD-writers. Heck, I
still have my original Sony single speed CD-ROM. It was kind
of orphan propriety SCSI system that would work only with the Sony
card. Then my first CD-writer was a 2X, followed by a 4X and
now I hear the CD-writer is getting quicker with the newest
models spinning at 12X. However, the re-writeable drives
are still mired at slower speeds. I assume this is because
they're actually writing twice. Once with a higher powered
laser to erase the original date, followed by the lower powered
write process. Beyond this, I'm probably getting in over my
head.
You have a laser printer and a color ink jet in
your printing arsenal, but you really want to print something as
large as ledger paper in color. In the past, unless you had
some high end office system or plotter you were stuck.
However Hewlett Packard has answered the call. First they
came with a ink jet that could accommodate ledger paper, but now
have raced past that idea with the new HP
1220C. This monster will handle printing jobs as small
as 4 x6 inches up to 13 x 50 inch banner.
There may be another player in the broadband
market sneaking up on the telephone and cable companies.
These two giants have been getting all of the press in their
struggle for dominance, but there may be another player. The
media companies, who need the larger pipes to deliver their product
may not be waiting on these two industries to duke it out.
The media
giants may be taking the route of developing their own system,
according to the story from C|Net.
By the time the dog days of summer roll around we
may be dipping our toes in the broadband waters. I have this
acquaintance at Time Warner who I see at the Winston Cup races
from time-to-time. We were talking about The Winston today
and he mentioned that my neighborhood could be getting
Time-Warner's RoadRunner service by the end of May. I've got
to talk with him some more and maybe he'll help me get a static IP
address. I think they are in the habit of only issuing dynamic
IP addresses. Supposedly all of the cable is in place and
they're just waiting for some head end equipment.
With this news I naturally called BellSouth to
inquire once again about ADSL and I got just the answer I was
expecting. An order taker reading from a script. I
could have told him everything he told me, even that BellSouth's
Fast Access service was not available for my phone numbers.
When I asked him if he had any idea when BellSouth
may be upgrading the cabinets my phone lines come out of I had
just as well been speaking a foreign language. It was
entertaining if nothing else.
I thought it was amusing yesterday when it
was announced that Unilever was buying bother SlimFast and Ben and
Jerry's ice cream. Now, when you put on a few too many
pounds eating the ice cream, Unilever can offer you the diet
program that'll help take it off. Got both ends of the
market covered, here.
If you're interested in following cases
that have made it all the way to the Supreme
Court you will have a new tool beginning next week. On
Monday the Supreme Court goes online, offering online court
decisions, weekly orders granting and denying new appeals,
schedule and argument calendar and more.
Got this interesting message from Barbara Thompson
[barbara@ttgnet.com]
today:
A cute web site along the same lines
as your posting on Sunday: I want to be a kid again! http://studsys.mscs.mu.edu/~merz/signup/where_do_i_sign_up.html
Suitable for kids and adults
Thanks.
[Sunday] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday]
[Friday] [Saturday]
Friday, April
14, 2000
This could be why Microsoft is having a round with
the Justice Department. Supposedly the some sarcastic MS
engineer poked a little jab at Netscape when developing
the code for some web site authoring software. The jab
turned out to be more than fun, it was a security hole that would
allow users to hack into web sites. This secret backdoor included
the words "Netscape engineers are weenies!" Microsoft
sucked it up and acknowledged it was there, but claimed it
causes no security concerns. What else would you expect them
to say?
Andrew is off to his weekend sleepover, so Katie
and Suzy enjoyed dinner out and then a quick in a local department
store where she conned us out of a new pair of athletic shoes and
some costume jewelry. We are such fish. Or maybe it
was because it's still very cold here and it was warm in the
store. When I raised the question of the shoe purchase, Suzy
justified everything with a reminder that she hadn't had any new
tennis shoes in a couple of years. Got to have a good
excuse.
[Sunday] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday]
[Friday] [Saturday]
Saturday, April
15, 2000
If today was any other day but today we'd be
heading to the post office to mail our taxes, but our federal
government is of such a kind and gentle nature that we get a
couple days break because our tax day falls on a Saturday and the
government don't work on a Saturday or Sunday. Therefore,
make sure those tax forms are postmarked by midnight Monday, April
17.
I remember one year I was in Los Angeles for a
soccer event we were sponsoring with the Camel brand. The
games were at the Los Angeles Coliseum and I usually stayed at the
airport Marriott. I was heading back to the hotel late one
evening when I ran into a major traffic jam as I got within about
three miles of the airport exit. I couldn't figure out what
was going on until I finally got to the hotel and discovered there
was a post office directly across from the hotel and it was April
15. I have paid close attention to April 15 since that time.
I have mentioned several times that the
free search engine service Atomz has sent me a couple pleas to
begin paying for their indexing service because my site has
surpassed 500 pages. First, it was hard for me to imagine
that this site has eclipsed that mark and second, I don't really
want to send them any cash.
In the mean time I have run across another free
indexing service, freefind.com
and am considering using this service for my site. The
drawback to this service is they splash an ad on the results page,
but they do give you a chance to include your logo on the results
page as well. Their html will allow you to incorporate links
in your search that allow users to search your site or the entire
web. I've allowed their robot to index my site and am
thinking about going to the next step.
Freefind's spider reported that it found 779 pages
on my site. That blows me away. Maybe I should
consider deleting some of the older pages. I am sure I am
wasting some valuable disk space on the web server at pair.com.
I also received this very interesting email on the
subject of search engines last night. It appears someone in
France is trying to develop a site that lists a ton of search
pages, presumably to get this page and hit count up so more can be
charged for advertising. Advertisers are not that dumb and
will eventually figure out these numbers have been artifically
inflated and that in itself will drive the rates down.
Hello!
Let me introduce myself.
My name is Pj duvivier, and you can
contact me at worldlinker2@worldonline.fr.
I am the webmaster of http://www.worldlinker.net
This site contains 1000 search
engine in the world and I search specialized guide or
specialized web page over all the subject.
I have the project to add a link to
your site, to the following page: http://www.wakeolda.com/search/search_eng.htm.
The link is added in a temporaly
files
Just to make sure I've got things
right, I have the title of your page as Search Engines, and the
description as
.
If any of this is incorrect, or you
would like me to link to a different page on your site, let me
know and I'll change your link.
You will find the link to your page
on my site at: http://worldlinker.bizland.com/fav6.html.
If you accept to link back your next
location will be http://worldlinker.bizland.com/favorite.html
or http://worldlinker.bizland.com/favorite2.html
You might be wondering why I did
this.
I want you to link to me.
So I linked to you first.
Why do I want you to link to me?
I'm trying to get links to my page
to increase traffic to my web site. If you place a link to my
site on yours, this will help do this in two ways:
1) Of course, with a link on your
site, people will once in a while click it, and come to my site.
2) Many of the search engines are
using the number of links to a page in their formula to rank the
page, and by getting more links to my page, I'll be in a better
position in the search engines, and get more traffic.
By the way, by linking to you, I've
already done these two things for you.
Please let me know whether you'll
link to me or not, so I can make adjustments to my links page.
If you can't put a link,
Thank you for time spent reading
this message
Best regards,
Pj duvivier
worldlinker2@worldonline.fr
Ps : you can forward this mail to
someone who can be interested ! you have my 468*60 banner here :
<a HREF="http://worldlinker.bizland.com"><IMG
SRC="http://worldlinker.bizland.com/banner.gif"
width="468" height="60"></a>
and my 120*71 banner here :
<a href="http://worldlinker.bizland.com"><img
src="http://worldlinker.bizland.com/pub2worldlinker2.gif"
height="71" width="120" ></a>
I am open to any suggestion ......
Your Email Adress is not recorded on
any Mailing List and you will receive only one time this
message.
You might consider concentrating on origianl
content on your site to build sustainable traffic!
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