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Sunday, April 16, 2000
Katie continues to do well as a first year band
student with her choice of the flute.
She's taking beginning band at school, but has
also enrolled in a beginning band class taught on Tuesday evenings
by Home Moravian Church. Normally the beginning band is
scheduled for an hour once a week. About half-way through
the season she started taking the second year class in addition to
the beginning class.
She had a goal when she started with the second
year classes. She wants to play in the band at the Easter
Sunrise service at Old
Salem. I think we need to have her examined! In
order to play in the Easter sunrise, besides being able to play
the music, she has to meet at the church just after
midnight. From there, the different bands go through the neighborhoods
playing Easter music before meeting at Home Moravian Church
somewhere around 3 AM. Then it's to enjoy a good ole North Carolina
breakfast of eggs, country ham and probably grits. I have
suggested to Katie that she pack herself a breakfast she'll like,
'case by this time she will need the energy! She has since
reported they'll also have doughnuts at breakfast, she thinks just
for her!
Nancy Renn, a friend who also plays in the
Moravian band and has many years experience at these Easter
sunrise services, has volunteered to take Katie under her
wings. We grateful for Nancy's offer and I'm sure it won't
take Katie long to become an ol' pro at this Easter morning thing.
We'll later join the thousands who assemble in
Salem square for this service. After the words have been
proclaimed and the crowd moves toward the graveyard we'll be
scoping out the location of Katie's band and then try to stake a
place in her section.
I'll let you know how we come out next week.
After her Easter experience, she's making plans to
attend a one day band camp at Appalachian State University.
She even wants to play a flute solo and maybe a trio with some of
her school friends in the competition. Suzy and I marvel at
her progression and often wonder where she's gotten this
confidence. She thinks nothing of playing in front or crowds
or, for that matter, taking on public speaking roles. We are
very proud of her to say the least.
[Sunday] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday]
[Friday] [Saturday]
Monday, April
17, 2000
We're getting a major afternoon thunderstorm here
in Winston-Salem. I wonder how many are dashing to the post
office this evening to drop those last minute tax returns while
getting pelted with major rain drops. We got a good soaking
leaving the Four Way Restaurant...and I had the wisdom to carry in
an umbrella.
I received an interesting solicitation in the
snail mail today. It was a solicitation from e|nic to
register the domain wakeolda.cc. I find this interesting
because Wakeolda is not a common name. It's the name I have
registered for this site. This tells me some direct marketer
is mining the database at network solutions and grabbing our
registered domains and our mailing addresses and then sending us
junk mail to solicit us to register another domain. And all
they want for this service is a measly $100. And I'm not
even sure if you get the domain for a full two years like most of
have come to expect with an internic registration.
In the letter they really try the hard sell,
attempting to entice you that dot-cc is the fastest growing other
top level domain in the world. And that major companies
within the United States have already grabbed dot-cc
domains. They mention Intel, Amazon, United Parcel Service,
Coca-Cola and Goodyear by name.
The funny thing is a local radio station for the
past several months has been running some heavy promotion for the
dot-cc registrations. Both WTQR
(FM) and sister station WSJS (AM)
have a deal with spot to register dot-cc domains at $100 a crack.
I was curious about this dot-cc thing so I asked
Bob Thompson about it when we were visiting the other night.
I had assumed it was the domain of some small country that may not
have many computers. He first response was similar, but went
one step further. He looked up the top level domain dot-cc
in the ISO (International Organization for Standardization)
country codes data base. CC is reserved for Cocos (Keeling)
Islands.
Easter is coming later this year...it feels
like it's almost a month late. Do you wonder how the date of
Easter is determined each year? I did and found this
interesting page at the US Naval Observatory that tells
you all about the timing of Easter. Easter will be on
April 15 next year.
[Sunday] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday]
[Friday] [Saturday]
Thursday, April 20,
2000
BellSouth has very benevolently out of the blue
sent an email saying my account now contains five email
address at no additional charge. In the past they had
charged $2.95 for each additional mailbox, which was one of the
things I disliked about their service. I wanted a mailbox
for Katie, Andrew and Suzy and in the past had to search around
for a free mailbox service in which they could pop their own
email. Inevitably when I would find one and have them setup
the provider would change its mind after a few months and want to
start charging, which sent me on the search for another free
service.
The word must be getting out on competition and
I'll bet Time-Warner must offer more than one mailbox with their
cable modem service. It can't be coincidence that just as
Time-Warner is getting ready to offer me RoadRunner cable modem
access that BellSouth would throw this bone. I would rather
they spent their energy on making my line ADSL compatible.
I set up a BellSouth mailbox for everyone and now
have to go into my setup at pair and change the auto forward to
make their mail point to their aliased mailbox at BellSouth and
then change outlook to pop from BellSouth. A small Easter
weekend project.
I told Katie tonight the weatherman had
changed the forecast for Easter morning and dropped his low
temperature prediction even lower. The low is now supposed
to be around 40 degrees. Her comment: "You didn't
have to tell me that." To which I responded, "I'm
telling you to make sure you take a heavy coat and gloves.
It'll be cold at daybreak when you're standing out there playing
your flute."
WinZip is now up to version 8. You
can download the Beta 3
copy here. Some of the enhancements include the ability
to have all downloaded files automatically copied from the web
browser's temporary folders to a folder your system. The
updated zip/unzip engine has automatic disk spanning support for
multi-disk Zip files.
Microsoft Project 2000 is now available for
a 60 day trial. Download from Microsoft's Project
2000 site.
C|Net has spent some time putting CD-RWs
through the paces and offers the top-5
drives in their opinion. I wasn't surprised to see two
Hewlett Packard drives make their top list, but was somewhat
surprised there was no mention of Plextor. Maybe they were
reviewing consumer drives and the tank-like Plextor models are
built for the more intensive professional market.
Bob Thompson mentioned on his page earlier this
week that he had received some spam, appearing to be from the BMG
music club. I received the same e-mail, but didn't think
much of it until today when I received this in my inbox
today. I didn't think much of yesterday's spam since we had
once subscribed to BMG.
Dear STEVE,
We appreciate your subscription to
Adelphia Cable TV. In the future, we would like to communicate
with you via e-mail regarding your account with us and/or
information about products or services that may be of interest
to you.
If you do not wish to have Adelphia
Cable contact you via e-mail, or you have received this
communication in error, please type "REMOVE" in the
Subject Line and reply to this E-mail and your name will be
deleted from our E-mailing list.
Thank you again for your business.
Sincerely,
Your friends at Adelphia Cable
The interesting thing is that I am not a Adelphia
Cable subscriber that I know of. I am a subscriber on the
Time-Warner system and I haven't heard anything about a acquisition
or merger with another system.
[Sunday] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday]
[Friday] [Saturday]
Friday, April
21, 2000
Today felt like Saturday. Our company is one
of those in the bible belt which chooses to close both on Good
Friday and Easter Monday. I took advantage of the day by
deciding to clean out the garage. The only way to spring
clean this catch all room is to remove everything and then decide
what can go back in. I elected not to move the freezer!
In this clean out I was able to come up with a
couple of bags that can head off to Goodwill Industries tomorrow.
The biggest problem is storing all of the bicycles we have
accumulated. For a family of four we have six bicycles in
the garage. This count includes two smaller ones from Katie
and Andrew's younger years. Actually, Katie's was an
intermediate bike, but Andrew's is the one that started out with
training wheels (I threw those away today. Have no idea why
I had been saving them.). I thought we would be able to get
rid of this little bike when his shiny new one (with front and
back pegs) arrived at Christmas, but the small has remained as his
"trick" bike. The neighborhood kids have devised
their own ramp by nailing a plank to a piece of fireplace
wood. I'm just waiting for someone to bust their backside
while trying to mimic what they've seen on ESPN2.
I think we about to the point where an outdoor
storage building is in our future. The lawn mowing equipment
will be an easy move, but I am sure I meet more resistance when I
try to move the cache of bikes.
It seems that Intel is having some trouble meeting
demand for its chips. This was seen as a negative this week
by Wall Street and Intel stock did nor climb on good earnings
news, blamed on their struggle to meet demand. May AMD's two
day head start on the 1 gig processor had something to do with
this as well.
A fallout from this happening is also the delay in
shipping
633 MHz and 667 MHz Celerons. These ship date for these
processors has been delayed until at least June.
This should not come as any big surprise.
When the state attorney generals sued the tobacco industry and the
industry settled the action out of court, the windfall was
supposed to be used to fund health related issues and anti-smoking
education programs. It shouldn't come as any surprise that
as the billions started flowing to the states, the lawyers were
first in line at the cashier's window and very
little has been used for the purpose in which the suits were filed.
I requested
FreeFind to spider my site again today and have setup its
controls to automatically catalog the site on a more frequent
basis. I was surprised to learn that this little personal
site has grown so much. Here's the report from the FreeFind
spider:
Your site has been spidered.
Our search engine has finished
indexing your site:
Url: http://www.wakeolda.com/
E-mail: steve@wakeolda.com
Pages indexed: 779
And Bob Thompson [thompson@ttgnet.com]
shed some light on why no Plextor drive may have mentioned in the
C|Net review of CD-RW drives I posted yesterday.
CNET is
advertising-supported and takes paid placements.<snip>
[Sunday] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday]
[Friday] [Saturday]
Saturday, April
22, 2000
When I woke up this morning I was greeted with the
live
breaking news from CNN that our United States jack booted
government thugs had stormed the home where little Elian Gonzalez
was held up with relatives, broke down doors and snatched the
little boy to return him to his father in the Washington, DC area.
From the pictures I saw on television this
operation looked more than a pre-dawn drug bust than an immigration
operation.
What I can't understand is how this one case has
earned the full power of the United States government behind
it? It's consumed our news for the last five months.
Silly me....I must have had my head in the
sand. This has nothing to do with immigration. This
has nothing to do with our non-relations with that little island
south of Florida. This has nothing to do with reuniting a
child who watched his mother die with his natural father.
It's politics at the Clinton administration's worst. And we
thought we had already this gang of Washington thugs stoop to
their lowest. We hadn't seen anything yet. This poor
child is being used as a political ping pong ball by both
sides....the Washington politicians as well as the family he is
staying with in Florida. The boy is the loser here.
There are no winners.
Unfortunately the news media is keeping this story
above the fold. How many times has a similar situation taken
place with those from a foreign land trying to immigrate to the
USA? Did they receive the full force of the U.S. Government?
I will admit there is one bit of difference. We don't
exactly have normal relations with Cuba.
It wouldn't surprise me if Mr. Clinton didn't use
this boy and this political hot potato to reunite some sort of
normalized relations with Cuba. Maybe it's about creating a
legacy for himself that would overshadow the one Monica Lewinsky
has provided him with?
One thing is for certain. Don't take what's
happening at face value. The Clinton gang has a plan, this
little boy is a part of it and it is NOT what it seems like on the
surface.
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