Cut The Body Loose!

From time to time someone I work with encourages me to think about becoming a Comedian.  He thinks I am hilariously funny and suggests it is because I was 48 years in Canada before moving here.  He isn’t alone, my Dentist and his staff look forward to my visits, and are ready for a good laugh as I amuse then a lot.  At my church I am the lead jester for sure, and have been introduced there as the resident comedian.

So I have lately been actually thinking of becoming a Comedian, wondering if that is my calling.  I realized right away that self employed Comedians don’t have health insurance as a rule, or disability insurance unless they can buy it, dont have preexisting conditions, and can afford it.  My mind leapt ahead as it does, and I wondered how would a Comedian need to collect on disability insurance?  Of course!  If a Comedian loses his sense of humor, then obviously he is disabled.

So now, picture the diagnostic tests which the psychiatric professionals will want to use in order to determine if someone has truly lost all of their sense of humor!  Would they hire clowns and comedians to perform, show the subject old 3 Stooges films and Monty Python files, Laugh In, I Love Lucy, Jerry Seinfeld?  With the subject all wired up to a lie detector looking for any response to punch lines?

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The subject line above paraphrases what I asked EJ today once I got him to call me back.  I’ve been leaving voice mails and sending text messages to no avail.  Something about another phone he says but apparently I can’t call it.  EJ has this very long religious message full of meaning to him and worth a couple minutes of airtime for me.

Well, EJ didn’t want to bother me if I was busy and was waiting for me to call – except for some reason he never got the other messages and texts I left.  Now he is out of the box until the middle of the month then he will call me back.

So after I run EJ down I get home tonight and fire up the laptop to discover that I haven’t blogged here in many months now.  So, I ought to answer the same question for the reader now that I “axed” of EJ.

Last night I attended the First Annual Netty Awards sponsofred by NET2NO.  I was pleased to accept a nice paper certificate saying I was a NET2NO Beer Sponsor and some Mardi Gras Beer Mugs Beads around my neck.  Computerrific Technology had sponsored the NET2NO Meetup Group in January 2009.

Other than that, I continue to be quite far behind with bookkeeping tasks, gardening, cleaning and selling off unused items of little sentimental value.   Between all of that, working my day job, running Computerrific Technology and participating in Religious and Social organizations – I really haven’t been able to blog much.

So tonight I figured I’d post something and here it is, just for the fun of it, before I settle down to work in my home office

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Listen! This is really important and stunning in the brilliance of its simplicity.

Keystroke loggers are software programs that spy on your keyboard by tracking which keys you press and seding that stream over the inernet back to a data collection node. They are usually installed via a trojan horse in the form of some tempting free software or even free pornography.

There is only one way to protect yourself from this form of snooping and that is to bring your own keyboard with you whereever you use a computer. You need first to rotate all of the keycaps, gently prying them off and reattaching them to a random key postion. This has the effect of encoding what you are typing since the keystroke logging software can’t know what letters are printed on your keycaps now that you have mixed them all up.

It does take quite a long time to get familiar with your new scrambled keyboard, but perservere and you will eventually regain nearly your full former typing speed.

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Before you blame poor Veronica White, pause a moment to see this situation is not as Black and White as it first seems.  It seems fairly obvious to this writer that a communications breakdown  caused White, who just happens to be Black, to make the apparently Black Racist release of White City Council members’ emails.  I can easily imagine the outside agitator asking for “copies of White’s Emails” and Miss Veronica thinking she was giving out only copies of her own emails, the Veronica White Emails.  Little would she know if some Black Hearted IT geek, the same one who deleted all of Mayor Nagin’s emails, deliberately included all the emails from all the White members of City Council, not just Veronica White’s email.  I think Miss Veronica is just an innocent bystander, as usual, and neither a part of the problem nor its solution.  My impression that this was the work of a Black Racist outside agitator is because there was no similar Black Mail attempt made by the outsider.

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It seems to me with growing frequency that much of what some people call religion is indistinguishable (in this life) with superstition.  Neither superstition nor religious belief is provable by measurement or statistics.

I think superstition whenever some belief only works if the believer “has faith”.  Nothing wrong with an informed and examined faith, but frankly some of the things many religions would have us believe on blind faith alone are really quite preposterous and unlikely.  Creationism in the strict seven days work done 6000 years ago variety of the religious far right seems to me to be such a superstition, certainly not a science at all.

Here we have come to Darwins’ 200th birthday this month, and don’t you know it but that Mr. Jindal’s solidarity with the religious right caused him not to veto the Science Education Act last year.  Now that act is causing loss of revenues in Louisiana and also impeding Science in Louisiana.  One national group of biological scientists, The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology,  has canceled their significant convention here, and other groups of scientists are speaking out as well on web sites and blogs.

Geez Louise, evolution has evidence to support its theory all around us.  It is a theory, but a well suppported scientific theory of the type science treats as true until or if later proven false.  A theory that has withstood years of research and questioning by the same biologists who cancelled their conference here in New Orleans.

Creationism or Intelligent Design has zero science involved, there is no growing body of evidence to support it.  In fact evidence says it cannot be as the Earth is more than 6000 years old for a start.  It points to the Bible for proof, which one must then first try to translate in the correct context and then also must believe on faith alone (blind faith I think) in the Bible as the inherrent word of God.  This is just as silly as the flat earth thing folks, although the flat earth theory had no big religious meaning behind it.

Now, if somebody wants to believe that God created everything in seven days is a metaphor for God or a Higher Power or Nature guiding evolution or setting it in motion, no problem.  To stand in the way of Science though, to harm Science and attempt to change its results to fit a superstition, those who do this should be ashamed of themselves.  Talk about sore losers.  But, you see, if Creationism isn’t “literal” about the seven days and the 6000 years ago, then all kinds of other things in the Bible likely aren’t literal either, it all falls more suspect and needs close inpection.

Mr. Jindal is an educated man and knows better, he should have vetoed the bill last year and needs to see it gets rescinded.

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Are you good?  More than simply checking for good behavior , being good has now come to include the status and condition of our life,.  Are our needs and perhaps some wants met?  Are we are hale and hearty?  Satisfied with our lot, and prepared for tomorrow and our future?  Then you are good.

So what about your investments?  You good?  Nearly every person I speak to says their net worth took a hit in 2008, usually by the falling housing market and the stock market 401K’s got hit too.  What will 2009 bring, other than the job losses we see in the first half at least?  Will our economy bottom and bounce a litte up again this year? Is it time to double down on our equity investments yet?  I mean, if you are going to buy low, then we must be getting to the time to buy soon with these record lows.

What about those job losses?  I guess a lot of folks will be forced into early retirement.  Some of these might actually afford to retire, others will want to work albeit perhaps less than full time or for less than previous pay at less demanding jobs.  One thing I experienced in Calgary in the early 90’s economic bust there was that enemployed people with bills to pay soon become very entrepreneurial as it is one of very few things you can do to survive or even thrive without a job.  Have you got a plan to retire, to scale back, or to get entrepreneurial if the ecomony doesn’t provide a traditional job?

Comments welcome, are you good?

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Several thousand unique threads of fact, opinion or thought, delivered in the form of emails, txts, sms, im, www, face, voice, video links come rushing at us every day.  Life is so much more complex this way than when our anscestors sat in trees or caves and grunted shreiked or grunted their joys and frustrations.

Takes hurricanes, they used to just whack us – we once had no forecasts or satelite photos.  No warning or even acknowledgement that it was only a hurricane was given  in the middle of the thing, our anscestors had no way to even know the storm would sometime end.

Todays ecomonic rush to the bottom is in my mind like droughts and pestulance must have been for our ancestors.  An attack on crops (income) or wealth (stored crops) to threaten securtity.  It is a problem that most of us did not really see coming, if we are honest with ourselves.  At least even the best of us did not know the timing.  How did our ancestors deal with problems they couldn’t forecast or predict?

So today the problems we solve are ones where we have no shortage of different opinions and ideas, forecasts, projections, pundits advice columns, etc.  We often today can even manage to understand and model the effect of solving one problem in different ways would have on the outcome of the other problems!  What has stayed constant is that some members of our tribe, party, clan or neighborhood have done well enough to help lift us all.

The thing I notice about Obama and other successful folks is that they are seldom found idle, usually they are busy working in every “spare” moment, especially when the work consists of thinking and communicating.  So this is how I feel I am motivated by our new President, to get busy and to do whatever small part I can towards fixing problems of the country.  All our ability to forecast and understand the future outcome of our actions will only move us forward if our leaders still continue to make a constant effort and not grow idle or get stuck on some single thing.

Incidently, I slept for 16 hours earlier this weekend, so NOW I am kicking into gear.  Yes, I see the irony in that.

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We must greaten Greater New Orleans, and it will take a lot of greatening.

Now we have a President who will keep the broken promises though, so I hope (pray) for first class levies and rebuilding wet lands.

I savor the idea that something might actually get fixed up here after people aren’t worried about the levies.

I find that it also motivates me personally to “greaten” a few things in my life, to do stuff and checki it off, to move forward.

What can we, you and I, do to help greaten Greater New Orleans?

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I had cause to sit for hours in a no cell phone, no laptop, no drink, no food, no television government waiting room yesterday all through the inauguration.  That was after dumping of pockets and being scanned.  Bathrooms needed persmission and a key.  No reading material other than a few government pamphets provided.

I’m not expecting luxurious waiting rooms, but in the name of security this is just not justified.  Airport flight gates are secure, and people there are allowed cell phones, computers, a cup of coffee or drink of water or a snack and unimpeded access to a restroom.  Thank goodness I quit smoking, other captives in the room were jonesing for a smoke bad.

This government waiting room was federal, and was serving citizens who had paid taxes supporting this office all their lives, had committed no crime or wrong doing.  Now we were also having to pay an expensive lawyer to do our business, in effect it was us in the waiting room that were having to pay for both sides of this process.  Why does the government have to go and lock us down like we are criminals or hostages, cut us off from the outside world, deny us a simple cup of coffee or soda?  The government employees at least got breaks and maybe even a glimpse of outside news, but the citizen clients did not.  In fact, I found myself making change so that civil servants could pay for the delivered lunch they took behind closed doors and ate at lunchtime.  All of us in the waiting room just had to forget about getting any lunch at all.

There were two classes of people in the room, lawyers and the rest of us.  The paperwork process had been made so confusing that even college graduates needed a lawyer to figure it out.  You could tell the lawyers from the rest of us right away as the lawyers all wore expensive looking shoes and clothing and sort of herded the rest of us through the system like cattle.  It felt like unless you were a lawyer or worked for the government, you were just a sack of meat being punished by the exceedingly long wait in a holding area devoid of any way to spend your time productivity while waiting for other people to reach some result.

So for the entire inauguration I had to sit and twiddle my thumbs while studying the photos of Bush and Cheney still up on the wall while the rest of the country gathered at computers,  televisions and radios even in many workplaces.

I remembered Reagan saying “Take down that wall!” and I wanted to shout “Take down those photos!” because after eight years it feels like we are toppling a wall.  The iron curtain has moved, no longer running through the middle of Germany.  Now days the iron curtain is in front of the entrances to federal government holding cells, err, waiting rooms for ordinary citizens.  When you cross that threshhold you are no longer an adult, a citizen, a person of free will.  Now you can’t even make a phone call or have a drink of water.

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Twice today I had reason to be walking a couple blocks West of the CCs Coffee House at 2800 Esplanade.  On the corner there is some sort of Indian place, a temple of some kind is my guess, followed by guessing an ashram, a community center  or perhaps just a house where many Indians in white robes live.  I remember occupants had long hair and beards starting to turn grey, and white robes.

So then the next thing is that this place is on a corner lot, and out at the corner in the middle of the sidewalk from both directions, carefully centered on a circular metal cover for I’m guessing a water main stood — wait for it — a half a jar on Dill Pickles looking fairly fresh and with the lid on tight.  And the smiling Indian gentleman in the white robe bobbed his head up and down at us and smiled each time we passed the pickle jar.

So here I am now, deciding what to make of the pickles over the flowing water main on the crossroads in front of the Ashram on January 2, 2009.

While searching for pickle ritual, pickle worship, pickle India and so forth I had cause to wonder, I know this will seem silly, but was teh smiling head bobbing man in white robes Indian or perhaps was he Chinese?  Was he Buddist?  I just don’t know, but its amazing how several witnesses to a scene will remember it differently.  I did find pickle rituals, pickle worship, pickle wate, pickle India links on the web of course, quite a time sink there.  Perhaps you’d be interested in The Pickle Water Festival?  http://pics.livejournal.com/frla/pic/000119a9/

Meanwhile I haven’t found any reallyt compelling information so I guess I will just assign the most likely scenario I can think of.  I’ll guess that the half jar of pickles centered over flowing water was an offering to some sort of Indian Deity.

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A lot of people would have blogged on Jan 31 about 2008.  A lot of people would have blogged on Jan 1 about 2009 and resolutions.  I waited until Jan 2 to do anything about blogging my thoughts, which says a lot about how quickly I accept change.  Its not so much procrastination as that it just takes me some time to process thoughts and feelings before I can write them.  So, since its already Jan 2, here is my take on 2009 version two dot Oh!

Well, the first resolution is that I just must get my bookkeeping done on time this year.  I used to always be caught up on that, but ever since life got put in the blender (back about the start of 2004) I have fallen way far behind and then made that a bad habit.  “Normalized deficiency” is when something is wrong for so long you stop noticing it.  Now I have noticed though, and resolved to clean up my act.  No more late fees, no more taking months to invoice people, no more holding checks for deposit, no more tax deadlines missed!  This story about how I need time to accept change just doesn’t apply to slow bookkeeping.

One look in the mirror tells me that I need a resolution about personal growth, actually about personal shrinkage.  Lets face it, I could loose a hundred pounds and still not look emancipated.  Lets resolve to go for 52 pounds lost in 2009, one a week.  Imagine if I was to strap two large paving stones on me every mor ning an walk around everywhere carrying them!  Imagine 52 ounds of butter in a bunch of Walmart bags to carry everywhere!  Makes me never want to eat again.

Hardly anybody makes only two resolutions.  That is only company for each other, not a crowd for the year.  the first two are about wealth and health, so number three ought to be about happiness.  I’m really pleased to report that after thinking about it I don’t need to resolve to be happier or change a whole bunch on this one.  Its more of a maintenance thing, to follow my heart and my head on the path already chosen (or fatefully put in front of me).  I’m pretty happy now.  I think I shall resolve to spread that around, to make others more happy in all kinds of ways, small and large.  Perhaps that is the secret to my own happiness anyway.

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My Dad was just three days younger than my Mom, yet he survived her by nearly ten years.  Dad was born in Bowden, Alberta Canada on this Dec 30th day in 1924 and died at Calgary, Alberta Canada April 17, 2007 aged 82 years.  Of course I loved him and I miss him, the same is true of my sister and others who knew him.  I saved this as a draft and when I returned to it I discovered that I’m not yet willing to share feelings about this topic in such a public forum.  So will just mark the date and move on.

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My Mom was three days older than my Dad, she claimed senority in some matters because of it.  Mom was born at home in Nanton, Alberta Canada on this Dec 27th day in 1924 and died at The Bethany in Calgary, Alberta Canada Dec 5, 1997 aged 72 years, days short of 73 years.  Of course I loved her and I miss her, the same is true of my sister and others who knew her.  I saved this as a draft and when I returned to it I discovered that I’m not yet willing to share feelings about this topic in such a public forum.  So will just mark the date and move on.

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Being Canadian, and Canada following British Commonwealth tradition, I know about Boxing Day and was surprised to find that here in the USA it is not a national holiday.  When I first started talking about Boxing Day to SueBaby, she thought maybe there was some kind of a prize fight in Canada on the 26th. of December.  The story goes that the British Aristocracy had lots of hired help, peasants living in little English Cottages where the animals slept indoors with them.  On the day after Christmas (which was an exhausting day for hired help), the help got a day off and were sent home Christmas night with boxed up leftovers from the feasting and maybe a little Christmas bonus.  Thus was born Boxing Day.  I put two and two together, and realized this also meant a rare day for the Aristocracy, when they could have the run of their castle with no hired help watching, and could run half naked through the rooms playing with each other, or play with Christmas toys, or do some napping and eating of leftovers.  Drinking too.

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New Orleans, LA – We are hurtling around the sun, and soon it will be Christmas, ready or not. Yet, it is currently 67 deg. F. outside and we probably won’t see more snow for another three or four years after last Thursday, a week ago now.

Due to the climate and weather here, I still find that Christmas doesn’t quite sink in with me until we are mere days away from it. (Similar to the way it is hard to fear a hurricane while the weather is still lovely here.) Suddenly it has dawned on me that its about time I got with the program, hitched up my sleigh and made Merry preparations.

Yet, I am mired still in bookkeeping and year end stuff which is also important to do.

So once again, I am on the cusp of a change, needing to slow down the bookkeeping and begin preparation for Christmas. So, unable to decide if this is the exact moment to switch those gears of if I should keep on hurtling a little closer still to Christmas without panic I chose instead to make another blog post. Also to sip a bedtime smasharoo of Glenlivet Scotch.

It amazes me to think through the years so far about Christmas past. I grew up having Christmas in a house where my breath at night froze on the wall if I faced it, now I sprawl under the ceiling fan here. My Dad and I both had dozens of parties where we wore red suits, I have both suits in the attic now. I have witnessed both the feeding of a tart and later the self defense killing of a wild weasel on Christmas day! In my time I have literally scrambled on icy roofs to make tracks or hang lights, but now I go ouside most times in a short sleeve shirt at Christmas.

Such a contrast in Christmases and my roles in them over the fifty some years of my memory. One day when I’m older and get to stay home more, I’ll have to write a different post every day through Advent about a Christmas past. No time for that this year!

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A member of our family totaled his car by driving down a New Orleans street and hooking the undercarriage of the violently bouncing car on a protruding man hole, bending the frame.

Myself, I had $500 damage to my Grand Marquis just by dropping a wheel in a deep pothole on Fleur de Lis Drive in Lakeview – who knew it would be so deep.  I was going slow, trying to get to my Church, it slammed the car into the ground so hard it broke the bumper and tore the shroud off the radiator fan.  There are NO PLANS to fix that road, although it is major enough to have a neutral ground and streetcar tracks on it.

The same car had the entire exhaust system torn off it by simply backing out of my Algiers driveway and catching the tailpipe in dirt where a street used to be.

The City has a lot of Grand Marquis and Crown Victoria cars which must be meeting the same fate on a regular basis at tax payer expense.  These cars are unsuitable to drive in New Orleans period, never mind taking them home.  If a City employee needs a take home vehicle, it would be best to give them a take home dump truck that is built for driving here.

I think given the condition of New Orleans streets, there should be a bylaw preventing New Orleans City owned cars from being driven on New Orleans streets.  Its just plain destructive of public property to drive a government car in New Orleans, during working hours or not.  The city owned cars need to be kept in adjacent parishes where they have actual roads to drive on.

We should NOT make exception for the city politicians and bureaucrats who have had the roads leading to their houses repaired, even though those roads are now reasonable to drive on without wrecking the car.  I guess thats why the politicians here can’t get the roads fixed, or let the roads get this way in the first place.  The roads they live on are in good shape, and since they don’t have to pay when their government vehicle is wrecked by driving in Lakeview or Algiers then its really no skin off their nose if the rest of us are wrecking our vehicles to get home.

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I picked a fine time to start a blog.  Now its the middle of December and I’m late doing a lot of important things already.  Let me tell you the two things that drove me to start it now.

First, I often have a lot to say.  In fact, sometimes I am said to “rant”, to write “essays”, and to “lecture” people.  Perhaps a blog will be a good outlet for me to express myself and get comments from the handful of people on the globe who care to read it.  Just maybe I can even learn to write more better starting with being more concise.

Second, I need to learn some new things.  WordPress is one of them.  There is a long list of others.  My livelihood depends on me keeping up with new technologies and tools so I can consult, recommend and support clients on what they need now.

I’ve actually been thinking about starting this blog for several months now, and finally made a start.  I won’t be able to spend a lot of time on it until at least after Christmas though, so it will be a while before either the content or the presentation amounts to much.

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