Nov 04

How Expensive It USED To Be!

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Back when I first wanted to get a cd recorder (around 1993 if I remember right. But may have been earlier.):

SUBJECT:CD-Recorders, Philips Lower Price. Don’t be fooled by others who say they have a lower price!!!

These prices include Corel CD-Creator software and Adaptec Controller for your PC!!

Philips CDD 522, $2,499.00

Smart & Friendly CD-R 1002 High Performance At a lower cost, single and double speed recording, Supports red book audio, Record a disc in as little as 37 minutes 1MB buffer, $1,549.00

Smart & Friendly CD-R 2000 Dual to meet any need, Single and double speed recording, Record a disc in as little as 37 minutes, Daisychain up to 6 together for simultaneous copies on all of them!, Unattended copy mode, Supports red book audio, Buffer expandable from 2MB to 32MB!! $2,499.00

CD-R 4000 For those who need warp speed, Single, Double, and QUAD speed recording! Record a disc in as little as 17 minutes, supports Red book audio, 512KB buffer. $3,599.00

CD-R Media, 74 minute CD’s when purchased with the CD-R 2000, as many as 1,000 pieces, only $7.50!! (EACH!)

CD-R Media as follows with other purchases:
63 Minute 74 minute
10+ $9.50 ea. 10+ $9.75 ea.
100+ $9.00 ea. 100+ $9.30 ea.
1000+ $8.45 ea. 1000+ $8.70 ea.

For the above CD-Recorders with Gear Windows add $360.00

For the above CD-Recorders with Macromedia Director, Authorware W.M.,
and Gear WIN MM, add $1,000.00

My first cd recorder was an external that was about as big as a 90’s vcr, recorded at 1 speed (which took about an hour per cd) and you absolutely could not do anything else while burning or you’d wind up with an expensive coaster. I seem to remember it costing around $300. The only reason I was able to afford it was I had sold 100 copies of a Medical Tickler Management System I wrote to the US Navy for evaluation and made enough to buy the thing. (The Navy never did contact me about buying more. Bummer!)

Nov 03

An Oldie But Still Meaningful.

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Let’s face it — English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren’t invented in England or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren’t sweet, are meat.
We find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.
And why is it that writers write but fingers don’t fing, grocers don’t groce and hammers don’t ham? If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn’t the plural of booth beeth? One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese?
If teachers taught, why don’t preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?
Why do people recite at a play and play at a recital? How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and wise guy are opposites? How can overlook and oversee be opposites, while quite a lot and quite a few are alike? How can the weather be hot as hell one day and cold as hell another?
Have you ever seen a horseful carriage or a strapful gown? Met a sung hero or experienced requited love? Have you ever run into someone who was combobulated, gruntled, ruly or peccable? And where are all those people who ARE spring chickens or who would actually hurt a fly?
You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out and in which an alarm clock goes off by going on. And don’t even get me started on “take a dump!”
When the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible. And why, when I wind up my watch, I start it, but when I wind up this commentary, I end it?

Forgot to mention that the day I took Phillip & Matthew to the property to cut some wood (last Wednesday) we were cutting wood in the clearing and this HUGE Doe came trotting across the flat space for the house and up the trail towards the back of the property. Was cool!

Oct 31

Damn! Another Week Has Gone By?

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Where does the time go? Seems like one minute it’s a week earlier then, BOOM, it’s today with lots of blurry time between the two.

What have I been doing? Who The Hell Knows? Time seems to run differently when I’m stuck around the house. One day I do dishes; next day laundry; next day dishes and laundry. I think I vacuumed somewhere in there one day. Keeping the fire going when it’s cool and sweating our asses off when it’s not but I have to keep the fire going anyway cause it will get cool.

Wait! I did take Phillip & Matthew out to the property to cut up some wood and bring it back to Phillip’s place this past Wednesday. Was nice being out there even if it was cool weather wise. We cut up a truck full was all. (Well, not the whole truck. Just the bed of the truck. Otherwise we wouldn’t have had any place to sit on the way back.)

GADS! I’m boring!

Still watching Smallville. This weeks episode was pretty good (Jimmy hunting the D0-Googer) but Chloe purposely killing that other guy kind of freaked me out. Bummer!

GADS! I’m Boring!

I had to go through my Subscribers list and kill off the obvious Spammer-assholes. Most of them seem to have G-Mail addresses so I just killed off everyone with a G-Mail address. It’s not like I’ve heard from a lot of them anyway.

Oh, my back seems to be doing better. Or is it just stuff I had going on with my leg? Anywho, since SWMBO bought me this new chair and I’m not resting my right leg against the support for the armrest I’m not having as much trouble with the numbness/burning around the house. Mostly now it only happens when I walk too long.

Stopped by the church today and donated another pint of blood. Figured it was the least I could do as I don’t pay tithing or anything. No, really. The Bloodmobile was there today and I almost always donate a pint of blood when they come around. Got a replacement 10 gallon pin for my new hat. (Accidently burned the last one up.) I don’t know that I’ll be donating anymore as they’re going to change things and make the paperwork even more invasive and time-consuming.

SWMBO took me to Baco Tell for dinner. It’s not real Mexican but I like it. Best part is her company though. We’ve been married 22 years this coming December. Wow! Now I’m sitting in the living room doing this and watching scary movies. It is Halloween! Thank Goodness we don’t have to worry about Trick-or-Treaters out here! We lived in our old house 11 years and had only one (1) stop by and here for 3 years and had one 2 years ago. I like that. But I’m old.

Oct 25

Damned OPEC!

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Lot of time has passed since my last post, I know. I’ve either been busy or just plain haven’t felt like posting.

Tried an experiment: Set up an e-mail account and joined one of those "Take Survey’s And Make Money At Home" places ($7) a couple of weeks ago. Almost 5000 spam e-mails later I have yet to take ONE survey. Initially, the site I joined (MakeMoneyAtHome.Com?) led me to a couple of pages with links to other places you could join to take the surveys. Talk about a round-robin of crap. Each link had me join to take survey’s that linked to other places to join to take surveys etc etc etc but never did get to take a survey. Now that mailbox if FULL of "Your Gift Card Is Waiting (with participation)" or "Get A Free TV (with participation)" offers ad nauseum. The "With Participation" part means that if you complete 3 silver offers, 2 gold offers & 2 platinum offers you get a "free" tv. But after spending a LOT of money fulfilling these offers you could have gone to COSTCO and bought the tv for half the price and a lot less hassle. Anyway, about to kill that e-mail address and write this up for Reader’s Digest or someone. What a joke. Except it really isn’t funny.

Weather’s been crappy mostly. Too cool for me. Been getting out to the property and running my digger around but I really don’t have a lot to do out there until we start to build. Our plans got through the engineer and should be on their way back to the architect. Gotta call the Contractor and see where he stands on his guesstimate.

Been helping friends move everything out of their moble home into their new garage so they can tear down his old moble home to put a new one in. I thought SWMBO and I were "pack rats" but these folks put us to shame! Most of their house was down to asiles between the junk they have stuffed in their house. I mean every "spare" inch of space was filled with something from floor to ceiling. I believe they are psychologically unable to throw anything away. I’ve found everything BUT a 15 year old stack of old phone books. (The oldest I found was 8 years old.) Don’t get me wrong: I like these folks. They’re great people. But they definitely have problems getting rid of stuff.

Been looking for a part-time job to take me through the winter. Not much out there for an old guy. I’m glad SWMBO has a great job but am starting to feel bad about not working. Oh, I do most of the housework and cooking (I make a great wife!) but I’m "the Man" and should be bringing in the bucks so SWMBO can be doing all that. Gads! We are the product of the time of our upbringing, aren’t we!?

Damned OPEC! The economy is going down the drain in most of the world and (it seems) especially the United States. Oil has dropped to $64 a barrel. Unemployment is on the rise and everybody has tightened their belts and OPEC is cutting back production to raise prices. Nothing else shows just how damned greedy these people can be! I’d love to invent something that would supply our energy needs enough to put the oil companies out of business overnight! All the oil companies but especially the ’ragheads’. Sorry, but ’ragheads’ are the feelings they promote with their insatiable demand for money at the expense of the rest of us. I did Desert Shield & Desert Storm, spent 7 months in Saudi and drove all over the place out there and didn’t see anything worth saving. If the Saudi’s were smart though they’d convert a lot of that empty sand and year round sunshine into vast solar farms and sell that electricity to the rest of the world.

Smallville has been pretty cool. I still watch it on "The CW" and still hate the commercials on Thursday nights and still download it Friday morning and watch it with said commercials. The sounds are fantastic when I listen to the show with earphones on! Wish I could do stuff like that. My attempts at making music for my time-lapse video’s (usually of clouds) have hit a ’sameness’ lately. I don’t know if it’s because of the limited amount of sound bytes I have to work with or if those are the only melodies running through my head. Probably a mixture of both. Anyway, I really like the way Smallville is heading. I really enjoyed Clark leaping to the top of a tall building in this last episode! Maybe he’s getting over his fear of heights…

Oh, SWMBO bought me a new telescope this week! It is so cool! A Celestron 144mm reflector, Before it got too cloudy I managed to see the bands of Jupiters atmosphere. Cool!

And I had an appointment with MY Doc to talk about the Degenerative Disc Disease and other things. He ordered a bunch of blood tests and the lab tech drew 5 tubes of blood. Got the results yesterday and all my results are midline except for the good and bad cholesterol. Bad cholesterol is way up. Good cholesterol is way down. Looks like I’m gonna have to try eating oatmeal for breakfast and do some other things to reverse that. But at least the screening for rectal cancer came out negative! (There’s always a bright spot!)

Wow. Making time-lapse videos of clouds and constructing music for them. Playing with Terragen. Ripping my dvd’s to avi files. Scanning my old pictures. Housework and cooking. Helping friends move. Moving dirt and making sure my drainage is working this year. Fixing up computers for friends. Doctor’s appointments. Laundry. Downloading Smallville, Supernatural, Sanctuary, Fringe and the new Knight Rider. Keeping the fire going in the woodstove and who knows what I,ve done and forgotten seems to keep me pretty busy. Life is good!