Oracle of Oracles

Oracle of Oracles
I think most of you know that I signed up for the Verizon.net DSL service about two months ago. My enrollment was not without its own set of troubles.

I had a visit from the Oracle of the Internet last night.

No, it wasn’t Al Gore or Bill Gates or Larry Ellison or Warren Buffett.

It was a more ethereal visitation from the Oracle. My two month old modem stopped functioning in the middle of a check on my email. It just stopped and nothing happened. This was not a good sign; if I were an ancient Greek, I would have folded up my laptop and barred the doors to keep the evil spirits away. I might have examined the entrails of the freshly killed goat to see what they augured for me.

This morning, shorty after sunrise, always an auspicious time, I performed the ancient Rituals to Resurrect a Modem, accompanied by the chattering of my hard drive and ever shifting images of the screensaver program. First, I cleansed my laptop of contamination and purged the Internet cache files and removed 34.5 MB of evil spirits and omens.

I think the Druids would have been proud of my efforts for the Power Cycling of the Modem Ritual was successful.

I felt restored and connected to the Ether once more. I could commune with my friends from distant lands.

Life was good again.

On the flipside, it is so troubling that I would have to resort to performing the Ritual of Power Cycling the Modem on such a new and fresh modem. The Ritual, in my experience, is usually reserved for older modems that have lost their connectivity ability through age and use.

Does this augury mean I will have more modem troubles in the future?

I certainly hope not.

I will take the usually precautions in the coming days and weeks. I will be backing up important files daily now and sending some of the more important material to easily recoverable storage at of-site locations at Hotmail.com and Yahoo.com email.

Later in the Day
I guess my Ritual of Power Cycling the Modem was a success for I have had no further trouble. I felt great about being able to follow all of the ancient rites correctly and that I paid proper respect to the ancient gods.

Life is better for me.

Haircut
I had to get my hair cut. I was really becoming ratty and seedy looking.

Michelle who has been my stylist for three years is still out on maternity leave. I have no idea when she will be back or if she will be back for that matter. I usually dread these sessions when Michelle is not around because no can come close to the way I like or want my hair to look at the end of the session.

Michelle usually comes up short on how I want my hair to look. She cuts my hair so it turns out the way she thinks it should look. I tolerate Michelle’s habit because I know the consequences of having to go find someone new to cut my hair is a far worse fate for me.

I could do what Doug does for his haircuts. He goes to a training salon and gets very individualized attention. I should also point out that he has surplus time on his hands and can afford to take an hour long hair cut. I would be spending two hours alone on driving there and back and then add on to that the time spent waiting and then the hair cut and you are quickly talking about a full half day’s effort.

Back to my story.

I went to the Great Clips this afternoon to take my chances with the hair styling gods.

The hair styling gods smiled on me today.

I had a new stylist. She was an older woman: don’t ask me how old because I couldn’t tell you. She was short, really short; she came somewhere between my elbow and my shoulder and English was a second language for her. Anyway, she did a great job on my hair.

I think she did a better job than Michelle has ever done with me and that is a statement. I think she did so well because she followed the way I had my hair when I sat down in the chair. She also didn’t try to strangle me with the little strip of paper that goes next to your neck when they put the apron on you.

I will ask for her again when I need another haircut. I may even do that if Michelle returns to the salon.

Woman of the Moment
I think Sunisa Kim has nice hair also.



I think these were early photos since they lack the makeup and styling of the other images.


Happy Halloween gentle readers.

Be well and stay happy.

More Leftovers

More Leftovers
As is becoming a nasty habit of mine, Monday’s blog is filled with leftovers from the weekend. My life is not very exciting now.

Maybe I should have a girl friend to liven my life up but let’s not have any finger pointing at me. I know there were Nurse Beth and Liz the Lonely who could have made my life more interesting.

Carbon Dating Myself
I can remember when software companies would mail you an update on a floppy disk.

Woman of the Moment
When in doubt, always add a third photo. Third photos are excellent space fillers and no one complains about an extra photo.




Observation
I was getting gas over the weekend in the Prelude that just clicked over 337,000 miles or 542,300 kilometers. I noticed a new Lexus SC 430 at the gas pump in front of me. Its license plate cracked me up.

5 MBZ 123

I don’t know if the “123”is correct or not but the MBZ on a Lexus was a killer image. I wished I had my camera with me.

Visitors
It was a good week as far as visitors went. It was not like the week before it when we had the hordes of Germans coming to the site. We had visitors from Texas, Germany [10 or more], Canada [5], India [2], Netherlands, Iran, Japan [4], United Arab Emirates, Denmark, Russia, Hong Kong [2], United Kingdom [3], and Poland.

We also had two curious visitors from the United States who stopped by for 17 minutes and 26 minutes respectively.

Sharon
My friend Sharon called me today. She went to Las Vegas for the weekend and had a very nice time. We didn’t talk about gambling since it is highly likely that you will lose and because Sharon, like me, is not too much a gambler.

Sharon told me that she really enjoyed the play “Proof.” Her boyfriend works with mathematics so he could understand and appreciate the play. I was glad that she could use and enjoy the tickets.


That was my Monday gentle readers.

Be well and stay happy.

Weekend Update - October 19th

Weekend Update
I had some successes and I had some disappointments this weekend.

My cold is much better. I think I am about over it now. That is a great relief for me.

I did some laundry and cleaning around the place. Cleaning is good.

Observation
If the European Union wants to take on Microsoft and its alleged monopoly power, it should focus on the Microsoft requirement of delivering updates to legally purchased Microsoft software only by a current version of Internet Explorer. That seems like it is exercising a monopoly power to force me to use IE when it is a piece of bloated, overpowered shit.

I’m certain that there are those out there who now can’t live without IE7.

I am one who can live without it. All I ever wanted to be able to do was surf the Internet, email, and chat with friends. I can say that I’ve never downloaded music or a film clip. I don’t use a peer-to-peer file sharing program.

It would seem to me that Microsoft can give us a version of IE that is IE Anorexic; you know, really, really light.

Woman of the Moment
I decided to feature these two related images that I picked up on the Internet. They seem to go well together.



Cinema
I had planned to go the cinema on Saturday and see two films that Doug had recommended to me. One was THE DEPARTED and the other was MARIE ANTOINETTE.

I had planned to go the new AMC Del Amo multiplex since it was about a mile and a half / two and a half kilometers from my house. I checked the times and found I could get in there and see both films and be finished by around 3:30. That would still leave me the rest of the day or most of the rest of the day to do other things.

It is a very nice venue, all stadium seating and a good sound system. I’m not sure I liked the limited movement with the seat back and a rigid seat cushion setup. I think it may take some time to get used.

My experience was very poor once I sat down.

The theater decided to change the screenings in the theaters and not tell anyone until it was too late to go to the new and proper venue and find a decent seat. Personally, I like to sit in the middle of the theater and about two thirds of the way up.

The attendant wandered in about ten minutes after the film was supposed to start and said it was showing in another theater and that the trailers were playing now and the film would start almost immediately.

That was hardly good customer service and intelligent planning on the theater’s part.

I had to wait around for the attendant to show up to give me my ticket refunds. She was surprised that I wanted a refund on the second film. I tried to explain to her that I like to plan and organize my life and the revised schedule was not going to work for me. I gave up instead and waited for my money.

The thing that really galled me more than anything else was that she made no effort to say she was sorry on behalf of the theater. I think I could have forgiven AMC if they had made a minimal effort at apologizing to the audience for the inconveniences.

One of the minimal efforts that they could have exerted was to restart the program in the other theater and give everyone time to travel to the other venue.

I felt the treatment I received was callous and cavalier. I would point out that AMC is not the only theater company operating in Southern California. Next weekend, I ought to be back at my old theater haunts and hope that the two films I wanted to see are still playing then.

El Gringo
I went to El Gringo on Saturday as well as on Sunday, the usual day.

I went on Saturday because I needed to have something go right for me during the day. I also had a healthy meal. I had a Pollo Negro Salad; it’s one of a handful of heart healthy meals.


A Pollo Negro Salad, as you can see, is a large salad. Pollo Negro is blackened and spiced grilled chicken that has been diced up. It is very spicy; my mouth had a burning sensation for a couple of hours after my meal. It was very filling and I enjoyed. I don’t think I would want to have this salad everyday; it is a little too spicy for my mouth and tongue. I do think it will be a regular meal for me, maybe once a month or so. That would be good.

I went for another spicy lunch today. I opted for the Blackened Mahi Mahi burrito. It is served dry; that is, without a sauce poured on top of the burrito. It is not as big of a meal as the other burritos and I think I am glad for that. The burrito certainly did fill me up and I am now set for the day. My mouth didn’t burn for as long or as much as it did yesterday.


Whitney is the server who works on Sunday. She also works on Saturday. Being an El Gringo server is not her main career. Whitney works in a professional photography studio and therefore can take better photos than I can. Maybe I should ask Whitney to take the food photos in the future. She said she likes to take surfing photos and prefers color to black and white photography.

Whitney is from greater Southern California and that is good. I did learn that Whitney goes home around 4:00 PM so I need to keep that in mind if I am planning to chat with her during my meal.


Our good Utah football team showed up on Saturday afternoon at Rice Eccles Stadium in Salt Lake City. They beat a struggling and weak University of Nevada Las Vegas 45 to 23, boosting their record to 5 – 4 and 3 – 2 in the Mountain West Conference.

Even with the nice margin of victory, I still have to wonder about which team will show up at game time. Utah was scoreless in the First and Fourth Quarters. Utah’s defense held UNLV to a single field goal in the second and third quarters and then gave up seventeen points in the last quarter.

I think the trouble maybe a lack of discipline and focus on the part of the team and the coaches. There is too much inconsistency with their play. The former head coach, Urban Meyer, always seemed to coach focused teams. What is more disheartening is the current head coach was the defensive coordinator when Utah went undefeated for the season 12 – 0 and beat Pittsburgh in the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl on New Years Day, 2005.

About the only positive note that I could find in the game was the improved play of the Utah starting quarterback. Brett Ratliff had a great day passing the football; nineteen completions for twenty three attempts, four touchdowns, a career high, and most importantly no interceptions.

Next week is a bye week for the Utes.

The next game will be November 11th when Colorado State plays at Salt Lake City. Then the Utes will play Air Force and end the season with BYU at home.


That was my weekend gentle readers. I hope you had a great weekend.

Be well and stay happy.

Special Weekend Bonus - Bad Halloween Ideas

Bad Halloween Ideas
Here are some very, very bad Halloween ideas. I can only ask what were these men thinking? Obviously, they were not thinking clearly at the time.

Weekend Bonus - Lin Chi-ling

Weekend Bonus Feature - Lin Chi-ling
Lin Chi-ling is a leading Taiwanese high fashion model. I only found a couple of photos of her so I decided to put them all up today. I will admit that my search for her photos was not as diligent as my one for the Hankook Tire Girls.






Please don't ask me to explain the last image.

Weekend Preview - October 26th

Weekend Preview
This is going to be a short Weekend Update for a lot of reasons.

My plans for the weekend are up in the air right now for one.

Vivian did not send me her current Man of the Moment name and photo so that section goes empty or unfilled.

I had thought about seeing my tailor from Hong Kong on Friday and then have lunch with Sharon. The tailor visit was integrated with the Sharon lunch. I haven’t kicked my cold yet so I’m not sure I want to hang with Sharon since she is recovering from some out-patient surgery. I will give her a call on Friday morning and see how she feels.

My Dissertation Committee Chair is still out of town so I won’t be doing much on it over the weekend. I had hoped to get some good writing time in.

I did finish some simple proof reading for one of Doug’s class papers last night. I was able to turn my comments around in a day so he will be able to finish the paper in time for class on Monday with no stress.

Woman of the Moment
Last night’s photos came from the Speed Options model web site where Sunisa Kim was the July 2004 featured model. I had the source wrong last night. Tonight’s photos are from the Internet.



Doug
Doug suggested that I go catch some films at the local multiplex cinema. I think this makes some sense for me. The last film I saw was V FOR VENDETTA in March.

He was high on THE DEPARTED as a film worth seeing. I expect that it will be in the cinemas over the weekend. I want to check out the independent and foreign films; Vivian was keen on THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND when we had lunch. That might be an interesting film to see.

El Gringo
Of course, there is always El Gringo on Sunday afternoon with its big plasma screen televisions around the place to watch sports programming while you eat. I have no idea what I am going to have to eat but I am certain I will be filled up for the rest of the day and it is likely to be spicy.

Happy Happy Joy Joy Day
It looks like the National Football League [American football] will not be coming to Los Angeles anytime soon. That means we avoid having to pay for a billion dollar stadium and suffering with a crummy team in our city.

Think of it this way, instead of having a team that hasn’t made it to the Champions League in years, you get to watch up to four free top notch matches every Sunday from the comfort of your home. No long lines at the overpriced beer queue. No long lines elsewhere. No rowdy fans to spoil the match. No cold and wind and rain. No long drive to get to the match and back home again. No cold food or warm beer.

It’s a perfect arrangement for me.


Be well and stay happy and have a great weekend.

Rethinking Things

Rethinking Things
I’m not certain that placing the Woman of the Moment section right next to a section about the Princess was the best possible placement location. As I think about the placement some more, I know now that I should have moved them.

Oh well, life happens and I can’t do much about the past now.

Just go forward and do things better in the future I guess.

Woman of the Moment
These photos came from the Internet.

I am developing a fondness for models in vinyl clothing. [Scroll down to the Weekend Bonus Feature.] Sunisa Kim is like sort of like Choo Mi-young except that their hair is colored differently and Sunisa has a tan and Mi-young is pale.





I know that four photos is more than I usually post. I added two extras since they went together with the thought. I wonder if I could get a job of polishing her clothing with ArmorAll?

Time Warner Cable
Time Warner Cable is becoming a monopoly in Southern California. They bought the old Adelphia Cable out of bankruptcy proceedings earlier this year.

TWC doesn’t strike me as having the sharpest tools in the shed working for them. In the first month of service, I had to make four calls about poor or no service. That was hardly a noteworthy start of the new and better TWC service was it now?

Now, it is time for channel reorganization so that all of the offerings are shown on the same channel across the network. I think this is a good idea. I got a fat envelope from TWC today. It was all about the new changes and stuff that are coming.

I opened it up and found the channel guide was for Manhattan Beach and Hermosa Beach; there was no mention of Redondo Beach where I live. I think the channel guide applies to my town. I could call customer service and ask them to send me Redondo Beach guide. They would say to download it; I could reply that I don’t have any Internet service but that would only open a floodgate of calls about their high speed Internet service.

I just know I’m going to get telemarketing calls from them for their cable phone service. I plan to keep my copper wire phone service. If the power goes out, so does your cable phone. If you live in earthquake country and almost on top of a major fault line as I do, good reliable phone service is important to me.

Naturally, the new pricing structure is a complete mystery to me. I know what I was paying a month on my old plan. I have no idea what I’ll be paying with the new plan or what I’ll be getting next month when the switch takes place.

The new program guide has a lot of colors in it to identify the various service levels and channels. It uses three shades of grey for example. This is fine in theory except it sucks in practice because printing colors will inevitably produce color changes and therefore confusion. I think they could have gone with some symbols like the ones you find on your computer keyboard above the row of numbers. That would have required fewer confusing colors.

But wait; let’s not do anything that resembles taking care of the customer. That might cost money.

I’ll be sure to let you know how this will all play out.


Be well and stay happy.

Correcting Mistakes

Correcting Mistakes
I corrected a mistake that I made over the weekend yesterday.

It’s very good to recognize that you made an error and were able to correct it. I had downloaded Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 with all of its fancy Windows Live associated stuff. I had trouble with the download and then I had more difficulty with the setup. Getting used to the new version and layout was going to be a challenge.

As it was, I had to use Netscape Navigator as my browser to upload photos and text to the blog. That was an inconvenience for me.

I made the decision to change over to Mozilla Firefox as my browser yesterday because both IE7 and Navigator were unstable platforms. I had been out to the blog site during the day on both programs with no trouble. I had wanted to upload the new Woman of the Moment photos. Every time I went to Blogger.com with Navigator; I got an immediate disconnect for no known reason. There was no error message or anything.

I went to IE7 and figured that the new version would allow me to upload the images.

Wrong.

I could only upload one image before the program crapped out on me. I restarted the laptop and was greeted with an error message that said my laptop was now blocking cookies so I couldn’t connect with the Blogger.com server.

More frustration because I hadn’t made a change to the cookies settings.

Then, I remembered something that Doug said about using Firefox as a web browser. I decided to take his advice. I knew I would be no worse off with the change. What did I have to loose?

Nothing.

I downloaded Firefox and loaded it. First thing I noticed about was that it was half the size of IE7. Second thing I noticed was that I could upload photos and text to the blog over my Verzon.net DSL connection.

Firefox is not without its faults. It doesn’t have a slick home page. I’m not sure how good it will be when it comes to playing a video clip. Its layout and architecture seem fairly straight forward. Firefox is compatible with my McAfee Safe Site program whereas IE7 wouldn’t work with it.

IE7 uses a manual program of creating your own safe web site list. You can tell that there is something fundamentally wrong with it when it doesn’t recognize a Microsoft Corporation web site as being a safe site and one that children can view.

On second thought, maybe the IE7 was on to something after all.

So far, I really like Firefox. It is simple to use although some of the functions take a bit of time to learn. The layout looks like it is right out of Windows 3.0 or 95. It seems perfect for web browsing and sending and receiving emails.

One more reason to like Firefox is that it doesn’t seem to overwrite its own logo over the individual web site logos in the bookmarks section like IE7 does with alarming regularity. I think it is easier to find a web site in the bookmarks if you can scan for the site’s logo instead of reading the entire list or portion of the list.

Woman of the Moment
Yesterday and today’s photo came from a variety of sources that I found through Google Images. The thumbnail sidebar photo is from the Speed Options web site.




The Princess
The Princess called me this afternoon to say that she had received her annual shipment of Hershey’s chocolates for Halloween. She was particularly pleased with the Reese’s White Chocolate Peanut Butter cups. She ate one while we talked on the phone.

The Princess and her roommate were going out to dinner for sushi and then planning to return to have some more chocolate before calling it a night.

Interesting food combination.

I have been sending her these Fall / Halloween boxes of chocolates since she first went away to college at the University of Utah. I used to say that the package was from Daddy but I gave up saying that since I was the only one who ever sent large boxes [15 pounds / 7 kilos]. I figured that she could determine who was the sender.

Visitors
Yesterday’s visitor traffic of 19 visitors was back to normal after the surge at the end of last week.


Be well and stay happy.

First Order of Business

First Order of Business – Woman of the Moment
The first order of business for the week is a new Woman of the Moment. The new Woman of the Moment is Sunisa Kim.

I first ran across her photos at the Speed Options web site models section. This was when I was learning about Mercedes Terrell and having her chauffer you to Lee’s Sandwiches for a couple of Number 2s.

Sunisa listed herself as 67 inches / 170 centimeters tall and measures 36B – 24 – 36 inches or 91 – 61 – 91 centimeters in the Speed Options web site. Her web site lists her measurements as 34C - 25 - 34 and she is 68 inches tall. Bravely, she put her weight down at 115 pounds / 52 kilos. Pick your own measurements I guess.

She has a limited web site of www.sunisakim.com. She has been promising to update the web site for a year or so.

About half of the photos used in the Woman of the Moment came from the Speed Options web site where she was the model of the month for July 2004. The remainder came from various fan and auto magazine web sites. You can use Google images and download your own favorites if that is your fancy.




Dissertation
I slogged along with the dissertation today and finished up my archival research work. The Excel spreadsheets look nice for now. I will have to tweak them a bit by the time I finish the project.

The second data set also seemed to confirm one of my hypotheses. The sample exhibited the same common trait across all ten banks in the same. Since this was a statistically valid sample, I should be able to apply the results to all of the banks in the universe.

Visitors
The visitor traffic pattern is now back to normal. The hordes of German visitors have left the blog and probably gone off to some other site. Still, it was nice to see over 100 daily visitors come to the site, for whatever reason, for a couple of days.

I wonder if last week’s visitor surge constitutes the blog’s moment of fame.

Mondays
Mondays always seem like a writing let down for me after the Weekend Update. I feel like I haven’t given you your eye’s worth of matter to read today.

I guess I do more interesting things on the weekends and the rest of the week is sort of dull by comparison.


Oh well, not to worry.

Be well and stay happy.

Weekend Update - October 22nd

Weekend Update
I spent most of the weekend nursing this nasty sinus cold which seems to be finally going away. I had a great night’s sleep on Saturday so maybe I have hit a turning point with the cold.

Visitors
For some unknown reason, this humble blog struck a very responsive cord with many in Germany at the end of the week. The trend continued at a lesser rate over the weekend. I think we had more than 300 Germans visit the blog this past week. Clearly, that is a record.

For the week, we had over 400 visitors.

For the month to date, we are over 600 visitors.

We also had visitors from Malaysia, Singapore, Poland, India, France [2], Korea, Hong Kong, Switzerland, United Kingdom [2], Mexico, South Africa, Brazil, Austria, Belgium, and China.

We had three curious visitors including one from Germany for 22 minutes, one from the United States for 11 minutes and another curious visitor who stopped by and spent 11minutes reading the blog. I forgot to note where the third curious visitor was from.

I do appreciate that you did come out and visit my blog.

Comments are welcome and accepted unless you are a blind, mindless robot and then I will decline your comment.

Woman of the Moment
This is the last regularly scheduled appearance of Mercedes Terrell. I am confident that Mercedes will return for the end of the year best of review.




Come on Mercedes, you can smile for us just once more.

Doug
On Friday, I went out to see Doug as part of a greater series of events. The major one was the meeting with my Dissertation Committee Chair.

We had lunch at Albertacos and we had our usual lunches / dinners; two Number 8s, medium drink, for there.


My Number 8 seemed to have more food than I can recall. I was stuffed and I was finished with my eating for the day except for a slice of bread around 8:00PM to hold me over until the morning.

We had talked about going to the local Tower Records in the Laguna Hills Mall to check out their close out sale on DVDs.

To be honest, I went into the store with no expectations at all. I knew that Tower had always been a high priced vendor so I didn’t expect to see too much of a price reduction to the point the prices would be competitive with DVDPlanet.com.

I was surprised at the nice condition of the store that made it easy for me to find what I was looking for. The stock was well organized by genre and alphabetical within the genre. This arrangement always confuses me when you have an action and drama cross over film. Fortunately, I wasn’t looking for a film like that on Friday.

I did find four DVDs that I wanted to pick up including three that were on my Academy Awards Best Picture list. I only have 27 more films on my Best Picture list left to purchase so I am making good progress there.

Dissertation
My Chair was out of the country and obviously was not available for the requested meeting so I turned around and headed on home. I will try to reschedule the meeting for next Friday.

I did manage to do some of the archival research work over the weekend. I spent most of Saturday and Sunday looking at reports filed by commercial banks on the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation web site and then entering the data on a worksheet. I still have to enter the data into an Excel spreadsheet. It is not exciting or thrilling but it did provide some very interesting evidence that one of my theories is correct. That was an unexpected discovery. How I will pull it all together will another question.

Andy Sippy
Andy Sippy is my tailor from Hong Kong. I have been buying suits from him since 1970. Probably, the only reason I still buy my suits from him is convenience. I can stop and see at a hotel, pick out a particular fabric and color, order a suit, and know that in about six to eight weeks, my new suit will arrive and that all I have to do is press it before I wear it.

The suits are well made and last, last a long time. I am still regularly wearing a suit that was made for me in 1997. I finally donated a sport coat that dated to 1988 that I just got tired of wearing last year.

Anyway, Andy will be in town next Thursday and Friday at a hotel in Pasadena. I am planning to see him and order one or two suits. If my luck holds out, I will be able to combine a trip to Pasadena with lunch with my friend Sharon. Granted, Sharon is a bit out of the way from Pasadena but it makes sense since I have already driven the 35 miles / 56 kilometers to get there so the incremental drive on to see Sharon for lunch is not that much. Also, Sharon starts her new job on the 1st and that is further away from the beach where I live so I should strike while the iron is hot.

Jury Duty
I got a notice to report for jury duty starting November 27th. I thought I had at least a year to go before I had to report for jury duty again. Fortunately, I only have to drive about two miles for my jury duty. With luck, I will not get called in for a jury panel and I will be off the hook for another couple of years.

I think that I may not be a desirable juror in a criminal case. I am older and conservative. That is not a great combination when you are a public defender and you have an accused that is charged with something like armed robbery.

On the plus side, all of the really big trials are not held at this courthouse so I don’t run the risk of being stuck on a panel that is sequestered for three or four months.

I also need to make a run to my local Barnes & Noble to pick up some books to read while I sit and wait. I might as well try to improve my mind while I sit around.

Internet Explorer 7
I think I may have made a serious mistake in downloading the latest version of Internet Explorer.

After using it for a couple of days, I don’t think it was that much of an improvement on Version 6. For one thing, it doesn’t resize the page when you have your “Favorites” opened.

Then, it lacks a button to link to the email program. My Yahoo toolbar has a button that will take me to my Yahoo.com email account. How could Microsoft release a web browser that did not have a link / button for email? I used email regularly and most of the people I know use email regularly.

IE 7 has the feel of Microsoft Outlook and that is fine except most simple users like me find Outlook to be an overpowering program and prefer Outlook Express with its simple and friendly email program. I think I may spend part of the coming week or maybe next weekend replacing it with the old familiar IE 6.

Komyo Ga Tsuji
I really missed a lot last week when I went to see the play.

It seems that Japan had launched its invasion of Korea and fought for several years without a conclusive victory. China has or is about to enter the war on the Korean side, a major turning point.

Unrest and discontent with the war at home are growing. The daimyos [feudal lords] are losing confidence in the Shogun [de facto ruler] and some are plotting a rebellion. Gee, that almost sounds like the United States today. People are weary of the war in Korea and it is draining the economy of resources [Johnson presidency during the Vietnam War].

The conflict is going to come to a head soon I think and the lords will be forced to take sides. This, of course, presents the possibility of a civil war.

All of this has placed Lord Yamauchi in that nasty place of being between a rock and a bunch of hard and harder spots. He has a long standing tie of loyalty to the Shogun that everyone dislikes; he is a vassal to the Shogun’s primary rival; and he has to keep an eye on Lord Tokugawa for the Shogun.

Lord Yamauchi’s wife, who is the real brains in the family [Clinton presidency], asked the particularly telling question when she discussed the lord’s promotion to a larger castle. She pointed out that he and two other lords were acting as trip wires for the Shogun in his attempt to control the Tokugawa clan. Then, she asked if it was better for him to align himself with the Tokugawas who she thought would be the next Shogun or to stay with the Toyotomi clan.

Having read history and seen the Korean version of the war and fall of the Shogun, I know that the really smart money will go with the Tokugawa clan.

El Gringo
Today was Sunday and Sunday means late lunch – early dinner at El Gringo. For some reason, El Gringo was crowded today so I did not have a chance to ask the server what her name was. Maybe next Sunday will be a better day for asking names.


I had a Taco Salad with chicken today. It was a very filling meal as you can see. Most of the meal was either shredded lettuce or shredded chicken. I think it was the most chicken that I can recall having in a taco salad or tostada in a very long time. The salsa today was particularly spicy so I enjoyed that even more.


Well, gentle readers that was my weekend. I hope you had a great weekend also.

Be well and stay happy

Weekend Bonus Feature - Choo Mi-young

Weekend Bonus Feature - Choo Mi-young
I am getting lazy now with my early posting of the Weekend Bonus Feature. I have got a nasty sinus cold so I don't want to think about posting that tomorrow evening when I will probably be in bed early and sound asleep. I have also developed a fondness for red-orange vinyl clothing for young women.

These are the last photos of Choo Mi-young. I hope you enjoyed her as much as I did over these last few weeks. I will have a new Weekend Bonus Feature woman next Friday.

Weekend Preview - October 19th

Deutschland
The last two days, the blog has been visited by the Germans in droves not seen since the time of the Huns.

Well, maybe not that many but the Germans have visited in large numbers. My blog is never going to win any traffic awards so I can get excited over visitor count. Yesterday, we had over 130 visitors; I think around 110 to 115 were from Germany. 130 visitors was a good week’s traffic for the blog. When I checked the visitor count today, before I posted today’s blog, we were at 180 and climbing.

There were also a dozen or more visitors from an Unknown Country. I checked and a number of these Unknown Country people spoke German and that leads me to conclude they were probably from Germany.

Side note, I get nervous whenever a visitor shows up at the blog from an Unknown Country. Wouldn’t the visitor know which country he or she is from?

Fascinating.

The visitors seem to have come from all over Germany; Berlin, Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg, Bremen, Hessen, Bayern, and Baden-Wurttemberg.

Naturally, all of the visitor traffic got me thinking. What did I say that was so compelling to cause this many visitors to drop into the blog? I don’t think I said much that was all that interesting or compelling.

It could have been because of Mercedes Terrell. I happened to talk with Doug today and told him about the surge in visitors. Doug agreed with me that Mercedes Terrell was an excellent reason to visit the blog. This would be a reasonable conclusion since none of the visitors stayed very long once they got here.

I don’t think it’s because I have a German last name. Doug thought this could be an explanation. If that were the case, then I would expect his blog, skeetonmischa, would have a large German following but it doesn’t. His blog has about 4.0% of the visitors coming from Germany.

For the record, the family, ten in all, came over from Thalburgel in the Grand Duchy of Sachsen – Weimer – Eisenach in 1852. One of the eight children served in the Union Army during our Civil War and died on the battlefield in Charleston, West Virginia in 1864.

I suppose that the visits may be the result of an Internet search gone wrong.

I would like to know why you happened to visit the blog so if you have the time; please make a comment and let me know.

Woman of the Moment
Since I was talking about our, Doug and me, favorite chauffer, now would be a good time to place her here. I’m glad to see that Mercedes’ career is doing well so she can afford to appear in more than one bikini.



Windows Live Messenger
I was using Windows Live Messenger until yesterday when I took it out of the laptop. I recall that it was supposed to be better, faster, more feature filled than the old programs it replaced.

It stopped working for me. I couldn’t log on to Windows Live Messenger even though the program tray icons blinked off and on for six hours with no success. Six hours seems like a long enough time to successfully log in or at least generate a reasonable error code message.

I downloaded the old Windows Messenger 4.7 version and it connected to the Internet almost instantaneously. It could be have been a bit slower but it was much, much faster than six hours.

I think I will stay with this version of Windows Messenger for as long as I can. It works for me and I can chat. Chatting is the only reason for having the program as far as I am concerned.

Vivian’s Man of the Moment

I sent Vivian a reminder for her Man of the Moment this morning. She replied and said that she had thought of a man but later forgot him. He must not have been all that memorable for her. Vivian said she would try to remember his name.

For a moment, I briefly entertained the idea of suggesting myself. I changed my mind because that would be too presumptuous of me.

Weekend Preview
Doug and I did talk today and we confirmed part of the weekend’s activities for me.

He and I will have lunch at one of our favorite places, Albertacos. I am leaning towards a Number 8 and a medium drink. That should fill me up nicely. Albertacos is in Mission Viejo and just down the hill from Saddleback Community College where spent several semesters.

I would hope there won’t be a large college crowd there on one hand while I do enjoy gazing at young college women who will probably be in shorts since the weather forecast is sunny and the temperature is supposed to be around 85F / 29C.

After lunch, we plan to go to his local Tower Records store for their bankruptcy liquidation sale. Tower does carry the Criterion line of DVDs and we are hoping we can pick up some more classic DVDs at a favorable price. I have my lists of DVDs to acquire but I doubt that the store will have any of them for sale. Instead, I may end up with some copies of recent film releases that I enjoyed first seeing on the big screen in my local multi-plex cinema.

On my way home to the Beach, I will swing past school and talk to my Committee Chair. Hopefully, this won’t be too long of a meeting. If things go well, he hopefully will like the structure of the dissertation and will be able to give me some guidance on the creation of some archival data.

Then, everything slows down on Saturday and Sunday.

The only event for the weekend proper is a late lunch – early dinner at El Gringo on Sunday. I also want to watch my Japanese samurai epic drama on Saturday; I missed last week’s show when I went to the play.


I hope you all have a wonderful weekend gentle readers.

Be well and stay happy.

What to Write About?

What to Write About?
I didn’t do a lot today so I don’t have too much to say.

No wait, I take that back. I did do a lot of work on my dissertation but I don’t have a lot of finished product to show for my efforts. I worked on what is called archival data research, primarily to measure how some large banks and some community banks fund loans to small businesses.

I hope that sounds impressive. If it does, I will really feel good then.

Archival data research consisted of slogging through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s data base going back to 1998. The data I was looking for was easy to find but I had to look at nine different annual reports to finish the archive work for each of the five largest California banks. Then, I had to load the data into an Excel spreadsheet that looks modestly nice. It was time consuming but everything flowed nicely for me. I’m comparing small business lending by large California banks and small California banks for part of the dissertation.

My next step after I completed the first spreadsheet for the five largest banks was to determine the number of small banks that were in existence prior to December 31, 1997. I had planned to use the sort function in the FDIC’s data base program that allows one to select certain criteria by date of the bank’s charter.

Sound simple, right?

Plug in the other parameters and push Find. Wait a minute or so while the data is extracted and then sent to my laptop.

Unfortunately for me, the date sort function was not working today. It would not give me a list of small California banks that began their operation before December 31, 1997. That meant I had to resort to a manual sort of all 214 banks in the small California bank list. I worked on that for most of the afternoon.

I still have about 64 more banks to check. This should go easily for me since they are all the smallest ones on the list and small banks, generally speaking or typing, are the newest ones that would be excluded from my final list. I think my list of older, small California banks will be around 100 or so.

I am not looking forward to the building a massive Excel spreadsheet for 100 banks that will run on for pages and pages. Granted, this would increase the size of the finished dissertation but I am not yet to the point of amassing volumes of information simply to thicken the size of the document. This is one of the topics for discussion with my Committee chair on Friday. I would prefer to use a random sample of 20 or 25 of the smaller banks because that would shrink the slogging through the data base that I would have to do and it should be a very representative sample of the group.

Let’s hope my Chair agrees with me.

Woman of the Moment
This is a good spot to put the Woman of the Moment. Mercedes Terrell is always a pleasant diversion for me.




Be well and stay happy. Tomorrow should be a better blog posting.

300 Million Americans

300 Million Americans
I heard on the television news this morning that the United States has 300 million people, more or less, living here.

I pondered that number. Frankly, it bothered me. The thought that a lot of them will want to live in sunny and warm Southern California because warm and sunny is so much better than windy and rainy and snowy was troubling. That will make our highways, no parking lots, even more crowded. Traffic will flow at the rate of molasses.

I may have been too generous with the flow model.

A good number of those people who move to Southern California will want to visit our sandy beaches in the Summer. Traffic in my part of the world will collapse because there simply isn’t enough room for many more people on the weekends.

I suppose I could rent out my second parking spot in the building on an hourly basis to people who are willing to walk the short distance, less than a mile or two kilometers, to the beach.

Of course, I might want to leave the crowds so that would mean I would have to hire an attendant to watch the second parking spot. That would consume my profits.

So much for my plan to make some quick money.

I suppose that I ought to be upset that there will be around 400 million in the country around 2045 or so. While I would enjoy living a long and productive life, I think that 100 might be more than enough of a long and productive life.

Living to 100 would make it certain that I would have amply opportunity to spoil any and all grandchildren. That idea is strangely compelling for me.

Observations on Relationships
“It’s hard to kiss the lips at night that chew your ass out all day long.”

This may be part of irregular series of observations on relationships.

Woman of the Moment
Mercedes Terrell is a product of warm and sunny Southern California. And to think, some people only thought of Southern California as being the land of nuts and fruits and shakes.



Doug
I was talking to Doug this morning, mostly about his Introduction to Film Studies class and his professor.

I make a donation to the American Film Institute annually. I don’t get many benefits from the donation except for some discount tickets to the AFI Los Angeles International Film Festival. I don’t want to go to the screenings but I thought Doug might find one or more of them interesting. We’ll talk about the screenings on Friday when I go out behind the Orange Curtain on Friday.

I suggested that we might want to hit the Tower Records going out of business bankruptcy sale and see if there are any interesting DVDs to purchase at a good price. Doug thought that was a good idea. I did have to point out that there may be lots of DVDs for sale but none that we would want to include on our collections.

Good point Dad.

Dissertation
I also plan to see my Dissertation Committee chair on Friday and talk to him about my Chapter 2. I sent him an early draft of on section of the chapter to review. I want to be certain that my approach to the chapter is correct; I don’t want to write one hundred or more pages only to be told that I have to do a massive cut and paste to fix things.

My Friend Elaine
I emailed my friend Elaine who lives in Hawaii, on the Big Island, after I heard about the earthquake on Sunday. Naturally, I was concerned for her safety.

Elaine and James, her husband, had me stay with them when I went to Hawaii on a vacation a couple of years ago. James is an excellent builder so I thought the house would be safe plus it is built on an ancient lava flow so the ground is solid.

The only damage that they suffered appeared to have been their old television set which exploded. Elaine said she was looking forward to buying a new and bigger flat screen television set. It was easier to justify the purchase now.

Netscape Navigator
I use Netscape Navigator as my alternative web browser.

Actually, I only use Navigator to cut and paste my blog postings. I write my blogs in MS Word and then copy them into the blog site. I used to be able to do that when I used Earthlink.net as my ISP. When I switched to Verizon.net, I couldn’t do that any more so I had to use Navigator.

This is such a pain. Anyway.

I downloaded the latest version of Navigator, 8.1.2, recently; the one cool feature of this version is you can adopt what Netscape calls the “Winscape” display style. Winscape looks substantially like the Internet Explorer that I use all of the time. I like this because I don’t have to remember two different programs now.

Carbon Dating Myself
I can remember when everyone used Netscape, as it was called then, as the web browser of choice.


Be well and stay happy.

Weekend Leftovers

Weekend Leftovers


The bad University of Utah football team showed up in Laramie on Saturday and suffered a humiliating loss, 31-15, to the University of Wyoming Cowboys. It was the first loss in Laramie since 1999. That was really bad. Our Utes are now 4-3 for the season and 2-1 for the conference.

I’m not certain if the Cowboys were than much better than the Utes or if the Utes played really badly. Utah had less than 200 yards of total offense for the entire game. They had more than enough turnovers and interceptions to last for the rest of the season.

This Saturday, Utah plays the University of New Mexico 3-4 on the road.

At this point, I don’t know which Utah team will show up for the game; the good one or the bad one. I think the Utes have a good chance to end with a winning season. I wouldn’t want to put any money on whether they get a post season bowl invitation or not.

El Gringo
I went to El Gringo on Saturday for lunch because I was having lunch with Vivian on Sunday. The late lunch meal also held me for the night when I went to the theater. I had two beef tacos, rice, and beans for lunch. It was a tasty filling meal for me.


The server remembered me from the week before. She was busy so I didn’t have a chance to ask what her name is. Maybe I will remember for next weekend.

Norton Utilities
I run Norton Utilities on my laptop just to make things go smoothly. I’ve scheduled the Norton One Button Clean Up program to run every Friday morning.

On Friday, I noticed that I had 338 errors in the Short Cut function test.

That’s scary to me.

How could my laptop develop 338 errors in the Short Cut function in only a week; especially since I had run the One Button Clean Up fix program last Friday?

Either my laptop is possessed or the program is a piece of crap and doesn’t fix anything when you push the “fix” button when it finishes its search for errors or maybe it’s all just a big pile of smoke and mirrors that are designed to make consumers like you and me happy and feel good.

Maybe there is another perfectly logical explanation that is currently eluding me right now.

Woman of the Moment
Mercedes Terrell lives behind the Orange Curtain out in North Orange County. Doug says that she lives in the 714 part of Orange County and that is not as cool as the 949 part. I can accept a 714 woman; she could drive me to the Original Tommy’s Hamburgers for a Mega Combo meal or to Albertacos for a Number 8 meal any day.



Theater
I went to see the play “Proof” on Saturday night. It won a Tony award for best drama when it played on Broadway. The film PROOF is based on the play.

I didn’t see PROOF when it played in the local cinema a year or so ago. Maybe it was just well. I think I would have liked the play better had I seen both versions. The play has a small cast of four actors and a limited set. This makes the play more interesting and it is easier to understand the characters better.

I gave my friend Sharon tickets to go see the play. I think she will enjoy it. I did call her on Sunday to let her know the play does have a lot of adult language in it and this may bother her. At least, I warned her so I did my part.

Vivian and I talked about the theater on Sunday. She went to see a preview performance of Carrie Fisher’s one woman show. Vivian said that she really enjoyed the play and encouraged me to go see it. Vivian said that Carrie Fisher talked about her life and her ups and downs and even talks about her Princess Leia hairstyle.

Maybe I will go see it.


Be well and stay happy gentle readers.

Weekend Update - October 15th

Fiery Red Hair
I think Vivian’s hair turned out a little less than fiery she led me to believe it was. Of course, it may have faded after a week of washings. The photo doesn’t do a very good job of catching the color. My limited photography skills could have been a factor as well.


All in all, I do like Vivian and I enjoy her company immensely.

The Princess would say that Dad’s being honest because he shared the dessert with her and he only does that with people he really likes, like me for example.

We had a two hour lunch at L.A. Food Show today.

We talked a lot obviously and we also ate. This was my main meal of the day.

We had to start off with the Avocado Bacon Chicken Cheese egg rolls. They were perfect again. This was a silent part of lunch because we were more interested in the egg rolls than we were in conversation.


Vivian suggested I try the Poke Martini which is not a drink; it is served in a martini glass. It is a mixture of ahi sashimi [raw ahi tuna], shrimp, avocado, sesame seeds, diced tomatos, and finely shredded lettuce served with a poke sauce of soy, honey, sesame oil and something else.


It was yummy.

I had a Show Burger for lunch. It was your basic half pound / quarter kilo burger with Swiss cheese, tomato, onions, pickles, lettuce on a bun together with some French fries.


Vivian and I both love desserts so we shared the Molten Chocolate Cake. I suggested that we have that. Vivian looked over the other choices and agreed that it was an excellent choice.


As you can see, we did enjoy the cake.


I think we will be back for another lunch at the Show in a month or so. Lunches like these are best had in moderation. I don’t think I could eat here every day unless I took half of my lunch home every day for my dinner.

Sudoku
The local sudoku puzzles have suddenly become more of a challenge this week. I had a gentle rated puzzle this week that featured two completely empty squares. I didn’t consider that one to be gentle at all. There was another puzzle that had an empty center square.

It used to be that there was only one tough rated puzzle each week and it was on Sunday. The newspaper changed the arrangement and is now featuring two tough rated puzzles. Now, the newspaper has two tough rated puzzles each week and this makes doing the puzzles less fun for me.

Woman of the Moment
One of the nice features about the Mercedes Terrell photos is that they include photos of sports cars. Men seem to like hot sports cars almost as much as they like beautiful women.



Mercedes turned 21 this month in case any of you are concerned.

Visitors
Vivian did not stop by this week to flip through the pages for her Man of the Moment with Orlando B. so we had no curious visitors this week.

We did have a good foreign visitor count this week. We had visitors from France, Bulgaria, Netherlands, Japan [3], Thailand, Germany [2], Brazil, Italy, Australia [2], Canada [5], Argentina, Texas [3], Qatar, Ireland, Israel, Austria, Ukraine, New Zealand, and Hungary.

Errata
I had some more stuff that I was going to write about but my lunch is leaving me sort of feeling tired so I will fill that in on Monday.

The Blogger.com photo upload program won't work for me tonight. I will try to upload the photos tomorrow.


I hope you all had a wonderful weekend gentle readers. I did.

Be well and stay happy.