http://www.busdriverjim.com
Things in general
I bought a frozen burrito at Broulim’s yesterday to have for dinner last night. I was too busy to take it home so I put it next to my car back at base, slightly covered in snow.
Of course it snowed more and when I got back to the car I couldn’t see it, forgot it was there, and drove off and left it.
I was so bummed last night I just skipped dinner…
My buddy Rod is feeling depressed and he sent me this email:
Over five thousand years ago, Moses said to the children of Israel, “Pick up your shovels, mount your asses and camels, and I will lead you to the Promised Land.”
Nearly 75 years ago, when Welfare was introduced, Roosevelt said, “Lay down your shovels, sit on your asses, and light up a Camel, this is the Promised Land.”
Today, Congress has stolen our shovels, taxed our asses, raised the price of Camels and mortgaged the Promised Land!
I was so depressed last night thinking about Health Care Plans, the economy, multiple wars, lost jobs, savings, Social Security, retirement funds, etc… I called a Suicide Hotline. I had to press 1 for English.
I was connected to a call center in Pakistan and when I told them I was suicidal, they got excited and asked if I could drive a truck…
We are really in trouble!
I found this very interesting question and answer today online:
Does it cost more to turn lights on and off then it does to just leave them on?
For an incandescent lamp, there is a very brief high current impulse when they’re first turned on, but this doesn’t remotely justify leaving them turned on — it stresses filament lamps, but doesn’t require very much power.
I speak as a NASA engineer who designed the power supplies for the Space Shuttle lights. For that mission, because of limited available power, we had to research this exact issue, and concluded that the lights should only be turned on when in use.
The guy that answered the question is Paul Lutus and he was the perfect person to do so.
He also has this great quote:
“The secret to using modern social media is not locating people who actually have a particular answer, but filtering out all the people who think they have the answer”.
I also relate to him: we’ve both developed applications in Assembly language!
That’s pretty much it…
I’ve been having some weird neurological issues for the last couple of years. My hands don’t work like they used to. Normal things are just difficult, it’s frustrating!
So, I made an appointment at the local hospital for a cheap brain exam. I told them I have no insurance and I didn’t want to spend more than $50 bucks! They have a technique where they insert a micro-camera into your ear, so I did it. Here’s the result!
Who are those characters? I think I’m screwed…
I’ve been working sick for the last two days. Picked up the crud that’s been hitting this town lately and the biting cold hasn’t helped a bit…
I was bummed out that I had to bail on Monday dinner, then my buddy Karen came to the rescue with an herb compound she assembled at her office today. Master herb concoctionist she is! I’m feeling Ok. I ate it with a stick in the Brolums parking lot.
My new glasses also came in. The sun on the snow has been hurting my eyes lately and these things are shaded and polarized. Sure beats the expensive clip-ons.
Hey Karen, maybe you could leave a comment detailing this mysterious herb mixture?
Or is it a trade secret? :-)
I’ve been really hyper-sensitive to names lately. The presidential candidates for example: Newt and Mitt, what kind of names are these? And Barack? I challenge anyone reading this post to recall someone they’ve known named Newt, Mitt or Barack!
We’ve seen what happens when you get a President with a weird first name. Bring back the Bills, Georges and Ricks, and forget that fool with two first names as a name!
In the last two days I’ve gotten mail from AARP and Aflac, both wanting me to join their clubs. No thanks people! Take me off your list. I have no health insurance, or old people insurance, and I’m fine with that. A terminal illness is just my excuse to head to Vegas for one last fling.
I was telling one of my hitch-hiking stories from back in the sixties, to Steph the other day. Turned out she’d heard it before (perhaps multiple times), but she let me finish it. She said something later that was very interesting: my stories never change in specifics, but sometimes are embellished with more information.
I realized that if the experience you’re trying to recreate was good on a human level in the first place, why embellish it? It would then become not real, thus invalid.
The story? Two hot New York school teachers were on summer vacation driving cross-country with a heroin dealer they’d met in a bar who agreed to be their driver just to get himself to Los Angeles to score a big drug deal. They picked me up in El Paso, Texas because they thought my badass longhaired self was cute. I stepped into a party car that didn’t stop until the next morning when the girls asked me if I wanted to be their driver down into Mexico because the dealer guy had scored, and split. I declined, went North, they went South, story over… Embellishments are available if you e-mail me. :-)
New Years Eve is approaching as I put the finishing touches on my new app PinPoint.
I was traveling around the world tonight, creating PermaMaps for the app and happened upon one of my old hangs back in the late seventies. It was a very cool apartment across from the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, in the middle of summer. I was developing IBM Sys-32 software from a desk with a view of the beach and boardwalk.
It was a crazy fun summer. Write code, go to the beach. Write code, ride the roller coaster. And here I am now, hunkered down in the snow, reminiscing about it…
Here’s the Map.
Plagiarism is running amok within the confines of this post.
Steph took this photo at a baby shower last night and I stole it. Also, binky is a registered trademark of Playtex, but it’s now a generic term for pacifier.
Who cares, she’s just too cute not to make the blog :-)
I created a Flash presentation, commemorating 9/11, back in 2003. I’ve wrapped it up into a simple page this morning, and you can watch it Here.
I asked Steph to do one of her Baskets for my local appreciative therapist friend who keeps giving me vodka, so she whipped this one up. Pretty sweet, she’s great at this!
There’s only one problem. The recipient of this basket follows my blog… Oh well :-)
I don’t know if anybody is noticing, but I’m adding new ways to display images and associated text, to this blog. And, if I can’t think of a topic for the post, I’ll just slap the date in. Here’s my newest technique: thumbnail floats left, text right, fixed size block.
The trick is to keep the commentary within the height of the thumbnail. Works great!
When I saw this car parked next to my bus in the Broulim’s parking lot, I thought of my auto-tech son, Riley. I was really curious who the driver might be. Turned out to be a Mexican girl, with a young son. I picked up single mom vibes. Probably left the guy after this automotive disaster.
I love mirror techniques. I was sitting down the road from a new customer off 4000, and took this shot. The ride turned out funny as the address was 844 and there was an 896, an 822, with a 113 in the middle. I knocked on the door of 113 and an old guy yelled out “Cancel”. Sigh…
This is a nice little property at the beginning of the bike trail from Driggs to Victor. There was a gate with a No Trespassing sign, so I couldn’t go further, but it had a real sense of peace about it.
There are a lot of ghost subdivisions in Teton Valley. Great expectations meet economic downturn. This little oasis is at the entrance to one of them. No houses, just this…