Category: Computers

Tuesday Night Grab Bag O’ Thoughts

Post author By Chris M. Day
Post date July 1, 2008
7 Comments on Tuesday Night Grab Bag O’ Thoughts

Just because I’m not there doesn’t mean that I can’t do this:

1. It’s 10 PM EDT in Homestead – and 9 PM CDT here on the River Walk en San Antonio as I begin posting this blog entry, and that makes it a true ‘Tuesday Night Grab Bag O’ Thoughts’. Normally these weekly thoughts are compiled and published late on a Tuesday afternoon, but that’s not the case this week. I was busy being a tourist on this particular Tuesday afternoon.

2. As the 10:30 AM service was just getting started at Life Pointe Church this past Sunday morning me and my brother were just getting started with our 5-hour / 300-mile trek from Allen Texas (north of Dallas) to San Antonio. (We’ll be making the return trip back to Allen on Wednesday afternoon.)

3. I saw this on a billboard on the President George Bush Turnpike north of Dallas – ‘YOUR WIFE IS HOT !‘ (in big bold letters). Underneath that it read (in much smaller letters) – ‘Better Get That A.C. Fixed’. Now that’s effective advertising that grabbed my (short) attention (span) !

4. We stopped by my brother’s office in a generic high-rise office building in Dallas to pick up a few items. My immediate observation of the joint – he’s got absolutely no pictures of me in his office. Hopefully this public thought right here will give him a substantial guilt complex that will remind him to go home and retrieve a picture of me so that he can proudly display it in his office.

5. Parts of I-35 southbound away from Dallas and towards Waco, Austin, and San Antonio kinda sorta reminded me of parts of I-4 westbound away from Orlando and towards Lakeland and Tampa. Central Texas looks a lot like Central Florida in many areas.

6. We hit 100,000 miles in my brother’s 2001 Jeep Grand Cherokee while driving southbound on I-35, and my brother actually captured the flip-over from 99,999 miles to 100,000 miles on video while driving about 75 MPH in the fast lane and passing an 18-wheeler. (I was slightly terrified during those couple of minutes.)

7. Me and my brother ate dinner Sunday night at this place in San Antonio about 9 miles from downtown. It’s a place that I’ve been to once before – in October 2003 the last time I was in town. We saw the WWE PPV ‘Night Of Champions’ there.

8. My brother is an official exhibitor (representing the company that he works for) at the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) 2008 presented by the International Society For Technology In Education (ISTE). Picture the Exponential Conference that we attended up in Orlando this past April but much bigger than that, and instead of Pastors and church staff members it’s teachers and principals.

9. One of the most popular blog entries of all-time on here was from January 2008. It’s the one where I posted all of those funny names for Chinese restaurants that have ‘Wok’ in its name. Well here’s a new one. Yesterday I enjoyed Lunch at a mall joint known as the ‘Side Wok Cafe’.

10. I saw “The Happening” Monday afternoon at the movies, and I thought that it was near-perfect (if you’re in to that type of box office entertainment). It was more eye-popping than it was bonechilling. What was even more horrific than the movie itself is the fact that parents actually brought their small school-aged kids into the theatre to watch the movie as well. If you know anything about this movie then you may just agree with me when I refer to those parents as ‘irresponsible’.

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Tuesday Night Grab Bag O’ Thoughts

Post author By Chris M. Day
Post date June 17, 2008
5 Comments on Tuesday Night Grab Bag O’ Thoughts

You know you want it, so don’t let me be the one to deny it:

1. On this dark and stormy Tuesday afternoon in Homestead I actually heard the following overused phrase from a coworker – ‘I think this is gonna be a really bad hurricane season. This could be the worst one yet !’ Remember when Hurricane Andrew destroyed Homestead 16 years ago this August ? That was one of the quietest Atlantic hurricane seasons in modern history. It only takes one powerful hurricane to wreck havoc with your life as you know it. If we have an all-time record 30 named storms this season, yet none of them strike land anywhere near you then what kind of hurricane season is that ?

2. We’re getting a lot of much-needed rain today here in Homestead. I totally dig that. We need every last drop of it and then some to pull us out of this extended drought that we’re in. We could really use at least three FEET of rain (that’s right – 36 inches) over the next three months !

3. If you think that you haven’t seen that many mosquitoes out and about thus far this Summer then check again by this weekend. Let me know if you can feel them biting you in a few days.

4. Last Thursday I celebrated the 23RD anniversary of my United States Air Force / Department Of Defense career. Time flies when I’m having fun !

5. Last Friday I celebrated the 13TH anniversary of me living here in my current home here in Homestead. This is by far the best place that I have ever lived in my entire life / Life.

6. For those of you who are new to my blog let me explain. When I refer to the last 22 months of my Life the word ‘Life’ is always capitalized. When I refer to the 39 years before that the word ‘life’ begins with a lower-case ‘l’. When I write about my ‘life / Life’ I’m referring to my previous sad, miserable, and directionless life, as well as my current Life – full of glory, joy, and purpose for I have been saved and reborn again by the Lord Jesus Christ. It’s all symbolic, but it also keeps it all in perspective.

7. My next laptop will have at least 2 gigabytes of memory in it. My current laptop has exactly one-fourth that amount. I think that I will finally buy a brand new laptop sometime between now and the end of the year. I’m actually not looking forward to it. Once I buy that new laptop this blog may suddenly go inactive for about 3 to 5 days because it will probably take that long to transfer all of my files over from this laptop to that laptop and also install and configure various programs. There’s a lot of work involved there. If I knew that it would be really easy then I would probably already have a new laptop by now.

8. Ela O. called me on the telephone this afternoon, and we talked for exactly 7 minutes and 29 seconds. She made me laugh hysterically, and I returned the flavour. The telephone is my least favourite electronic device that I could easily live without; however, when I see that it’s Ela on the other end (via my Caller-I.D.) I know that I should be prepared to laugh up a storm with her. She has every reason in the world to be sad and miserable, yet she is one of the happiest and most joyful women I know in my current Life. She’s got a whole lot of purpose remaining in her Life here on Earth on God’s fantastic journey !

9. Ela tried to pull a fast one on me during that telephone conversation by telling me that I was being assigned to make coffee this Sunday morning at the Life Pointe Church Café. We have quite a few Medical Doctors and Registered Nurses that are part of our LPC family. They would be put into action and forced to go to work on their fellow brothers and sisters if I were to make coffee on Sunday morning. We would need a couple of shuttle buses to transport the victims from the movie theatre to the hospital. I stopped making coffee for the general public in 1989 – not because I made anyone sick or anything like that – but because I could. Nowadays I actually make my own instant coffee for myself on most mornings. It would probably cause irregular heartbeats for most normal healthy humans.

10. The Sun is now shining brightly and baking the atmosphere directly above my neighbourhood. That only means one thing. Prepare now for another ferocious thunderstorm with torrential downpours in about an hour.

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Saturday Morning Shenanigans

Post author By Chris M. Day
Post date May 24, 2008
6 Comments on Saturday Morning Shenanigans

B U G S – The bugs are back in town here in Homestead due to all of the recent heavy rains. You may be thinking to yourself, ‘Hey – Wait a minute. I live in Homestead. It hasn’t rained since March !’ You may also be thinking to yourself, ‘No doubt. I thought the sky was caving in on us yesterday afternoon. My yard turned into a giant lake ! My new patio furniture was thrown by the funnel cloud into the canal !’ There is rain all around us. Some of us have received a lot of it this past week, and some of us are still living in a dust bowl. Pretty soon all of us will get a lot of rain, and the bugs will flock to Homestead on their Summer break. Get ready to be eaten alive by little itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny mouths with glow-in-the-dark green eyes.

G A S – I filled-up my car this morning with not quite 11 gallons of gas at Chevron on Useless-One at Campbell Drive at the remarkable price of $4.059 per gallon. That’s about 15 to 20 cents per gallon higher than every other gas station in the general vicinity of that Chevron, but I am kinda sorta semi-loyal to Chevron, and I really wanted to use my fresh new Chevron-Texaco credit card this morning for the first time. $4.059 may seem outrageous to a majority of whining and complaining Americans, but $4.059 for the equivalent of a gallon of gas anywhere in Europe is known as ‘the good old days of the 1990s’.

J A V A – Speaking of items that we Americans love to spend a lot of money on – Starbucks in Homestead – not to be confused with Starbucks in Florida City – is OPEN for BUSINESS ! OK calm down Travis. The drive-thru is open for business. The inside of the joint is apparently not quite ready for customer utilization, so you’ll just have to wait a little while longer to sit inside for hours on your wireless Apple Mac.

One final item of interest – Many of the mega-stores and restaurants at the first phase of the Homestead Pavilion shopping, dining, and entertainment complex at Campbell Drive and the Turnpike are expected to make their grand openings between the middle of October and the middle of November – just in time for the NASCAR Championship Series at the Homestead-Miami Speedway and of course the Christmas 2008 shopping season.

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Bedtime Stories

Since the Saturday after Thanksgiving 2007 not a single day has gone by here on this blog without at least one posted entry. That’s 163 days in a row, so why stop now ? The continuous blogging streak continues.

This is Day 164, and this is the Monday night edition of ‘Bedtime Stories’. I do it for all of my thousands hundreds of fans worldwide.

TODAY was one of those rare days where it was rather slow at work, and extremely hectic here at home. We had wide area network (WAN) technical difficulties throughout the day today, so there were long periods of time in which our computers were essentially useless with no internet, no web, and no E-Mail. I like to refer to that period of time in which computers had no internet, no web, and no E-Mail – as 1993 ! 😉

I pretty much came home from work this afternoon to use a computer that actually works – that is – connected to the rest of the world.

Monday is always a busy day here at home on my computer. Nowadays it’s even busier as I do a lot of post-Sunday follow-up work for my church. As usual I’m not even close to being done with it all, so the fun shall continue tomorrow (Tuesday) afternoon. I adore serving God’s people at Life Pointe Church. My Life is purpose-driven. I am alive.

Also TOMORROW – Be sure to check out the most spontaneous weekly series here on this blog, as it’s another thought-provoking edition of the ‘Tuesday Night Grab Bag O’ Thoughts’. You just never know what 10 items of interest could be on my mind on any given Tuesday night.

Have a safe, peaceful, and relaxing Monday night everyone, and until we chill-out again here on the blog remember this:

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