From my dad: *Raise Refusal*

For many years I worked as a receptionist and switchboard operator at
a busy company. After a good annual review, my supervisor told me I
was up for a raise, pending approval of the vice president.

A month later, my supervisor called me into his office and told me
the VP had refused to approve the raise. His reason? I clearly wasn't
doing my job.

Every time he saw me, I was either chatting with someone in the lobby
or talking on the phone.

This will make you smile

Are you too wired?

Loved this. I think I flunked the test?

Are you too wired? Eight sure signs you need to disconnect! by ZDNet's Donna Bogatin -- I recently noted that being always-on is not always a good thing, especially when it comes to your sex life! Take my quick test to see if it is time for you to turn-off the always-on button, just in time for a holiday weekend!

Podcast of the Week - Daily Giz Wiz

This is my number one don't miss podcast of the day. Dick DeBartolo is one of the long lived writers from MAD magazine. He is also a gadget freak, so what is there not to like?

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Mad's maddest writer and The Giz Wiz, Dick DeBartolo, digs into his massive gadget collection for the gadget of the day. Released every weekday. This program is co-hosted by Leo Laporte.

DailyTech - RadioShack Employees Get the Boot Via Email

Cold man, this is very cold. Think I will take my business elsewhere.

DailyTech - RadioShack Employees Get the Boot Via Email: "It's bad enough getting fired from a job, but to get your pink slip in an email? That seems to be business as usual at RadioShack these days. The Boston Globe is reporting that 400 RadioShack employees were fired via email on Tuesday morning. The message was short and to the point:

The work force reduction notification is currently in progress. Unfortunately your position is one that has been eliminated."

America eats its young | Salon.com

A different Garrison Keillor than you hear on"A Prairie Home Companion."

America eats its young | Salon.com: "Cutting out healthcare for one-third of the population -- the folks with Bush-Cheney bumper stickers, who still believe the man is doing a heckuva job -- will save enough money to pay off the national debt, not a bad legacy for Republicans. As Scrooge said, let them die and reduce the surplus population. In return, we can offer them a reduction in the estate tax. All in favor, blow your nose."

Bush to widow: "No point" in talking about the war

On his way to vacation at his parents' compound in Kennebunkport, George W. Bush stopped at a local elementary school Thursday to meet with family members of U.S. troops who have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. After the meetings ended, Hildi Halley, whose husband died in Afghanistan in June, said she told the president that it's "time to stop the bleeding" and "swallow our pride and find a solution."
Bush's response? Halley said the president told her that "there was no point in us having a philosophical discussion about the pros and cons of the war."

Quote for the day

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.
- Dr. Seuss

True Majority: Enough JonBenet!

Last week, guess which story topped the national evening news on ABC, CBS, and NBC? JonBenet Ramsey1. Who was the big guest on Nightline and the Today Show? JonBenet Ramsey’s father. What story made front-pages of America’s newspapers, including the New York Times? You got it.

It wasn’t the war in Iraq or the tenuous truce in Lebanon, or even 10 million kids here at home who lack health insurance. It was JonBenet.

Sure, it’s an interesting mystery and a terrible murder, but under what criteria of professional journalism could it possibly merit being the top story in America last week? We’re so disgusted with “journalism” in America that we’re suggesting an action today that we’ve never suggested before.

Contact the News Anchors at ABC, CBS, and NBC, and tell them we’ve had enough JonBenet.

To sign the petition Click here.

Bush on Global Warming - Kind of

Will Ferrell - Bush on Global Warming on Transbuddha

Katherine Harris in heaven? It's more likely than the U.S. Senate

Truly crazy people in the U.S. right now.

"But the real issue is why should Baptists care, why should people care? If you are not electing Christians, tried and true, under public scrutiny and pressure, if you're not electing Christians, then in essence you are going to legislate sin. They can legislate sin. They can say that abortion is all right. They can vote to sustain gay marriage. And that will take Western civilization, indeed other nations because people look to our country as one nation as under God, and whenever we legislate sin and we say abortion is permissible and we say gay unions are permissible, then average citizens who are not Christians, because they don’t know better, we are leading them astray and it's wrong."

Harris' standing in the polls would suggest that the world is in a whole heap o' trouble: She trails Nelson by 35 points. But Harris? She's covered no matter what happens. She says there's "no question" but that she'll be spending eternity in heaven. If God ever asks her why she deserves the trip up, Harris says she'd say: "Because I loved your son and because I know he died for my sins. I know he was resurrected at your right hand and I served him. You know, we're covered with, our sins are covered with his blood and so we are blameless before him. We are as white as snow."

The Blog | Bill Maher: Why Not Impeachment? | The Huffington Post

The Blog | Bill Maher: Why Not Impeachment? | The Huffington Post: "So a judge has ruled that not only is Bush's warrantless wiretapping program illegal, it's also unconstitutional. And not just unconstitutional, but doubly unconstitutional; it violates both the 1st and 4th amendments. We're talking a smackdown of Judge Judy-esque proportions."

Videora iPod Converter - iPod Video Converter

Videora iPod Converter - iPod Video Converter

Videora iPod Converter is a free video conversion application developed by the creators of Videora. It allows you to convert your regular PC video files (avi, mpeg, etc) into the proper video format that your iPod understands.

AMERICAblog: Because a great nation deserves the truth

AMERICAblog: Because a great nation deserves the truth: "Someone give George Bush a God damn civics lesson "

Fat Factors

Intereseting article in the NY TImes on Sunday. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/13/magazine/13obesity.html?ex=1313121600&en=f843a5b06faa63f8&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

One thing that popped out at me, and I know it from all too personal experience, is that once you lose weight you can't go back to eating like a regular person.

This is typical of people who have lost weight — not only a lot of weight, as Janet has, but even a little weight. According to Rudolph Leibel, an obesity researcher at Columbia University who was involved in the discovery of the first human gene implicated in obesity, if you take two nonobese people of the same weight, they will require different amounts of food depending on whether or not they were once obese. It goes in precisely the maddening direction you might expect: formerly fat people need to eat less than never-fat people to maintain exactly the same weight. In other words, a 150-pound woman who has always weighed 150 might be able to get away with eating, say, 2,500 calories a day, but a 150-pound woman who once weighed more — 20 pounds more, 200 pounds more, the exact amount doesn’t matter — would have to consume about 15 percent fewer calories to keep from regaining the weight. The change occurs as soon as the person starts reducing, Leibel said, and it “is not proportional to amount of weight lost, and persists over time.”

ABC News: Film Documents Families Coping With Autism

ABC News: Film Documents Families Coping With Autism: "Aug. 8, 2006 — Autism can isolate a child from loved ones and friends.

It takes a toll on not just the child who suffers from it, but also his or her family.

Although the condition is extremely prevalent — according to Autismspeaks.org, one in 166 children is diagnosed with autism and more children will be diagnosed with autism this year than with AIDS, diabetes and cancer combined — many people do not understand what it is.

'Autism Every Day' is a new documentary about the everyday life of families with an autistic child, focusing on Alison Singer, whose daughter Jodie suffers from autism."

Faith Promoting Story

In 1986, Mkele Mbembe was on holiday in Kenya after graduating from college. On a hike through the bush, he came across a young bull elephant standing with one leg raised in the air

The elephant seemed distressed so Mbembe approached it very carefully. He got down on one knee and inspected the elephant's foot, and found a large thorn deeply embedded in it.

As carefully and as gently as he could, Mbembe worked the thorn out with his hunting knife, after which the elephant gingerly put down its foot.

The elephant turned to face the man and with a rather stern look on its face, stared at him. For several tense moments Mbembe stood frozen, thinking of nothing else but being trampled. Eventually the elephant trumpeted loudly, turned and walked away.

Mbembe never forgot that elephant or the events of that day. Twenty years later he was walking through a zoo with his teenaged son. As they approached the elephant enclosure, one of the creatures turned and walked over to near where Mbembe and his son Tapu were standing. The large bull elephant stared at Mbembe and lifted its front foot off the ground, then put it down. The elephant did that several times then trumpeted loudly, all the while staring at the man.

Remembering the encounter in 1986, Mbembe couldn't help wondering if this was the same elephant. Mbembe summoned up his courage, climbed over the railing and made his way into the enclosure. He walked right up to the elephant and stared back in wonder. Suddenly the elephant trumpeted again, wrapped its trunk around one of the man's legs and swung him wildly back and forth along the railing, killing him...



Probably wasn't the same elephant.

Joke

Herr Professor Doktor Weiss' reputation was made when he conclusively proved the fraudulency of the Mayan codex that claimed to show that that ancient people knew the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter to an exactitude unknown until modern times, in his article, "Bye, Bye, Mesoamerican Pi."

Kim Komando: Getting a grip on flash drives

I have recently been hearing about flash drives. I know they are portable devices, but I was wondering how they work. And how do they differ from thumb drives and hard drives?

I'll bet you're not the only one confused by this. We have thumb and hard drives. We won't even talk about floppy and optical drives. The makers should publish scorecards.

Flash drives are also known as thumb, jump and USB drives, among others. They are all the same thing. These drives use a type of memory known as flash.

Flash has no moving parts. Instead, it is made of rows and columns. Each juncture of row and column has two transistors. One of these is known as the floating gate. The amount of charge passing through it determines whether it is a 1 or 0.

Flash has a number of advantages. For one, it's tiny. So flash is easy to slip into small places.

Flash drives can hold as much as 8 gigabytes of data. But you can easily put them in your pocket. They make transferring data between widely separated computers easy.

Flash also runs cool. So you can comfortably hold a flash drive in your hand.

Although the largest flash drives are expensive, smaller ones are not. These drives are following the same trajectory as hard drives. Capacity is growing rapidly as prices plummet.

Flash memory is much newer technology than hard drives. Most hard drives have platters that spin at 5,400 or 7,200 RPM. More expensive ones spin at up to 15,000 RPM.

Hard drives are descended from drives developed by IBM in the 1950s. So they've been around a long time. They have gotten new life in devices such as the iPod. However, flash memory could supplant them in some applications, such as laptops.

Hard drives have read-write heads that move very quickly above the platters. They occasionally hit the platters, an event known as a head crash. That destroys the drive. Even a speck of dust can cause a head crash. So all this movement has its downside.

However, hard drives can hold vastly more data than flash drives. Currently, the largest consumer hard drive holds 750GB. Compare that to flash drives, which top out at 8GB. The hard drive is not that much more expensive, either.

So, to answer your question, flash drives and hard drives don't have much in common. They both hold data. Neither is volatile, so they don't lose data when shut down. Both are relatively inexpensive. And both are small, considering their capacity.

Flash is solid state, which means it won't break. But hard drives hold a lot more information. If you're editing video, for instance, that's really important.

Life in the 1500's

The next time you are washing your hands and complain because the water temperature isn't just how you like it, think about how things used to be. Here are some facts about the 1500s:

Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May and still smelled pretty good by June. However, they were starting to smell, so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor. Hence: the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting married.

Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children Last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it. Hence the saying: Don't throw the baby out with the bath water.

Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof when it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof. Hence the saying: It's raining cats and dogs.

There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could mess up your nice clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That's how canopy beds came into existence.

The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt. Hence the saying: dirt poor. The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they added more thresh until, when you opened the door, it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entranceway. Hence the word: threshold.

(Getting quite an education, aren't you?)

In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while. Hence the rhyme: Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old.

Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man could bring home the bacon. They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and chew the fat.

Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.

Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or the upper crust.

Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky. The combination would sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up. Hence: the custom of holding a wake.

England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a bone -house, and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the graveyard shift) to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be saved by the bell or was considered a ...dead ringer.

And that's the truth...Now, whoever said History was boring!!

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