Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Relay for Life

Through the hard work of my wife and daughter, and many of our dear friends, I am pleased to announce that we were able to raise $2,706 as a group (Jan's Fans) for the American Cancer Society in this year's Relay for Life. Way beyond our initial goal of $1,000, and representing, I think, a great success for our first time. It is a testimony to the giving nature of our friends and family, and the love that they all have for Jan, that we were able to be so successful.






















Even Chet Edwards came out and put in an appearance, although I am not sure how effective this was as a campaign stop for him.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Internet Privacy

The latest big technology news is the so-called privacy breach in Facebook. Apparently when you have been playing Farmville, or Mafia whatever, the people who run those games have had access to your information on Facebook, and may have sold that information to others, so that they can market to you. How much information that is seems to be hard to determine, but at least they know your name and/or e-mail address.

My father worked for a number of years for a company called Names Unlimited. Their only function was to amass lists of names and addresses of people who had previously bought things from mail-order catalogs, and to then group them by their apparent interests, location, or whatever, and then sell those lists to other people who were interested in marketing through the mail. In so doing, we all received a little more "junk" mail, but the cost of First Class postage was pretty cheap, because the US Post Office was making a mint off of all the junk mail that they carried. Well mail-order has mostly gone away, to be replaced by online shopping, and as a result the cost to mail a letter has gone up from .25 in 1990 to .46 in 2011.

I guess my point is, if you want to play the games on Facebook/Myspace/whatever for "free", then you should know that there really is nothing that is "free", there is always an angle. They aren't spending money on programming all of this stuff just so you can waste time at work, there is always an ulterior motive.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

And the winner is....

Here is an example of a recently settled lawsuit, where the real winner, once again, is the attorney. He wins a settlement of $610,000.00, and pockets 70% of it as his fee. I know it costs a lot of money to prepare to litigate in a case of this type, but c'mon.... $425,000, and you never even went to court?

Monday, October 11, 2010

The Book Incident

In case you haven't heard, President Obama was nearly hit with a paperback book in Philadelphia. Secret Service agents have interviewed the book thrower and have dismissed him as being overly-exuberant, but looking at these pictures, the facts just aren't adding up. The angle and velocity of the book are off, I think that we might be missing a second thrower. Fortunately the alert Secret Service Agent (the one in the yellow tie in picture 1), was able to apprehend the book in question, and at the time of this writing, the book is reportedly being held and undergoing interrogation in an undisclosed Philadelphia location. Several eyewitnesses have identified the book differently. Clearly the President was unaware of how terribly close he came to a mild thump, or possibly a papercut.

Friday, October 08, 2010

For the record

Tomorrow will be the 70th anniversary of John Lennon's birth. Not his 70th birthday. You cease to have birthdays when you die. If you disagree with me, then it is also the 424th birthday of Archduke Leopold V of Austria, but since he died 378 years ago, that just seems silly.

Wednesday, October 06, 2010

Weird News

In case you missed it, there is a great story about a three year old girl's "princess" party here. As they say in one of my favorite movies, "Raising Arizona", "It's a crazy world - someone should sell tickets - I'd buy one".