Dec 9, 2011

Message to Trump

Mr. Trump,

Please don't give up on the idea of having your very own debate among the potential GOP presidential nominees. You are so close to achieving your goal of turning the election into your very own reality TeeVee Show that it would be a shame to stop now -- even if there are only two nominees willing to participate.

I was so looking forward to this first step being followed up with other "debates" around the board-room table where you systematically eliminate a nominee each week thereby sparing us all of that tedious primary election and convention stuff.

Donald, be assured that we all eagerly wait the day when the president of the USA is selected by being the last person standing on an island after proving that he, or she, can walk more rope-bridges and eat more worms than anyone else.


Sep 16, 2011

Fashion Trend - Bicycling

Finally, a bicycling helmet with style!

Not really, this is just an adverstising for Electra brand bikes. Maybe it's not too late to start marketing my own line of bike helmets I've been designing.  So far I have prototypes of yarmulke and beret helmets.

I'm still looking for crash test volunteers.

Jun 9, 2011

Extremely Seedy

For all of you who might see this potentially scary name on your caller ID unit -- I just received a call where the caller ID says VISA LOST-STOLEN.  When I picked up the phone it was just a recording (not from my bank either) blindly offering lower interest rates.

May 13, 2011

Cha-Ching -- Palin Style!

Cashing in like a pro, Bristol Palin joined a teen pregnancy prevention nonprofit foundation in 2009. Via Think Progress I read that the AP has found and published the foundation's 2009 tax information. Here is a quick break down:

  $35,000:  grants to teen pregnancy health and counseling clinics (the purpose of the "non-profit"?)
$165,000:  TV advertising
$262,500:  18 year old Bristol Palin's salary

Wow.  Just wow.

Apr 23, 2011

Trump Candidacy

I'm no fortune teller but I have a vision and I want to go on record now (before it becomes all too obvious).

Here's the spoiler -- he won't run.  Not now, not ever.  But I think he pull this shtick every 4 years for the rest of his life.

Here is how I think it will play out:

He'll hint at it more and more as the season of Celebrity Apprentice winds down.  Then he'll announce that he is about to announce.  In fact, it will turn out that he will announce his decision during the last 10 minutes of the season finale of Celebrity Apprentice.  Between now and that day he will call into radio and TV shows and he will grant exclusive and long interviews.  He will speak at special events and he might put out a book about something or other.  As the big day approaches teasers and promos will remind viewers to tune in to the season finale.

At long last the finale will arrive... and the viewership will be huge. In the end Trump will say that he loves what he does too much, and like Sister Sarah he can do more the save the world from outside the system. The next day we'll hear how big the viewership actually was, but from Trump you'll hear that his show was the most watched show of all time -- regardless of what the truth is.  He will say it is because of him and he will be right.  Then the next day he and his team will start negotiating his fee for the next season.  Based on the huge ratings increase it will be a lot more than this years take. And it will all be thanks to the airtime given to him by Fox and other outlets that certainly know that Trump wouldn't stand a chance in hell in the face of the scrutiny that comes with a real candidacy.

Update:  Well, it's two months later and this, from today's NY Post:

 ...sources said he will personally pocket $65 million a year, 
a substantial increase on his previous deal...

Even Later Update:   It's about eight months after this post was written and sure enough, Trump's new book is out. The man who was born rich, and still managed to have two bankruptcies all by himself, lays out his plan for making America great again.

Jan 31, 2011

Anthony Milano, on keyboard...

Me and the squeeze went out for our Jazz fix last night at a local place that features a Django-esque trio on Sundays. The trio has one consistent member who goes by the moniker Chico Malo and each week he brings two others along to join in. Last night I noticed that the keyboard player looked a bit young.  For that matter there seemed to be a lot of young people in the place last night.  I found out later that the keyboard player is 14 years old!  I commented to the waitress that he'll be famous some day and she assured me that he already is.  

Here is an older video of him playing some Honky Tonk, when he was 11 years old.

Jan 5, 2011

What's in a name? Sync vs. Sink

When Xmarks announced that they were closing shop a few months ago I decided to use a different utility to keep my Firefox browser bookmarks in sync across the multiple machines that I use. Man, am I glad that they merged with whoever it is, and decided to stay around for a while.

In the interim I was using the Firefox Sync plug-in.  It worked OK for the most part but yesterday it behaved more like Firefox SINK, if not Firefox STINK.  After spending lots of time cleaning up bookmarks on my desktop machine I instructed it to stink up sync up my bookmarks to their server. Then I went over to my laptop and deleted all bookmarks so that it did not attempt to merge the sloppy collection of bookmarks over there with the clean collection. Then I told the browser on the laptop to sync up with the server.  The intent here would have been obvious to Xmarks but what do you think SINK decided to do?  Yes, it synced the empty list of bookmarks to the server then synced the empty list on the server to my desktop!

It was then that I realized that in addition to this poor interpretation of what the user (that's me) was trying to do there was no recovery features and no support at all! It seemed that all of my bookmarks on both machines were gone.  How's that for automation?!

Thank goodness that my, long unused, account on Xmarks was still active.  I reinstalled the client on my browser and logged in.  They first thing Xmarks did was issue a warning that basically said: "Hey, there is a lot less data on your machine than there is on the server. Do you want to proceed or restore?"  It didn't say it in those words but when I clicked the appropriate options to restore my bookmarks it actually gave me a choice of restore points to go back to.  A few clicks more and I was restored to the state I was in when I last used Xmarks.

Even though it is a free service I will sign up for a "premium" account as a thank you.