Stories

The things I thought were Excellent:
- Places: Universal Studios, Islands of Adventure, Pleasure Island, the Cruise, Epcot, Key West, downtown.
- Terrain: trees, rain, ocean, lizards, alligators, swamps. The plant live, animals and insects here are widely diverse.
- People: Most are very laid back. Everybody seems to treat you like a friend.
- Food: There's a restaurant on every corner. The BBQ is actually smoked meat, not just sauce on brisket.
- Businesses: A thimble collector could have a lucrative shop here.
- Driving: No one honks their horn here. Drivers here don't pay attention to the road, but they are laid back.
The things that need improvement (sucked):
- The phone system. You may have to dial phone numbers four times to satisfy the phone system.
- The news is stupid. If what the news has said is true, justice doesn't work for poor people.
Its very irrelevent. A truck driver snoozed, rear ended some people, and the news mentions he's a sex offender. Why?
The news was showing weapons retrived from a gang at a park here. They were knives you can buy at a 7-11.
- The justice system:
A sober, poor immigrant landscaper hits a 4 year old who runs out into the street. He runs.
They catch him and give him a public defender.
The public defender pleads him guilty. He gets life in jail for hit and run. Why weren't the parents charged?
Any immigrant who has an accident here will have to run. They will be afraid of American justice.
His life was ruined by the parents who let their 4 year old run around unsupervised.
He would have gotten charged with criminal negligence no matter what he did.
- The roads, street numbers and street names are a mess.
- Most of the lakes are accessable only if you own a house on the shoreline.

Sun 4am-Orlando
Mon 5pm-12hrs-1236 Pleasant Ridge,Forrest,Ms (680 miles) leave Tue 8am.
Tue 5pm-08hrs-9427 sr-dd,Bloomsdale,Mo(1181 miles) 500miles
08hrs-Lincoln,Ne(1668) 487 miles
07hrs-Cheyenne,Wy (2100 miles) 432 miles
08hrs-Salt Lake City,Ut (2541) 441 miles
04hrs-Cedar City,Ut(2793) 252 miles
03hrs-Las Vegas,Nv(2965) 172 miles
50 hours

Orlando,New Orleans,Ida,St Lake City-46
Orlando,New Orleans,Houston,San Antonio,Tucson,Phoenix,Grand Canyon-46
Orlando,New Orleans,Memphis,Ida,Topeka,Denver,Albuquerque-45
Orlando,New Orleans,Ida,Oklahoma City,Albuquerque-44
Orlando,New Orleans,Houston,San Antonio,Tucson,Phoenix-41
Orlando,Ida,Oklahoma City,Albuquerque-40
Orlando,Ocala,Atlanta,Nashville,Paducah,Ida,St Louis,Kansas City,Topeka,Denver-41
Orlando,Ocala,Atlanta,Nashville,Paducah,Ida,St Louis,Oklahoma City,Albuquerque-40
Orlando,Mobile,Shreveport,New Orleans,Amarillo,Dallas,Albuquerque-37

Thinking about coming back to Vegas. Thinking about all of the favors I've done there.
One good deed every day can add up to the thousands after years go by.
I'm saddened that I'm not worth a free phone call during the holidays.
Some think this planet might be another planets hell.
This planet is simple and beautiful. People make it hell for each other.
John Lennon couldn't spread the truth with his song (Imagine).
People just keep blowing each other up, stealing, politicing land away from others.
If only people could see, the harm they do others hurts themselves.
We only think we are individuals. We can't see that we are components of a single life force.

I had a good time at the park's last night. It sure is different here.
I remebered one other place here in Florida, It is Fort Lauderdale.
We haven't been there yet have we? I should proberly call the kid's
tonight. I think our websiteLVDARLINGS is looking very good.

LUV Ya
Becky

This blog lets people enter in Formatted text. EG: FORMATTED
Which means a user doesn't have to know HTML to get a highlighted message across.
I suppose that I should be grateful for these differences in browsers.
Complicated machinery requires education to build and repair.
In my opinion, displaying and formatting a screen should and could be simple.
A designer, should not have to concern himself with HOW FAST something is displayed. That should be done by the rendering engine. It shouldn't be a consideration in every line of code written.
I started to use Dreamweaver, Frontpage, Word, Publisher, and Flash.
I chose to write all of the code for this system by hand.
The problem was, they keep you away from the code, and they generate tons of unused code.
When I get done with this system, I'll know exactly what every line of code does, unlike those guys, and my system will contain 90% less code.

With Tandem Cobol, the SORT command is a pig.
People still use it. Yes, it's in the manual. The alternative is simple. Create a key sequenced file, let Tandem manage the speed of the indexing, and it will not only be quicker, the sort will be rerunnable. For small files, it will never hit the disk. The Tandem is the best selection for online databases, meaning it can handle keyed files much better than in-memory sorts. And using key-sequenced files sure beats the heck out of writing a whole program to sort a file in an unrerunnable fashion.
People still use indexes and other ancient concepts presented by Cobol.
I just can't become one of those people. My code must be compact, readable, and efficient.
I don't know why I'm getting off on this tangent.
I guess it's because I'm seeing what a mess the internet has become. Instead of getting simpler, its getting more complicated. There is absolutely NO REASON to create another language for displaying a screen or to access a database.

I could have retired. I could have wasted the rest of my life. I could have been out of the rat race.
There is something I'm supposed to accomplish. MY GOD told me this.
My god is nature, and nature doesn't speak English.

Nature makes you hungry, makes you have children and then protect them, all without words.
Nature's told me there's something I'm supposed to do, in the form of an instinctive feeling. I'll know when I've done it.
Then I can fade away. I give my body perhaps 10 more years.
Whatever is going to happen, it'll happen in the next couple of years.
It won't be me doing it though. It'll be nature doing it through me. I'll just doing what I've been told to do.
Maybe it's my destiny to save someone's life, I don't know yet.
Hopefully, I won't be a pawn anymore in ending other people's lives. I hate being the messenger of death.
For some reason, I've been given the understanding of what life is and why we are here.
But I can't share it with anyone, simply because, they just can't see it. You have to know it.
You have to listen to the god that created every cell in your body.
And God doesn't speak English.
I still don't understand why people don't marvel at a blade of grass.
I saw that it was a miracle when I was a child. Why would god have to do a magic show better than that?
We all have been risen from the dead. Why is that so hard for people to see?

They both left me with a negative feeling about myself.
Dad, once again, compared me to the person whose roof he lives under.
His wife's son is a computer professional. According to Dad, he gets contracts all of the time.
So, what's wrong with me.
I could try to tell Dad that I'm not a coder, I'm a designer.
My goal is to create a product that doesn't need my high rates, or a high level of competency to maintain.
If I get contracted to write a report on a system, it won't be just a report.
It'll be the most efficiently written report in the entire system. It will be the best report they have.
I would consider part of my job to be writing a report in such a way, that a 6th grader could modify it.
I could write code that only I could modify. I could even write code with hidden bugs in it.
But that's not my style. I don't want to make a living off of a set of programs.
If his wife's son is always getting contracts to make updates on the same set of programs, it's probably crappy code.
He's making a living off of being sloppy. His code is unmaintainable by anyone else.
My legacy to Las Vegas is a series of Tandems that sit in the basement somewhere.
One person updates it. He does't need any eduction. He runs a menu.
There is no programming expertise needed to maintain it.
I talked to Mikey. He said talked to Kevin.
Kevin told me there wouldn't be anything out there until after the holidays.
He told Mikey something was coming up in Washington and that they'd be willing to train Java programmers.
I put that together like this, fuck em. I've never used headhunters in the past, except for this one time. I learned their tecniques back in the 70's. I know what they do. I know how to they get jobs for people. It's not rocket science.
But I'm not looking for a job right now.
If I was, I wouldn't be using a headhunter. I'd be using my time to make my own contracts. I'd cut the middle layer of incompetency out of the process. A headhunter, an employment office, a job councellor, none of these people are necessary in obtaining work. If they get in the way, they are useless.
About the Raymond James interview, one more time.
I was glad that I didn't get a job working there. They seemed too slow and too incumbered by unnecessary details to be a place where I could be creative. If I worked like that on this website, I'd be spending most of my time filling out forms I created. On this site, I can create more in one day, than I could in one year working there.
About M2, one more time.
It may be fine, for someone else to sit at a desk, and write code exactly as they had been told to do. To me, doing that would make me unnecessary for the project. Why wouldn't the person who wrote the code and showed me exactly where to put it, just write the code herself? Billing comes to mind. They need a body to say that they wrote the code, so they can bill for that person's time. In other words, I'd be useless following marching orders like that.
I'd be last chair, last clarinet, in the band. And that is just not my style!

Every day in this life should count. We have 30000 days to live here. We can decide to waste or not waste each day.

That would be my formula for a good life.
I wanted Becky to be involved in the evolution of this website.
We went to Walmart and bought some cheap desks. Now they are sitting side by side in the bedroom.
I want Becky to help me accomplish something cool. Any female can give birth to a child. Thats as natural as breathing.
Very few people give birth to ideas.
She's already helped me bunches and she doesn't even know it.
Becky's biggest contribution to this sites development, is her not understanding how to use it. |
Everyone has talents. I need her talent to finish this site. If this site can be broken, she can show me how.
She'll try to do things on it without reading the instructions. She doesn't see the functionality of this site, she see's the flash and pizazz of it.
Henry Ford was a genius of sorts. I think they called him "The Father of the Assembly Line".
His accomplishments wasn't so much the Ford vehicle, it was the assembly lines where the Fords were built. To make the assembly more efficient, he didn't study the hardest worked, he studied the laziest one. The laziest people figured out how to do the same amount of work, with the least amount of effort. They thought about what they did.
He turned Mass Production into the science it is today.

I got irritated at Becky because she didn't seem to know anything much about setting up my website.
I told her we have a choice.
That's to be poor, or not to be poor. The way to be poor was to waste each and every day.
The way to get ahead, is to make each and every day count.
If its spacing out the days until the end that she wants, then we should go into truck driving now.
To me, that is slow suicide.
I want to make each day count. I want to do things most people don't do. I do not want to be normal.
Life is a gift. We have a choice. We can appreciate it, or we can take it for granted.
I think most people take life for granted.

It seemed to me that I'd be a good fit for one of those boats. I can deal, maintain their systems, and fix things. Everything there was so familiar. I know I could improve their marketting strategy too. The boat had mainly drive bys (like us), and bus people on it. Most of the people their would never be the targets of a Las Vegas casino.
I was dying to fix half the things I saw. I was this || close to fixing one of their toilets
Their slot enrollment wouldn't let you combine points. It couldn't handle joint memberships. Data entry was rough.
Their cruise reservations was clunky. After signing someone up, you had to search for their name in the database and pull up a change screen to see what you had entered. It looked like a cheesy system.