The loan fell through.
I was told the interest rates were fixed at 3.75%, interest only for 5 years and I'd get $40,000.
In the end, the rates were fixed for 1 month, and I'd get $18,000.
And my loan officer, gets for his 20 minutes of personal attention, gets $6,000.
Just got an update
The loan officer called and said the title company slipped in an extra $1,000 for him.
And my insurance was whacked. They were going create an impound account that included Auto insurance.
He also said my payment won't change for a year.
I got a 1.8g dual processor PC
200gig, 500mg memory, DVD writer for $200, with XP Pro installed.
Sonny actually helped build it.
Its pretty cool, except I can't install IIS6 on it..I don't have an XP Pro SP2 CD.
And to tell ya the truth, I really don't feel like reloading XP.

I canceled the interview at Sam's Town.
I mainly wanted Becky to go, because if I go to work for them, the Notary thing is dead.
Becky was a little too confident about her interview. She had her resume and it was scant.
We'd applied at Sam's Town before.
They want you to fill out another application, even after filling one out online. Last time they wouldn't take my application until I put down the zip code for my schools (including elementary). They intentionally make applying for a job a super pain.
J Long promised we'd have the loan done today at 4pm.
He promised he'd send me an email telling me where to go. He promised today he'd call me in two minutes. He actually told me we could have the loan done Saturday, and then said Monday. But he called in sick Monday, and never called me. I'd drop the WHOLE loan thing, but I'm into it now for $350 and they've pinged my credit history. So, now, this is important.
Greenburg called about 2 positions that opened up.
One is Louisville, KY, the other is in Columbus, GA at Total Sys (TSYS).

So, Jimmy. How did it go for you, Rebecky and Sonny? With your interviews?

Well, shame about your not dealing at Sam's Town. I wanted to come out there, and question every one of your deals, and "toke" you $20 on every other hand. Hope you had all that stuff from Outpost shipped here to me.. Initial estimate on the damage to my car is $5066, three weeks with a rental provided me by his insurance, Progressive. I am sure the estimate will rise as they tear down the car.

At IBEW. Oscar Goodman was there too!!!
About 200 people graduated in Paul's class.

On the way back from a trip to Tampa/St Petersburg, I got rear ended HARD on the I-4, near the attractions, south of Orlando. My nice, "new" car, took the hit pretty good, but it did a fair amount of damage. The idiot (driving a SUV) hit me at about 65 mpg. And why? He was making unsafe lane changes in that fast moving traffic, while talking on his cell phone. As more time goes on, I am being to believe that Floridians are taught that they must weave in and out of lanes at high speeds and to be carrying on a conversation on their cell phones.

Yeehaa...its at the IBEW on Lamb and Bonanza.
Its beautiful, how the smallest of events can change someone's life.
Rob called me about IBEW. I called Paul. We all scooted on up to IBEW.
I got called for work, then changed my mind about working with them.
Paul got called, and decide to give IBEW a shot.
Rob never got called.
Now Paul is a Journey man!!!!
Thank you Mr Rob Allred. RIP.

So, does this mean that Paul can now take a trip somewhere?? A "journey" of sorts?

Yeeeehaaaaa!!!! 20,000 people rally in Mexico City to break the Guinness Book of Records
And no, you can't zoom in on these pictures...haha.
Click here for the Full Story.
I keep wondering how this would have worked out in Vegas
Maybe at the Fremont Street Experience or on the Strip.
Would these people be thrown in jail or would it start a ritual? hmmm.
I'm not sure how it would have worked out in the legal arena, but if it were to happen here in July, I guarantee the people would all be wearing sandals!
What I didn't see in these photos is where the people put their clothes. I'd think these people didn't walk naked all the way from home to the Metropolitan Cathedral.
Mexico City is the 2nd largest city in the world.
AND Its only 1,800 miles from Las Vegas.

I threw in a color representation for the heck of it.
I MUST BE BORED! LOL.
Waiting for things to happen is a miserable thing.
Right now, I'm waiting for:
- A word back on my refinance. The loan agent keeps messing around.
- Yellow Book to come out. The Yellow Book is almost 2 months late.
- A response back from the resumes I sent out.

WASHINGTON (AP) - A massive exploding faraway star—the brightest supernova astronomers have ever seen—has scientists wondering whether a similar celestial fireworks show may light up the sky much closer to Earth sometime soon. The discovery, announced Monday by NASA, drew oohs and aahs for months from the handful of astronomers who peered through telescopes to see the fuzzy remnants of the spectacular explosion after it was first spotted last fall.
Using a variety of Earth and space telescopes, astronomers found a giant exploding star that they figure has shined about five times brighter than any of the hundreds of supernovae ever seen before, said discovery team leader Nathan Smith of the University of California at Berkeley. The discovery was first made last September by a graduate student in Texas.
"This one is way above anything else," Smith told The Associated Press. "It's really astonishing."
Smith said the star, SN2006gy, "is a special kind of supernova that has never been seen before." He called the star "freakily massive" at 150 times the mass of the sun.
Observations from the Chandra X-ray telescope helped show that it didn't become a black hole like other supernovae and skipped a stage of star death.
Unlike other exploding stars, which peak at brightness for a couple of weeks at most, this supernova, peaked for 70 days, according to NASA. And it has been shining at levels brighter than other supernovae for several months, Smith said.
And even at 240 million light years away, this star in a distant galaxy does suggest that a similar and relatively nearby star—one 44 quadrillion miles away—might blow in similar fashion any day now or 50,000 years from now, Smith said. It wouldn't threaten Earth, but it would be so bright that people could read by it at night, said University of California at Berkeley astronomer David Pooley. However, it would only be visible to people in the Southern Hemisphere, he said.
___ On the Net: http://www.nasa.gov

To the calculator for the heck of it.
It only took about 10 minutes and its VERY handy!

1) Manage, work hard, and save, save, save; and you might get lucky after a lifetime.
2) Borrow, and manage; and you might have a million dollars this year.
Me, I'd rather owe a million dollars than own a million dollars.
3) Have wealthy relatives. Be born rich.
If you have weathy relatives, it doesn't matter if you screw up.
The well will never run dry. Your spending will be controlled by their handouts.
If you have a million dollars, and you screw up
You risk money that took you forever to save (unless you got lucky somewhere).
If you lose it, you will probably commit suicide, in shame.
If you owe a million dollars, and you screw up
You don't risk any of your own money.
If you plan it right, you don't even risk a bad credit rating.
And if you funnel money off while you have it, you can run circles around hard working people saving $1,000 a year.
If you lose it, you'll walk away laughing, and you'll do it again.
We all should have learned a lesson from Enron, don't you think?
Of course, I'd hope noone would build their credit to borrow $1,000,000, just to go bankrupt.
I'd hope people would borrow $1,000,000 to create commerce.
The way I see it, the plantation owners and the slaves still exist.
The only difference now is that the slaves aren't centrally located on plantations, and they don't know that they are slaves.
Fear keeps modern slaves picking cotton, just like it did 200 years ago.
Instead of fearing being tarred and feathered, people today fear losing their car, house, and dignity (whatever thats worth).
The game is self perpetuating for the modern day plantation owners.
They offer credit to anyone. They buy and let others pay.
They've spread news about how to better your struggles when you can't pay your bills.
What they've done is, they've managed to keep people working. People must work.
People buy things they can't afford. It keeps them working.
It is a very good system.
People who don't work are shunned.
They are shown as the homeless, the impoverished. The welfare people.
I would think the majority of non-working US citizens are born rich.

I ordered asthma medication on March 1st, through the internet.
There was some problems with the shipping, and it looked like I'd gotten burned on the deal.
Last night, I told Becky that today, I'd just run up to CVS, get a prescription and pay what would work out to be $200 for a bottle of combivent.
This morning, UPS knocked at the door. They had my 6 months worth of asthma meds.
What are the odds of that?
I think its a major coincidence that I was drawing the line today for biting the bullet on meds,
and they just show up after 70 days.
BTW - I got 4 bottles for $100, and it works wonderfully!!!

COMMENTS:
What the $^*%$%#?
Isn't EVERYTHING a set of patterns and infrastructure for something?
I still don't know what Astoria does different (besides creating new buzz words)
I guess what they are really saying is Astoria makes it easier for web programmers to access data
I think one of the most annoying things about working with computer techs these days is
they just don't know how to talk to people.
This is how I sum up the above article (in my mind)
1-First I boil down all of the synonyms
   ASP=The old BASIC language with commands for the internet
   ADO=The old BASIC language with commands for accessing data
   XML=The old FILE structure with a different way of storing its DATA.
   JSON=The old FILE structure with a different way of storing its DATA.
   RDF=The old FILE structure with a different way of storing its DATA.
   REST=Another way to let the old basic talk to microsofts new commands.
   Microsoft's ADO.Net Entity Framework=ADO=The old Basic language.
   The old BASIC language = a computer language.
2-I take out all of the ridiculous statements
   Accessing Data Services in the Cloud
3-I reread everything that was said and I sum it up.
   Microsoft introduces Astoria.
   Astoria gives Basic easier ways to access data on the web.
4-And I understand.

What really gets me is these people get paid highly for talking crap, inventing new words, and embelleshing old stuff.
I don't care how you slice and dice it.
Computers still do three things and its simple:
-Find out what you want
-Get data if necessary
-Show the result.

(CBS) The cremated remains of actor James Doohan, who portrayed engineer "Scotty" on "Star Trek," and of Apollo 7 astronaut Gordon Cooper soared briefly into suborbital space Saturday aboard a rocket.
It was the first successful launch from Spaceport America, a commercial spaceport being developed in the southern New Mexico desert.
Suzan Cooper and Wende Doohan fired the rocket carrying small amounts of their husbands' ashes at 8:56 a.m. local time. "Go baby, go baby," said Eric Knight of the commercial launch company, UP Aerospace Inc. of Farmington, Connecticut.
Since it was a suborbital flight, the rocket soon plummeted back to Earth, coming down at the White Sands Missile Range. The payload with the remains descended by parachute.
"We nailed it. We stuck the landing," said Knight.
UP Aerospace launched the first rocket from the desert site in September, but that Spaceloft XL rocket crashed into the desert after spiraling out of control about nine seconds after liftoff. Company officials blamed the failure on a faulty fin design.
Family members paid $495 to place a few grams of their relatives' ashes on the rocket. Celestis, a Houston company, contracted with UP to send the cremated remains into space.
Charles Chafer, chief executive of Celestis, said last month that a CD with more than 11,000 condolences and fan notes was placed on the rocket with Doohan's remains.
Doohan died in July 2005 at age 85. The remains of "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry were sent into space in 1997.
The launch from the fledgling spaceport — currently a 100-foot by 25-foot concrete slab in a patch of desert more than 50 miles north of Las Cruces — keeps the New Mexico project ahead of its nearest competitor, in West Texas.
Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, is said to be developing the spaceport north of Van Horn, Texas. Bezos' Blue Origin is working to develop tourist space flights.
British billionaire Richard Branson also has announced plans to launch a space tourism company, which is expected to have its headquarters at the New Mexico spaceport.

Well, it sounds like a great stay, there at Dinneyland.. See, if you had flown me out there, I could have gotten you those passes, because I still have my Studville (California) Driver's License. So there... See what you've been missing, driving the F150. You can go a long way further with a tank of gas in a passenger car. Did the kids enjoy it? It was their first time, wasn't it? I plan on being in Heavensville (LA) the third weekend in October. Maybe I can get you those passes at that time.

I am attending the UCLA football game against North Damn-It (Notre Dame). It's on Saturday October 20. I will be attending the game with Dominic Lewis, one of the contractors I worked with at Northrop, who I also worked in the very early '90s. During the late '90s and early '00s, he worked at Microsoft, and is back there again. His family (wife and kids) are up there in the Seattle area.

Maybe we saw The Andromeda Strain a few too many times in our formative years, but we can't help shivering when we hear about microbiologists reanimating long-dormant lethal viruses.
And those biologists working to make human limbs grow back: Haven't we seen that film? Don't the guys in lab coats all die in the first reel? They may sound cinematic, but the incredible research projects on the following pages are not imaginary. They're real, funded ventures by respected scientists. They have perfectly rational goals. They also happen to creep us out. Continue reading below for six of the scariest ideas in science.
Check out Popular Science