Harleys, Cars, Girls & Guitars

Happy New Year! Dan Fogelberg: Same Auld Lang Syne

Hard to believe Dan's gone. We played together a few times in the Red Herring Coffee House on the campus of the University of Illinois, before he made his first album.

Dan was playing a Martin D-28. First time I saw and heard a Martin, and I just had to have one. A couple of years later, when I was living in San Francisco, I bought my own D-28. Played it for 30 years.

Didn't see Dan for 20 years, although I always followed his career. Then, I ran into him in Syracuse, where he was giving a concert. Always a gracious man, he probably pretended that he remembered me after all those years.

We had a great music scene back in the day in Champaign/Urbana. Steve Goodman and the other folks from the Earl of Olde Town showed up regularly. REO Speedwagon was just getting it together at the Red Lion, a musty bar. Hound Dog Taylor, Muddy Waters and Paul Butterfield were in their prime. Paul later showed up as my neighbor in Woodstock.

I've traveled all over the country looking for a better music scene than I enjoyed back in those days. Haven't found it.  The grass isn't always greener.

Happy New Year!

Steven Crowder: Detroit in Ruins

Political opinions really are like assholes. Everybody's got one, including me. Here's an interesting political rant from YouTube:

Proving political ideas with video... well that's nonsense. You can build any kind of pretend world in video. But, this Steven Crowder does know how to influence people. This video has drawn 319,487 viewers.

Last night, I was up late, and I wandered around the web. Being out of work does that to you. I'm turning 60 in a week, and I'm beginning to wonder whether I'll ever work again.

Web surfing led me to a number of sites detailing the ruin of Detroit. Detroit was once the symbol of American wealth and optimism. Detroit was the Motor City! Now, it's a vast wasteland. Did you know that you can buy a house in Detroit for under $1,000?

I'm definitely in a bad mood. Not working is a nightmare. I'm not going hungry, nor am I going without food and shelter. I've got a car. And, I'm not going to be doing without any of those things for the rest of my life. (At least, I don't think so.) But, the inactivity and lack of purpose... it's tough to swallow. I don't know if I can learn to live without working.

Could be that my days of making a big paycheck are over. Might be working at WalMart or Sam's Club with the other old guys.

I'm sending out a half dozen resumes every day. And, I'm dreading the interviews. The young guys don't want to hire an old man. I'd like to get outraged by this, but... I can understand. And, my abilities are beginning to decline.

Oh, well, here's a humorous take on getting older, sent to me by Big Joe.

Big Joe is laid up with bad back. Get better, Joe! I'm praying for you.  And, I can't remember shit!

Jingle Bell Rock: The V-Twins!

Merry Christmas from The V-Twins! Shouting Thomas and Big Joe Vaccarino wish you all the best!

Job Hunting and Identity Theft: Williams Systems

craigslist.com is rife with scam artists. No surprise there. Since I'm looking for new clients, I scour the site several times a day.

The scam artists have become much more clever. Everybody's onto the Nigerian bank scams. The latest technique is to advertise a job, and hook a sucker. Williams Systems advertises what appear to be local office jobs on craigslist. If you respond to their ads, you will get an e-mail in return asking you to navigate to another website in order to request a credit report.

Why a credit report? Williams Systems will tell you that you are being considered for a very responsible job, requiring you to handle corporate credit cards.

The goal of this scam if to con the job seeker into filling out a credit report, complete with identifying information, including Social Security number, bank account numbers, etc.

One part of this scam is especially clever. When you visit Williams Systems' site, you will see the lovely picture I've posted above. God bless these folks, they're doing it all for charity! They're helping cute little girls playing with butterflies and flowers!

Jesus Christ! How cynical can you get?

Christmas at Macy's in Herald Square

I traveled to Manhattan yesterday for an interview with a potential new client. 36 bucks round trip on the Trailways bus!

The client was located on 31st street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. An odd location. This neighborhood is a tweener. Not exactly Midtown, and certainly not Chelsea. Several businesses congregate here... wholesale florists, the fashion industry, and rental rehearsal studios for the music business. I've been to quite a few band auditions and rehearsals in this area.

While I was waiting on the bus home, I walked around Herald Square. The area swarmed with Christmas shoppers. Christmas isn't such a big deal for me anymore. My kids are grown up and gone. No grand kids yet. And, well... I'm out of work and I'm not planning on spending much money this year. I'm even beginning to think about retiring.

Years ago, when Myrna was still on this earth, we both raked in big bonuses at Christmas. We would spend thousands of dollars on presents for ourselves and the family. Those days are long gone.

Don't know what will happen with the client. They liked me, but who knows whether they really have any business? Everybody's scrambling right now. We'll see.

Sun Open Office Productivity Suite

Now that my contract with the pharmaceutical company has ended, I'm sending out dozens of resumes. Problem is, every employer and agency wants the resume to be in Microsoft Word format.

I don't own Word. The pharma company gave me a laptop with Word installed. I'm about to ship it back.

My Dell XPS M2010 computer shipped with Microsoft Works, which features a very inadequate word processor. Works' word processor has its own native file format. When I import Word documents into Works, I'm confronted with formatting errors.

I don't want to buy Microsoft Word, because it costs about $225.

Solution? I think I've found it.... Sun Microsystems' Open Office Productivity Suite. It's free! Open Office is what is called an “open source” software product. If you're a programmer or hacker, you know that Sun created Java, a dominant web programming language.

Open Office features what seem to be virtual clones of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Access, along with a minimal drawing program. Open Office also throws in a program called “Formula.” Don't really know what that does yet.

The Word module works fine. It opens and saves Word format documents without any formatting changes that I can see. And, the interface looks about the same as Word.

The functionality of a word processor was standardized long ago. Paying for a word processor... well, who wants to do that? So, Open Office seems like a good solution to my problem.

PollCode: Will Cubs Ever Win a World Series?

Now that my consulting stint with the pharmaceutical company is over, I’m spending a lot of time on the computer looking for work. This means I’m surfing the web all day. Finding a lot of new things.

I’m trying out a new web widget called Poll Code. (984,804 polls created!) Here’s my first poll.

Will Cubs ever win World Series?
	Yes, next year
	No, not in a millions years
	When hell freezes over
	When they spend as much money as the Yankees
pollcode.com free polls

Please, somebody take the poll. This widget cleverly checks IP addresses and prevents people from voting more than once.

First Snow Storm of the Winter

We’ve already gotten about six inches up here in the Catskills. My car and my Harley are sleeping happily in my new garage. Snowplow guy showed up at 7 a.m.

I’m staying home today. My contract with the pharmaceutical company has ended, so I’m looking for work. The next job, if there is one, will probably be the last job before retirement.

My 60th birthday is only a few weeks away. My 60th winter!

Maybe, in a few years, I’ll get the hell out of here and live in Florida. The snow is pretty, and I enjoy it for the first month. When the deep freeze of January and February sets in, I’ll have had enough.

I added about 18 inches of insulation to my roof this summer, and my house is so much warmer. I’m not feeling the arthritis quite so much. However, I’ve got to get out there later today to do some shoveling and roof clearing. Who knows how I’ll feel after that?

Woodstock and Climategate

I don’t like saying this, but the Woodstock/Hudson Valley area deserves, more than any place I’ve seen, to suffer economic decline and political failure. The anti-business and anti-development manias that dominate this region guarantee that no sensible business wants to set up shop in this area. Couple this with the bizarre sense of entitlement of the populace, and you’ve got a mess.

Environmental fanaticism is at the heart of this. Woodstock has been overtaken in recent years with the Green movement. Global warming has been the key issue. In the past few weeks, we’ve discovered that the great global warming scare is a fraud.  The global warming consensus was manufactured through fraud, suppression of opposing viewpoints, and the manipulation and destruction of data.

New York State is one of the highest tax jurisdictions in the country. No surprise, it is losing business and residents to states that welcome business and offer lower taxes. Government payrolls are enormous in New York. Government is seen by the electorate as the source of everything.

Woodstock is epicenter of this worship of government. Old style Marxism maintains its hold here, long after the rest of the world fled that backward doctrine. Because of the legend of the hippie era, Woodstock is the dumping ground for the psychotic casualties of every leftist social movement. Every few years, another group of revolutionary loons and cultists descends on this town.

Sometimes I wonder: Can this be changed?

What should Woodstock be? In my opinion, it should be a successful, commercial arts center. Decades ago, Woodstock had the opportunity to create a thriving music business, a sort of little Nashville. This opportunity was systematically sabotaged by the extreme left, which decided instead to make Woodstock a center for their cult. The live music business was systematically destroyed by lawsuits, political vendettas, feminist hysteria… you name it. All that remains is a music business that isn’t really a business at all. Every music venue and event in this town is just another propaganda and ideology platform for the extreme left.

I wonder… is Woodstock noticing that its most cherished environmental crusade, global warming, is being exposed as a fraud? Could Climategate deter the cult… even a little bit?

I doubt it. Self-destruction seems built into Woodstock.

PC Blue Screen of Death

My main computer, a Dell XPS M2010, has been out of commission for about a week. On its way to the graveyard, the computer flashed the infamous PC Blue Screen of Death.

I’m working now on my little laptop, which one of my clients gave me. What a pain in the ass! Minimal RAM, a cramped keyboard and none of my usual multimedia programs.

Oh well, I’m experiencing a lull in work.

I still manage to spend a couple hours a day in front of my computer. What was life like before we wasted so many hours surfing the web and frequently social networking sites?

Don’t know how seriously the Dell is wounded. I’ll find out in a day or two when the recovery CDs arrive in the mail. If it’s a physical problem, I’m screwed.

That means sending the computer in for repair, or taking it to Best Buy. My Dell is three years old… approaching obsolescence. Might be time to buy yet another new computer.