I signed up for Earthlink’s high-speed Internet tonight, taking advantage of a 6-months-for-$30-a-month deal which may/may not expire tonight.

I don’t use Roadrunner’s email servers, so there’s nothing keeping me as a customer. And it’s not that they’ve provided poor service, either. It’s just that the $30/month is a good deal (even for only 6 months) and their $42 a month afterward is STILL cheaper than Roadrunner.

A bonus is their offering 50% more speed than Roadrunner. 2 Mbs down and 384kbs up. Woo woo!

I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while now. My buddy Matt gave me a copy of this when I was out visiting him a few weeks ago and I couldn’t put it down until I had finished it. Its an article in this month’s Fast Company magazine called The Wal-Mart You Don’t Know.

Read it. Then read it again. That corner Wal-Mart is slowly destroying American manufacturing through its relentless price pressure.
Continue reading →

On a tip from my friend Tom Corbitt, we went on a field trip to see the New Hope Valley Railroad (aka. NHVRR) in New Hill, NC. Some of my six readers might remember Tom when he dated Jessica Fink way back when.

Anyhow, the railroad is owned by a group of railroad aficionados who volunteer their time, their money, and (most of all) their sweat to restore and maintain their own locomotives and rolling stock. The club has an impressive array of railroad stuff, too. I counted four locomotives at the museum, from a steam engine to 40-ton diesel electric engines. They also own their own six miles of railroad track.

We got out of the car at the parking lot and crossed over Old U.S. 1 on a pedestrian bridge that was formerly a railroad trestle. We were alone in the railyard with all varieties of rail equipment scattered around us. Soon Kelly, Hallie, and I were wandering around, climbing onto the locomotives and peering into the cabooses.

The engines and cars were all still decorated from the last ride they took of the year: passengers are taken for a holiday ride around the track with Santa. The festive decorations made me a bit jealous of not getting to take that trip.

It was easy to imagine myself at the controls of one of these massive beasts. Up until this year, the club offered to let you drive for an hour for 100 bucks. I wish I’d known about that before their liability insurance made them quit. Stupid personal-injury lawyers!

We marched around to every car, climbed up every ladder, and took pictures of anything we could. If we had this much fun all by ourselves, I can only imagine what the place is like during a work weekend or ride day.

I’ve decided to drop by for a visit one of these Saturdays and find out what the members are like. I might learn a thing or two about welding, diesel repair, hydraulics, or other cool skills I don’t know. Or I could learn to be a crewmember even! In return, I could offer my skills as a painter, electrician, computer guy, or anything else they might need.

If you’re into big, heavy machinery, or transportation history, you should make the drive down to see the New Hope Valley Railroad.

I’m going to follow my friend Jamie Gaines‘s lead and take a look back at the year I’ve blogged here for you, the five loyal readers of mt.net. It would up being quite long, which is why its taken me so long to put it together. Enjoy!

The year began with lots of rants about the Iraq War. As if the web needed any more of that. I pretty much harped on what a bad idea it was, and I still believe that. It was good to have an outlet for my griping, at any rate.

Things got interesting on February 19, when I saw what I can only describe as an unidentified flying object, dropping out of the sky as I drove home. Some time later, I actually filed a report with MUFON, once I convinced myself I was still sane. Ok, at least partially sane.

April brought about some major changes in my life. I was canned by $FORMER_EMPLOYER on April 14th. I was working really hard at the time and was quite frankly wondering why my work was unappreciated. It was a place with surprisingly big egos for such a young company. I was dumb for jumping into that mess. Leaving felt more like an escape. Still does.

It didn’t take long before I was interviewing again. I talked with some fine folks in Wilmington, who later threw money at me to come work with them. Everything seemed right except for the location. It was with regret that I passed it up. Their offer made me feel very special.

Fortunately, I got a lead on my present job with Oculan on April 23rd, culminating in my accepting their offer on May 19th. By June 8th, I was doing my own demo.

Things got, uh, weird again in my March 26th post. That’s where I saw a ghost for the first time. Or at least, ghostly phenomena. It was an attention-getting experience, believe me.

June 17th was a bummer day. That’s when my longtime friends the Greenoughs moved out of my neighborhood. I had a lot of emotion in that post. As if I needed a reminder that they don’t live there anymore, today I saw a Carolina flag flying from their old house.

Sailing Lake Gaston put me on top of the world, as my July 6th post relates. Sailing is the best damn therapy I’ve ever had. When I climb in a sailboat, I leave my worries on shore. One day I hope to own my own boat.

My blogging experience improved dramatically at the end of July when I switched from bplog to Drupal as my weblog software. Now comments could be posted. I’m still very happy with Drupal. I’d recommend it to anyone.

August 3rd made my younger brother Jeff a father. That day Hadley Elise was born. Hadley is another Turner SuperBaby, breaking all growth records, just like her cousin Hallie did before her (and her cousin Audrey, born February 16th, continues to do).

On August 10th, I posted about torrential rains that flooded the Oculan parking lot. We stood at the windows, thinking the culvert next to our building would overflow at any minute. I also remember cleaning out the storm grate and grabbing a black snake in the process. Thanks to my heroic efforts, the office was saved. Heh.

September 8th brought the sobering epiphany that the WTC attacks were staged. When you see something resembling an extra engine on the belly of Plane #2, you have to forget all about the box cutters.

September 19th brought Hurricane Isabel to our great state. Isabel skimmed the Triangle area, and largely left the state unscathed. Fortunately, we had Talk Like A Pirate Day to keep us amused.

I got all melancholy at the beginning of October with my posts about the closing of Garner Bike Line and Polk Youth Center. Fortunately, those events were totally unrelated in any other respect.

I was off to Minnesota with my family for a fun business-and-pleasure trip in early October. We were treated like royalty by Kelly’s aunt and uncle, and to this day still talk about it.

I dissed my once-favorite band R.E.M. on the 10th, and wound up kicking myself three days later when I learned the original band members had played together. It was a rare, rare, rare, chance to see the old band, and I felt like a dolt for missing it.

I had a string of long, emotional posts upon my business trip to Pensacola. I swung by my childhood home in Spanish Fort, AL and surprised myself at the emotions the place held for me. I stayed up way too late, writing and writing and the words poured out of me. Sadly, the pictures I took at dusk were too dark to see. Dammit.

November brought another blast from my past, when I returned to San Diego after a five-year absence. ‎I didn’t have much time for visiting or siteseeing, but I enjoyed reliving in my mind the time I spent here. At the end of the trip, I could have sworn I was two steps away from having Lance Armstrong crash into me on his morning ride. I spent June enthralled in the Tour De France coverage.

That brings me to my November 24th stunt regarding Your Mama jokes. I was feeling jealous that my friend Jamie Gaines was getting far more comments on his posts than I was. I hatched the Your Mama jokes contest as a way to generate comments on my site. It worked beautifully, and to this day remains the post with the most comments on my site. Jamie himself even linked to it, not truly understanding my purpose in doing it. It proved to be a fun diversion from the usual posts here, which are often too geeky, controversial, or just plain weird.

I had the chance to revisit San Diego at the start of December. I was there to see my old ship USS Elliot get decommissoned and to meet up with my former shipmates. The writing I did after the decommissioning ceremony is some of my finest blog writing.

We had weirdness in the air when thunder rocked the nighttime December skies, followed by real rocking in a Richmond earthquake. I railed against throwing the book at spammers, thought they’re scum. Oh, and I decided on a new career direction in mid-December.

That pretty much covers the highlights of my blogging world for 2003. There are lots of rants in-between, lots of useless ideas proffered, and lots of tinfoil-hat material thrown in there as well. The beauty of blogging is that I can instantly share my thoughts on any topic at any time. The danger is that those quick scribblings live on forever on the Internet.

So be it. I am a proponent of saying what you think when you think it. I admire those who are honest in their dealings with people. This world would be much better off if everyone knew where each was coming from on any particular topic.

Sharing will bring the world closer. What a concept, huh.

Thanks for sharing in my thoughts!

My cat turns 12 years old today. Happy birthday, Smitty! Her gift today will be a kitty-kilo of catnip.

Happy New Year, everyone. May 2004 be safe and prosperous for you.

This made the rounds at work.
—
A shepherd was herding his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the shepherd: “If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?”

The shepherd looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing flock and calmly answers: “Sure, why not.” The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his AT&T cell phone, surfs to a NASA page on the internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.

Then the young man opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany. Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of complex formulas. He uploads all of this data via an email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response. Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and turns to the shepherd and says: “You have exactly 1586 sheep.”

“That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my sheep” says the shepherd. He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car. Then the shepherd says to the young man: “Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my sheep?”

The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, “Okay, why not?”

“You’re a consultant.” says the shepherd.

“Wow! That’s correct,” says the yuppie, “but how did you guess that?”

“No guessing required.” answered the shepherd. “You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew; to a question I never asked; and you don’t know crap about my business. Now give me back my dog.”

I’m working on a Blog recap for 2003. As the five readers of mt.net know, it’s been a busy year with lots to cover. I’d hoped to have it ready tonight, but its taken much longer for me to assemble than I thought.

Look for it tomorrow.