Out with the old and in with the new.

So long 2008. December 31 means it's time to pay the rent. The traditions of reflection and revelry promoted and practiced on New Years eve have never held much fascination for me. There are many opportunities in life for reflection. As to the revelry, it is a sentiment that is too easily hijacked with devastating and deadly results this time of year.

I used to dread going to work on days preceding holidays because our store shared a common parking lot with several large rot-gut stores in Addison. Starting a few days before each holiday, the parking lot started filling up with booze delivery trucks and users. The intensity of delivery and buying grew worse as the time counted down to the final store hour and it was a total mess for us and our customers. New Years eve was the worst of those days but even an ordinary Friday was enough to bring in the crowds. Plenty of them had a head start and more than a few mishaps, crashes and arrests happened right in that parking lot. For me, it all just amplified the stupidity of the whole enterprise of booze being tied to celebration in the minds of some many humans.

I've probably been to no more than a handful of "New Years" parties. They must not have been all that worthwhile after all because I cannot specifically recall any of them.

So today is probably a good day to exercise my Kohl's gift card and pick up a few groceries while I'm out. One of the earliest recollections I have of being aware of a new year is that of my dad starting the coffee at a Mom and Pop's cafe early one morning when I was a kid. I don't know why I can recall that day but I remember him wondering if the lumber yard would be open that day and I didn't know why it wouldn't. He said it was a holiday and lots of businesses were not open just like it was Sunday. But that cafe was always open and dad checked early just about every day.

Early tomorrow morning, I'll see if J's is running smooth.

GOP Thinks Intertubes is the way back to power.

The party of Ted (the Internet is a bunch of tubes) Stevens and convicted senator from Alaska, thinks it will march back into power by holding a conference on using the Internet headlining Glenn Reynolds (“Instapundit”), Michelle Malkin, and Joe the Plumber!

Bring it on.

Hodgman; Sweet!

I got a couple of John Hodgman's books for Christmas - Thanks Tom & Wendy - so this popped out at me today.

A Fine End For 2008.

We had a great Christmas again this year. Christmas eve was burgers at Ben's with the Eagles "Hell Freezes Over" for background on my son's new HD TV while we opened presents and dined. Then and movie and we all went home to rest up for our Christmas day trip to Ft. Worth and more fun with even more extended family. I wasn't on the ball this year and didn't take many pictures. We all just had too much fun to mess with taking pictures. Maybe in the future, rooms or 'bots will be smart enough to keep tack of that chore for us. I'm already fired up for Christmas 2009. Meanwhile, I'm waiting for the mechanic to show up here and replace the fuel pump in Santa's sled and I have at least a week of reading in two really funny John Hodgman real paper books I got for Christmas. Then I'll be off to the stores to save the economy with some of my new gift cards.

I really enjoy the war on Chistmas.

I actually love Christmas time, and a lot of other holidays. I admit that I'm a little.. er .. different as to one of the reasons I get a kick out of the Christmas. I enjoy all the family things and good will and gift getting and giving and candy and in the last few years I've particularly enjoyed the "War on Christmas cooked up by the likes of Bill O and all the poor down-trodden 'believers'. You know, the 90% of the U.S. population that is so persecuted by reality, oops, I mean the 5% of us without a supernatural buddy. One of the funniest comments so far this season come not in the Onion but here>>

The pay quote - Merry Christmas.

Someone should remind Bill O'Reilly (and the other folks who have made an annual ritual of using Christmas to stir up sectarian animosity) that one of the reasons the Puritans came to New England was to escape the celebration of Christmas, which they regarded as un-Scriptural in origin and sacrilegious in practice. (And this was, let us recall, well before the composition of "Jingle Bell Rock" or the introduction of the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalogue.)

'Tis the season to count our joy and happiness.

There are always a lot of stories in the news this time of year about joy and happiness. I know someone named Joy and even someone named Darling. That just popped in there and has nothing to do with this story.

Of course there are usually some stories this time of year about unhappiness and such. I've seen some of Dan Gilbert's talks and peeked in his non-fiction book; Stumbling on Happiness, and just today I ran across The Happiness Project. These are just few of the things people are doing to bring a little more joy to others and I think they are good things.

A long time tool for brightening up people's days is the old saying and practice of counting blessings. It is a form of polishing your gratitudes and it is good for the gatitudor and the gratitudee. It is good to look not only at how folks do that from both sides. Not only should we make a practice of keeping track of things we are grateful of, we should appreciate how we actually do keep track of things we are grateful of because it also could help us appreciate those things in others.

I was noticing again today some of the things that count for me. There is my family and my friends and health and the Internet :) and heat on a cold day and sunshine when it's not cloudy and .... Pretty soon the list is huge. But thinking about how I keep track of everything and put it to use for me and you makes the list get real long, like books and books long. Then I realized I'm pretty much like everyone else and the keeping of the blessings is made up in everything from the stuff I've collected to phone calls to to the icons crowding the desktop of my computer. They are all little bits of things I like and people I'm grateful of and it's a great time of year and I don't have to look far to see those things in you.

Now there is even a gratitude collector for the iPhone and a facebook happiness project and everyone can start their own project. So play with the ideas and make the world a little better and have a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

There's new business like shoe business.

Or, while I'' punning, The shoe heard round the world.

Sam Harris; Fun With Religion

Even if there were one true religion, (and most followers of the thousands of beliefs think they are onto "the one") and if believers were logical at all, most should figure out the odds are that they are going to hell.

False Hope Springs Eternal

In the article, Set in Our Ways: Why Change Is So Hard over at Scientific American and under the heading of "False Hope Springs Eternal," I chuckled at myself when Nikolas Westerhoff says:

Even after age 60 it is difficult to completely reframe your life. In fact, those who seek to make large changes often end up failing even to make the most minor corrections. The more an individual believes he can set his own rudder as he pleases, the more likely he is to run aground. That’s one reason why so many smokers who tell you that they can quit whenever they want are still smoking 20 years later.

In 1999 psychologists Janet Polivy and C. Peter Herman of the University of Toronto Mississauga coined a term for this phenomenon: false hope syndrome. Over and over, they say, people undertake both small and large changes in their lives. Most of these attempts never get anywhere, thanks to overblown expectations [see “Picture Imperfect,” by David Dunning, Chip Heath and Jerry M. Suls; Scientific American Mind, Vol. 16, No. 4, 2005].

For me, I think getting stuck in my "way" probably was pretty much done when I was about six instead of thirty and I'm still trying to quit smoking. I think the article ignores an important factor; education makes it less likely to acquire some bad traits and disfuntion or getting hung up with the wrong crowds in the first place and allows one more tools and options and better odds of steering out little ships of life to interesting destinations.

Most people are bad at estimating odds and marketing knows it.

After 911, more people were killed because they were afraid of flying (and drove instead) than were killed by the terrorist acts.

Starting Off On The Wrong Path

President elect Obama has the backing and good faith of a lot of people who thought he would bring a non-sectarian, progressive tone to his administration. Instead he is having the blathering idiot nut bag Rick Warren give the invocation at the presidential inauguration ceremony. He betrayed us.

Does fashion trump addiction?

Is environment and circumstance the elephant in the room that no one sees when it comes to thinking about addictions? How about liabilities and legal issues for hosts and guests? Read on>>

Happy Science

Ten hints for happy daze.

GPS - A Higher Power

Seeing lightning rods on top of a church buildings always perks up my irony detector. But using hidden cameras and installing GPS tracking devices to protect baby Jebuses just about melts my irony meter.

I put the sheets in the washer and dozed off on the couch. I woke to what I thought was the sound of a helicopter coming this way. That's not too unusual living a few blocks from an airport. As the nap fog lifted I realized the rotor sounds did not seem to be moving or changing even though they sounded just like a UH-1 straining against the upper left corner of the Vne envelope. After about 30 seconds I started to get curious so I walked over to the door and started to look out and realized the sound had decreased so I started to the front door - same thing when I got there. I opened it anyway before I realized that my washing machine must run at 2X the rotor rpm of a Bell UH-1 and when the sheets are all bunched up on one side of the tub, it can sound like a helicopter trying real hard to get somewhere in a hurry.Posted by Picasa

Thumbtacks, Notebooks And All The Pretty Horses

Microsoft introduced Thumbtacks today.
<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:6a905d98-0332-4c3f-8b25-75737cd9b675&showPlaylist=true&from=shared" target="_new" title="Thumbtack Introduction">Video: Thumbtack Introduction</a>
Thumbtacks is like Google's Notebook but better. I really like the gadgets and especially the properties gadget.
<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:fa6082f9-a8e0-4067-9c32-53ef1ae4ab42&showPlaylist=true&from=shared" target="_new" title="Thumbtack Gadgets">Video: Thumbtack Gadgets</a>
Then Thumbtacks can be published and embedded even in blogs like this.

Lard Help Us

Ken Ferraro of Purdue University, reported in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, that 27% of Baptists and 20% of other fundamentalist Protestants are obese while only 1% of Jews, Muslims and secular people are obese. Another BIG reason to watch not only what we eat but also, what we and our friends 'believe.'

Energy

I was just thinking about the stress test I have tomorrow and it reminded me of one of those obvious questions about treadmills - why do they have motors? They should have generators instead so we are producing energy with exercise instead of using it. For that matter - why are gym parking lots full of SUVs? Maybe we should draw up some zoning codes that gyms and health clubs are not allowed to have parking lots. Just asking.

Clinical Trials

Here's the picture that goes with the story about the flu shot and the EKG snafu. I just started checking out Picasa 3 and tried the blog this button. Amazingly, Blogger can find it in it's heart to display the picture if I'm using Picasa. Blogger still will not post pictures from it's built in composer window nor will it display this picture there when I want to edit the post.

Rats, Blogger is broken.

It's time to move on to some other kind of blogging thingy. So if this site crashes for a while it will probably be from me screwing things up. Maybe this time I'll remember to copy all the files somewhere so I can maybe, just maybe import everything into whatever comes next. Blogger support sucks. Pictures will not post using the post a picture button in the composer. They dutifully upload to the correct directory but no code is generated to display the pictures in the post. It's been broken for a long time so I don't think they plan to fix the problem. If I have to manually href every time I want to stick a picture or something on here, there is not much point in using Blogger.