Sidetracked Charley

Just tried to log on to my bank account and failed the security questions. Don't you hate those questions? You fail just because you forgot to put an "S" on a word or capitalize your high school. And fail the questions twice and you are locked out. The worst websites for security are banks of course. And oddly enough my insurance company. How often do you log on to your insurance company web page? With me it is twice a year and it seems as if every time I have to redo my password or some security question. I have come to expect problems but I have no problems generally with my bank account. In fact this is the first time I can remember being asked my security questions. Has my identity been stolen? That would be the icing on the cake for 2010. This year has been so horrid I refuse, like other friends, to take inventory of it. Instead I have done a couple blogs on best memories and best gifts in an effort to accentuate the positive and ignore the negatives. This blog ...

A spiritual center As 2010 and the year of the Tiger move toward close (February 3, 2011) I find myself tharned. Tharned:  Describes the act of a person or animal being frozen in terror, e.g. a deer caught in the headlights. Perhaps originally found in Richard Adams's novel 'Watership Down,' the term was also adopted by Stephen King for use in his novel 'The Stand.' Michael stood tharn while the grizzly bear bore down on him. It has been a rough year. Some attribute it to the Chinese Year of the Tiger and hold out hope for the much gentler Year of the Rabbit ahead. Others take solace in the fact of how much worse can it get? Lots! But I refuse to go there. I don't even want to give conscious thought to anything bad. Instead over the last week I have immersed myself in four wheeling with my sister and getting acquainted with my Windows 7 and new computer. Surveying the remains Four wheeling has been more fun. The weather has been unseasonably wa...

Christmas 2010 is now in the past. But what a great Christmas it was. My sister and her two fur kids came up from San Fidel on Christmas Even. The weather has been beautiful here so after opening presents Christmas morning we loaded the dogs in the jeep and hit the back roads. I would have begun this blog with pictures of the dogs wading in Coyote Creek, or the Pussy Willows that believe it is spring but I left my camera at Jessica's and Ronnie's last night. We went there for a grand Christmas feast for ten. Ronnie did smoked turkey and brisket. He is a master of the smoker, and Debbie and I came away with some leavings to have in sandwiches for today's vehicle exploration. We hear tell there is a new road we have not yet tried. After we pick up my camera this morning we will be off. Weather should be an unseasonable 42F and sunny today. Meanwhile the southeast part of the United States is under an ice and snow alert. My sympathies. I hope all of you had a great Christ...

Debbie's Arch A friend on Facebook asked about best memories of 2010. I guess I have rather been stuck on the worst memories of 2010 so I think Scott for bringing this topic up. I am going to devote some time each day in the remaining week of the year to come up with another nice memory of the year. First is this arch in Lavender Canyon in South Canyonlands, Utah. We were four wheeling in a restricted/limited access area quite all alone and with no trail guide and no markers as to whether we were going right or wrong. And also no named arches that we knew of. In fact until we began seeing them we were not even aware this narrow canyon had arches. Debbie spotted this one first from the other side. Alan and I thought she was imagining things and it was not until we passed it and could view it from the other side that what we thought was just a depression in the cliff face was clearly and opening. The day alone in the Lavender canyon was an awesome one with lots more arches dis...

Parties! I am not, never have been, a party animal. I was a terribly shy child. I learned at sometime to act as if I wasn't but it was hard work. Alcohol in my youth helped me fake it more easily but after giving up that crutch I find large groups terrifying unless I am behind the podium or on the stage. In short in order to deal with large groups, containing friends or strangers, I must have a defined purpose: Speech, role, agenda, photographer,  my art. Parties are work for me; not fun. And since my CBT nine years ago, large parties are exhausting. And I don't mean just wiped out the next day but maybe a whole week. Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy small affairs. Petite little groupings of 8 to 10 people whom I mostly know, but even those I like sparingly. The trouble with the Christmas holiday season is there are too many of those even to honor them all. And too many people decide to erase all their obligations for the year with one huge party. I have pretended to be o...

Going to get a bit airy-fairy here so if you are a non-believer in the effects of planets upon our lives skip this blog. I was siting here with my first cup of coffee, considering the past week for my TW3 blog, and scanning my way through Facebook News (is that an oxymoron?) when I hit the link from Big Sky Astrology regarding eclipses and solstices. Seems this solstice eclipse is going to be in 29 degrees of Gemini, my sign, and it has not occurred for 19 years. That got me looking back at the changes in my life 18 to 20 years ago. Dynamic time for me. And there is no denying that the last year has been very dynamic. So I went Googling. And at another site where I found the image above I found: In a spiritual point of view, a Lunar eclipse intensifies tremendously the power of a regular Full Moon: the Tibetans say that a Lunar eclipse multiplies the karma by 1000!…Whatever you do on a Lunar eclipse, + or - 5 days, can have implications during years on your karma...

I told HP on Sunday I wanted a shipping notification within 48 hours or I was canceling the replacement HP Pavilion order and getting a refund instead. And low and behold the HP Case Manager did indeed get a shipping notification to me. However, Fedex has yet to receive the HP desktop computer to ship. For a while this morning the Fedex tracking number provided me by HP even said it would get delivered today. Frankly I was leery of that one because it gave a ship date of the 11th and I didn't give them my ultimatum until the 12th. I must admit this was a rather clever ruse. Too bad they are not as clever at giving good customer service. Meanwhile someone is marketing is sending out e-mails saying I can still order a computer today and get it before the end of the year. Interesting since I have been told I would be very lucky to get the one I essentially ordered in November before the end of the year. Really HP get your script straight. Is this sort of game playing really das...

I would like to say HP is the Grinch that stole Christmas but I am not sure they are any worse or better than 99% of modern business. It all comes from Mexico or China with support teems in India or Texas (both have impossible accents) and CEO's in the United States that only care about the bottom line and not customer satisfaction. I am so sick of being asked to take on line customer satisfaction surveys (even my computer nerd that destroyed the original HP had one) that I tell them it is really simple just note unacceptable for everything you ask me to rate. It doesn't help that because I do a very base rate on Qwest (because basically they were the first firm this year that lied to me) it is costing me 3 cents a minute to be lied to by HP. You know when they say this call may be recorded to ensure customer satisfaction? Well, I am thinking of recording them on my end to compare the lies they tell. Supposedly they have an open file on a computer (might HP case managers u...

I all fairness let me first say I am not really neutral on computers right not. I have been dealing for over a month with a three year old HP desktop computer that a local nerd, in the business to save computers, killed after losing 3 years of data. Yes, I backed up, but to an external hard drive that failed. So I was forced to go shopping for a computer when I did not have the time nor the money. Nor quite frankly was I feeling warm and fuzzy about the boxes or the people that worked on them. But computer shopping I had to do. I am a small business and while I have a laptop for play I need the desktop for lots of year end business stuff and beginning of the new year submissions of art for fairs throughout 2011. HP had a cyber Monday sale that extended through the following Tuesday and I found a computer, that while not the one of my dreams, met my minimum requirements, fit my budget and would be delivered within a week. The HP Pavilion arrived on December 6th and I un...

My sister asked a thought provoking question yesterday: "Why do we believe things are getting better after the end of the old year?" Or what is the difference between December 31st and January 1st other than one is 2010 and the other is 2011 by arbitrary agreement. It occurred to me, while pondering this issue, that there is none, but from somewhere the belief arose and has carried down to the present day seemingly unchecked by reality. The actual magical day might just be Winters Solstice instead. Worldwide, interpretation of the event has varied from culture to culture, but most cultures have held a recognition of rebirth associated with this planetary event. And that makes a lot more sense than the new year. The winter solstice occurs exactly when the Earth's axial tilt is farthest away from the sun at its maximum of 22 1/2° 26'. And while this is for just a brief minute the influence of a planetary shift has been noticed throughout the ages. The Christian ca...

About now all my faithful readers are asking themselves just how long I can carry on this TW3. I know my Roman numerals up through thousands and no doubt can find the millions and trillions on Wiki if in the Ancient Roman world anyone even wanted to innumerate to that extent. And even in today's world it does seem silly at times. Today I am getting a new desktop computer with one terabyte of memory: A terabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information . The prefix tera means 10 12 in the International System of Units (SI), and therefore 1 terabyte is 1 000 000 000 000 bytes , or 1 trillion short scale ) bytes, or 1000 gigabytes. 1 terabyte in binary prefixes is 0.9095 tebibytes , or 931.32 gibibytes . The unit symbol for the terabyte is TB or Tbyte . It really seems very silly because I have not used up a fraction of my three year old hard drive memory on the failed computer. I need one of those simplistic little examples my teachers used to come up with - l...

A friend asked me this weekend, "If you had never had a computer how would you start leaning how to use one?" I admit I was tired when this question breezed by me. I was also downloading photos and posting them on Facebook and checking my e-mail at the time. I think I stared at her. Dumbly I might add. So she asked when did I start learning computers and how? I had the advantage I suppose to work for one of the construction management companies that led the field in using computer programs to manage multi billion dollar projects. We had Wangs and we programmed them ourselves. We were introduced to them by having them put in our cubicles with games the company had designed to get us familiar with the keyboards and functions. One of my early tasks was to enter line after line of Basic code into the DOS system. Line conditioners were just a thought at the time so I learned to save frequently. Almost killed a secretary that wanted to reset the Xerox machine by flipping the brea...