I have been trying to encourage my sister-in-law Susan to quit smoking for the past several years. She has smoked heavily for over forty years, so it is not going to be easy for her to quit. What bothers me is that her doctor has already told her that she needs to quit smoking because her lungs are not working at their full capacity. And her doctor has told her that the age of her lungs are about fifteen years older than her actual age. That tells me that she is on the path to an early death.
Unfortunately, she does not seem to have much interest in quitting smoking. Even though she has repeatedly promised her kids that she is going to quit, and even commits to a specific date, that date comes and goes and she still smokes. It seems that every time I turn around, she is outside smoking a cigarette and talking on her cell phone. The smoke stinks up her clothes, and stinks up the car when she sneaks a smoke in there.
I’ve been hearing a lot about the new electronic cigarette that has recently come onto the market Although it does not advertise itself as an aid to quit smoking, what I have read about it seems to be a viable option for people who need to quit smoking but really don’t want to. I’m going to talk to Susan about trying one and see if she would smoke one of them instead of the “real” things. If these are really less harmful to one’s health, then I’m all for it!
I was browsing the Internet this morning and saw a lot of hoopla about a new creation – a wedding dress that dissolves in water. The photos that are provided with all of the articles look like ballet tutus. What’s up with that? I can’t imagine a bride walking down the aisle in a tutu! Is that really the dress?
The articles talk about how women buy wedding dresses, wear them once and never again. And what a waste it is. In my family, it seems that the women save their wedding dresses in the hopes that one day their daughters will wear them to their weddings! Of course women who only bear sons might have problems with that!
I can remember going to a historical place that held lectures and the lecturer spoke of how wedding dresses used to be black, and that the women wore the same dress to church every Sunday, and that the dress was also used as dress that the woman was buried in. I guess those dresses really earned their keep!
One of the things that I enjoy a lot about where we live is the fact that we have three acres of land, and live across from a large farm. On our land, about half of it is woods. We don’t really notice our neighbors very much, the landscaping has been nicely done so that their houses are not immediately visible out of most of our windows. I like the fact that at night there is no light pollution, so we can look up at the sky and see the stars. For the most part, the only sounds we hear are the sounds of the livestock from the farm across the street, or the birds singing.
One of the things that has surprised me about living out here is how many of my neighbors say that they can’t get high speed Internet at their homes. I can remember when we lived in New England we were stuck with slow dial-up, but technology has advanced considerably and now it seems that people can get high speed wild blue Internet service just about anywhere in the country!
The next time I meet someone who says that they can’t get high speed Internet at their place, I’m going to ask them if they’ve tried satellite internet. It’s worth a try!
One of the reasons we chose this house to buy was because it had a propane fireplace in the family room. We reasoned that it would be a good emergency heat source in the event that we lost electricity during a storm. Well, we have used it once or twice, just for atmosphere, not really for heat, but let me tell you that fireplace certainly did heat up that room!
Well, we DID lose electricity yesterday due to that blizzard, so I went to turn on the fireplace. Wouldn’t you know that fireplace would not start up? I couldn’t get the gas to turn on! So I brought our kero-sun heater into the house from the garage and lit that up for heat. My wife complained that the fumes gave her a headache and she cracked open a window for ventilation. She was convinced we were going to die of some kind of cabon monoxide poisoning. I’m sure if we had been able to get on the Internet at that point she would have been looking that up!
I am always amazed when I meet someone who lives locally but tells me that they can’t get any Internet Services where they live! When I probe them for more information they tell me that they can’t get cable Internet, and that the dial-up service that they have tried in the past was too slow. I can understand that – I used to have dial-up service and it was slow, but it was better than nothing! When we moved to this house and we got faster Internet I was really happy about it!
I think that DSL service is too limited for most people – I don’t understand how and why the technology of DSL only allows for service withing a short distance from the DSLAM location. I can’t imagine that very many people live within those boundaries! I do think that people who have children in school should have some form of Internet, even if it is slow. These kids are going to need Internet access more frequently as the progress through school. And mobile broadband is just too expensive at this point for people to be able to use that service for personal use.
Isn’t technology wonderful when it works? And it’s absolutely hateful when it doesn’t work the way it is supposed to! I’ve been around long enough to know that computer glitches are the work of the technology demons that hover over and around everyone who uses the computer. At any moment the blue screen of death could appear! In the not too distant past, even minor computer glitches could paralyze an office for a day or two; waiting for the “computer guy” to show up to fix the problem, or even worse the computer would have to be taken to an off-premise site for a week or more. Ahhhh….. those were the “bad ol’ days!” of the pioneering days of the personal computer.
In the modern day, remote desktop software can be, and often is, the answer to many of the problems that can arise in an office full of computers. This secure software enables a user to be in one location and access the computers in a different location to trouble-shoot and hopefully repair what is wrong with the troubled computer. So if the problem with the computer is not something as drastic as the motherboard frying, the quick-fix is a real possibility with this type of technology.
Have you noticed that when you call a large company that you almost never get a real live person quickly? I recently was calling my health insurance company to try to get information about some of the claims that they should have received and processed. I found that instead of the traditional “press 1, press 2″ prompts that I’ve become accustomed to, I was getting an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system.
My ivr customer experience was frustrating in this case because the machine could not recognize what I was saying. I think that I speak English perfectly well, but my wife says that I have a pretty thick New England accent. Very aggravating if you are supposed to speak answers into the phone and the machine on the other end keeps replying “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand your answer. Please repeat…..” I got frustrated and handed the phone to my wife, who does NOT have a New England accent. She even found herself having to repeat her answers several times for the doggone thing to go through! I think there are some improvements to be made in this kind of system!
A more exciting advance in self service technologies is the voice recognition biometric technology. This type of technology is used in security situations – it is like taking fingerprints of your voice. I think this will be a great tool in the area of banking and law enforcement! This can help law enforcement track down suspects who have gone so far as to go through plastic surgery to change their appearance!
I was reading an article on the Reuters website earlier today; a friend sent me the link and told me to read it. The article was talking about how solar energy will be cost competitive with fossil fuels by the year 2013. Well, if that is true, I think that the US government should just stop even talking about drilling for oil off the coast of Florida and in Alaska. I understand that even getting that oil drilled and refined will take at least five to ten years to reach the gas pumps, so what’s the point of spoiling the environment when we will have perfectly good alternative fuels ready by then? Now I understand that solar energy will not be able to run everything that needs gasoline, but there ARE other sources of fuel out there that could be used to replace fossil fuels that will be ready to be on the market by then and will be cost competive too.
I find it very interesting to see how many different ways people use the Internet. My 80 year old mother uses it only for reading emails, and only when my daughter goes to her house and opens it up for her to read them! She is definitely NOT one to be talking with about the technicalities of computers and the Internet! When she wants to type a letter, she drags out her old manual typewriter! Yet there are many people who are her age who are “fluent” in their use of computers and the Internet.
My niece uses the Internet essentially for entertainment. She is not interested in learning anything – ever! My wife uses it constantly as a resource to research things that interest her. She LOVES the Internet – it is her security blanket!
One of the more fascinating ways that college students are using the Internet is to form social networks to help each other with their courses. There is one website called Course Hero that is designed to do just that. They have support study groups and cheat sheet exam preparation papers. If you need a Biology Exam Study Guide and you go to UT, you can join the community and type in “UT Biology Exam Prep” and chances are good that you will find that some other student has uploaded their study guide to share with the community.
I am fascinated by the advances in technology. It seems to me that the advances are moving in great leaps and bounds in the past couple of decades. When you take a look at how many centuries it took mankind to develop things such as railroads, cars, electricity and the like the progress was very slow going. I can remember going to the Epcot Center when it first opened in the 1980s and went through the ride in the big globe and thought about how futuristic the scene was of people talking face to face from across different continents to each other using computers and web cams, and how that technology is in widespread use in my own lifetime, it just amazes me!
And I can remember when mobile telephones first came out, how large and cumbersome they were. The first mobile phones that my wife and I had were hardwired into our cars, were about the size of a lunch box, and they actually had cords to attach the telephones to the base! And even having those phones was considered a major luxury! Now the cell phones are a necissity of life – if my wife leaves the house without hers, she goes into a panic! And all of our kids have to have cell phones, too, so my wife and I can reach them, and they reach us, in case of emergency! My goodness, how life has changed! Now my cell phone fits in the palm of my hand and is completely cordless. I think it is truly amazing how quickly the cell phone technology has evolved.
My sister in law is in the real estate market part time, and she has been telling me about a new use for her cell phone. She uses it for Mobile Marketing. She says that Cellit Mobile Marketing provides a wide variety of marketing tools that can be used by her cellphone. She says that it makes her computers almost obsolete! She said that they can help her promote her business with games and contests that keep her clients interested and her company name in the forefront of their minds. She said that she can use couponzap.com to create coupons that help her to promote her restaurant business too.
She says that she loves their House4Cell services for her real estate business – she can send and receive information about properties for sale from her phone to her client’s cell phone. Information such as photographs, square footage, and pricing information in her client’s reach within seconds! She says that’s a great service to have.
I was surprised to read in the Time.com website that underneath this red clay, in the Piedmont section of Virginia (which is where I live) sits a huge deposit of uranium. And, there is talk about mining it, to fuel nuclear reactors to generate electricity. I have a lot of concerns about that. From what I understand nuclear energy still is problematic because there is no good solution for where to put the nuclear waste. And mining uranium can put the environment, and our health at risk. Yeah, I have some concerns about that.
Recently I was reading on the Time.com website that scientists have discovered an area in Utah where there is a concentration of dinosaur footprints (and possibly tail drag marks) that are so closely concentrated together that they have decided to call it a “dinosaur dance floor.” The theory is that the area was an oasis in a desert so many dinosaurs went there for water. The scientists say that many of the footprints were originally thought to be simply “potholes” but were recently discovered to have toe and heel prints. The site is along the Arizona-Utah border, in a protected wilderness area. Good thing it’s in a protected wilderness area! They should have plenty of time to research that area without worrying about commercialism paving it over!
I was reading an article on the livescience.com website earlier today about how the New York City bedbugs that have been plaguing the hotels there are becoming resistant to the insecticide that is used to kill them! The article was continuing to talk about how bed bugs live in the mattresses or bed frames of beds, and that they feed on people, which results in large painful welts. The article also was talking about how they harbor diseases such as HIV and hepatitis B but that there is no evidence yet that they transmit those diseases. I find it very hard to believe that if they harbor these diseases that they don’t also transmit them! This is a very scary thought to me - the possibility that you might pick up such a dangerous disease by sleeping in a hotel bed? I’m not thinking about sleeping in a NYC hotel anytime soon, thank you very much!
I was just reading one of my favorite websites, livescience.com and found a story about how the earth’s position has shifted over many centuries, which has caused the zodiac signs to change a little bit too. Well, that made sense to me and I kept clicking and reading. I ended up on a webpage where it gave me the chance to enter in my birthday and see whether or not my zodiac sign is really what I thought it was. Well, yes it is, but my son’s is different! And so is my sister-in-law’s! And my mother-in-law’s!
How funny is that!? Of course, these folks have been born “on the cusp” which means that they have traits of two signs, but it really is interesting that they are not the “sign” that they thought they were!
My wife and I have been talking about how to best dispose of our garbage. She would really like to compost and has been asking me for months to set up a compost pile. She keeps telling me that the compost would be good for our garden. We don’t have a garbage disposal: and I tell her that I’d rather just get a garbage disposal. Composting sounds like a lot of work, and I don’t feel like doing the work. She tells me that garbage disposals are bad for septic systems, but I know lots of people with septic systems have garbage disposals!
I was reading an article on the Slate.com news website that discusses whether people should use garbage disposals or just put their garbage in the trash to be hauled to a landfill. The article assumes that no one has a septic system, and it recommends compost piles as the first and best choice, the garbage disposal as the second best choice, and putting garbage in the trash to be hauled to the landfill as the worst choice. I wish the article had addressed septic systems!
One of the things that I’ve always been a little bit concerned about with these flash drives is how secure could they be? They are so very small it is easy to lose them, and it could be very easy for some unscrupulous character to “palm” them and take off without you even knowing it! Well, leave it to Kanguru Solutions to come up with a Security system they call the Kanguru Remote Management Console that allows the owner to access (and block) the Kanguru brand of flash drives, the Kanguru Defender, Kanguru Defender Pro and Kanguru Bio AES drives remotely! What will they think of next? This is SO Futuristic!
With this new system, if one of the Kanguru flash drives goes “missing” it can be remotely deleted! That prevents the data from being accessed by unauthorized users. This puts me in mind of the old “Mission Impossible” television show where the tape automatically self destructs!
If the flash drive user forgets their password, the administrator can reset the password remotely. The drives can be set to lock out users or delete themselves if the drive does not connect to the authorized server within a prechosen time period. What great security measures!
I was amazed the first time I saw a USB flash drive. My kids call them “thumb drives.” The first one we bought didn’t have much memory (I think it was 128) and was really expensive, but it was a convenient way to move files from one place to another. The next one we bought was four times the storage size (512), but the same big price. A couple of months ago we found a USB flash drive for sale that was a the same price as the other ones we had bought a couple of years ago, but it had whopping 8GB storage! It’s incredible how technology advances so fast!
One of the coolest things about having lived in New England was seeing the Northern Lights. Now that we’ve moved further south, we don’t ever have that opportunity. I was reading on the Time.com website that scientists are finding out more information about what actually causes the Northern Lights. There are satellites up in space that have been transmitting data to the scientists that is helping them to understand the Northern Lights better than ever before. According to their theory, the Northern Lights are caused by magnetic explosions that occur between the earth and the moon. These storms happen about every two or three days. I don’t remember seeing Northern Lights THAT often! Maybe most of those storms have happened during daylight hours, you can only see the Northern Lights after the sun sets.
