VPN Lover

Ok, my karma must be good today. The VPN link is churning bytes, abeit, very slowly but who cares because it is at last doing what I have paid $400 for hardware and untold labor to acheive. What a deal – I thought a hardware solution would be the best because it frees machine resources to do other things of great importance. Maybe Cisco is a cheap solution afterall.

I received an email from Keith today. No new news but he is busy and still employed so this is good. Maybe when I get back to Indiana my “Win Server” will be ready to try out. Man, I want the capabilities of advanced email handling in Windows.

Linux plus Sendmail work pretty good for me but I need to add a bit of zip to my life so I want MS Exchange capabilities.

Sunday – the beautiful

After a cold, blustery Saturday the day dawned with beautiful skies and cool but acceptable temperatures. I spent the morning on intellectual pursuits. I then had a Burger King Whopper Large lunch at the corner of 66th St N & 82nd Ave W. After which, I felt a bit tired and being a mentally relaxing afternoon with blackbirds croaking in the skies I took a 20 minute siesta before hitting the trails.

Around 94th Ave lies a park that has two caches with 2 stars Difficulty and Terrain so I decided to tackle them. I found them both rather quickly so I went to the big Walmart on Hwy 19 to get some asprin – I like the Equate brand of EP Asprin because it does not hurt my stomach.

Ok, I have to go out for a short walk – see you later.

A 5 cache day

Is this really FL? I was bundled up moore than Indiana in the winter today. It was/is cold! I left the house with a fist full of caching sheets about 1130 hrs after a non-eventful morning trying to recover from the week before – read like hell week on campus.

I really did not enjoy the first cache of the day but it was a cache and I am after caches so caches it is today. The second is in another “bad” area of St. Pete but this one has real potential for being a neighborhood fixer upper. This estuary area is one of up-scale homes surrounded by barbed wire, cameras, neighborhood watch’s and other generally bad indicators in SSW St. Pete. It has a cache in an unknown, un-named park but I liked it immediately and if you are an urban pioneer then this is the place of dreams. The third was near the “Beach” and so was the fourth – found them ok. The fifth took some time and my GPS was dying but I managed – Veteran’s Park is cool.

I got home after all this and went out for an hour walk. Every block had a party group out on the front “lawn” with a bonfire and drinks in hand – to bad I did not have time to stop and celebrate. I guess when it gets really cold here (read 45 degrees) everyone has a bonfire – the burning wood smelled real good and was just like home in Indiana.

Absolutely Amazing

Quote:

Career Tip of the Day – Business attire and productivity
If an employee wears khaki shorts and a polo shirt to work, does it mean he’s a slacker? According to a national survey conducted by Leflein Associates, Inc., this may just be the case. The American Industry Dress Code Survey reports that executives believe a change in dress code would result in productivity gains. The senior level executives polled at more than two hundred companies nationwide say that the switch from strictly casual to a professional business dress code would result in an estimated 3.6 percent productivity gain. Also, more than seventeen percent of the respondents report that productivity would improve as much as forty percent if there was a business dress code implemented in the workplace. Seven in ten senior execs agree that when employees wear suits, they project a much better image of their organization (70 percent) and are more likely to be noticed (68 percent).

End Quote:

This is absolutely amazing to me as less than 10 years ago I was threatened with termination if I did not comply with the dress down code of a now defunct Fortune 1000 company. Every generation of senior management executives has a “better idea” I guess and most lead to the cliff with their Lemming counterparts. Today I just have to laugh at the folly of Mr. P of Company T. The above quotation percentage was used almost in the reverse context less than a decade ago.

Around the World

OK, here is another way to go around the world in multiple tens’s of hours. Click this link!

Around the world in 170+ hours

A guy wants to circumnavigate the earth in a Cessna 210 as a private citizen. Here is the route around the world – and I am sure you are smart enough to backtrack to his website: Ok, here it is.

Bummer dude!

Hello world! This is the week that was – again. Can I use this as my refrain even though it is probably copywrited by the long ago TV program? TGIF because it was an “0 dark hundred” meeting this am. Get up early, travel south to the job site, try some wireless radio tests and regroup.

Well, at least some of the group re-grouped and ate breakfast at Mel’s Diner. The most important member – me – got to wait for a contractor that is usually early but today was “on-time”. Aw, what the hay – these guys are a good group and I really like working with them so who cares if they just “meet their commitments” instead of “exceeding their commitments”. In the end we had a great day and really produced some good honest work. A day well spent.

Lunch today was at 1400 – alone. Actually, almost alone. Don cell’d me late in the lunch and said “Order me the same”. This I dutifully did and, of course, it came well ahead of schedule ( I guess Don tips better than me). Ok, so far but now Don was late and this was a trendy outside on the street kind of place so the food was getting cold. Enter Don, traveling kit and all, ready for an eat and run to the airport Friday. So friends, that was lunch for today at Fisherman Joe’s.

Thurs can u dig it?

Did I leave the door open? Leaving Indiana it was in the 40′s with the days before in the 50′s. Now, newly ensconced in Florida it is the same temperature? How can this be? Easy, I left the door open and I am closing it this morning. So I am willing to bet it will get warmer now. Have a great morning…Charlie.