Do you smell that ? It’s the smell of your hard drive burning ! The most destructive virus ever created by mankind has infected your system, and it’s literally burning a physical hole right through the middle of your hard drive.
Read all about it on a SHOCKING ‘Thursday Night Internet Hoax Hall-Of-Shame’ tomorrow (Thursday) at 5 PM Eastern / 4 PM Central / 11 AM Hawaiian. It’s what everyone will be talking about on Friday morning over at Denny’s in Florida City (where all of the food is).
Don’t forget about the original ‘Friday Night Blogroll Review’ featuring the greatest blog entries of this past week from the greatest bloggers that are near and dear to me. That includes this crazy cat who reminds me of me because when I read his blog it looks just like my blog ! Phil - One Sunday we should really mix it all up by having me guest-write your ‘Talk Soup’ on your blog in your style, and having you guest-write my ‘Tossed Salad’ on my blog in my style.
OK enough of all of that lunacy. THANK YOU BLOGGERS for blogging on here with me. Even if you don’t have your own blog and you’re just here to read what I have to write then that still makes you a blogger. If you read blogs then you blog. It’s that simple.
So until we blog again - REMEMBER THIS from 40 years ago !
1. Tuesday nights have become ’me’ nights at home. On Mondays I’m typically away from home for 13+ hours with work and the weekly staff meeting at Life Pointe Church. On Wednesdays I only have about 3 hours at home after work and before Life Group. But Tuesdays when I get home I stay home and catch up with stuff. It’s my ‘fun’ day - my ‘I don’t have to run’ day !
2. TODAY I extended my ‘fun’ day by 4 hours and worked just a half a day. I went to Target for the first time since perhaps last December, and I went on a 90-minute shopping spree. Actually for the amount of time that I was scouring that store I didn’t really buy too many items (17). I could have really gone wild and bought 35 items !
6. I’m having a lot of fun and learning a lot too with my fresh new Panasonic DVD Recorder / VCR Combo. I bought it online at circuitcity.com a couple of Saturday nights ago, and FedEx delivered it to me (free of charge) less than two business days later ! I couldn’t believe my four eyes when it arrived that fast !
7. Since my new DVD recorder has a digital tuner I’m exploring and enjoying crystal clear digital television for the first time ever. I have 90 new digital channels (expanded basic) that I always had but couldn’t access until now. That includes 50 music channels. I dig that !
8. Last night and this morning I recorded four hours of digital television programming on DVD-RW for the first time ever. I’ve got some tweaks to make to this process. I recorded it all in EP mode (which allows for 8 hours of programming onto a single 4.7 GB DVD). The picture quality suffered a bit. I’ll have to bring it down a notch for my next recordings. I’m learning.
9. I’ve pushed back the purchase of my fresh new HP Pavilion laptop indefinitely - but not for too long. Once the initial enjoyment value for my DVD Recorder / digital television revolution begins to wind down a bit then it will be time for me to buy my next new toy - the laptop. It should happen sometime in August.
10. Bright and early this morning I was once again reminded why I rarely go through the drive-thru at the McDonald’s at the Oasis Plaza en el este de Homestead. It’s because the service is subpar. They get confused handling more than one order at a time !
It’s a warm and sticky Thursday night aqui en Homestead, and we’ve entered another extended dry period weatherwise with an abundance of clear skies, bright sunshine, and hot temperatures through at least the early part of next week. The chance of rain will be slim to none, but I can never rule out a quick passing shower in July - especially during the late-night and early-morning hours. Get out there and have some fun, but drink plenty of water !
TOMORROW on the big blog everybody’s waitin’ for the grande unveiling of this week’s original ‘Friday Night Blogroll Review’. It’s what’s happenin’ dude at my favourite blogs from my favourite bloggers. Then on Saturday morning be sure to catch my ‘Shenanigans’. You just never know what could possibly happen when I get in my car on a Saturday morning and drive from here to there - wherever there may be. (Food will probably be involved.)
Until we hang out again here on the blog or LIVE and in-person - remember this !
Chris In 1994
It’s a ‘lost’ picture of me from 1994. I found it this morning while looking for something. Check out the ENORMOUS spectacles and the obsolete telephone and computer equipment on my desk !
Wednesday, July 16, 2008 at 4:55 PM
· Filed under Computers, Shopping
If Best Buy has this item in stock at their Cutler Bay store location then consider it to be my fresh new state-of-the-art laptop this Friday afternoon !
That’s right. I’m finally pulling the trigger on my long-standing ‘I need to eventually buy a new laptop’ initiative. I’ve had enough of talking about it (and especially dealing with my old 2002 laptop). I’m ready to act on it. I’m ready to seize this moment. I’m ready to just do it.
PLEASE - I am requesting no interruptions this Friday night. I’ll be busy setting up my new laptop - even if I have to stay up all night long (like Lionel Richie) to do so !
1. It’s a cool, dark, and stormy Tuesday afternoon in Homestead. We’re still in a drought if you can believe that. We need a lot more rain than this to get ourselves out of this fine mess !
2. My brother and his lovely wife got me addicted to the TV show TMZ while I was at their house in Texas. I watch it almost every night now. I never saw a single episode of it before my recent trip to Texas.
3. I never realized how much I actually like iced coffee … before I started drinking iced coffee ! I’ve made the new Homestead Starbucks a Monday afternoon tradition (right before the weekly Life Pointe Church staff meeting).
4. Irony ? - A coworker of mine standing barefoot on an old chair on top of a hard floor while updating our building’s safety bulletin board !
5. Yesterday I picked-up the new premium fish fillet sandwich from Wendy’s, and I brought it back to work. I microwaved it (to get it a little warmer than it was), and it emitted a wonderful smell that attracted a small portion of my coworkers. They adored that smell. It probably smelled better than it tasted. It was a fine sandwich, but I wouldn’t consider it to be ‘premium’. If anything it was perhaps a bit overpriced.
6. Watch this cool Life Pointe Church promotional video from this past Sunday morning. I’m not in this one. I told Jesse that I wanna be a lovable babyface in his videos rather than a miserable heel. Travis alleges that I have a loyal cult following at the church. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a not so good thing.
7. Every Sunday morning at Life Pointe Church I manage to get myself in to a whole bunch of pictures, yet they never see the light of day. I challenge you to put those pictures online, or send them to me and I’ll put them on the blog here.
8. Here’s my brother in a recent text message to me describing what he had to deal with regarding his beloved dog Buddy - ‘… on Saturday he ate grass outside then ate insect killer that I sprayed, then vommitted BRIGHT YELLOW PUKE in A CIRCLE in the living room’.
9. My 2002 HP Pavilion laptop is dying a slow death. I can see myself buying a brand new one sooner than I thought - like before the Summer is over. I may even donate this old laptop to the church once I buy the new one.
10. Got ‘Rock Band‘ ? I’ll be the lead vocalist. I’m good like that !
1. Of all of the regular weekly blog entries that are posted on here this is the one that I look forward to compiling and posting more than any other. This is totally unrehearsed, and I am totally unprepared for it. This is raw, and that’s what makes it so cool. I have absolutely no clue what I plan to blog about for the next 9 items of interest, but I’ll just let my fingers do the talking and watch what happens.
2. The 10TH season / 9TH summer edition of “Big Brother” on CBS-TV begins this Sunday night at 8 PM EDT / 7 PM CDT. Please don’t bother me while it’s on (three nights a week as usual).
3. Some days everyone around me is a lousy driver. They either drive too slow in front of me, pull out in front of me, or tailgate me. This was one of those days. I couldn’t wait to get off of the streets.
4. Everytime I sneak a peek at this book I spend more time in it than I intended. I need to find some time this weekend to intentionally spend a couple of hours with it. It’s what I do for Life Pointe Church. It’s how I serve God and His children here in Homestead.
5. This afternoon I ordered a medium roast beef sandwich combo (with curly fries and a Sierra Mist) and an apple turnover via the drive-thru at Arby’s in Florida City (where all the food is). That’s what I paid for, and I’ve got the receipt right here to prove it. I got the curly fries, the Sierra Mist, and the apple turnover, but in lieu of the medium roast beef sandwich that I was truly looking forward to devouring I instead got - get this - a REUBEN ! I can dig mistakes like that when they work out in my favour flavour !
6. Are you tired of all of the rain here in Homestead (nearly 14 inches over the past 22 days) ? GOOD - I’m forecasting very little to no rain at all for the next 5 to 7 days (until perhaps early next week). Let’s see if I’m right.
8. I saw my hot new laptop on sale at a Best Buy in Plano Texas last week. The longer I wait the cheaper it gets with more power. Laptops with 4 GB of RAM are pretty much standard nowadays. So are desktops with 8 GB of RAM.
9. I survived my 5TH cold in 8 months. It lasted 6 days. I kinda knew that I was getting it before I got it, and it was pretty much gone before I realized it. Here’s hoping that I don’t have to be blogging about my 6TH cold in 10 months come Labour Day Weekend !
10. THIS JUST IN - My brother and his wife (my sister-in-law) now have a cold. My 6-DAY cold ‘peaked’ on its 3RD day. That was my last full day at their house. I felt a little bit better on the 4TH Of July - the day that I left them behind and flew back home. A single contact with my nasty cold germs left behind and it was pretty much all over for the both of them. They’ll probably infect each of their coworkers.
Just because I’m not there doesn’t mean that I can’t do this:
1. It’s 10 PM EDT in Homestead - and 9 PM CDT here on the River Walk en San Antonio as I begin posting this blog entry, and that makes it a true ‘Tuesday Night Grab Bag O’ Thoughts’. Normally these weekly thoughts are compiled and published late on a Tuesday afternoon, but that’s not the case this week. I was busy being a tourist on this particular Tuesday afternoon.
2. As the 10:30 AM service was just getting started at Life Pointe Church this past Sunday morning me and my brother were just getting started with our 5-hour / 300-mile trek from Allen Texas (north of Dallas) to San Antonio. (We’ll be making the return trip back to Allen on Wednesday afternoon.)
3. I saw this on a billboard on the President George Bush Turnpike north of Dallas - ‘YOUR WIFE IS HOT !‘ (in big bold letters). Underneath that it read (in much smaller letters) - ‘Better Get That A.C. Fixed’. Now that’s effective advertising that grabbed my (short) attention (span) !
4. We stopped by my brother’s office in a generic high-rise office building in Dallas to pick up a few items. My immediate observation of the joint - he’s got absolutely no pictures of me in his office. Hopefully this public thought right here will give him a substantial guilt complex that will remind him to go home and retrieve a picture of me so that he can proudly display it in his office.
5. Parts of I-35 southbound away from Dallas and towards Waco, Austin, and San Antonio kinda sorta reminded me of parts of I-4 westbound away from Orlando and towards Lakeland and Tampa. Central Texas looks a lot like Central Florida in many areas.
6. We hit 100,000 miles in my brother’s 2001 Jeep Grand Cherokee while driving southbound on I-35, and my brother actually captured the flip-over from 99,999 miles to 100,000 miles on video while driving about 75 MPH in the fast lane and passing an 18-wheeler. (I was slightly terrified during those couple of minutes.)
7. Me and my brother ate dinner Sunday night at this place in San Antonio about 9 miles from downtown. It’s a place that I’ve been to once before - in October 2003 the last time I was in town. We saw the WWE PPV ‘Night Of Champions’ there.
10. I saw “The Happening” Monday afternoon at the movies, and I thought that it was near-perfect (if you’re in to that type of box office entertainment). It was more eye-popping than it was bonechilling. What was even more horrific than the movie itself is the fact that parents actually brought their small school-aged kids into the theatre to watch the movie as well. If you know anything about this movie then you may just agree with me when I refer to those parents as ‘irresponsible’.
You know you want it, so don’t let me be the one to deny it:
1. On this dark and stormy Tuesday afternoon in Homestead I actually heard the following overused phrase from a coworker - ‘I think this is gonna be a really bad hurricane season. This could be the worst one yet !’ Remember when Hurricane Andrew destroyed Homestead 16 years ago this August ? That was one of the quietest Atlantic hurricane seasons in modern history. It only takes one powerful hurricane to wreck havoc with your life as you know it. If we have an all-time record 30 named storms this season, yet none of them strike land anywhere near you then what kind of hurricane season is that ?
2. We’re getting a lot of much-needed rain today here in Homestead. I totally dig that. We need every last drop of it and then some to pull us out of this extended drought that we’re in. We could really use at least three FEET of rain (that’s right - 36 inches) over the next three months !
3. If you think that you haven’t seen that many mosquitoes out and about thus far this Summer then check again by this weekend. Let me know if you can feel them biting you in a few days.
5. Last Friday I celebrated the 13TH anniversary of me living here in my current home here in Homestead. This is by far the best place that I have ever lived in my entire life / Life.
6. For those of you who are new to my blog let me explain. When I refer to the last 22 months of my Life the word ‘Life’ is always capitalized. When I refer to the 39 years before that the word ‘life’ begins with a lower-case ‘l’. When I write about my ’life / Life’ I’m referring to my previous sad, miserable, and directionless life, as well as my current Life - full of glory, joy, and purpose for I have been saved and reborn again by the Lord Jesus Christ. It’s all symbolic, but it also keeps it all in perspective.
7. My next laptop will have at least 2 gigabytes of memory in it. My current laptop has exactly one-fourth that amount. I think that I will finally buy a brand new laptop sometime between now and the end of the year. I’m actually not looking forward to it. Once I buy that new laptop this blog may suddenly go inactive for about 3 to 5 days because it will probably take that long to transfer all of my files over from this laptop to that laptop and also install and configure various programs. There’s a lot of work involved there. If I knew that it would be really easy then I would probably already have a new laptop by now.
8. Ela O. called me on the telephone this afternoon, and we talked for exactly 7 minutes and 29 seconds. She made me laugh hysterically, and I returned the flavour. The telephone is my least favourite electronic device that I could easily live without; however, when I see that it’s Ela on the other end (via my Caller-I.D.) I know that I should be prepared to laugh up a storm with her. She has every reason in the world to be sad and miserable, yet she is one of the happiest and most joyful women I know in my current Life. She’s got a whole lot of purpose remaining in her Life here on Earth on God’s fantastic journey !
9. Ela tried to pull a fast one on me during that telephone conversation by telling me that I was being assigned to make coffee this Sunday morning at the Life Pointe Church Café. We have quite a few Medical Doctors and Registered Nurses that are part of our LPC family. They would be put into action and forced to go to work on their fellow brothers and sisters if I were to make coffee on Sunday morning. We would need a couple of shuttle buses to transport the victims from the movie theatre to the hospital. I stopped making coffee for the general public in 1989 - not because I made anyone sick or anything like that - but because I could. Nowadays I actually make my own instant coffee for myself on most mornings. It would probably cause irregular heartbeats for most normal healthy humans.
10. The Sun is now shining brightly and baking the atmosphere directly above my neighbourhood. That only means one thing. Prepare now for another ferocious thunderstorm with torrential downpours in about an hour.
B U G S - The bugs are back in town here in Homestead due to all of the recent heavy rains. You may be thinking to yourself, ‘Hey - Wait a minute. I live in Homestead. It hasn’t rained since March !’ You may also be thinking to yourself, ‘No doubt. I thought the sky was caving in on us yesterday afternoon. My yard turned into a giant lake ! My new patio furniture was thrown by the funnel cloud into the canal !’ There is rain all around us. Some of us have received a lot of it this past week, and some of us are still living in a dust bowl. Pretty soon all of us will get a lot of rain, and the bugs will flock to Homestead on their Summer break. Get ready to be eaten alive by little itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny mouths with glow-in-the-dark green eyes.
G A S - I filled-up my car this morning with not quite 11 gallons of gas at Chevron on Useless-One at Campbell Drive at the remarkable price of $4.059 per gallon. That’s about 15 to 20 cents per gallon higher than every other gas station in the general vicinity of that Chevron, but I am kinda sorta semi-loyal to Chevron, and I really wanted to use my fresh new Chevron-Texaco credit card this morning for the first time. $4.059 may seem outrageous to a majority of whining and complaining Americans, but $4.059 for the equivalent of a gallon of gas anywhere in Europe is known as ‘the good old days of the 1990s’.
J A V A - Speaking of items that we Americans love to spend a lot of money on - Starbucks in Homestead - not to be confused with Starbucks in Florida City - is OPEN for BUSINESS ! OK calm down Travis. The drive-thru is open for business. The inside of the joint is apparently not quite ready for customer utilization, so you’ll just have to wait a little while longer to sit inside for hours on your wireless Apple Mac.
One final item of interest - Many of the mega-stores and restaurants at the first phase of the Homestead Pavilion shopping, dining, and entertainment complex at Campbell Drive and the Turnpike are expected to make their grand openings between the middle of October and the middle of November - just in time for the NASCAR Championship Series at the Homestead-Miami Speedway and of course the Christmas 2008 shopping season.
Since the Saturday after Thanksgiving 2007 not a single day has gone by here on this blog without at least one posted entry. That’s 163 days in a row, so why stop now ? The continuous blogging streak continues.
This is Day 164, and this is the Monday night edition of ‘Bedtime Stories’. I do it for all of my thousands hundreds of fans worldwide.
TODAY was one of those rare days where it was rather slow at work, and extremely hectic here at home. We had wide area network (WAN) technical difficulties throughout the day today, so there were long periods of time in which our computers were essentially useless with no internet, no web, and no E-Mail. I like to refer to that period of time in which computers had no internet, no web, and no E-Mail - as 1993 !
I pretty much came home from work this afternoon to use a computer that actually works - that is - connected to the rest of the world.
Monday is always a busy day here at home on my computer. Nowadays it’s even busier as I do a lot of post-Sunday follow-up work for my church. As usual I’m not even close to being done with it all, so the fun shall continue tomorrow (Tuesday) afternoon. I adore serving God’s people at Life Pointe Church. My Life is purpose-driven. I am alive.
Also TOMORROW - Be sure to check out the most spontaneous weekly series here on this blog, as it’s another thought-provoking edition of the ‘Tuesday Night Grab Bag O’ Thoughts’. You just never know what 10 items of interest could be on my mind on any given Tuesday night.
Have a safe, peaceful, and relaxing Monday night everyone, and until we chill-out again here on the blog remember this:
It’s a quickie ‘Bedtime Stories’ on a Monday night because it’s getting very close to 11 PM EDT (bedtime for me).
Be sure to catch the fun tomorrow afternoon after 4 PM here on the blog as I present to you everybody’s favourite weekly series - the ‘Tuesday Night Grab Bag O’ Thoughts’. You just never know what could possibly be on my mind on a Tuesday night !
Until then - be safe - be at peace - and remember this:
Greetings Friends this is ‘Bedtime Stories’ on this Thursday night - brought to you by the new 1959 Chevrolet Station Wagon !
This is the 4TH and final blog entry for this day. 4 blog entries in a single day is my self-imposed maximum limit. I’ve done that on many days since this blog started, and I’ve never gone past that limit. I figure that if I’m posting 5 (or more) blog entries in a single day then I’m probably spending way too much time on my computer !
It’s another hard day at work for me tomorrow, but the cool thing is that it’s Pay Day Friday, and the final day of the work week. I’ve got a busier than normal weekend planned. On Saturday night I’ll be dressed up in near-formal attire for the night. Maybe I’ll get myself into some pictures so that I can post some of them on here so that all of you can see what I look like when I try hard enough to look the very best.
Be sure to catch the blog in action tomorrow afternoon. I’ve got the ‘Friday Night Blogroll Review’ in full effect featuring some of the best blog entries of this past week from some of my favourite bloggers that are near and dear to me and this blog. Please remember that there is to be no wagering as to which specific blog entries and bloggers will make the hot list.
Have a safe and peaceful Thursday night everyone, and until we hang out again on here remember this:
It’s just after 8:30 PM EDT on this wild and crazy Monday night, and I just got home from a full day of work (at the base) and even more work (at the church office) about an hour ago. I am so totally exhausted after this nearly 14-hour day away from home, but it was the funnest day I’ve enjoyed in recent memory ! I had an awesome time at both places of work.
It was fun hangin’ out with Travis, Paul, Jesse, Alex, and Anne (you need a blog too) at the church office this afternoon, and I now have a ton of new stuff that I need to set up on my computer here at home to get started with my new position as Life Pointe’s ‘Director Of Cool’ as Pastor Travis is tentatively referring to it, or as the ‘Director Of Life Pointe Connections’ as I am tentatively referring to it (until I come up with something even more catchier or at least relevant).
I’ll get it all ready and organized by this upcoming Saturday night. I’ll need to because I go to work and hit it hard on Sunday afternoon after I return home from the two services with everything that I need to do to get connected with everyone. I’m really looking forward to it all.
Well that’s what I’ve got for tonight as far as ‘Bedtime Stories’ is concerned. It’s my only blog entry for this Monday. I’ll be back on the blog tomorrow (Tuesday) after 4 PM with my most-anticipated ’Tuesday Night Grab Bag O’ Thoughts’.
Have a safe, peaceful, and relaxing Monday night everyone, and until we blog again remember this:
This blog - and all other WordPress blogs - should look normal now. The annoying problem has been corrected.
If you didn’t experience a problem today then you don’t use Internet Explorer 6 (like most people do to surf the web). You probably use Internet Explorer 7, or Firefox, or some other obscure web browser.
I briefly considered upgrading to Internet Explorer 7 tonight, but then I quickly realized how much I dislike it. (We use it at work.) I’m also sticking with Windows XP indefinitely. It’s the 2ND best operating system that was ever created - 2ND of course to the legendary Windows 98. Good Times !
Before I call it a night I want to remind everyone about the ‘Friday Night Blogroll Review’ tomorrow night here on this blog. Be sure to update your blogs in the morning with some good stuff because I’ll be pinging my favourites again.
Way back during the early-to-middle-1990s (it seems so long ago) when surfers of the World Wide Web (then in its infancy) could be counted in the thousands (rather than the couple billion that we have today) there was essentially only one web browser to use. That would be Netscape Navigator. It is often credited with kicking-off the worldwide phenomenon of the Internet, as well as the entire ‘dot-com-boom’ (that would eventually go bust at the end of the decade).
Microsoft came along about a year after Netscape (in 1995) with their Internet Explorer web browser, and the rest (as they say) is Internet history. Internet Explorer (5.0) eventually surpassed Netscape Navigator as the most popular web browser in the world in 1999, and nowadays it is utilized by an estimated 90% of the world’s web surfers.
Thanks for those early Internet memories Netscape. You started it all back when the World Wide Web was a barren landscape. Those were the good old days !
