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These Olympics games have been awesome. I loved watching the swimming, the opening ceremony was spectacular, to watch athletes putting in their best effort in being the fastest or strongest has just be incredible. Incredible until today… I Turn on NBC to see what is going on at the Bejing Olympics.. and I see what looks like Synchronized Team Rope Dancing AKA Gymnastics Rhythmic.

Are you Serious?!?!? A bunch of Girls/Women dancing around the gymnastic floor with ropes. UGH!!!! They are talking about this being Baseball and Softball’s last year in the Olympics.. but they keep this crap??? Has anyone ever heard of this except in the Olympics? This is almost a made up event. It is bad enough we have badmitton as a event, but seriously add events people really want to see.

Just got done with a IM session with a friend of mine

it’s like October 2007 all over again!
the rumors are really wild this time
everything from closing down MTC and DTC
to whacking all of SI and IPE’s

I was through that mess once.. I really feel for my friends back at AOL. The current management, Randy Falco and Ron Grant, have really screwed that company. And my friends will suffer for their stupidity.

The rumors also say that performance bonuses will be stopped and the layoffs will be smaller. Mainly because they got burned last year by the “widespread-edness of the october layoff”. That means they can have smaller “focused” layoff and offer smaller layoff packages.

Nice…

We went car shopping this weekend. We were looking to purchase a new car for one of our daughters. What attracted me to this dealership was a TV advertisement that we saw prior to leaving the house. They were advertising 2008 cars for under $10K. I knew it was too hard to believe because when looking at the value of those cars, they were listed for twice that price. When I got to the dealership, I told them that I wanted to buy one of those cars they had advertised for under $10K. They told me that it was a lease car for 3 years–because that’s when the $10K is up on the car. Not necessarily a lie but certainly very misleading, but I guess that’s how they get you to come to them.

My daughter and I went to several dealerships. I think that the sales people thought, as they see two females approaching that we would be an easy sell and that they can push us around. They tried all the tricks that they must teach them in sales school to try to get you to take the car home that day. I was shopping for a car, but I told them several times that I was not going to take a car home with me that day. First of all, I didn’t have my husband with me. I told him that I needed to go home and discuss it with my husband. Second of all, I did not want to rush into buying a car. I wanted to shop around and see what my best offer would be. So I said to them, if you want me to come back, you better make me the best deal possible to make me return.

At one of the dealership, the sales person comes back and brings back a piece of paper and offers me a payment schedule scenario. I asked him, what the payment scenario was based on. So he tries to explain, and I said to him that I don’t want you to show me the payment scenarios, that will get worked out when it’s time, but I wanted to see the bottom line number on the price of the car. Basically what they do is they try to show you the payments based on the deposits that you are going to make, but they don’t knock down the price of the car at all. We went on rounds and rounds of discussion saying the same thing. Finally, when I talked to the manager, about 2 1/2 hours later, I reiterated what I had told the sales person–I want to see the bottom line and then I would decide whether I want to come back or not. When he came back, I was shown a pretty good number, and I will most likely go back and purchase a car.

For the record, I hate car shopping, because it certainly kills your entire day, but if you have nothing else to do, well then it’s certainly entertaining.

This is stupidity in action. Tax law: Are you eating those pumpkins? - Yahoo News. If I were to purchase a pumpkins in Iowa to make pies, and I do make my pumpkin pies from fresh pumpkins, I need to fill out a form to get a tax exemption from the Iowa Department of Revenue.

They need to be careful, or else it will create an underground industry of pumpkin smugglers or bootleggers. Women will be recruited to be mules to smuggle pumpkins into the state pretending to be pregnant.

Today was the beginning of a huge layoffs at AOL. It was a very sad day to be at work. I watched as my friends and coworkers packed up their cubes and left the building. Even my manager was among the approximatly 750 people that are laid off. Most of everyone I have talked to can’t understand the capriciousness of the lay offs. Some of the groups in the company were completely laid off. One of the Network Operation Centers (NOC) in Columbus Ohio was dismantled. A NOC that we relied on to monitor our systems.

There was little work done today at the Dulles campus. By mid afternoon most people had left for the day or were rambling around the campus still numb from the sheer number and severity of the layoffs.

I am sitting at BWI waiting on standby because some moron can’t drive and got in a wreck, and every idiot has to look as they drive by on I-95. So I was able to squeeze one hour of driving into two hours and I missed my flight by about 20 minutes, so I get to spend the next 5 hours waiting for the next flight. I hate flying. At least I can get wireless via Boingo.

If I miss standy no real sense in going to Colorado Springs. I would just be there with enough time to get my luggage say Hi/Bye and jump back on a plane. This really sucks.

If this article from the Scripps Howard News Service is how Democrats debate those that do not agree with them, then this country is in deep trouble. I feel sorry for those poor people who had to endure these ad hominem attacks.

It is attitudes like what is portrayed in that article, that make me vote for anyone that is not a Democrat or have a political left leaning. Hate is hate no matter what, and the Gore supporters are showing that they can hate with the best of them.

My wife and I wanted to build out our basements last year. We contacted a few contractors and asked for bids on the project. The bids ranged from upwards of $20K to under $10K. Being cheap, we took the bid under $10K. First mistake.

We checked the guy’s references, and even visited one of the remodels that he did. My first thought was, and it was later to be proved correct, that he does not give much attention to detail. But I brushed that aside since the room that we saw looked fine, no glaring defects, and we hired the guy. He started In October of 2006 and made great progress… for a few weeks. Then he stopped showing up. No phone calls, nothing. We called him and asked, “Um… where are you?” He had injured his leg shortly before he started on the basement and the doctor told him to take it easy. Ok fine.. the guy has a bum leg.. give him some slack. After about two weeks we called again, he said that he would have his son finish the drywall and that he was still on track to finish by Christmas.

His son arrived around Thanksgiving and did the majority of the drywall… Alright now fast forward to about a week before Christmas. With nothing done since Thanksgiving, we asked for a face to face and inquired about the basement. We were going to be out for Christmas we asked for the house keys back. Well we did not get a face to face but did get the keys back. We should have gotten another contractor but we were concerned that no one would come in after this guy to finish the job.

We contacted him after we got back in town, and gave him back the keys. He insisted that his leg was ok and he was going to finish the basement in short order. Well to make a long story short, he did not restart on the job until almost the end of February, after we called him and said we wanted to talk about whether he was going to finish the job. Almost full month and a half after christmas.
He did not have an eye for finishing details. For example, he did not use any electrical outlet boxes in the builtin entertainment center to manage the 6 speaker wires, two ethernet cables, the cable for the TV and all the wires needed for the subwoofer. Instead he cut two holes in the back and pulled all the wires through. He was going to leave it like that until I pressed him on that issue.

Our basement is finished, but we will never use that contractor again. There are many other items that we were less that pleased with, and in the end we wanted him to finish and hire someone else to “clean up the mess”. We still do not have carpet down, but we hired someone to do that. We also hired another contractor to redo the fireplace. And this contractor did a fantastic job on that. Him we are going to rehire for other odd jobs we need.

From now on I will only hire someone who has a personal recommendation from someone we know, or follow my initial hunch on the work he has completed in the past.

I was watching the morning news today, and an ad for the clerk of court came on. It was a political ad for the Nov 6, 2007 elections. November 2007!!! Geez, it is the clerk of court, who really cares about the clerk of court except for the clerk of court? Why do we have to endure this crap for the next 8 months.

This is going to be a very tiring year. We have all these presidential candidates that are crisscrossing the country 1 year before any state primary. Every speech is filled with enough acrimony to drive the most optimistic person into a deep depression. I am already weary at hearing all the garbage that they all are spewing, but we are going to have to listen to this for more than a year. God help us.