Site News

I have finally redone the templates (mostly) for my tech site at TheAppDotNet, including the mascot I won in a blog contest a couple of months ago. I still have to add back in my blogrolls and whatnot but it’s coming along very nicely.

I ended up spending the last seven hours of my only day off this week in a meeting in Anniston Alabama, which really sucked. It’s about the last thing I want to do on my day off but I didn’t feel like scheduling any of my managers off and then making them go to the meeting.

I may put up another post or two but I think I will be hitting the sack pretty soon. I am actually supposed to be doing a couple of reviews for ReviewMe but most likely am going to go past the deadline and just lose them. I hate losing money like that but have just not had the time the last couple of days and the deadline just sort of crept up on me.

The right reverend Al Sharpton today denounced reports of an investigation into his 2004 presidential bid and suggested that federal authorities were retaliating against him for his civil rights advocacy.

Civil rights advocacy?

Al Sharpton is the biggest fucking racist in this country aside from his ‘brother’ Jesse Jackson. They are both a pair of race-baiting haters that wait until they have been out of the news for a couple of months and then jump in with something else calling everyone else racists and bigots. Like now.

According to CNN as many as ten Sharpton associates were subpoenaed on Wednesday to testify before a federal grand jury in Brooklyn on December 26th. Hey, isn’t that when Kwanzaa starts? I don’t guess they will be making it to the grand jury or will find some way to get out of it between now and then. All of my personal pissiness aside, the grand jury probably could have picked a better date for that shit, like after January 1st. If they were to summon my ass on December 24th I would be pretty pissed off.

A couple accused of beating their toddler to death, tucking her into a plastic box and dumping it into Galveston Bay were indicted Wednesday on charges of capital murder.

I love coffee. Ever since I was about ten I have been drinking coffee and I don’t go very long without drinking it. Heck, I even have it at night. I can usually drink it up until about eight PM or so without having any problems falling asleep. I don’t know that I would consider myself a coffee connoisseur but I certainly love the stuff, hence my motto ‘sleep is just a cheap caffeine substitute’.

I drink everything from canned Folgers as well as Waffle House and Starbucks coffee. Right now my favorite by far is Starbucks but that is because of consistency. Most of the gourmet flavors that I have picked up from the grocery store have a greasy oily taste that I just don’t like. There are some places around to get great coffee though and I found one that I am going to have to try. Apres Cafe has quality exotic gourmet coffee on their web site that is available to order 24 hours a day. You can even call them on an 800 number listed on the web site as well. Along with coffees, they also offer tea and chocolates, a must at this time of year. Who doesn’t like nice dark chocolate. Very soothing.

I am particularly partial to very dark roasts and am pretty interested in trying their Sumatra Mandheling as well as the Midnight Special, one of their darkest roasts. I would also like to try their Kenya AA Lenana. The brew has a deep complex aroma of smoke, grapefruit, berry, hints of butterscotch and dark chocolate.

Apres also offers recurring deliveries, subscriptions in other words, so that you never have to run out of your favorite brand of coffee. At the rate that I drink the stuff, if it’s any good this will end up being a necessity for me. With recurring deliveries they also give 15% off on shipping via UPS ground, you get free samples of their coffees as well as other special offers on coffees and teas.

I’ll let you know how I fare toward the end of the month and compare it to my favorites that I am able to buy locally.

Sponsored by Apres Cafe

I had a pretty long day yesterday so I just now approved some of the track-backs and comments that were caught in my spam folder yesterday morning. They should be showing up properly fairly soon.

We had our annual ‘Santa’s Sleigh’ yesterday for the children of our employees. It’s always been a pretty cool thing which we do but it has evolved over the last couple of years to become a party and even the adults show up now.

What we do is to get a list of all them employees children and their ages. What we used to do is rent an RV and then the division managers and area vice president would make three stops and the kids got their picture taken with Santa and got a gift. Nothing major. With a ton of kids we usually hit Big Lots or something like that because normally it’s a couple of hundred gifts we have to get and we do have a budget we have to keep.

Over the last couple of years it has been turned over to the Division Manager. This year we blocked off the back of one of our parking lots and had a local company come out with the air walk things, popcorn, snow cones, we grilled hot dogs and had other refreshments and snacks. We got a hold of the company RV with our logo and actually hired a Santa instead of one of us trying to pass ourselves off. It was pretty cool and lasted about three hours.

The girls always enjoy it, as did the Marine when he was young. We have many pictures from Santa’s sleigh with all three kids. I suppose I need to scan them at some point.

Although I am off today we have a mandatory holiday meeting I have to attend, which is one of the reasons I am off. I changed my manager’s schedules so that they were all working as I didn’t want to give them any excuse to not be there on time this afternoon. I won’t hear anything new but have to attend anyway. It sucks because I only have one more day off between now and Christmas and that is next Friday. The Marine will arrive home next week as well. I have to pick him up from the Greyhound station next Friday morning.

Next week we have our company Christmas party in Anniston, Alabama for all of the managers and their spouses or girlfriends/boyfriends. It is usually pretty nice. There has only been one that turned out bogus and that was in 2003. My AVP rented a meeting room and had it catered. It ended up more like a meeting than a holiday get-together and there were so many complaints that we have had it at a restaurant each year since then. The manager’s are used to bullshit like that but all of our spouses said they wouldn’t be back if we were going to continue having it there.

Michael Vick at one point was one of the highest paid players in the NFL until he blew it with the dog-fighting deal. He turned himself in early last month and began serving his time even though he had not been sentenced at that point.

This really isn’t a post to recap everything that happened. I was just pretty pissed off when I read the article over at CNN. The part that really disgusts me is that several people sent letters in support of Vick, including Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin and Hank Aaron. I expect that kind of crap out of Shirley girl but Hank Aaron? That dude used to be one of my heroes and the fact that he can throw his support behind Michael Vick is disgusting.

The title of this article at CNN pisses me off almost as much as the deed itself. Basically what happened is the Carlos Huerta, a senior at Loyola Marymount University in California for making threats at Juicy Campus, more of a message board than a blog.

The message Huerta is suspected of posting was that he was going to shoot and kill as many people as possible before being killed himself by police. They certainly need to take it seriously, but leave it to the main stream media to call this moron a ‘blogger’ and put bloggers everywhere in a bad light. Just because someone posts messages on the Internet does not make them a blogger any more than the fact that I build my own computers makes me a PC manufacturer. Fucking idiots.

Omaha’s Westroads Mall reopened today with extra security. Westroads mall is the mall in Omaha, Nebraska where Robert Hawkins killed eight people earlier in the week before turning his gun on himself. The Von Maur store, where the killings took place, still has not reopened.
There is a makeshift memorial of flowers, notes and poems that cover around two thirds of the bottom steps of the entrance that gunman Robert Hawkins used when he entered the store.
There may have been some other issues that led to the shootings. According to CNN:

Apparently Harrington told Bellevue Police a month ago that one of Hawkins’ friends had offered to sell Valium to his 13 year old son and that Hawkins had once shot at a car during a bad drug deal.

Hawkins had been in a state-mandated psychiatric care in the summer of 2006 after four years of treatment and counseling, and walked away not because he was prepared to face society on his own but because they felt that there was nothing left to offer him that he was going to respond to.
During the time in which he was a ward of the state, Hawkins was diagnosed with depression, attention deficit disorder, impulsiveness, hyperactivity and a disorder characterized by negativity and hostility toward authority figures. He was convicted of third-degree assault as well as for offering to sell drugs at school.
Omaha police released two suicide notes yesterday as well as a will that were written before going on his shooting rampage. One of the notes is insulting to the people that he killed.

Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Stop the ACLU, Rosemary’s Thoughts, Right Truth, Stuck On Stupid, Leaning Straight Up, The Amboy Times, Chuck Adkins, Pursuing Holiness, The Uncooperative Radio Show! Special Weekend!, Adeline and Hazel, , third world county, Pirate’s Cove, The Pink Flamingo, Celebrity Smack, Right Voices, Church and State, Blog @ MoreWhat.com, 123beta, Adam’s Blog, , Big Dog’s Weblog, Cao’s Blog, Phastidio.net, The Bullwinkle Blog, , Nuke’s, Faultline USA, The World According to Carl, Blue Star Chronicles, Global American Discourse, High Desert Wanderer, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

My grandmother used to have an old grandfather clock that she gave my mom and dad several years ago. Actually it was more like 30 years ago. Time flies when you’re having fun I guess. I love that old clock but I am not even sure if it works anymore. Although clocks have pretty much stayed the same over the centuries, technology has made them much more accurate and I would love to have one of the Howard Miller Clocks like the one in the picture. We have a couple of clocks around the house but there is nothing as majestic as a beautiful grandfather clock.

The one in the picture is the Howard Miller Taylor Grandfather clock and lists for around nine grand but they currently have it online for $6300, which is a pretty steep discount. It sets around seven feet tall and is fairly heavy, around 135 pounds. It would look great right next to my entertainment center. A couple of years back when we picked up new living room furniture I made sure that the TV/entertainment center was more of a cabinet. It’s pretty large and heavy and the doors on the front close so that you can’t see the TV at all, which was the whole point of it. The coloring on this clock fits right in with the rest of the furniture in the living room.

One thing that I wasn’t aware of when I started pricing clocks is the fact that you can pick different chimes for the clocks. You aren’t necessarily stuck with a certain chime just because you like the look of a certain clock. The clocks blog has a bit more information on different chimes in this post about them and provides links where you can even listen to the chimes on the web site.

In addition to grandfather clocks they also sell mantel clocks,  wall clocks and all sorts of other things to spruce of your home decor. I wouldn’t mind having a nice mantel clock to put over my fireplace. Right now it’s full of Christmas decorations but they will be coming down next month and something other than the mirror that usually sits there would be nice.

An Aruban judge ordered the release of Joran van der Sloot earlier today. This could possibly end any hopes for prosecutions in the disappearance of Alabama teenager Natalee Holloway in 2005.