just got back from a stylin Thanksgiving vaca. One thing that was kinda neat was that on the way back some of the scouts in Conneticut were giving away coffee and donuts and sometimes hotdogs at various rest stops.

Did a couple of events today. First the Resource Hub annual awards meeting which was nice. No beer but the food was good. The people were mostly local business folk and pols. That's understandable since the Resource Hub is a resource for growing local businesses.

After a short time schmoozing there, I made my way over to the Shipyard Brewery for the Metro launch party. Talk about a breath of fresh air. It was a tantalizing mix of models intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and artists of all kinds. The beer was good, too.

If the magazine holds up to it's potential Franklin McMahon and Josh Shea will have done an outstanding job of showing Portland that cool and hip can be the same thing.

Been doing a betatest for Lightscribe. It's a cool piece of equipment that burns the label right onto a laser sensitive coating on the disk. Burn the data flip the disk and burn the label it's pretty neat.

been listening to the first few disks of the grateful dead beyond description on Windows Media Player They are really tasty. The extras alone are worth the cost of the set, 12 cds for 150 or so, which of course is the point. If you are a deadhead you probably already own the albums in one form or another. So of course you wouldn't buy them unless they had something on them you didn't already have like a lack of scratches and hiss.

Well go forth and purchase them if you got the scratch. The jams on Blues for Allah reminded me why I liked the dead so much in the first place. They will bring tears to your eyes.

Just did a spell check on that last entry and the word blog wasn't recognized!

OK so I went to Church this morning and they read the story of the loaves and fishes from Matthew. Well when I heard this story the first time they loaves and fishes came from a kid and in Matthew they come from the disciples or at least the kid isn't mentioned. Well there have been a lot of changes to the service and a revision of the bible since I went to church on a regular basis but I thought that this was a bit to much. I had always thought that the kid was something special. He had the faith to give up his lunch to Christ and poof the multitudes are fed. Well there were some logistics involved so that the 5000 could be fed but they were fed.

It turns out that the kid is in John. The apostles were human after all and humans tend to see things from an individual view point. One leaves in the kid, others don't.

I do feel a little better and maybe I should pay a little closer attention to the books. Course if I really wanted to have some say over all this I could go to seminary and try and build a flock. But I think I'll just stick to my blog for now.

Maine has been redistricted. A lovely and painful process to be sure. I just spent way to much time trying to find out who is running for what to represent me. I found out I was right about my senator, Ethan Strimling, but wrong about my rep, Glenn Cummings. As a web designer it really annoys me when politicians don't have web sites or don't do basic search engine optimization, but that's mostly me looking for work. Still it's not like it's hard to put one up and have a few people link to it.

Anyway here is a page to find out which candidates are running for what office in Maine.

Just a reminder that there has been some redistricting in Portland, Maine. I have set up a list of polling places in Portland, ME, at http://vote.skartdesigns.com. There is also a link to confirm your district and precinct.

just got my blood donor card today. wish they had noted when I'd last given blood on the back. Oh well I guess I can call em up and ask.

This is just an email to see what mailbots are phishing my blog and see how long it takes them to send me stuff. So if you send blogemail@skartdesigns.net an email, I probably won't respond. I probably won't respond if you email me at this address either. Probably won't see an answer from blognot@skartdesigns.net either.

October NetPM at Lightship Telecom

Well after a short absence I was back at a Mesda NetPM last night. This one was at Lightship Telecom's data center. I really love the smell of a server farm. It's sort of like new car smell for me. It says power, it says information; and knowledge is power. Is raw information really knowledge? yeah but it's not wisdom. I guess the power comes from the use of the use of the information. And knowledge isn't wisdom, and certainly power isn't wisdom. Wisdom isn't power ... but I digress.

Saw some fun folk there. Mark Ford showed up. He is doing some neat stuff at UNE with patient simulators. That is machines that pretend to be human patients not machines that pretend to have patience. I left early and still people were coming in.

The food was good and plentiful. Finger sandwiches, and brownies. Corn Chips and salsa. assorted sweets. other tasty stuff. give it a 3.9. I like more along the lines of chicken fingers and deviled eggs still it was quite tasty.

Beer didn't run out. It was shipyard. Give it a 4.1. Could have been a bit more varied I'm drinking Sam Adams these days.

I had a good time and they did a good job. It's always nice when one of their execs greats you as you come in with a smile and a cool light up pen. Overall give it a 4.1.

Well it finally happened, I put some gas in my tank and went in to pay for it. When I came out they had raised the price 2 cents. I guess timing is everything.

Church on Wednesday

So I went to the Holy Eucharist service at my church, Trinity Episcopal, in Portland today. It's not well attended in the middle of the week so they hold it in the chapel off the sanctuary.

It's really nice. Kinda tight but it's a whole service with three readings and a sermon. The sermon is interactive. I don't know if it's supposed to be but with that few people in that intimate a room it becomes a discussion rather than a lecture.

Course I'm always hurting for cash. So I'm always praying for more for me or least enough. I get home and there is a letter saying that one of my debts has been waived. It's not exactly a check but I'll take it.

I went to talk to the Preacher, Larry Weeks, about some stuff the other day. I mentioned that my daughter was going to start the violin and asked if he had any thoughts about someone who had an instrument we could borrow. He said he would look into it. Couple days later another friend of ours comes up with a viola for her. OK it's not a violin but we're pretty pleased and the school has someone to play viola.

One of the readings today talked about faith and that with faith the size of a mustard seed one could command a tree to fly into the ocean and it would obey. Course you want to be careful about asking for things like that cause sometimes that means that the tree isn't the only thing that flys into the sea, see recent conditions in Florida, but I digress. Point is have a little faith and things will turn out alright.

OK so heard a really powerful show from American Radio Works today. It was about the 9/11/2001 attacks and the hearings this past spring. Listen to it on the net well there is a link to it there. Turns out that Public Radio really is worth listening to and supporting.

just added comments let's see if it worked

OK so XP sp2 downloaded the other day. No problems here. It recognized my current firewall, ZoneAlarm, and disabled the windows firewall. It did do some funky stuff with Norton but that was just to say that my av program wasn't working when it clearly is.

I absolutely love the popup blocker in IE that came with it.

I run a pretty stock system with no real twist and turns so your results may differ but SP 2 is working for me.

Of course the pop up blocker just blocked the spell check on this post which made me jump through a few hoops to turn that off. I a tad disappointed in that because I thought that it would work with popups caused by clicking on stuff. Hmm perhaps I spoke to soon.

Still it's not giving me loads of trouble and I know where the switch is to turn the pop up blocker on and off, tools>Popup blocker>Turn on/off, so that's not so bad.

I was just listening to MarketPlace on Maine Public Radio and they were talking about Super Chefs. It seems that when Wolfgang Puck sold his pizza to another company, the quality suffered somewhat. That happens sometimes.

When I was working for LL Bean, there was a legend that Eddie Bauer had written to LL Bean after he had sold out to Spiegel. He warned Bean that if he sold to another company that his vision would be trashed. Seems he was probably right Spiegel filed for bankruptcy in the last few years and Bean is still expanding. That expansion in itself may not be in line with LL's original vision but that's another story.

Anyway I guess the point is that there is a reason people say selling out is a bad thing. On the other hand if someone wanted to use some of my art for some hyper commercial purpose and pay some obscenely large price, I'd totally be down with that.

OK so you need to check out the Paper Napkin Blog.

Paper Napkin is an email service that will send an auto rejection to anyone who sends an email to anyaddress@papernapkin.net. See the website rather than sending an email cause the rejection note is there.

Went to Bob's Discount Furniture the other day. 

It's a pretty neat place.  Besides having lots of comfy furniture, they have a large coy pond at the entrance and what they call the on the house cafe in the back.  Free cookies, coffee, ice cream, pop corn, etc.  They have a video game room and a hd television running movies all day.  Not sure if they'd let me stay and watch the movie while eating their food but I watched the Wizard of OZ for a while.  If I find myself with lot's of time I may just go there and watch a whole movie. 

I mentioned this to a friend and he asked me if the furniture actually was inexpensive and I said I didn't know as I hadn't priced furniture for a long time.  They have 18 locations from Conneticut to Maine so they have some buying power.  Me, I went for the free eats.

Picked up a couple of hitchhikers today.   A young couple somewhere between 16 and 25 years old.   I almost didn't pick em up cause I was just going into town but that turned out to be where they were going too.

I asked them what they did and they said that they road the rails.  All the people that I've talked to that did that stopped as soon as they could because they just didn't like getting beat up.  I mentioned this to them and they said they hadn't had any problems.  I hope they remain lucky.

Anyway I was able to take them where they wanted to go, the South Portland Memorial Branch Library.  They were really grateful and it just made my day. 

Did you know that the South Portland Municipal Golf Course has its own library branch or rather South Portland Memorial Branch Library has its own golf course.  I think that's really neat.