Daily Doings at the Line of Death Bar & Grill

This afternoon, at 2:28 PM EST, Atlantis lifted off flawlessly.

Mission number is STS-129 (link to Wikipedia page which will be updated throughout the mission).

I'm happy that my local cable company carries NASA TV!

A couple of weeks ago, I was flipping channels (as I often do), and came across Suze Orman's show on CNBC. She's written several best sellers on personal finance. I was watching the "Can I Afford It?" section, where people call in and ask for Suze's advice on major purchases. In all the cases I heard that night, Suze gave a "denied" rating. I probably would have denied many of them too. One woman wanted to borrow money against her 401(k) to buy a few thousand dollars' worth of clothing.

Needless to say, I didn't sense a lot of compassion from Suze that night. I didn't care for the tone and timbre of her voice either. She came across like a heartless harpy. And so I turned the channel.

I also thought back to the times I've seen Donald Trump on TV. This man rarely, if ever, smiles. Is he a happy man? I think not.

It seems to me that the wealthy -- or those that try to make you wealthy -- are hard-nosed, shrewd, and generally unpleasant to be around. Unless they're trying to sell you something. Is it any wonder the word "miserable" begins with the word "miser"? Or is it a coincidence that they appear to have a common root?

It's not "money is the root of all evil". It's "Love of money is the root of all evil". In other words, greed -- one of the Seven Deadly Ones.

I'd rather be broke and happy than rich and unhappy, if I had to choose between the two.

Having another night where I can't sleep. I'm just not tired. And it's driving me crazy.

I think I have a workaround for the laptop memory.  I put a Post-It note on the underside of the memory access panel, so that it would push and hold the memory chip down into the socket.  But as someone once told me, "workarounds are not fixes". I'm worried that the compartment would become hot enough the the note to catch fire.

Still stumped on the DVD playback.  It plays fine on the laptop (650 MHz Pentium III w/512 Mb memory) and M's gaming computer (2 GHz Celeron w/256 Mb memory). But on my high-end desktop (3 GHz Pentium IV w/2Gb memory), the audio and video are still choppy.  redaxe gave me some tips but none of them seemed to work. (Update: I trierd the other optical drive and it seems to work OK. I'll need to remember to not use the DVD burner for playback of DVDs.)

Wish I could go to this event as well, but as with OVFF, timing and finances are the major stumbling block.

http://event.electro-music.com/

A few years ago, when I was still listening to WVXU, I heard a couple of local financial experts on their weekly show. They offered three steps to wealth and financial success.

1) If you're single, don't get married.
2) If you're married, don't have children.
3) If you have children, don't get divorced.

If this is the rule, then I've struck out.

So, I've been listening to the radio a lot lately. And one of the commercials I often hear is John Cummuta hawking his "Transforming Debt Into Wealth" tape and/or CD. I've thought about calling and requesting his no-obligation free tape/CD, but at the same time, I'm skeptical that his system would work for me. And so the yellow flag of caution is raised.

Based on the comments I received from my last post, I'd imagine that a significant amount of revenue for the Cummuta organization comes in from the sale of programs, seminars, etc. This is probably true of any organization trying to sell a wealth building system. The late Charles Givens tried to do this in the 1980s and 1990s. And others appear to be following in his footsteps.

The internet is full of critiques of the system -- some favorable, some not so favorable. Meanwhile, a voice from my past echoes, "Would you rather be right, or would you rather be rich?" Right now, I don't want to be snookered into buying a system I can't afford. Like Rich Dad Poor Dad, I'd probably be best off if I obtained this from the local library.

So I've taken a week off from most everything, as I went through some paper records and futzed with the computers.

I filed my unemployment claim the day after I was laid off. (To recap: The project I was working on was running over time and over budget, as software projects tend to do. As a result, the client had to make some budget cuts. Part of those cuts included letting go of two contractors. C'est la vie.) Now I wait for the nameless faces in Columbus to decide whether or not to give me unemployment compensation.

Yesterday, 6 months' worth of receipts from 1999 went into the shredder. They were still printing entire credit card numbers on receipts back then. I'm glad they don't do that any more. As for the receipts printed on thermal paper, it appears that the printing has faded on a lot of them.

( Meanwhile, I bought a new toy. )

Shout-outs for today: happy birthday dragonfeydaile!

Last night, one of my soda pop bottles froze in the refrigerator and shattered the glass bottle containing it. I spent a good half hour carefully picking up glass shards and mopping up diet black cherry soda.

This morning, I get word from my account manager that my contract is ending at the end of this month due to budget cuts, 2-3 months sooner than I expected.

I was looking for my MP3 player this morning as well, and couldn't find it. The last time I saw it was in the car about a couple of weeks ago. I hope no one stole it. (And if they did, why would they take only the MP3 player and leave everything else? I hope it's just misplaced.)

And to top things off, I dropped my plastic water cup at the water cooler, spilling the water, getting everything drenched, and breaking the cup.

Hope your day has gone better than mine.

Shout-outs: Happy birthday tollers!

1) Singer and writer Jim Carroll, author of The Basketball Diaries and best known for his 1979/1980 hit "People Who Died". Somehow it seems perversely apropos to post a link to an anime video to the tune of the song. Sing along if you feel up to it and/or know the words. Teddy sniffing glue, he was 12 years old....

2) Actor Patrick Swayze, best known for his role in "Dirty Dancing". The tabloids warned this that this day would come.

I'll let thatcrazycajun and filkertom write the obits. They seem to do a better job than me.

[Updated 19:56 15-Sep] Here's a link to the song without the silly anime.

Somewhere in my mind is a vague memory of a Saturday morning kids' show where the Archie gang tries to out-Scooby the Scooby gang. They go and visit haunted houses, trying to look for ghosts. But they don't rip off the masks of the villains. Or maybe they were visiting friends of Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Did this show actually exist, or am I hallucinating?