From one old man to another ....................

Happy birthday to Mike "I have maps older than this kid!" Shanzer!

Make the most of it, my friend; at our age, who knows how many more we have left!   :-)

From the kind people who brought you Tiananmen Square.


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article3607668.ece


And these people won the rights to host the Olympics???   Wow.

Most of mine are way too easy.  I gotta get some new tunes.   :-(

1)  There's something I want to ask you, before it's too late.
2)  See those people there?  They look after me.
3)  My features form with a change in the weather.
4)  I get the same old dreams, same time every night.
5)  The time is now to take my wares to the street.
6)  And old man came here telling tales of days gone by and seven veils.
7)  You see it all around you, good lovin' gone bad 
8)  I was talking to a friend of mine, he said a woman had hurt his pride
9)  We roll tonight, to the guitar bite
10) The Mississippi Delta was shining like a national guitar
11) Every moring when I wake up yawning I'm still far away
12) How long must I stay, how long must I go on?
13) Lights are out on neon drive, unprotected in my bed.
14) I got the call today, I didnt wanna hear, but I knew that it would come
15) Can't you say you believe in me?
16) She says it's cold outside and she hand me my raincoat
17) When they turn the pages of history, when these days have passed long ago.
18) The show is over, close the storybook
19) This is the springtime of my loving
20) Wait a minute baby, stay with me a while

It's starting to smell a lot like Y2K in a few dark corners of the internet.

I came across this little nugget of calm rationality tonight.  We all know that the US economy is in a bit of a mess right now, and we may be heading toward a recession.  Job anxiety and household debt are up, home values and 401(k)s are down, and George Bush has decidered to salvage a $13 trillion dollar economy with a $150 billion dollar stimulus package.   Good luck with that.

Fortunately, it turns out there are some straight-forward and rational ways we can prepare for the coming recession.  We can start by converting our life savings and investments into precious metals; stocking up on seeds, dry goods, gasoline, and water; buying tents, sleeping bags, and kerosene heaters; sharpening our knives and axes ( in case we have to gut a woodchuck and cook it over the Coleman); purchase new guns and ammo; and finally put up that windmill we've been talking about all these years but just haven't gotten around to yet.

It's all spelled out here:  http://2good2lose.com/recession-list.shtml

Don't delay, people.  That windmill won't erect itself you know.

- Greg

Just to brief note to update all our friends and family of how we are doing down here.

Life continues to be a little crazy but is beginning to settle down into a normal routine again.  The holidays are finally behind us, which means that we can actually do the heretofore almost unimaginable again -- drive past toy and grocery stores without having to stop to enrich further the leaches at Visa and American Express.

Today we got our first snow since moving.  It wasn't much at all, less than an inch, and it will be gone in a day or two.  Still, as a man of the snowy white north, it was absolutely hysterical watching the local media cover the event like OJ Simpson and Al Cowlings were personally delivering the fluffy white stuff in the back of Al's slow-moving white bronco.  There were media alerts, news tickers, and warnings about closed schools and shutdown businesses ... even live helicopter shots (I swear I am not making this up) of DOT trucks applying brine to the road.  And, exactly like Debs warned us, there really was a run at the local stores for toilet paper and batteries!  Apparently, it hasn't snowed more than an inch here since 2004, an episode that snarled traffic for hours and closed businesses far and wide.  Being a weekend I have no idea how many people were affected the same way this time, but needless to say we took it all in considerable more stride.

The last week has brought us, however, some much needed (albeit still insufficient) relief from our drought.  We continue to live under extreme drought conditions, and water restrictions will remain an everyday fact of life down here for many months to come (some are now saying that, owing to the rapidly growing population and insufficient water capacity at least some of these restrictions may never go away).  Such is the price for living in this beautiful area (interesting side fact: our hometown of Apex was just rated number 14 on Money magazine's "100 Best Places to Live list", read all about it at http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/moneymag/0707/gallery.BPTL_top_100.moneymag/14.html if you are interested). The good news is that the long term forecasts now indicate that the drought may let up more by spring, so we are keeping our fingers crossed.

Alyssa has been doing well.  Year round school seem to agree with her and us.  As I previously explained to some of you, schools down here are in session year round, and students go in repeating sessions that are 10 weeks on, 3 weeks off.  The entire student body is then "staggered" into these rotations such that, at any given time, 1/4 of the students are rotated out.   This allows schools to operate with more students than seats.  Some parents hate the system, but we find it works well enough for us.

Alyssa has also been participating in a youth basketball program at the local community center.  Today she had her second game, and so far her team has one both of them.  She has made a number of friends in the community, and has picked up hobbies like roller skating, biking, and scootering (did I just make that word up? Probably.)

Work continues to go well for me.  As you probably know, I found work at the SAS Instutute in Cary, the world's largest privately held software company.  The bread-n-butter of SAS has traditionally been their base statistical analysis software (hence the acronym SAS), which is used by mathematicians to crunch huge volumes of data quickly and accurately.  On top of this base product they have developed a number of what they call "Solutions" that tackle particular market segments like genetics, risk assessment, credt fraud detection, business intelligence, data mining, and so on.  I am working on a solution called "Financial Management", which you can read more about here if you are interested:  http://www.sas.com/solutions/financial/fms.  I am currently assigned to the lower level "Accelerated Computation Engine" portion mentioned in the article.  That part of the project involves a great deal of custom OLAP technology (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olap if you are unfamiliar with OLAP), so I'm learning a lot about that as I go along too.  

SAS is a great company to work for and is famous for their generous employee perks and great job security (see http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/04/18/60minutes/main550102.shtml).  I consider myself fortunate to have landed a job so quickly at all, even more so at a company like SAS (especially given my interview, which I felt I had handled poorly as I was somewhat rusty at sitting on that side of the desk after all those years!).

Wendy has recently started her new job at NVIDIA and loves it!  She spent a week at orientation in CA a week or so ago, but is back at home and now working out of the local Durham office.  I'll let her fill you all in on how that's going in her own journal in the coming days and weeks.

Other than that, we are all well and happy.  We enjoy the area down here, although we wish we could somehow convince friends and family from New York to move down here and keep us company.  Stay warm and stay safe and we'll do the same down here.  Hopefully we'll get back of to New York sometime soon to visit with you all.

- Greg