Bought a new car today. A 2011 Honda CRV. I’d set the money aside for it a while ago and told the dealer I didn’t want financing. After the test drive the salesman said that accepting financing was the only way I could get the deal without having a bank check in hand — as if that were possible to get on a Sunday. I said goodbye, and made it clear I wasn’t kidding. I ended up buying the car with my Amex Gold card.
Whenever I see something like this, Living a Six-Figure Lifestyle on a $30,000 Salary, I ignore it. Whatever this guy is saying it’s pure bull, and I don’t know why this sort of junk is allowed to appear on Yahoo!
I’m watching Lawrence of Arabia on TCM. One of the most memorable movie experiences of my life was seeing the 1989 reissue in a downtown Boston theater.
http://youtu.be/RQA_ldX0VI0
What made it so memorable, besides the fact it’s a great movie, was that only days before I had returned from Arabia myself. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
I spent a month there on business, and it was a very busy, unusual month. I turned down an invitation to see a public beheading, from an American who had been working there for ten years. He told me the single most important issue confronting the Kingdom, and in turn America, over the next 20 years would be the Islamic Revolution that had begun ten years before in Iran. He wasn’t wrong.
I started using WordPress in September, 2006 with the then-current version, 2.0.3. A bit over a year ago I was curious about the differences between WordPress and the previous leading blogging software for self-hosted sites, Movable Type. (Mark Evanier uses an outdated version of Movable Type.) I found this item by a blogger named Derek K. Miller. I was particularly interested in Miller’s discussion of a WordPress plugin that generates static pages, instead of using a WordPress caching plugin as a way to speed up sites on shared hosting services. (I later decided to cache.)
Miller was a writer worth reading, so I checked out some of his other posts. He was a musician, husband, and father, living in Vancouver. Reading Derek K. Miller’s posts, it quickly became apparent that he was a very sick man, and he was being treated for advanced colon cancer.
Derek, you have a big and loyal following — fellow musicians, fellow Vancouver residents, and others whose lives are affected in one way or another by cancer. Because of that I didn’t link to your blog, and I didn’t contact you, but for the past year I’ve been following penmachine.com. I am saddened to learn that you died two days ago.
At work today there’s a CPR training class. It filled before I could sign up, but that’s OK, because I already know all about CPR from watching movies. You clasp your hands together, slam them into the chest of the victim over and over, while yelling, “DON’T YOU DIE ON ME, DAMMIT!” That usually works, and if it doesn’t you throw your head back and scream, “NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!”
Follow-up: Denro says…
SUCCESSFUL CPR: You keep saying “COME ON, COME ON, BREATHE, DAMN YOU!”, then the person coughs a few times, shakes their head and gets up. Then you say “You really scared me back there.” The person says, “Thanks, I owe you one. Now, let’s get those dirty devils!”
