my wu-chi blog

In two weeks I will move back to Phoenix.  I have been in Texas for about 11 months and am ready for something new. I had a great time while I was here and felt that I was really able to help Linda become comfortable with being in charge of all of the computer stuff for her businesses.

So, what’s next?  Well, my time in Phoenix will be short for I just accepted a job in Portland, OR that starts August 17th.  The job is through AmeriCorps VISTA (think Peace Corps, but within the states) and I will be working with state health agencies to help them incorporate new software that allows them to collaborate on their documentation and health emergency plans.  Or something along those lines.  The position is for one year.

This is a paid gig, but not a well paying gig.  The VISTA program “is the national service program designed specifically to fight poverty” and in doing so, they want to make sure we understand what it is like to live in poverty so we are paid less than minimum wage.  Should be a very interesting and challenging year.

June 27th, 2009 | Category: Portland, Texas Ranch |  Email This Post | Comments (1)

I haven’t been able to cross off a state for quite some time – very depressing.  The five remaining states are:

• North Dakota
• Rhode Island
• Vermont
• West Virginia
• Wyoming

I have gotten a few more foreign countries: Australia, France, Germany, Greenland, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Switzerland and United Kingdom.

June 14th, 2009 | Category: Texas Ranch |  Email This Post | Comments (1)

Santa came into the store yesterday looking for a new belt.  Unfortunately, we did not have any belts tall enough for him, so we gave him the contact info for one of our vendors that is close to his summer home.

Hopefully this does not put us on the naughty list.

June 14th, 2009 | Category: Texas Ranch |  Email This Post | Leave a comment

This is the second most frequent phrase I hear at work, behind, of course, ‘I love the smell of leather’. Customers say this when we ask to see their ID when they use a credit card. We always ask to see the ID and we always hear them say they wish more people would ask.

I also use it as a way to get better at guessing peoples ages!

June 9th, 2009 | Category: Texas Ranch |  Email This Post | Leave a comment

At work today my co-worker called me a nerd and for some reason I was offended.  I told her I was a geek and she said that they are the same.  I told her they weren’t but could not come up with a reason why.

Not really sure why I would rather be called a geek than a nerd.

June 9th, 2009 | Category: Deep Thoughts |  Email This Post | Comments (1)

With all of the rain that we have been having, plus the fact that it is spring and things grow in the spring, the ranch has changed from a brown looking land to a green flourishing land.  Unfortunately, this means that we can not see where we are walking while walking around a lot of places on the ranch, which is bad since snakes are out and about.

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May 30th, 2009 | Category: Texas Ranch |  Email This Post | Comments (1)

Linda’s friend Shay took Linda and I to the Kerrville Folk Festival Thursday night.  Shay went to it many a times back in the day (the festival started in ‘72) but had not been back for a long time.  Some friends of hers that she met when she used to go were playing Thursday night so she tooks us to see them.

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May 30th, 2009 | Category: Texas Ranch |  Email This Post | Leave a comment

I was reading a review of a new iPhone app called RunPee that will “tell you what are the best parts to leave the movie for a few minutes, so you can run to the loo”.  It is amazing what people will come up with.

Anyways, the reviewer made a comment about the Terminator movie that is opening this week and where the best parts to run to the bathroom should be:

Stay at home and poop for the duration of the movie. You will end with the same result, and a much satisfying experience.

Ouch!

May 20th, 2009 | Category: Miscellaneous |  Email This Post | Leave a comment

Found an article on the Guardian website about net neutrality that I thought had some good talking points:

…ISPs would also like to be able to arbitrarily slow or degrade our network connections depending on what we’re doing and with whom. In the classic “traffic shaping” scenario, a company like Virgin Media strikes a deal with Yahoo to serve its videos on a preferential basis, and then slows its customers’ connections to Google, Hulu, and other videohosting sites to ensure that Virgin’s videos are the quickest to load. As the Craigslist founder, Craig Newmark, said, this is like the phone company putting you on hold when your ring your local pizzeria, with a message inviting you to press one to be immediately connected to Domino’s, its “preferred pizza partner”.

…The real victims of network discrimination are the nimble little startups, the firms that are in the same position today that Google was in 10 years ago when it consisted of a few marginally funded hackers and some taped-together hardware under a desk.

…But the real problem of per-usage billing is that no one – not even the most experienced internet user – can determine in advance how much bandwidth they’re about to consume before they consume it. Before you clicked on this article, you had no way of knowing how many bytes your computer would consume before clicking on it. And now that you’ve clicked on it, chances are that you still don’t know how many bytes you’ve consumed. Imagine if a restaurant billed you by the number of air-molecules you displaced during your meal, or if your phone-bills varied on the total number of syllables you uttered at 2dB or higher.

May 20th, 2009 | Category: net neutrallity |  Email This Post | Leave a comment