At Home On Piety Hill

I heard about this hero and had to track down his story. Glad I did:

Being blind is no different than being sighted,” he said. “You just live life a little differently.

Smiley and his wife both credit their faith with sustaining them over the past 16 months. “I just thank Jesus Christ every day that I’m even alive,” Smiley said after he was promoted.

That’s the vista or view of Julio Ojeda-Zapata in his review, Vista’s pretty, but it’s a shameless Mac OS X imitator Bottom line. He sums up Windows Vista this way:

Get a Mac with OS X unless your home-computer needs are Windows-specific, or if the fine Media Center is a must for you. You likely won’t regret a Vista-PC purchase, but I’m betting you’ll enjoy a Mac much more.

An amusing tongue-in-cheek video by David Pogue covers the same ground in a more creative fashion. I have to say that I use Windows XP at work and I really don’t mind it that much. It does some things pretty well and I just recently began using my Dock like I use the Taskbar… it works for me. On the other hand, Explorer really bugs me and, if I were to advocate a boycott or some action to pressure Microsoft, it would be to advise everyone to use some other browser like Firefox or, for Mac users, Camino or Safari at home. At work, where they are forced to use Explorer, they can access their .asp stuff on the intranet, which usually looks pretty crappy anyways. But, on their own time they would be using a standards compliant browser to visit commercial and recreational sites on the web, sending the stats for competing, standards-friendly browsers off the charts. That should get their attention.

I read this substantive, relevant article in, of all places, that creaky ol’ Rolling Stone Magazine. The writer puts the spotlight on China’s new, innovative and virtually unstoppable Chinafication strategy in Tibet, expected to wipe out the last traces of traditional culture there in fairly short order. So, you can peel the Free Tibet! bumper sticker off of your Subaru or bio-diesel Mercedes, because the war has been lost — it’s time to shift your “compassion-of-the-month-club” energy to some other lost cause. But, don’t even think about Darfur or the Congo or any other hellhole on earth, where people are committing genocide, fratricide or even polka-cide, for that matter. The people of the US are fed up with such high falootin’, JFK fantasies about “making the world a better place” and, as everyone knows, “if the US won’t go, nobody will go (read UN, NATO, SATO, etc).” I suppose the world community could whip out some sanctions or something… that’s been real effective with Iran, North Korea, China… oops. No, the fact of the matter is that socialists and progressives in those countries will do whatever it takes to subjugate and rule the masses, just like they will in the US.

Okay, I can finally announce it! Camille has just been promoted to manager and she “broke the record for the quickest promotion” to manager in her firm’s history. There’s no CPA following her name, but that’s a mere formality.

What some may not know is that Camille developed many of her management skills as a young girl in her home, neighborhood and school under the able mentorship of her mother.