Photo Friday: Sentimental

Photo Friday: Sentimental
Originally uploaded by louhamilton23.

Cathie's grandfather gave this to her when she was a little girl. It has TONS of sentimental value to her.

Since the core of the body is plywood, the head broke at the neck. She was very upset about this and was thrilled when I has able to fix it.

What are people thinking?

I was just on another blog and he was talking about penny stocks arriving in his e-mail as spam and who would ever take these offers. This made me think of all the stupid, waste of time e-mails I get in a day. I'm glad most of them get filtered into my Junk Mail folder.

I cannot stand these people who forward e-mails about the war, pictures that are "too good to be true," poems that need to be forwarded, and god knows what other crap I choose not to read.

Most of these e-mails can be proven to be false just by going to one website, www.snopes.com. Just do a quick search on the subject of the e-mail or a phrase in the e-mail and you will most likely find it to be completely false.

A recent e-mail I got showed a soldier with a black patch on his shoulder which says, "Doing the work for" and the flags of Germany, France, and Russia below it. A quick search on "black patch" proved the picture of be false and gave an explanation of where the original, unaltered photo came from.

My other favorite is when I get a poem or feel-good story that needs to be forwarded to 13 people in the next 15 minutes or you will have 7 years of bad luck. I'm sorry, I have never forwarded a damn thing and I have a never had a bit of bad luck. I have a beautiful wife, 2 healthy, handsome sons, an awesome job that I love to go to, and a house in a wonderful town. Where is the bad luck in that life?

My frustration come from thinking about these things too much. What kind of person creates this kind of fictitious information and puts it out in the Internet? I guess more importantly, why do people believe this and forward the e-mails along to others? Do people actually read these fucking e-mails before they forward them along? Do they actually believe in this shit? Again, what are people thinking? And then there is my favorite situation -- when you hear someone talking about these e-mail topics in public as if they heard it on CNN or some other national news program the night before. This actually was a conversation I heard where they were talking about a flight formation at an Air Force Base. I had seen the e-mail a few months before and knew that the photo was altered by Photoshop. Idiots!

Working in the IT field, I guess you can say I have the inside edge. This crap is polluting our Internet. It is preying on the naive. And most of all IT IS REALLY PISSING ME OFF!

On a better note, our weather finally has changed for the better. We will be getting into the 60's the next few days and hopefully stay this way for the remainder of the season. Anybody have any exciting plans for this summer?

My new toy

I know that I haven't been around much. Not dead, just busy.

Since I will be working from home more, I felt it was worth upgrading my home office. The upgrade that I decided to get was a new monitor.

When I worked from home in the past, I just plopped my laptop on my desk and did my work. It worked all right for me, but I wanted some additional desk space to spread out on.

This is what my desk looked like before the new monitor. (My old 15" CRT monitor was shoved below the desk for when I had to view my network server in order to fix any of my shares or print jobs.)

After doing a lot of research, the Samsung 22" monitor was best in its class. Additionally, it was on sale at Circuit City online. Therefore, I had to get it since the sale price was in my budget.

This is the box after bringing it home.

Yup. That's 22 inches of LCD flat screen, baby! It also has a 2ms refresh rate and 3000:1 contrast. The color and clarity of the 1680x1050 native resolution it awesome!

Nice packaging. Very clean and not over done.

Everything looks to be there.

And finally. This is what it looked like after everything was set up. I'm loving it!

I broke out my old 2-port KVM switch so I can use this monitor on both my network server and my work laptop when it is on its port replicator. (Anyone want to buy a Linksys 4-port KVM switch with cables? Let me know.)

Now, I just need to clean up and do some cable management then the work space will be perfect.