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Showing posts from October 31, 2004

Expidite the expidited

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I am headed to the passport office this AM to get a new passport. I didn't have time to do the expidited renewal after getting back from Japan. So I made an special expiditing appointment with the passport folks in Atlanta. I am glad I only have to drive into Atlanta, not fly up to NY or Washington DC. It seems I have had to do some expiditing everytime I have renewed my passport. Passports are good for 10 years. When you get a new passport it is a time to ponder where you will be and what the passport will look like in 10 years. The pic belows shows the wear on my now cancelled passport. it was a 50 page book (the extra pages version) and 46 pages are fully used. Many countries require 3 empty pages to enter their country. So, I got full use of the larger size passport. If you need more pages, you send the passport in and they will "sew-in" more pages. The thickest passport I ever saw was at the Uzbekistan-Turkmenistan border. A truck driver I saw had a Uzbekistan passpo...
Small Business School - home.jsp I just finished an economics course. It was fun. In January I am starting a Finance course. I really like the economics way of thinking. The following is a piece of a transcript from the small business school tv program. I think it really rings of truth of capitalism. Adam Smith in the "Wealth of Nations" (1776) talks around this fundemntal concept that Novack puts in a nice simple wrapper. I really like this. HATTIE: We talk about our economic system so little. Michael Novak says that democratic capitalism can be thought of as a three legged stool. One leg is the rule of law. Democracy, the government, public servants. I like to think of them as referee's. they have on the black and white shirts and they're running up and down the field trying to make sure the bad guys are corrected or thrown out of the game. As a business owner, I feel that sometimes some are bureaucrats who are heavy handed, controlling, demanding and ...
I have lost a lot of weight, about 30 pounds. It has not been that easy, but I have cracked the code. I gave up coffee, switched to diet food for everything I could. I switched to eating lots of salads, and eating a lot of fruit and yogurt. I also do exercises every morning. You know... exercises. No equipment is required. You can do them anywhere you are. It is very practical and inexpensive. I was thinking that I have drank about a pot of coffee a day for 20 years. That works out to be 3650 gallons of the black stuff. That is a lot of coffee. I had a headache for three weeks when I quit, but it was worth it. The coffee seems to inhibit the production of insulin so some of the fat can never be burned off no matter how hard you try.