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Back South Again with More Projects

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A lot of driving. I have forgotten how much driving is involved when on the farm. Everything is far. But I also had to drive up and back twice to Syracuse to pickup/drop off Angie at the airport and a business meeting for Wisdomino in Albany. Yeah it was a lot of driving for me. All and all it was about 4000 miles in three weeks. Early in the morning I decided to check out some auctions (dangerous). I ended up being high bidder on a 2015 New Holland Boomer 33 ( "hours unknown, does not run, may have problems, no key, no battery" ) from the State of Tennessee. I figured I could swing by Nashville and pick it up on the way to Georgia. And indeed I did. It was only a couple of hours extra, maybe 4. But, it was more efficient than going to Georgia and then back and forth to Nashville. Nashville is about 4 hours from Duluth. So I was looking at a 4 hour savings. After I go through it and getting if working I will tow it up to the farm in NY. I wasn't prepared for a trac...
We received more facts about the Awards that Donna Cuyle, Dave Schriber, Susan Spear, Kim Bush and Joan Rifanburg won in the Society for Technical Communications Annual competition. In addition to the Award of Excellence we were honored to receive a Distinguished Award from the Rochester chapter at the 43rd annual conference. This is the first time we have been successful in obtaining that level of award. This is a difficult achievement to obtain and we have been working on this level of award by reviewing the comments (mostly from non-winning entrants) from judges over the past few years and identifying areas where we could be effective in making improvements. Much to our delight, when we went to accept the awards in Rochester we learned that not only did we win one of the five distinguished awards, we also won “Overall Best of Show,” out of 38 submitted publications. Our publication was judged higher than publications from Eastman Kodak, Xerox and other companies. If that was...
From Douglas: He drives a Honda Insight. The following vehicles must have fallen out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. From least ugly to the ugliest, here they are: 10. Chevrolet Avalanche 9. Scion Xb 8. Chevrolet Aveo 7. Chrysler PTCruiser 6. Subaru Baja 5. Toyota Echo 4. Scion Xa 3. Honda Element 2. Honda Insight 1. Pontiac Aztek
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STC Awards Woo Hoo! The folks in my department won the top awards at the Regional STC conference Friday. You can't ask for better than that. The PDF link above shows some of the awards we won. We are still sorting out the significance of some of the awards, including overall best of show! I don't think I could be more proud. All sorts of folks were scrutinitizing the books and we let a Technical Communications professor from RIT borrow them for some work she is doing. Friday was a good day. Saturday, the weather was fantastic. I don't know how warm it got, but I was lying in the grass next to the llama pen for quite a while. I did some farm work and relaxed. Now I have to pay for it. I have a lot of home work (at least 10 hours) to get done on this great day (possibly even nicer than yesterday). It takes a lot of discipline to concentrate and work through homework on a weekend like this one. I will do it. If someone, someday, ever asks, "How did you manage to ...
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llama 1.0 I like to watch the llamas in the morning. Before first light they sit out there, facing south like they are worshiping the sun about to rise. It is like a movie to them. They seem captivated by the scene.
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Times Square Webcam I was in Manhattan Tuesday night through Friday evening this past week. I think that was the highest I have ever slept. I was on the 34th floor. I don't think I have ever stayed in a room higher than that. I am not sure though. It was interesting watching Good Morning America on TV and essentially being there at the same time. I ate fish and Thai food. The food was great; surprisingly, I didn't really gain any weight. I took a project management class at the American Management Association facility at 8th and 48th. The class was good. I met and worked with some interesting folks from around the country. The instructor remarked that our class was a good one. I think she really meant it. We were all very interested in learning. Project Management is an interesting subdiscipline of management. Some companies have a natural culture of project management and others do not. I like project management because the terms used are highly defined, like physics. I...
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Museum of hoaxes It is Easter. I am on spring break this week so I only had to spend about 1/2 an hour on homework. That was nice. We got some gravel down in the driveway this morning. The driveway is just downright bad now, a big improvement over its previous state. I have to calculate how much crusher run to get... Actually forget that I'll just order a super jumbo truck load. That should be good for a couple of weeks. I am also figuring out how to lime my fields. I need about 40 ton of lime. I am planning on mounting the spreader to the rear of the tractor so I can apply lime while I am mowing. We had another chicken croak. She was sick and one of her sisters poked her real good when I was in with them. She dropped in about five minutes after that, Dead Chicken. Douglas has an ant farm working in the kitchen. That is a lot of fun. I am going to have to post a little movie of the ants in their mindless drive to make tunnels. No plan, no real reason, just instinct. Click ...
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The following is a picture of my desktop. I am watching a TV program in the upper right (Skeeter Davis). I have my class in the center and ebay in the rear along with the e-mails, of which many are unread.