The hills have eyes

September 28th, 2007

The backyard work continues!!!!

This project covers mostly the hill. We are cutting away a large portion of the hill and installing a retaining wall with three tiers. As some of you know we removed the Torrey Pine out of the yard. We were left with a stump. The stump was ground down to the hill for not a minor cost and they didn’t do a very good job.

The amount they removed was only about 10% of the stump. The paver folks were left with very difficult task of removing the rest. It was almost five feet deep and three feet wide. The amount of sawdust was incredible. The following picture is of some of the roots that are buried into the hill. Notice the size of the root compared to the head of the worker?

Hills have eyes

All I can say is these guys earned their pay getting this stump out.

paypals enters the digital identity age

September 27th, 2007

Every wanted a hardware token? For $5 you can get one from paypals:

https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/cps/securitycenter/general/PPSecurityKey-outside

mail call…

September 12th, 2007

My current inbox status:

Home: 4 messages (wow, can’t believe it’s so low)
Work: 4100+ messages (It’s a loosing battle)

Not a dime and running second

September 5th, 2007

So the months of speculation are over. Fred Thompson has announced his candidacy for President of the United States.

Here is his new widget:

Money, Money, Money… It’s a rich man’s world.

September 4th, 2007

We got up this morning and headed out to Fort Worth. We wanted to go to the US Bureau of Engraving and Printing. We had visited the location in Washington, D.C. back in the early 1990’s so we wanted to see this new modern facility in Fort Worth.

The tour was quite informative. We learned that they no longer inspect the sheets of notes visually, like we saw them doing in D.C. Instead, it is all done with digital imaging comparison. They are able to tell within 3/10th of a second if a note is bad or not.

We learned that they are unveiling a new $5 and $100 note this year and should be in circulation by next year.

Another interesting thing we learned is there is a department of the Bureau that deals with recovery of mutilated money. you can send them money that has been burned, petrified, eaten by termites and they will work on identifying the money. If they are able to validate the notes, they will pay you for them. They have some amazing stories of how they have been able to return hundreds of thousands of dollars to people.

After the tour we headed back to Dallas for our flight home. The flight was mostly uneventful. We arrived safely.