Jeff Blogs

I am fascinated with the whole New Year’s holiday. For the life of me I cannot understand why we have decided to celebrate having to go out and buy a new calendar. I know there are other holidays that are just as confusing.

I never have understood how a furry rodent suffering from Sciophobia (a fear of shadows) was able to score not only a cool holiday like Groundhog Day but also a classic movie. And don’t even get me started on Columbus Day where we celebrate men who get lost and don’t stop and ask for directions. Seriously, who comes up with these?

(continue reading…)

I have never been one who was overly excited about Halloween. Horror movies never were a big thing for me and I absolutely hate sitting at home waiting for the doorbell to ring so that I can hand out candy. Still, looking back over my life I have to admit I have a lot of memories surrounding Halloween.

As a child I lived in what I now think of as rural Idaho. At the time I thought I lived in the big city but your perspective changes as you get older and you realize that the town you grew up in could fit inside Chase Field in Phoenix and it would not even be a sell-out crowd.

(continue reading…)

According to my calendar, today is Columbus Day. As I have written previously, I have an issue with Columbus Day in general. I just do not get why Columbus gets his own holiday. I know he supposedly discovered the new world but I still have a problem with that given that there was a Native American welcoming party when he arrived. As near as I can tell, if you discover something you probably should be the first guy there otherwise it defeats the whole discovery concept.

But hey, you have to give Columbus credit, even though he got here late to the party he had the right propaganda machine in place to take credit for something he didn’t really do and was able to cover up the whole fact that he was actually just lost.

(continue reading…)

Ok, I admit it I am a complete technology geek. I am always looking for some excuse to trick out my life with the latest gadget. In most cases my quest for the ultimate device only impacts me and I can therefore justify being on the bleeding edge of technology. Sometimes my desire to add technology to my life affects others and that is usually when I get into trouble.

The person who seems to be impacted the most for my quest for technology nirvana is my poor wife Trina. I cannot tell you how many times she has come home to find out that I have technologize another part of her life that she was completely content with before my added gadgetry.

(continue reading…)

From an early age I was told I was not quite normal. That seems like kind of a harsh thing to tell a kid especially if you are that kid’s parents. The thing was, I thought that was a good thing so I grew up thinking that not being normal was actually a good trait to have. I can’t really explain why but I just seem to have the ability of piecing things together slightly different than other people. In some ways this has been a great thing. I have a knack of looking at something from a different perspective and providing an observation that might otherwise go unnoticed. On the other hand this can sometimes get me in trouble or at least into an area that is uncharted and pretty weird. The invention of the computer and more specifically the Internet hasn’t helped at all; in fact it has made matters worse. Now I have a lot more information at my disposal I tend to put it together in rather unique ways. Take e-mail for example. Like many of you I get up each day and check my email and find out that more than half of my in-box has been filled with SPAM. Usually at this moment I take a severe detour to begin trying to understand why unwanted email was named after a canned meat product but I’ll spare you from that and try to get right to the point. Unlike most people, I don’t just immediately start deleting these unwanted messages. Instead I read each one. I blame my mother for this. She always said that if someone is willing to take the time to send you a letter you should at least have the common courtesy of reading it and acknowledging them. So for some unknown reason I started replying to SPAM and what I found is that those people really don’t want you to reply because they never respond back or if they do it is usually to ask me to quit emailing them. That seems a little messed up don’t you think? Today I got an email and I thought maybe I would share it with you.

(continue reading…)