Rob Sterling

OK, so I’m a little annoyed by a purchase I made from Amazon. I eat a lot of quinoa, so I made a bulk quinoa purchase last week from Amazon. I ordered the six-package bulk package from Arrowhead Mills - a brand I really like. However, it seems that during bundling at Amazon.com’s fulfillment center, one of the six packages of quinoa was sliced open. When I got home today, the parcel was in my vestibule but there was leaked quinoa all over the place!

I’ll order quinoa this way again. I think the problem is unlikely to happen a second time, and even with a 1/6th loss, the cost is still a lot cheaper than buying it at the supermarket.

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So I was shopping at the Wal-Mart in south Richmond tonight. I love Wal-Mart. I didn’t really have access to one when I lived in the New York area, and I appreciate the density of Wal-Marts in the south.

I was there to pick up a bottle of wine, some blue corn chips and salsa to bring to my sister’s house. The couple in front of me at the checkout line had these items in their basket:

• One box of Snuggles brand fabric softener sheets.
• One pack of Orbit gum.
• Two different 2500-piece jigsaw puzzles featuring scenic views of Las Vegas, Nevada.
• One box of the new K-Y brand “YOURS+MINE” product you’ve probably seen advertised on television.

I had to wonder how these products might fit together. Were they part of a shopping list to achieve a specific outcome? What MacGyver-like project might be completed with these components? I don’t know.

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So in 1988, a month or so after the presidential election, I attended a speech by Joe Biden at American University. About 15 people were in attendance - not a lot of folks. During the somewhat anemic question and answer session, I posed a smart-ass query. I asked - approximately - “In Arthur C. Clarke’s Fountains of Paradise, the author speculates that no person who is willing to suffer the indignities of running for President of the United States is morally competent to actually fill the position. Clarke argues, instead, that the presidency should be selected by lottery from among qualified individuals. What do you think about Clarke’s idea?”

And Joe Biden sneered at me and said, “I think that’s a terrible idea.” He went on for a minute or two, but the gist of it was in the first sentence.

Of course, Joe Biden had just run an embarrassingly incompetent campaign for the Democrat nomination, in which he plagiarized Neil Kinnock and also made rude remarks about his critics’ IQs.

It doesn’t matter, though, because Obama is going to lose in November, assuming Hillary doesn’t get the nod at the convention.

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I’m a big fan of James Lileks, a writer for the Star Tribune of Minneapolis/St.Paul. I’d like to say I became familiar with Lileks during time I spent in Minneapolis in the mid-90s setting up online stock trading for American Express Financial Services, but I didn’t. I actually learned about him after the Blog Explosion of the early 2K’s; his famous Olive Garden “Screed” of February, 2002 was the first of his essays I remember reading.

Anyway, I was looking on del.icio.us for Hummels references and found that on December 14, 2004, James Lileks set up a del.icio.us account, linked five sites and never used it again. Three of the five sites were Hummel sites.

I like Hummels as much as the next guy, and probably a lot more, but using del.icio.us almost solely for tracking Hummels is an unusual application for the service.

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I installed Picasa for Linux on my parents’ PC last night and I’m very pleased with the results. Previously I had them running the Windows executable via WINE, but performance and reliability were poor. Now they’ve got a solid way to upload and share photos.

My parents bought their current PC about five years ago. I recommended switching to a Mac at the time but my Mom still had a proprietary Windows app she needed to access for work. When they retired to Richmond early this year with a ridiculously crapped-up PC, I seized the opportunity to move them over to gOS-flavored Ubuntu, using the same aging PC. gOS has been fairly trouble-free and the machine runs well again, and I’m nearby to address any hiccups.

The reason my parents’ Windows OS became so corrupted, of course, is that my parents lack the computer savvy to avoid malware. And not to get into theoretical discussions beyond my competence about whether Mac, Linux or Windows is the “most secure”, but the simple reality is that there are far, far, far more dirtbags out there exploiting Windows vulnerabilities than Mac or Linux vulnerabilities. Last night when I was working on their PC, I found several Windows .exe files in the Firefox default download folder - stillborn.

Linux native versions of applications like Picasa are a tremendous asset to those of us looking to keep our loved ones safe from botnets, password thieves and other bandits. If you’re in the same position, you might want to try downloading gOS or Ubuntu. I installed Ubuntu on an old PC of my own and screwed around with it for a month or two before I installed gOS on my parents’ PC. It’s easy, it’s far safer than Windows, and thanks to the likes of Google, Firefox, Skype and others, it’s now practical.

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My grandmother owned a ton of Hummels, and I’ve got a strange soft spot for them - enough so that I actually own a Hummel-related domain at Hummel Trader.

Last week Goebel, the German manufacturer of the figurines, announced that it would cease production, after years of declining sales. I assume the decline has a lot to do with the dying-out of the generations that favored the figurines, like my grandmother’s. Kinda sad. It’s also strange that so many types of kitsch are still selling fine, but yet Goebel was unable to find a contemporary market.

[German Porcelain Maker Halts Hummel Production - Deutsche Welle]

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For the last few years I’ve been working on a lot of small and mid-size affiliate marketing projects, and I’ve decided to begin spending some of the capital I have at this blog in the advancement of my affiliate empire.

So to begin, I give you Decorative Solar, a new blog I set up to take advantage of the growing interest in energy efficiency and solar power around the home, along with improvements in solar applications.

An example: solar panels are declining in production costs at an amazing rate. It’s only a matter of time before companies begin to produce them in decorative shapes and patterns. So I thought I’d get ahead of the game.

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From Ghostbusters, a 1984 movie I assume most readers have seen:

Dr. Peter Venkman: This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Mayor: What do you mean, “biblical”?
Dr Ray Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath-of-God type stuff.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Exactly.
Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies. Rivers and seas boiling.
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes…
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria.

The Venkman closer was meant to be the punchline. But now the unthinkable has come to pass.

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I saw in this morning’s Times-Dispatch the celebratory headline that Richmond’s standing in annual crime ratings has improved: City ranks as safer in crime survey. According to the Morgan Quitno Press, we’ve gone from the fifth most dangerous city in America to the 15th. Progress is progress, I suppose. On the other end of the survey, Brick Township, NJ once again has seized the title of safest city in America.

Well, I’ve lived in Richmond for three years now. I lived in Brick Township from 1972 to 1974, and I also lived in Silverton, right next to Brick, from 1994 to 1996. I am very familiar with Brick. The town used to be known as “Bricktown”, and before that “Bricksburg”, both of which have at least a touch of flair - but today it’s just plain “Brick”. It is a colossally uninteresting place - the name alone gives away the game.

Brick is not actually the safest city in America, because it’s not a city. It’s just a sprawling township that has occupied all of its land with low-density residential housing and strip malls.  Compared to other townships in the area (such as Wall, Berkeley or Lacey) Brick is kind of a dump. I moved to Richmond to escape the poor alternatives of suburban vs. urban living in New Jersey - sprawl is no way to live.

Richmond may get a black eye in crime ratings, but it’s a great place to live. Brick does incredibly well in crime ratings, but the mere thought of ever living there again makes my head hurt.

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A friend of mine here in Richmond named Ron Klein has done something pretty novel. About two years ago, Ron set out to buy the rights to a book called Turn Your Imagination Into Money, which was first published in 1934. Once he’d acquired the rights, Ron set about preparing a new edition, which has just been released. So Ron has salvaged a bit of lost wisdom, made it available to a new readership, and possibly figured out a way to bring in some nice income for himself.  Not bad.

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