Some years ago I had the dubious honor of sitting in on a negotiation meeting between my main client, and his telephone service providers. My client did the vast majority of affiliate recruiting via a telemarketing "boiler room", and the bundling of leased lines for combined data and voice service was becoming mainstream. Anyway, the part that's relevant to Eric Cantor: this business owner had engaged a negotiator to negotiate a price structure. The meeting concluded with the negotiator claiming some compe... (...more)

Session #22: 3.3mi / 47m09s; 4.12mi/60:00m, peaked at 7.0mph for a half-lap, and held out another 1.5 laps at a 5.4-5.6mph jog. After that, 1.5 laps was my limit in speed phases, but I feel like I had really good breath control. That burned ~500 calories. I was supposed to get groceries after the gym Monday, but I ended up not getting out. Ditto yesterday, and my cupboard was pretty bare... so I staved off hunger with V8 all day and broke into a can of salmon in the late evening. Vitamins and omega-3... (...more)

OK, I gave TBird's Lightning extension the proverbial college try for firing task reminders. The problems I have with it are: - TBird uses ~80MB of memory idling, while TMR uses zero until Win Task Scheduler fires it; - sometimes it just stops firing reminders at all until I restart TBird; - some tasks show twice ("snoozed" occurrences of recurring tasks?); and - If you edit a task, it remains "open" but is dismissed from the reminder window without a snooze. So, Lightning's task minder isn't really... (...more)

As noted last week, I'm looking for a replacement for Phatsoft TMR. I might just roll with the task manager in Mozilla Thunderbird's Lightning extension. TMR is still available for download via Tucows and Sourceforge, although on SF the project URL tmr.{sf|sourceforge}.net redirects to phatsoft.net, and phatsoft.net has since lapsed and been squatted by those domain-squatting fucktards who brand their squatted domains with that bile-inducing "what you need, when you need it" tagline I came to hate so much ... (...more)

Remember that scene in Karate Kid ... ok, I just made myself feel old... Anyway, where Daniel-san is balancing on the fencepost or pier tie or whatever that is, practicing his crane no-can-defense kick? That inspired me to try a variation on calf raises. Standing away from a wall so you're forced to balance entirely by muscle action, bend slightly at the knee and lean forward just enough to center your weight in the ball of the "active" foot. Holding that balance there, raise the other foot, and bend that ... (...more)