Somethings are so easy to predict. A simple 3 page bill sent to the house of representatives is transformed into 100 pages. Just before the vote Democrats then go on a rant blaming everyone but themselves, but mainly the Republicans. They then act surprised with Republicans take exception to this. Immediately them blame the Republicans while ignore the fact they they are a majority and that over one quarter of their own party voted against it. Does not matter if they shout loudly enough that it is all the fault of the Republicans. Now they will have a sound bite come election time. Will anyone see that they have sold our economy for the sake of their election? That they have placed their own interests above the those of the people the represent?

In Congress it seems that things other then cream rise to the top.

Universities

Recently I was invited to be an adviser for the Computer Science department at our local university. The program is up for its 6 year certification renewal. They invited a several people from local companies who have support them to be on the advisory committee. We had a luncheon with the members of the accreditation committee today.

I must admit that I find this ironic as my only academic degree is a AAS from the Community College of the Air Force. However I was the natural choice to represent my company. A few years ago we donated 6 robots to the university. Three of the professors attended a training class to learn how to program the robots. These were not the first or last students I've had with PHDs.

If you are interested in programming for a living, be prepared to be a life long learner. You might have started programming with FORTRAN, moved to C, Switch to PASCAL, learn JAVA, and be working with C# today.

Quiet Mornings

I have become a relatively early riser. I am almost always up an hour or so before the rest of my family. The quiet of the morning is enjoyable, a chance to read the paper, to walk around the neighborhood before people start to stir. Maybe it is inherited. My father worked at a factory almost an hour away. On a normal morning he was up by 5:00 AM. If offered overtime he often chose to start work an hour early, meaning getting up at 4:00 AM or even 3:30 AM on some mornings.

I do get much of my news during the day from the Internet and I usually watch the local evening news, but I do look forward to the morning newspaper. Oh I wish it had less advertisements, more news, and more stories written by reporters instead of copied verbatim from the wire services, but there is little in this world I would not "improve" if given a chance.

I hear footsteps upstairs so my "quiet" time is coming to an end. We will be going to visit our daughter today. Her Birthday is this week. We will celebrate it with her today.

So it begins

I've been reading other blogs for awhile now and I've decided its not too late to join the party. In programmer years I am ancient. I learned programming with BASIC, FORTRAN, and assembler. Today we use .NET, C#, and JAVA. The community has evolved from modems dialing bulletin board systems at 300 bps to multi megabit connections to the internet.

As an intelligent son of a lower middle class parents who did not belong to any privileged group I found college unaffordable. Scholarships paid for about half. It didn't take a genius to calculate that student loans were going to max out before I could graduate. So I did what many generations of Americans have done, I enlisted.

Eight years later I left the USAF as a Staff Sargent. I spent two tours of duty doing maintenance on B-52G heavy bombers. My aviation career after the USAF was fairly short. The airline I went to work for filed for bankruptcy and went out of business, but they did get me involved with automation.

This lead to my current career as as an Applications Engineer with a industrial robot company.

There now you have my thumbnail biography. So what do I have panned for this blog? What ever I feel like saying. It maybe about computers and programming. It maybe about current events around the world. It may even touch on those forbidden subjects of politics, religion, or sex. It might just be whatever random thought I happen to have.