I wasn't impressed by the guy in Colorado (?) that let folks control his Xmas lights from the web. Lessee, an X-10 module and some scripting software. No big deal (but the media seems to have been impressed by the [yawn] technical feat). I used to have something like that. Some of you may recall when I let folks switch my webcams. You probably don't know that I also had a little script which blinked a light in my room whenever anybody accessed the infamous showercam. Hey, I wanted to know if I was showering or performing. I intentionally put a password on the page that let me turn the house lights on and off from work. It isn't much fun to have the living room lights go off and on whilst you're reading the newspaper. As it turns out, the Xmas lights were a hoax. He just swapped out some pictures via a script.

For all of our petty bickering over which version of ancient writings is the correct one... once in a while something (like a tsunami) comes along to remind us that we're all just hurtling through the space/time continuum on a rather unstable rock.

Time for a year-end progress report I suppose. With a couple of days remaining, it looks as if I'll break my overall sales record (two years ago) by a couple of dollars. Xmas was good, and just barely cancelled out the sucky summer. Profit margin is dramatically lower. More customers, buying cheaper and less profitable items. Costs were high this year, mostly due to renaming the business. But I've had no injection of funds. Nothing to inject. And the business is finally paying the mortgage consistently. After three years, it looks as if I'm solidly breaking even. Yay. The difference from the last couple of years is almost entirely due to the fact that I'm not buying anything nice (ie. expensive) anymore. I'm only buying the stuff that sells, and that's the cheap junk. You can't argue with the marketplace. The only way to survive is to have what they want, whatever it might be.

As usual, the NRA is tragically out of touch with reality. They sent me a video for Xmas. The first half contains footage of folks out hunting big bucks. As in male deer. Everybody is out hunting for big bucks. So why then do they devote the entire second half of the video to showing a bunch of folks blowing away shit with machine guns? These have been mostly illegal for quite a few years... depending on if you have political connections which of course implies that you've bagged some of those big bucks.