It's News to Me

Life at 90

Caleb Elroy Shikles, at the age of 90, maintains this blog, Caleb's Corner.

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I joined Vernine and Associates in 1979 and for the next twenty years enjoyed an association that profoundly affected my life. By 1999 the company had run its life-cycle, but during those years I had the priviledge of working in hundreds of companies and visiting all but three states in this country. (The three I missed were North Dakota, Alaska and Hawaii.) Aside from the tour of the U.S. that my work provided I was also blessed by exposure to a remarkable assortment of people, both in the companies that I visited and particularly in the company I worked for.

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Palladium FAQ

Ross Anderson has posted this TCPA / Palladium FAQ. There are links in this FAQ that will help to explore this topic more completely for those of you who are interested.

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Trading Freedom for Security

From the caption to this entry, you'd probably guess that I'm going to join the fray about our «war on terrorism» and the price we pay to wage it. But you would be only partially right.

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News Groups

Today I had the occasion to introduce my friend, Paul, to Usenet News Groups. He has gotten Windows XP installed on his computer and uses Outlook 2002 as his email program. During the introductory period of adjusting to this new environment, he has had a number of relatively simple questions about using the program that he has relied on his friends to answer. I suggested that he might start reading the microsoft.public.outlook group to see what questions are asked and how they are answered. I also helped him set up his copy of Outlook Express to point to the news.microsoft.com news server and to subscribe to the group mentioned above.

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Back to Work

After a very brief break (one day off over the weekend), I head back to work today. As I do, I find myself concerned about two things I usually avoid sharing with others -- Budgets and Politics. Here in Tennessee we've seen state legislators spend months deliberating about what to do about the state's shortfall in revenues. They've talked about instituting a state income tax and about cutting services. By the lack of any affirmative plan to increase revenues, they've by default accepted the option of cutting services. Already sitting at 48th in the nation in spending on education, there are bound to be large cuts there, and the quality of my granddaughter's education lies in the balance.

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Bloggers who don't post regularly suck!

If you start reading blogs regularly, you quickly realize how disappointing it is to visit a site several times in a row only to find that the site author hasn't posted anything new.

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Father's Day

Today is Father's Day.

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Leadership, CRM, and Warning Letters

This past week ended on a down note for me. I was «written up» for failure to contact a customer to notify him of a cancelled appointment. A written warning at the place where I work is a very serious punative strategy that can eventually result in separation if a second such written warning has to be issued. In this post, I'm not going to present my defense of why I think the warning was inappropriate in my case. I'll pursue that at work where it rightly should be discussed. However, the event prompts me to write about an underlying issue that I want to explore in this post.

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Is nothing safe?

First Reported JPEG Virus Found

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