080330 Cleaning Off The Desktop

I apologize Readers, but last week’s blog was blocked by the editors (in that my girlfriend is “the editors”). It was the first comedic bit that I had written in some time. She was afraid that it would lead to our being killed.

With Easter coming so early this year, it was almost on top of Presidents’ Day. Seeing the obligatory documentaries on Lincoln’s burial bleeding into programs about the history of Jesus sent my mind down a path I have found before and, last week, I thought I would bring you along for the ride. A little bit of research leads to a wealth of information about Lincoln’s remains being moved numerous times and excruciatingly complete descriptions of the final viewing of his corpse just prior to its being encased in tons of concrete in a specially designed tomb unlike anything seen before. By relaying those facts with a slight editorial slant, I was able to make the case for the thwarting of a grand conspiracy to animate a zombie Lincoln, alter the election of 1896 and change the course of American society. Then I reached over to the most celebrated case of a dead man rising and made the case that our government needed to take sterner action to stop the zombie Jesus than simply hiding chocolate eggs under the laurel bush in the side yard.

For some reason, she was convinced that people would take offense at that piece and it was withdrawn to cease her yammering on the subject.

As for the blog from two weeks ago: there were inquiries by readers into how to go about building an income stream like the one I built. Anyone truly interested may contact me though the link to The Virtual Jim website. I will mentor anyone who I feel comfortable working with. An individual who is accountable for their actions, teachable and willing to honestly work toward helping others can feel assured that I would work with them or would tie them into someone from their own geographic area. Anyone looking to put a short cut into the system is going to crash and burn quickly and is not worth my time.

Speaking of The Virtual Jim website – I was able to rebuild all of the files lost when a motherboard fried in January and have them safely backed up in external drives. However, the procedure for uploading from the Adobe GoLive program into Go Daddy’s hosting server has been lost. I remember when I first set up the website, figuring out the upload protocol was aggravating, but eventually I figured it out. A smart person would have made notes rather than relying on a computer that might ultimately burn out to remember for him. So far, the helpful people at Go Daddy have been less than helpful which surprises me. This should not be a hard thing. If anyone reading this has experience uploading from GoLive into Go Daddy, I would love to hear from you. The site is overdue for a major update. As of today, visitors cannot even get to this blog from The Virtual Jim.

Readers have asked for my take on the fall of Eliot Spitzer. They remember my very negative feelings toward the man when he was the New York State Attorney General and my dreading what would happen when he became governor. Then, after his state of the state address, I wrote a positive piece about him. I was confused about how he could fund the things he proposed and be as fiscally conservative as he promised in that speech but if half of what he promised came to be…. Well, Spitzer never followed through on anything from that speech. He continued being the same man he was before: a very vane man who portrayed himself as the moral superior of all those around him and a man who was so much better and smarter than the rest of us that he needed to protect us from ourselves in every aspect of our lives. I am not surprised by the events that brought him down, only by the speed in which it happened. His whole short term was a disaster as he first comically replayed Watergate on the Hudson by trying to take down Senator Joe Bruno and then mis-stepping through every issue before him. I take no pleasure in what has happened to Mr. Spitzer, I am just glad New York has gotten through his short term so that we can get on with passing a budget. As for his wife, I wish her the best. She should have known what she was getting involved with. With her aging father-in-law Bernard worth better than 500 million dollars, I would expect her to stick around for a while.

In the interest of fairness I should revisit the blog from June fifth of last year when I bemoaned several bad customer service incidents which had piled one on top of another. One of the companies highlighted was Fairpoint Communication who somehow has maintained a monopolistic control over phone service in this particular geographic area. When my credit card expired and was reissued with the same number but a new expiration date, I attempted to contact Fairpoint’s billing office. At one point, I left the phone line open for two hours while hold music played. On another day, the office closed while I was on hold. I tried writing and emailing without results. I connected with a representative on the phone after three months and a very overdue bill. Last week, I called the same billing office to change my credit card number after a large supermarket chain was hacked and my old card number showed up in Texas for multiple gas station stops. This time, I was connected to a pleasant and courteous person immediately. I was filled with hope for a better tomorrow.