Reflections

An old college buddy of mine visited a few weeks back. We had a great time partying, drinking, and also visited one of the hottest strip clubs in San Antonio. It was nice being able to catch up. It took me right back to the college days. I guess some things never change.

We’ve all moved on, but still know how to have a great time.

I am hoping to go back to see all my other college buddies. It will be nice to have fun again.

Here I am sitting at my blog again. Just thorught of writing something as I have been quiet for so long.

It’s been a hectic week at work. I’ve been busy with about four projects none of which I find too interesting. I just needed a sense of accomplishment and thought that I would work on these and get them out of the way so that I can get into some interesting and challenging work.

Well.. I’m gonna stop for now…I’m off to see the apprentice…

Macs are great machines. The first one I owned was an old Macintosh Classic about seven years ago. It ran Mac OS 6.0 which I later upgraded to Mac OS 7.something. Apart from the small monochrome screen, the Mac Classic was fun to mess around with. It had excellent word processing and desktop publishing and the best musical composition software in its time (1990s).

Inspite of the its user-friendly and innovative features, market share for the Mac has declined over the years. One of the reasons IMHO is the high pricetag. Comparatively the declining cost of an average PC and the expanding choice of software over the years made it a more viable alternative. Secondly, Apple has been concentrating their efforts in marketing its oh so popular and highly priced Apple iPod.

The advent of Mac OS X and the Mini will hopefully change things significantly. Apple has made an excellent move combining the stability and security of Open Source software with the ease of use of the Macintosh platform in an effordable system. The powerful UNIX core of the new operating system has attracted a number of UNIX developers to port existing applications to the Macintosh. Mac OS X Panther comes with X11 and many POSIX features that will run UNIX applications with little porting effort.

I now also use an iBook G3 (not the latest and greatest–I know), but it runs Mac OS X Panther smoothly without any problems. I will always be a Linux/Unix fan, but am impressed with what the Mac has finally achieved.

I received an invitation to what they called a “Seminar on Ecommerce”. The guy that invited me mentioned that the company is partner with some of the highest ranks in the technology sector including IBM, HP, Sun etc. I took this as a great opportunity for networking. However, for some reason, I couldn’t help feeling that this guy was trying to sell me something. Anyway I thought, I would still go as I had nothing planned after work that evening.

The meeting started off as a really negative outlook of how most people spend their best years working for their employers…bla bla bla…living each month paycheck to paycheck…bla bla bla…retiring at the age of 75 etc.–the usual pitch made by typical MLM (Multi-Level Marketing) schemes. The guy rambled on for about an hour requiring participation by the audience asking them about their dreams and expectations in life, often times filling in his own answers to for his benefit.

After an hour of torture, the guy wrote the word Quixtar on the whiteboard. I should have known. I had heard about this scheme from my dad a few months ago.

It was a quick money making scheme alright, except they were the ones getting rich. The membership costs $250 renewable annually at $40. Not to mention the promotional videos and expensive seminars that were additional costs. There were still many that were impressed.

I googled the words MLM and Quixtar and came across a number of references that explain the scam in greater depth. What amazes me are the number of poor souls that were actually impressed and fired up with the fact that this was really the path to success!

Well, here it is–my very own blog. At this moment, I’m not sure what it’s really going to turn out to be. Lets just say that it’s my space to express my thoughts on things I encounter each day–a filtered brain dump if you will…