I took the bus back from Richmond to DC early Sunday morning. I love contrasts, so after driving John’s Mini Cooper S all over West Virginia, getting on a budget bus with a Chinese driver and full of folks dropped off by a collection of barely running vehicles, or who’d sprinted across the industrial landscape to the bus’s 7-11 launching point provided the perfect counterpoint to end my trip with.

The seats filled up bit by bit, each of use staking out our row with bags and purses and coats. Whatever we could use to signal that this isn’t the seat you were looking for. Move along. Move along. Continue reading →

Esther McClure Win's Poetry Award (click to enlarge)

While going through papers at EJ’s Uncle Johns over the weekend, we came across this page from the Uvalde Leader, her local town paper from her Texas days. John was clearly proud of her, and it’s probably no surprise that I am as well – Ernest

From the Newspaper Article:

Winning two awards for ber poetry in one week was an unexpected pleasure for Southwest  Texas Junior College student Esther McClure, particularly since one of the awards carried state wide recognition. McClure won first place in the college poetry division of the SWTJC Creative Arts Contest, which concluded with the awards ceremony on February 22. Continue reading →

John McClure was my wife’s uncle, and he passed away the other night. He’d actually passed away a few days before, but they brought most of him back, at least for a time. EJ and I went down to be with his wife Aly as she said goodbye.

I knew John for less than a decade all told, but you only needed a minute to get his measure. John was one of the good ones. He’d give you a hand in a second, and never give you grief for having gotten yourself in trouble to start with. He was a low key guy, dependable, honest, and a lot of fun in the bargain.

Continue reading →

[amazon_link id=”B0044DEDCA” target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ][/amazon_link]In a clear case of the shoemaker’s children, I’ve been living with a pretty crude connection between my media PC and my sound system. The PC itself is an old HP Pavilion that died and got resurrected with a new copy of Windows 7 Home Pro and a new power supply. As far as serving up media and surfing the web, its 4 GB ram and 2.4GHz processor keep up with most anything I ask of it. The audio outputs on the back however, don’t do justice to the sound from either videos or mp3s, and since I’ve ripped every CD we own onto it, I really should have done something about that a while ago. Continue reading →

Pmi prep course

So, I’m spending the weekend taking a prepncourse for the Project MAnagementb Professional certification. Which I already hold. 

I’ve gotten number of certs in my life, mostly IT oriented, and a few degrees along the way. Certs are about current practice, while courses tend towards meta-knowledge, and as a result certs expire after a few years, while course learning, though less useful in the trenches, lasts forever. More or less.

Unlike my IT certs, the PMP is one I mean to keep active. 

Why? Don’t I care about the tech side?  Continue reading →