Re: Sen. Barack Obama:

On Jun 8, 7:29 am, Dave Head <rally...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sun, 08 Jun 2008 07:03:20 -0400, Just Judy <SpamFreeJ...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sat, 07 Jun 2008 15:17:41 GMT, Dave Head <rally...@xxxxxxx> wrote:

I thought I was fatigued just because I was getting old (61 as of the day
before yesterday.)

   Happy two days after birthday, Dave.  ;)

Thanks, Judy.

And, of course, there was a whale of a lotta people here that disagreed with
me, that had me killfiled, so posting here and getting no replies also kinda
got to be a drag.

   Don't worry about that.

Didn't worry about it, it just wasn't any fun to post here.

   Many of the posters here have been here longer than my 10
years, and a bit of camaraderie has built up over the years.  I also
think (haha) some people hesitate to post to *new* posters because some
here are known to have sock puppets, and the mainstream folks feel
embarrassed to have replied to a sock puppet.  Keep posting, dood.  ;)

I'll be here.  Dunno how much time I'll have - I just have a lot right now.

   So, will a good day at work be better than a bad day at home?
Hmmm.

No...

   On this we agree 100%.

<G>  I used to have that T shirt about a bad day fishing still being better
than a good day at work.



Ouch!  That sucks.  I had a friend once whose doctor was the same quack that I
had, who kept going back to him several times over a week, for abominal pain,
and then his appendix burst.  Damn near killed him.  The quack shifted to being
a podiatrists sometime later, which is telling, since I've been told from other
sources that there are a lot of quacks in the foot-doctor field.  Maybe so.

   There's a reason it's called The_Practice_of medicine.

It wasn't hard to see what was going on with the guy - he was trying to work at
the speed of light, kept his office open ridiculously long hours, etc - he was
trying to make a mint, but didn't give himself enough time to actually think.

What he did with me was give me an antidepressant, which was not that bad a
move since my brother was killed by a drunk driver the year before and I _was_
clinically depressed, but I had a bad side-effect when my blood pressure went
to 192 / 94.  When I went back to him and he saw that, he didn't stop to think
about possible side effects from the antidepressant, he just put me on blood
pressure medicine.  I had to sit down and think about what was going on, and
then simply quit both medicines.  BP went back to normal.  I couldn't quit the
doctor 'cuz I was on an HMO, but being a Fed employee it was easy to quit the
HMO and go back to PPO - Blue Cross Blue Shield.  Then I switched doctors.

[Working in Iraq]
I'm curious:  what makes you say it's the best job you ever
had?  I've not had contact with anyone who has been to Iraq, so I'd
love your perceptions of the country!

Oh, it was a great job.  Just come to work, do the job and do the job and do
the job.  No jealous co-workers that want your job, or think that you're not
doing enough, or find out something bad about you and spread it around to the
management if they can while trying to improve their relative position, etc.
etc.

   It sounds like you've had some crappy work environments.
Bummer.

Oh, yeah - they weren't all that bad, but the occasional incident goes a long
ways to sour one on the whole institution.  I've been stabbed in the back quite
severely twice in the last year - probably not a good idea to give details
publically, but, well, I hate work, always have, always will.  It seems to
bring out the worst in people.

   On a few occasions in my secretarial working life, I was
confronted with an "office manager" who worried I was after their job.
It never took me long to convince them that not only did I not want
their job; I don't know whey they wanted their job!  I was happily
oblivious to all other office politics.

Its great when you can do it.



 And, it was relatively easy compared to what I do - it was writing
requirements documents for counter-IED devices to hopefully detect and/or
defeat IED's and the people that plant them.

   How long have you been working on computers?

Since I graduated with the Bachelor's in Computer Science and Engineering from
the University of Toledo in 1983.  Haven't been programming the whole time, but
it was almost always something related.

Shocking aside - I _never_ expected this - but EVERYONE there, the military
people, the contractors, and the DOD employee civilian volunteers there (like
me) were the NICEST people you'd ever want to meet.  I would never have
guessed, and that was not my experience when I was _in_ the AF from '68 to '72.

   1968-1972 were pretty tense times in the military; do you think
that had anything to do with your perceptions?

No, not that much - I think the difference is that most of those people were in
the military not because they volunteered, but because they got drafted or
joined some other service to avoid the draft.  A whale of a lotta people were
not happy about being where they were, and it showed.

   What do you normally do?  Are you in the military, or are you a
civilian employed by the military?

I'm a civilian employed by the Navy at Dahlgren, Va.  I just volunteered both
because I though I could help the troops more directly in real time by doing
that, rather than incrementally improving a weapon system that they might not
even see for a couple years, as well as the fact that it will allow me to
retire earlier because of the extra $$$ that came with going there.  I can now
retire in 4 years, most likely - when I'm 65.

   I was too afraid to wait until I was 65 to retire.  That's what
my *step*father did and he was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer one
month before his 65th birthday.  :(

Well, I have to take my chances.  Life would suck, even when retired, if I was
poor and couldn't do my hobbies.

 The key is paying off the house.
I could technically retire right now, except for that - I wouldn't have enough
$$$ left over to have a good time if I retired before paying it off.  And if
the radical greens get their way and gas goes to $8 a gallon, I'd just have to
go back to work anyway - if I could find any at an age of 60+  Probably have to
work at Radio Shack or something.

   Have Old Salt put in a good word for you at Wally's World.  ;)

<G>

   Seriously, it's scary to watch the gas prices go through the
roof.  Perhaps because I use a tank full of gas every 4-6 weeks, I'm
not quite as nervous as others, but it's surely also because I know the
US population has been very fortunate in gas pricing throughout my
lifetime.  In the mid-1970s, I met my first British friends who
reported paying the equivalent of $4.00+ per imperial gallon of gas,
when I was paying 75 cents per US gallon.  Because oil is finite, I'm
amazed that prices were so low for so long.

I use a full tank of gas about every 2 1/2 days.   Its really expensive.   I
was reading a news article that said that it is _not_ the speculators doing
this like some try to say, it is the fact that oil production peaked in 2005 at
85 million barrels a day and hasn't increased since, just stayed the same,
while world demand has soared.  Sooo... the price goes up.

The nutso thing of it is that, according to the head of BP Oil, which is
something I saw in an interview with him a year or 2 ago on the tube, that if
America drilled all the oil it had, we wouldn't have to import a drop.  I
believe it.  There's ANWR, and an ocean of oil under the oceans off our coasts.
We shouldn't have to import anything.  And, of course, if we had been working
on processes and procedures to extract the shale oil in the NW USA for the last
30 years, we'd likely be an oil exporting country now, since that oil is 3X the
Saudi reserve.



   I haven't begun seeing higher prices in the grocery store yet,
but it's soon to occur.  As one of the mnid posters writes in his
signature file:  "If you have it, a truck brought it," and gas prices
are sure to affect every product we buy.

If diesel gets too high, the trucks will go bankrupt, and we will be in an
enconomic collapse.  Millions will likely starve to death.





   We've been lucky; our time is running out rapidly.

   Take it easy on yourself once you are back to work.  Get plenty
of rest, and post often here.  <g>

If I get my way, I'll go back to Iraq at the end of the year - I have to apply
for and get selected for that job, tho.  This would be C++ computer programming
with the Marines at Camp Fallujah, more counter-IED stuff.  Maybe I can save a
soldier.  Might get to convoy around the place a bit - I wouldn't mind seeing
the countryside, as long as I go out with a bunch of Marines that are armed to
the teeth! <G>  I was totally behind the wire for the last tour, safe(r), but a
bit boring, too.  And if I get this, it'll be 6 months, and I'll retire upon
returning, the very day I return.  Gone.  Bye.  I quit. Etc.

   I wish you luck in your goals.  Tell the Marines that you'll
need a computer to do usenet on.  If they give you any lip, tell them
you're only following *my* orders.  <g>  That should help you.

<G> - I'll take my own computer there - just need to get hooked up to a
commercial ISP.  Prolly one at Camp Fallujah, dunno.

Dave- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

I had an oportunity to go to Iraq back in the latter part of 2006 and
early 2007 to work for a private contractor but the gov. and him
couldn't come to terms on the question as to who would pay for our
insurance. Seemed the gov. didn't want to cause of the large anount of
tax free money we would have made for 12-15 months over
there,eventualy the whole thing got scraped. Now I have prostate
cancer and am undergoing chemo right now. Lifes a holiday and every
meal is a bannquet. lol
.

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