Paul's Comments

Around August, 2002 I got this idea for a story, about a man who dies and winds up in an afterlife which is somewhat similar to our own but with a few twists. The name of the book is In the Matter of: Instrument of God.

I've been working on it since. Things have happened including working on other things, being busy and so on and so forth. I was down to needing to finish one scene that I was putting off. Finally, I got stuck on a programming project I'm working on that was so unpleasant that I used finishing my book as an excuse to put it off.

So now it's finished. I need to change a couple items, about one page near the end to make a part of the story funnier, but it's done; I've tied all the loose ends together. It will probably end up being two books because it's about 750 pages.

Now I have to go on to the other book, tentatively called Willis and Friends which got created when I was writing an intermediate chapter of Instrument but then realized it worked better split off as a separate book. That one is currently about 175 pages.

This was not my first book. That one I wrote about 12 years ago, called The Gatekeeper: The Gate Contracts, is a full book, about 350 pages, and if I ever finish all of the interconnected story, is two more books.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to get them published.

I realized I haven't posted anything for a month. I also haven't gotten around to updating a new comic I wrote (not the PGGG cartoon here; it's a new one I'm working on.) But I realize I've been busy, I guess. I don't really know exactly what I've done over the last month, some of it is just getting out and doing what I have to do, e.g., if I go to my credit union to take out money, that's basically an all-day job as it takes about three hours each way to travel there by bus and train. I can travel to downtown Baltimore - about 60 miles - faster than I can get to Upper Marlboro, about ten miles from here.

That's not an April Fools joke, by the way.

But I sometimes wonder what I've actually done, and sometimes it seems like, in the end, not much. I do research on a number of things and sometimes work on things. But it sometimes seems like not much gets accomplished.

It's Girl Scout Cookie season. If you like Thin Mints - as I do - and want them during the off season, Keebler makes a similar product, the Fudge Shoppe Grasshopper mints. Now the news is telling us that - just like no one expected Toyota to have safety-related problems - a Kentucky bakery has recalled the Lemon Chalet cookies because of a breakdown in cooking oil. Apparently it's not that they're unsafe to eat as much as they taste funny (or bad.)

I got the phrase 'Toyotaed' from an associate of mine who points out how bad the service of Delta Air Lines is by mentioning when someone gets a bad trip* from an airline that "they got Deltaed." So when an unexpected product recall occurs, I say the product "gets Toyotaed."

--
* The use of the term "bad trip" here which also is used to refer to an unsatisfactory experience taking LSD, is intentional for ironic purposes

My favorite stock is Berkshire Hathaway Common, (BRK-A), and I happen to be a big fan because it's the most expensive stock in the world. They never do stock splits so the price remains the same, roughly. It reminds me of the corporation that runs the planet Venus in Robert A. Heinlein's Podkayne of Mars in which you're only one of three classes of people: a visiting tourist, an employee of the company, or a stockholder. You have to be fairly wealthy to have enough money to buy at least one share to become a stockholder but once you are, basically you're set for life.

No, I don't own any stock in Berkshire although I wish I could. I've made jokes how "I could have bought Berkshire Hathaway at 8 (thousand)" but that's not true, I probably didn't notice BH until maybe 1995 and by then it was between $20 and $27 thousand a share.

The current price for Berkshire Hathaway is about $117,000 a share.
I couldn't raise that much money if I sold a kidney, lung and anything else of which I have spare parts (presuming I could sell body parts; Federal law doesn't allow it.) That means that if you're wealthy, sick, need a part and can't get on the waiting list or have a wait expected to exceed your estimated life expectency, you go to India where you can buy a spare part, and cheaply too. (Presuming you have your own private checking done to make sure the donor doesn't have AIDS.)

Originally I wrote that it's interesting that is very close to the price to obtain a taxi medallion in New York City. That's before I looked it up. In May of 2008, the City of New York sold 86 medallions in a group of 46 2-medallion blocks for a minimum price of $700,000 each and one medallion for an independent for $189 large.

That tongue-swallowing nosebleed price for Berkshire is the reason I'm such a fan of it. Plus I've been a customer of theirs from time to time; BH is the holding company for GEICO insurance (among a whole bunch of other companies).

You know, it's pointless for me to just post things here without checking them; a two-minute search on the internet can give me almost any fact I need to find out. I first said that I'm not sure if Berkshire bought the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad or if it was the chairman of the company - who I could not remember his name - on his own. Again, two minutes told me that Warren Buffett didn't buy BNSF for his own account, it is a (wholly owned) subsidiary of Berkshire.

I decided I wanted to post an article here about something, so I go to this website and I'm informed I can't get through. My hosting provider is having trouble translating the domain name paul-robinson.us into the internal subdomain it is actually hosted as. Well, I try going onto NearlyFreeSpeech.net to check their control panel. Well, even they are having the same problem I'm having.

So I decide to go back and check whether my subdomain can be reached directly, but I need to find out what it is. So I go to my DNS provider, which is GoDaddy, and find out that my automatic password that the web browser generates is wrong. While I understand the need for security, the one real problem I have with GoDaddy is the "three strikes and you're out" penalty, that basically if you try to login 3 times in a row with the wrong password your account is locked until you call them for an unlock. I don't know what the right balance is but I think 3 is too low.

Well, anyway I go into my web browser's Password manager and there are different passwords depending on which service it has gone into - an indication that I've logged in at different places and different times - and so I don't know which is right. So I end up having to call them for an unlock, which, since it's 4 in the morning - call it 2 A.M. in Arizona - the wait is extremely short. So I get the guy on the phone to read me the password hint, and from that I know what it is, and it works.

One thing I find as an example of how stupid some people are, in that they see a number of disreputable organizations operating domains using GoDaddy that they figure anyone using them is also disreputable. They apparently have no sense. In general, GoDaddy is the cheapest provider of domain services in the world; everyone else is about 3 times or more as expensive. So those who don't need handholding or technical support will use them, as will anyone registering a large number of domains. Unless you're authorized to be a registrar yourself, anyway, they will be the least expensive provider for most services.

Now, this blog runs on NearlyFreeSpeech because their hosting is very inexpensive, and allows me to run this site without advertising. I figure it costs me about $15 a year to host this without ads; the cheapest I can get an ad-free site from GoDaddy is about $3.50 a month, or about 3 times as much.

Now after all this, I have no idea what I was going to post about!