The curly fries were not necessary

They were, however, very good. There is a subsidized cafeteria run by an evil workers comp insurance company. The cafeteria is not evil, in fact quite good. You can have a Niman Ranch burger with cheese on a soft sesame bun for $3.50, really, real cheese, real meat, real bread. Michael Pollan may actually approve. I like Michael Pollan, maybe he states the obvious but he does it from a refreshing pespective which gives cause for pause and thought. His message sinks in.
So burger, with Swiss, curly fries, salad...full.

"Microsoft Office Access 2007 has been successfully installed" This happened only after I had to Google a .cab file called SKU111. What they neglect to tell you during the installation is that you have in insert your previous installation disk (it does say source) but thankfully some geek out there had posted a solution to this annoyance.

One of the two reasons for installing this today is that I have a query that is troublesome. Here is the trouble: I am summing a rows value from four tables into a new table that contains the values from those four tables and the sum, across the rows. The query seems to go well until it is almost complete, as it is cranking (there 105K records) it displays the new/calculated values but when it finishes, all values change to NAME. Now, NAME usually indicates a type error or a calculation error (going with type in this case). It is now just sitting there, crashing.

Nail on the Head, so to speak

now, this is good
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/2008/02/14/66-recycling/
hope they don't mind me putting this here

It's Friday, I am listening to Ghostland Observatory. Not that listening to Ghostland Observatory is a Friday thing, it is just what I am doing right now.
Oh and working.

Recipe:
Shrimp Dip (concocted sitting in the car driving up north for the weekend. Note: this is not a diet plate).
1 lb. shrimp (minus what your brother steals when your back is turned)
1/2 c. sour cream
1/2 c. cream cheese
1 T. Tapatio or other habanero/jalepeno hot sauce
4 T. grated yellow onion
salt and pepper to taste
juice from 1/2 lemon or more if you really like lemon

Mix it all together with a fork
Stick it in the fridge for about an hour
Serve with French bread, carrot, celery

Delete, Delete, I Eat Meat. This the name of the Ghostland Observatory album I am listening to. It rocks.

Observations on MySQL 5.0. Everyone says it is a much better product than previous versions. I dig it, as an Access user of many moons, it is nice to get in and dig in. Writing queries has taken on new meaning in that you can see what you are writing, actually asking the program to do as well as understand what is going to happen as you are writing it. Delicate desire of the command line over the GUI right? I like them both but hey I believe in God and evolution so shoot me. Point is, like cooking as to opposed to just eating, I get to know what is going in and that is just delightful. I can control what I want to see and I can manipulate the code as opposed to getting some error message about something I did not enter and cannot fix.

Renewable

The wind sort of went out of my sails on this issue. Not to say it is less important, because it might be the most important issue. I think Stupor Tuesday did me in. I fear four years of McCain. Don't let it be. Eight years with the "idiot" was too many. There was no good there and I cannot tolerate another president who will spend four years justifying our presence in the Middle East. Fuck him. The only way to fully defeat their collective mentality on the Middle East is to reduce our reliance on oil. No small feat there kiddies, eh? Okay so there's my segueway to renewability. That was not a word and now it is...ha!
Without the rhetorical definition like last time, we know that renewable energy is energy from sources that naturally renew themselves, like wind, solar, geothermal, hydro. Wiki says that renewable energy accounted for 13% worldwide in 2005 with 52% of that being from hydroelectic. 7% is the number for the United States use of renewable energy. Shit, we can do a lot better than that, and that number is two years old. So what I do? It has to be everyone doing their part, as well as all those companies doing their part. I ride my bike to work most days, I compost and reuse my compost in le garden. I recycle everything. I live with a recycle nazi who keeps me in check. I try to be super conscious of waste and try desperately not to waste. I have noticed that my level of consumption in the form of needless crap has greatly decreased over the years. I used to think it was because I am poor but I also think I am just more aware of what I really need and don't need. And I have a ton of crap already, can't contribute to the landfill anymore, even though there is some super cute shit out there for the kiddies in my life. If only Trader Joes did not use so much plastic for their packaging! The other day I bought one of those rice bowls. The bowl is plastic, wrapped in cardboard label which is fine but then you remove the plastic from the bowl, lift up the hyper-paper-plastic bowl cover and inside is a the sauce packet, the oil packet, the freeze dried veggie thing, all in plastic. Just a small amount, really but a shitload of people eat these and similarly wrapped ramen type of meals because they are cheap and easy and better than McDonald's. And it all goes to the plastic island. Think, think thinking.

But getting back to the Presidency. I, like a lot of us, want to see a Democrat in there. Either Hillary or Obama would be fine, better than McCain. But if it comes to McCain or one of them, will the public sway in favor of a democrat or will the "willful ignorant" prevail. An interesting statistic would be to see how many of each party are in the voting pool.