KILL A TREE



In the world of computers my wife does not excel. She tries. Sometimes she tries very hard and I give her a lot of credit for attempting things without much information or training. Recently she has become in charge of a large fund raising event simply by attending a service club meeting, raising her hand and suggesting a format. As a result she is spending a lot of time on the phone and computer and there are two months to go before it all comes into focus and bears fruit.

One of the things that happens when spouse is on the computer is she prints out a lot of stuff, all to our wireless networked ink jet printer. The next thing that happens is she opens up 15 programs and asks me to fix things when the computer bogs down under the load. Programs do funny things when they cannot find sufficient memory to do what they are supposed to do, but mostly they just become s---l---o---w. Sometimes they lock up and there is no resuscitation short of energy death and reboot.



For this fundraising event spouse wants, and should have, a web site to advertise and provide forms for certain vendors. In preparing materials for the web site content, the printer is spewing a waterfall of ink onto pristine, white pages. Most of this ends up in a recycle box which we use for note pads and scratch paper. We have enough note pads to cover the remainder of this century, and remember we are still two months away from launch.

Sometimes spouse likes things she sees on web pages and decides to print out the page without formatting the print job so that the one page she wants to see suddenly becomes 3, or 7, or even more. Note pad material.

So far I have totaled up about eight bucks of paper, exactly $98.98 of ink, plus tax, and $ 98.39 for a domain name and one year of server hosting. That is just a few pennies short of $206. The next time spouse wants to attend a service club meeting I am giving her a wad of cash and a sign that says “Will donate money to (fill in the blank) .”

And to you techie folks out there, there is a small, but well healed, market, beyond the Gamers, that would be willing to fork over big bucks for laptop computer with 32 gigs of RAM.

Scotty. Beam me up.



DeLorean - Highway to Cure MS

When I took the DeLorean to a fundraiser car show a couple of weekends ago, a young fellow with a nice looking camera came by and started taking pictures. From the care he took with his shooting angles and the conversation he was having with his friend, I guessed that he may know his way around both cars and cameras. When we started talking I learned that he made his living photographing events, mostly weddings, but that his hobby was shooting cars so I asked him to email me some of his photos. It was a very pleasant surprise when I received his email today with a big zip file attachment.


The photographers name is Trevor Fry of FRYMOTO.COM and he lives in San Luis Obispo, California.

The car event was “Highway to Cure MS”, staged just outside Arroyo Grande, California in a pasture in front of a donor’s home. When I pulled into the pasture in the morning, the car staging manager immediately directed me to an isolated spot near the county road and entrance to the event. The gull wing doors of the DeLorean always get attention and apparently my job for the day was to chum the waters of commerce, and bring the casual passer by into the pay gate.

It was a beautiful spring day, even if a little cool, and the people and food were great.