Julio’s Musings Around Columbia County, New York

Back in the day, slightly before the advent of the Internet or World Wide Web, the best way to either anonymously take a dig at someone or laugh at their expense was writing/reading the graffiti on the bathroom stall.
Mind you, I was never a writer - just couldn’t remember to bring a pen with me for those moments and I thought it was somewhat lame anyway. But reading it was a great way to spend the time you had.

Most bathroom stalls had no room for any more scribbling and it was just scribbling on top of scribbling. Sometimes it was racist, actually during a part of my growing up in New York when race relations were not what they should have been, it seemed like 1/3 of the scribblings were taking shots at every race with all sides freely involved.

Now it has moved to the WWW where the likes of Silicon Alley Insider (I won’t put the link as I don’t want to confer “link juice” to them) have become the bathroom stall but with all the inherent power of vast distribution / SEO and a multitude of contributors who previously wouldn’t dare take a chance at defacing public property.

You have a gripe with someone? now you can anonymously thrash them and think you won’t be caught by writing a slanderous comment about them on a post hopefully related to where they work. Of course if there is the will there is the way to trace who the suspected anonymous commented are but it does require a lot of “bothering” and generally isn’t worth the trouble.

Anyway, the bathroom stall lives on as a metaphor on the Web and for those that are lame enough to slander anonymously, think about it- no one cares enough even in a negative way to write about you!

Source: Hubblesite.org
With the 40 Year anniversary of the first Man on the Moon, got to thinking (again) what will be our generation’s contributions to the advancement of Mankind.
Trillion $$ deficits, flipping burgers at McDonalds as a legitimate career choice, SUV’s , bank foreclosures , endless dribble on the Twitter, “boxers or briefs” on Facebook, Michael Jackson and Madonna,sport stars on steriods etc.

Don’t get me wrong, I contribute and enjoy adding my 2 cents worth of dribble on Twitter. It’s like enjoying watching something as useless as “Hollywood Squares” or the long line of nonsense on Television. Good diversion for tired minds after a long day of sloughing out out.

Just like we needed an outlet hundreds of years ago driven by desire to find new trade routes to the Indies, we need an outlet of possibilities with the Galaxy (ok let’s start with our Solar System first) for a population of 6 billion and growing.

Even though wherever we go we will always bring along our nature and by extension our problems , the need for new room to fight it out is key for the human race’s survival. It is not just the once in million year meteor strike , it’s the need to tame a hostile environment because it is there and because there is a sense, hope or pipe dream that this time we will make it better whatever better means.

Tags: Julio Hernandez-Miyares, Galaxy

Though this February winter day is relatively balmy by standards of the past few weeks here in New York City, I still have to take this opportunity to “Take a Momentary Break From Winter”. It is already past Ground Hogs Day and I believe it is just days to “Pitchers and Catchers”.
Nevertheless, with the car in a heavy film of road salt, ice (melting today) all over and people generally ghostly white from lack of sun the past few weeks, I would pay anything to jump into the photo if I could even for just a day.

Tags: Julio Hernandez-Miyares

On Sunday August 31th, I took off solo from New York City on what I expected to be a 4 hour trek via I-95 to Reston, Viriginia 250+ miles south of the Big Apple.
With my Venti Starbucks coffee I was on the road if you can call the Brooklyn Queens Expressway a road at a few minutes to 7am.
Well the good news is the trek did take about 4 hours, traffic was light , no construction either and I pulled into the Reston Towne Center Starbucks for my free refill of venti coffee a few minutes ahead of 11am.
Nevertheless the trip was less than uneventful though I may be exaggerating somewhat. The road was filled with State Troopers with the worse on the 100 miles of Maryland that I had to traverse.
Though I came out of the trip unscathed there were two instances I thought I may have been caught though I was either at the speed limit or a few miles over (5 miles per hour or less over). In one instance, in the left lane I passed the Trooper waiting in the center median and he pulled out right after I passed. Though I thought he was after me, he quickly veered towards the far right lane and nabbed someone in the right lane though I was not able to ascertain from my previous views in the rearview mirror what that individual could have been guilty of. Approximately 30 minutes further south as I was driving the speed limit with someone following at a safe distance, the whirling lights flashed on the poor SOB behind me. Since neither that motorist or I were exceeding the speed limit, I was once again unclear of what infraction could have been committed. Both were too close for comfort so the remainder of the trip especially as I entered Virginia and its $1000+ speeding tickets was like the slow boat to nowhere.

I guess I can say I wish those troopers I luckily avoided on Sunday had something better to do but of course they don’t. Long summer weekends are the prime hunting season for this prey but this instance it seemed they were going to far and it was just viewed as a good revenue raising opportunity from unsuspecting and compliant out of towners taking advantage of the last summer fling.

[tabs]Julio Hernandez-Miyares, I-95[/tabs]

That is what you mostly hear when at the many teleconference meetings I attend on a regular basis. In fact I hear the same thing at in person meetings as many individuals bring their PCs to “work” during the course of the meeting. It has become a pet peeve of mine as if you are not the Project Manager and taking notes (how they got that unenviable responsibility I don’t know but better them then me , then you should be listening intently to the on-going conversation and not incessantly im’ing or blogging or reviewing the number of worthless stock options or whatever.

In fact, I believe one of the major contributors to the lack of decisions or even agreement on what a decision was when one is made is that most people attending the teleconference are not paying a wit of attention to what is going on in the proceedings.

Irrelevant picture of one of my dogs.

As an aside ,Can’t imagine how difficult it was to grab a copy of this AOL Pictures image on my computer. Downloading to desktop doesn’t work whether on a MAC or a Windows machine. I have been using Flickr to maintain my photos. That statement is a stretch as I only recently purchased a digital camera but now I take it with me all over and takes photos of skyscrapers, subway stations, dogs, countryside whatever. I tried out a free Flick Account and within one week I had upgraded to the Pro version for approximately $25 a year. Something like 2 gigabytes upload storage per month! Quite easy to do the basics including selecting an uploaded photo, writing some text and creating a blog entry directly from the Flickr site. Now if only AOL Picture could do that!