Bummer

 

President Barack Obama is coming to Raleigh Wednesday to hold a Town Hall Meeting. The event will be at the Broughton High School Gym which is a typical school gym - a rather small venue. I'd guess maybe 500 - a thousand tops - could fit in there.

With such a small venue - the demand for tickets would be great and supply tight.

I was very surprised when I got a call Sunday afternoon asking me if I'd like to attend.

Of course! Awesome!

OK then - come by the school Monday (today) to pick up 2 tickets. Bring ID, etc. etc.

Well - I happen to have scheduled 2 days of contractor interviews for Tuesday and Wednesday.

When the State needs to hire consultants / contractors for design work - we request proposals - sift through them - pick out the top candidates - interview them - select who we want to hire - then negotiate a contract.

Typical contracts are in the hundred thousand(s) range. Pretty good money - but nothing to get excited about. Lately we've been getting a dozen or more interested firms per project. Usually we interview 4 firms. Pick the best - and carry on. Happens all the time.

This particular project is different. It's for some very complex landfill and contamination investigation, remediation, and implementation of clean up. There's hundreds of these sites in NC. The budget for the initial contracting is $40 Million.

We plan to contract with 4 companies (instead of 1) and are gong to bundle multiple sites together per contract. The average contract will be $10 Million - which is bit more than the typical couple hundred thousand.

For that kind of money - there's been a LOT of interest. We received dozens and dozens of proposals.

We're going to interview 6 firms on Tuesday and 6 firms on Wednesday. Select 4 - and go from there.

This is just way to important a project for me to hand off to someone else at the last minute. Plus - If I did get someone else to handle it - they'd have to commit for both days AND all subsequent negotiations and everything else that goes along with the project.

As much as I'd like to go see the Prez - there's just no way.

Bummer.

Sooooo - the tickets are going to Nuke'em and a guest of his choosing.

Of course, Nuke's politics are a bit to the right of Attila the Hun.

In the interest of National Security - I went ahead and alerted the Secret Service.

They said they already knew all about the Nuke'a'Nator and would have plenty of tasers on hand.

LOL

Just kidding.

Nuke seems to be really looking forward to going.

With such a small venue - it's gonna be up close and personal for this type of event. I bet he really enjoys it.

If he gets to shake the President's hand - I'm gonna be pissed off big time.

Feeding Mama Raccoon

A short video of feeding one of the raccoons that visit the house. I didn't do any editing. My camera records in .mov format and I don't have any apple editing programs.

I've been experimenting with some online video conversion sites - to convert to .wmv - which is the Microsoft format - for which I do have an editor. But so far, the quality of the converted file is seriously degraded.

So - in this case, I uploaded the raw video.

This is the routine - I get home from work - she shows up and bangs the screen door - I (or Nuke) feed her.

She has us well trained.

If it's raining, we put the food bowl inside the screened porch and prop open the porch door with the block of wood you see sitting on the deck.

Like I said - well trained.



Oh, a quick note about my asking her about her arm. She injured her left arm - she had been limping for a couple of days. No outward sign of damage and nothing looks broken. She's walking a lot better now. Seems to have been a minor injury that is just about healed.

2009 ACC Football Schedule

I really like the Football Helmet Schedule. As always - click on the image for a larger view.

Analog Person

I'm kind of like the cliche - I'm an analog person in a digital world.

I downloaded the image to my pc. Where I then tried to upload it to this blog. Which on every attempt, I got an error message. Something to the effect that the file is corrupt.

Besides being a bit insulting - the message really didn't give me much to go on to fix the problem.

Wondering if the file had a virus or something - I ran it through a couple of anti-virus programs. Nope - nothing wrong here.

So - I went back to the original web site and downloaded a new copy. Tried to upload the new file to this blog. Same result.

After a few attempts - I finally decided that maybe the problem was that the image was .pdf format and maybe that doesn't work with blogger. So - I opened the file with Adobe Acrobat and then saved a copy in .jpg format.

Bingo! No problems uploading.

I guess these are things that some people just 'know'. But for me - it's a struggle.

On the other hand - why couldn't the error message tell me something useful - like - "blogger does not support .pdf format" - or even just a generic "the file format you are uploading is not supported". The message telling me the file might be corrupt was pretty much misleading. Granted, it made me aware that the file wasn't going to upload - but heck - I thought that I might have downloaded a file with a virus or something.

I just hope when the time comes - my walker is manual and not digital.