Sunday was a beautiful day. It was one of those days that just makes you want to get out and explore. I had just such a thing planned for that day, though I didn’t know the weather was going to cooperate so well with my plans.

Back in October I attended an antique auction in Madison, Georgia with some friends. The weather that day had also been gorgeous but I had neglected to bring a camera with me. I still enjoyed the auction and brought back an old desk chair with me. I thought I had gotten myself a very decent bargain that day and I’ve seen nothing to disuade that notion in the days since. I made a note to myself to come back the next chance I got and bring a camera.

Madison Courthouse
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Madison is the town that Sherman refused to burn. I can understand why, the lay of the land and the architecture of the town and houses are beautiful and many of the current structures of the town are civil war era structures. The town also seems to have a very strong commitment to the community from the citizenry. I’m not sure what the economics of the town is but it does seem to have a fairly vibrant industrial base that isn’t immediately apparent. I got lost for a little while looking for the auction house and happened upon the industrial area of the town.

The auction ended up not happening. The container was delayed in shipping and there were no antiques there to bid on. It couldn’t have been a nicer day to have wasted a trip. The gentleman at the door apologized, all red-faced, and I felt very sorry for what he must be having to go through the rest of the day. I grabbed my camera and headed back toward town.

Farm sprayer mistaken for abstract sculpture
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Pulling out of the parking lot and headed back toward town I took the route back out that I had taken in on my original visit. Getting lost brought me in from a different direction. On the way out I saw what I thought was an abstract sculpture set up on the side of the road. I pulled my truck over and got out to take a picture. That’s when I realized that the sculpture was actually a farm sprayer that was intended to be pulled along behind a tractor. I was a little embarassed to be standing on the side of the road photographing a sprayer but I still like the picture.

Madison street scene
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It was still a little before noon when I got into downtown Madison. With it being Sunday there was a little time before the stores and cafes started opening so I walked around the town and took some pictures. It has been a long time since I’ve gone on a photo excursion and I felt a little self concious wielding my camera around town but it didn’t take long before I forgot about everyone else and just enjoyed taking the pictures.

Madison alley
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I ducked into an alley to take a shortcut across to where my truck was parked and discovered that it wasn’t only the streets of Madison that were pretty and that there weren’t only shops in Madison. Walking through the alley I found some courtyards of residences. People live in Madison and from the looks of this courtyard they live very well. This town is truely a jewel.

As much as I was enjoying exploring the town it was time to leave so I got in my truck and headed back toward home on Georgia state highway 83. This road would take me through Bostwick and into Monroe. This is a very rural route with miles of cotton fields and small cattle ranches.

Old House
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Along the way back, just before getting to Bostwick, I stopped at this old abandoned farmhouse to take a few pictures. This house is still in decent enough shape to bring back but it is rapidly falling into disrepair and I fear it may turn the corner within another year to pass the point of decay to where it can’t be restored. The story is that the owner of the house can no longer take care of himself. The house was built back in the late 1800s. I hope it can be saved. There appears to be a good bit of property to go along with the old house. I’m not sure if the old store house you see in the background at the right edge is a part of the property but it is also a structure that needs to be saved and restored.

Bostwick Cotton Gin
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Bostwick is the home of Georgia’s annual Cotton Festival. About the only thing left of Bostwick is the cotton gin, the Masonic Lodge and the Susie Agnes Hotel. It has some other businesses but those three stuctures dominate the town. The Cotton Festival, in the fall, fills the town with people and tents are set up selling crafts, the barbeque pits at the Masonic Lodge are covered with meats smoking and a display of antique tractors entices everyone to mill around just looking. The cotton gin is also in full production at that time and little pieces of cotton lint swirl around in the air.

The Susie Agnes Hotel
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One other distinction that Bostwick has is that the film My Cousin Vinny had a few scenes filmed there. I haven’t seen the movie myself but I’ve been told that the hotel and the cotton gin played a couple of minor roles in the movie. The old farm house, above, I’m told was also briefly in the movie as a part of the roadside scenery in one of the scenes involving a car driving down the road. Maybe I’ll bet the DVD this week and watch the movie.

Tow plane and glider
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As I was driving on into Monroe on my way back home I looked up and saw a glider sailing in for a landing off to my left. I found the Monroe airport and found that they were having some sort of meet or competition or just a bunch of glider pilots having fun soaring on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. It was a very fun Sunday drive for me.

.. is taking a break. Christmas and all the rest will keep me too busy to write anything here for the next few days. Check back after the first of the year. I promise I’ll be back by then, if not before.

In the meantime, Merry Christmas to you and a Happy New Year too.

Back thirty years ago I began my first official employment with a company called McDonald’s. For a high school student it wasn’t bad employment. The hours were flexible and the lessons I learned were valuable to me in every job I’ve taken since then. Even though I was only making $1.60/hr the pay wasn’t bad for the times.

With all that said I’ve been saddened in recent years over the decline in service, food quality and cleanliness at the McDonald’s restaurants and I’m not surprised at all that they have finally, after 47 years in business posted their first quarterly loss. Some folks are saying it’s due to the heavy competition from rival Burger King while others are saying it’s due to the unhealthy menu that they are offering. I disagree.

McDonald’s and Burger King have been in fierce competition with each other for decades and for all the lipservice people are paying to eating more healthy diets when lunch time comes around, you’ve got limited time to eat and your stomach is growling healthy food is no longer the primary concern. Sloppy service and stale food is their problem. If I can’t get fast, fresh food served to me with a smile in a clean environment I’m going elsewhere. For the past three years that’s what I’ve been doing. It looks like other’s have been doing the same.

I just got a new domain up and running email for a business I’m starting and mail had not been working for 45 minutes when I got hit with spam. In the last two hours I’ve been hit with spam for non-existant users on this domain six times. I’m about to give up on e-mail as a business tool. I don’t know what the answer is to this and I’m becoming more and more of the opinion that the answer is “nothing”.

ElcomSoft was acquitted by a jury of violation of the DMCA. A lot of folks are cheering the verdict and view it as a path towards the overturning of much of that law. I think maybe people are doing more wishful thinking than analysis of the verdict.

Orin Kerr gives a wonderful explanation of why ElcomSoft was acquitted and it has nothing to do with flaws in the DMCA. The DMCA only allows for criminal prosecution when an offender has “willfully” violated the law. Unlike most laws where ignorance is an excuse, the DMCA is so complex that there was a need to give protection to those who “accidently” violated law out of a lack of understanding or ignorance of the law.

I just heard Jerry Douglas on Live365 and loved his bluegrassy rendition of the Jimi Hendrix song, “Hey Joe”. The internet just sold another CD.

Bruce Schneier addresses counterattacks in this month’s Crypto-gram. He makes an important point:

Our society does not give us the right of revenge, and wouldn’t work very well if it did. Our laws give us the right to justice, in either the criminal or civil context. Justice is all we can expect if we want to enjoy our constitutional freedoms, personal safety, and an orderly society.

Anyone accused of a crime deserves a fair trial. He deserves the right to defend himself, the right to face his accused, the right to an attorney, and the right to be held innocent until proven guilty.

Vigilantism flies in the face of these rights. It punishes people before they have been found guilty. Angry mobs lynching someone suspected of murder is wrong, even if that person is actually guilty. The MPAA disabling someone’s computer because he’s suspected of copying a movie is wrong, even if the movie was copied. Revenge is a basic human emotion, but revenge only becomes justice if carried out by the State.

Brokers in intellectual property are facing a lot of problems in protecting their property. There is no doubt about that and desperate times do deserve drastic measures but there is a limit to how drastic those measures should be allowed go. We have a system in place that we need to work inside of to protect intellectual property. If we ignore the rights granted in the constitution then we are also ignoring the document that is the foundation of our copyright laws and all our other laws.

In a democratic republic leaders ought to consider stepping aside for the good of the country when they find themselves doing more harm than good.

Burningbird talks a little about comfort foods. You know, the stuff you crave when things aren’t going just right for you. You might enjoy them even in the good times along with everything else but this is the stuff you want and crave during the bad times.

She mentioned mac and cheese being one of hers. Let me tell you a little something about mac and cheese. When I was in elementary school we were strongly encouraged to clean our plates. Now the food in my elementary school cafeteria was never haute cuisine at any time but the mac&cheese they served made every thing else look like it came from a five star restaurant. This stuff was baked a crispy golden brown with a little black around the edges and it was served in bricks. I hated that stuff. Until this day I still can’t eat mac and cheese without gagging so I don’t. Add a little tomato sauce or ground beef to it and I’m fine with it but just plain old mac and cheese makes me sick.

What is comfort food for me is meat loaf served with mashed potatoes and gravy with fried okra and collard greens. If I can’t get collard greens then turnip greens will do but I prefer collards. I like a little cornbread with it too and iced tea for a drink. That meal feels me up and makes me feel good inside even when everything out side is falling to pieces.

What are some of yours?

On Thursday Time Online reported on Trent Lott’s Segregationist College Days and leaned heavily on comments made by former CNN President Tom Johnson to portray Lott as a leader of the faction to keep Sigma Nu a whites only fraternity.

I have no real doubt that that isn’t the case, but, reading the article left me feeling that Johnson has an axe to grind with Lott and has for a very long time and it could be that Lott’s role in the debate back then could have been exaggerated by Johnson. Johnson claims his motivation was against splitting the fraternity while Lott’s motivation was against integration. That is most likely the case but I would have liked to have seen more sources cited in the article.

Let me make one thing clear here, if I were a Republican I would be calling for Lott to resign his position as the Republican leader of the Senate. I don’t think the party ought to call for his resignation of his senate seat, that’s up to the citizens of Mississippi to decide that, but I wouldn’t want him leading my party. I don’t believe he is an active racist and I don’t believe, on an intellectual level, that he still believes in segregation. On a gut level, though, I believe he cringes a little every time he sees a biracial couple. This should not be viewed as being supportive or Senator Lott. I’m not.

What I’m getting at is that I expect more out of Time in their stories than this. It takes more than a bitter rivals memories of something that happened around 40 years ago to give a story like this credibility. I would think that Time would be able to come to this conclusion as well as I have.

As I mentioned below my office was closed down on Tuesday leaving me out of work. Yesterday I sat at home and made phone calls and also had an appointment with a couple of fellows to discuss some collaborative business efforts. While I was sitting at home the doorbell rang and I found a package delivered by UPS at my door. I thought it might have been something ordered by my wife for Christmas and that it might be something that she would prefer I didn’t see right then so I took it up to our bedroom and left it there for her to find when she returned from work.

When she got home she had no idea where the package came from so then it hit me, it was probably some little Christmas treat from my former employer that had been ordered prior to the decision to close the office. I was correct.

A number of thoughts ran through my mind at that point. I guess you can imagine a few of them, but the two overriding and conflicting thoughts were, How dare them just toss me and my coworkers aside and send this token the very next day and That was really pretty nice of them to send this out to the employees with the financial problems they are facing.

I really didn’t expect to feel any bitterness toward my former employer but there is some there. From a strictly objective point of view they made a decision that I most likely would have made myself given their distance from the Atlanta office. From my feeling side I can’t help but feel a little betrayed. I’ve worked with them for five months and was kept covered up for three of those months and told I had done an excellent job.

Last week I put together a demo application for a prospective customer that went off with rave reviews from the customer and others in my company. This week I’m calling old contacts and looking real hard at the work I did on that demo and thinking about the lack of a non-compete contract… and looking for a phone number.

I really enjoy reading Mark’s posts on tech stuff but this is the writing that first drew me to his site and it’s also what keeps him on my blogroll.

Well, I walked into the office this morning and was told that operations were being shut down in Atlanta. As of 5:30 this afternoon I became unemployed. So, here is my resumé. Also, for those folks that require it, here it is again as a word document. That’s about as open as I could get as to my real identity. The funny thing is that I feel worse for the company that just laid me off than I do for myself. They just got themselves a new competitor at a time that they really can’t afford the extra competition.

Anyway, if you know of a company in the Southeast that really needs to get a handle on their plant floor data I’d like to talk to them. I think I have something to offer them.

Some folks are just whacked.

Sometimes you read things and wonder why would someone think of writing about this. I’m not saying it isn’t interesting. I’m not saying it’s useless. I just wonder what makes people think up this stuff.

“Hundreds of years of trial and error have led to the strongest way of lacing our shoes,” says mathematician Burkard Polster: the ’straight-lace’ and ‘criss-cross’ methods. But there are about 400 million different “reasonable” ways of weaving one lace through a shoe with seven eyelets down each side, says Polster, who works at Monash University in Victoria, Australia.

I don’t doubt that someone will find this information extremely valuable one day but why did anyone think about studying this?