So, if you recall, in this previous journal I was talking about a friend who made by hand four engines. You may also recall that two of them were cosmetically altered leaving only two of the style I so desperately admire. Of the two, my good friend Bob owns one. The other appeared lost to history.

So, in my job at work I am hopefully migrating into more of a trainer role. As part of that job I will be working to better my department as well as another. This would include training new hires as well as bettering the existing staff.

In order to find weaknesses within our staff I would be monitoring some of our staff's customer interactions and then grading them. Fine and dandy.

Ok, so to sum up in one of those executive summary things:

I gots me a new jorb working for Sun Microsystems.

If you want to reach me at work, my email address is the pride and joy of the job:

I'm simply god at sun dot com.

That's right, I'm god.

You got a problem with that?

Didn't think so.

Aserejé, ja de je de jebe tu de jebere sebiunouva
majavi an a bugui an a buididipí

Oh what wonders we develop when we link trains and computers. The Union Pacific engine 3895 (called a Challenger) is on the move, and you can track its current position live via the Internet.

From this page you can see the overall planned route and the current location. If you zoom all the way in you can get street level maps of the area and see how the tracks flow across the country.

First, I brought you some information about the Pepto-Bismol commercial. Well, I have caught the thing on tape (unfortunately it was done at a poor quality by my mom) and I have dubbed it to mp2 AND I have 50 screen captures from it.

I will be posting them to my web space (not my web server, blame Dan for the 7 month down time, 7 months, I don't know if I should laugh or cry).

As some of you may know there is a recent Pepto-Bismol TV ad where there are these people standing in line to use a photocopier when they are each struck with a different gastro-intestinal ailment. And they then do a dance about it, and their magic cure: Pepto-Bismol.

Well, IMHO, the diarrhea girl is fine, and she's got the moves. (See this previous discussion on the topic) I also think I shouldn't eat at their cafeteria.

So, as you know, I love trains. I have a nice collection of train things. Well, all of my stuff is in what is known as HO-Scale. But, I've spent much of my life belonging to a club that has a large O-Scale railroad. Several years ago a fellow member of this club built from scratch four models of my favorite steam locomotive.

First, the good stuff. I'm going to be at the TCF computer show on saturday. If any of you are going and want to meet up, let me know.

Second, the bad stuff. Stop reading now if you don't like hearing sad tales about pets. This will go progressively worse as you read on.

Warning, this JE contains some painful descriptions. While this is partly to share what I do it is also to solicit input on some of my questions I pose. It is also NOT a recommendation to anyone and I do not encourage anyone to attempt what I do. I didn't just sit down one day and decide to electrocute myself; it has taken me years to get to this point. Oh, and sorry it is long.

So, the other evening I get a craving for a snack. I eye up some of the ice cream and decide to blend it up for my beverage and fix myself a burger. A lovely combo IMHO.

So, I put the ice cream in the blender, add some milk and some chocolate syrup and as I begin to blend it I notice there's all these people filling up the lawn.

It seems that not a single one was Jewish (possibly because of my combining of meat and dairy).

Thus I feel I should point out that:

As you may recall there was a weird woman that came to my door a few weeks ago.

Well, I suspect she has attempted to make further contact. I'm sure it was my charming sense of humor and dashing looks.

I don't know about in your neck of the woods, but around my place the several local TV stations like to compete for viewers. They like to use different lures and quote different statistics about themselves.

There are several fronts, with a few winners in my mind, but the battle of interest here is for traffic. I will post my breakdown of the other battles following this discussion.

For those of you who don't know the Iron Chef: Battle of the Masters series is coming soon to FoodTV (starting April 23). Well, the thing is there appear to be three "challengers" (I can't exactly say "Americans" since Puck at least didn't start that way) going against two Iron Chefs. That seems to be one extra "challenger." The commercials also tout a "surprise twist" of some sorts.

We are all probably aware of the fight by one Michael Newdow to have the phrase "Under God" removed from the defined pledge of allegiance (as I understand it, those who wish to add the phrase are welcomed, at least that is my feeling on the matter).