I'm up earlier then uslual

I had enough sleep going to bed about 3am and listening to Coast and “The other news.” I want to do some blogging and catch the noon markets and get some reading done. The whole idea about getting up early is to get my things done and go into the office as soon as I eat and see Rob to get a form to release my vacation pay for next week.

I decided to go for the Creative Labs Zen and get the external hard drive and WS. This way I can work on that CH story and get it fixed up and sent out. Maybe I can even get myself a cheap laser printer in there as well. They’ve got a sale item for something like $60 for a monochrome laser printer. That’s all I need. The other thing I’ve been wanting to do is to take both Computers over to Fs and get the hard drive from my W98 machine installed into my this computer. The most important thing though is WS, the hard drive, the Zen.

I just checked the markets on the noon news hour and oil is sitting at $132, which is pretty good. Big news is that Ford lost over 8B in sales in the first quarter of this year because nobody is buying SUV’s anymore. I think over the next 5 years we’re going to see less and less SUV’s on the road these days. I hated the minivan and the SUV (Same thing in my books) when they first came out in the 1990’s. They looked cheep and you could tell they looked like they came right off the assembly line. They were a status symbol of the 1990’s along with Rap music, which I never embraced. The SUV reminded me to much of a “Peoples car.” Not like the Volkswagen Beetle of the 60’s and 70’s but something everybody was buying. More bandwagon jumping. Keep up with the Jones’s mentality. Outside of the girlfriend I've had and some minor sucesses, the only thing I liked about the 1990’s was the Internet.

Not much going on today. Before bed I ended up working on my Blogger blog. I’ve got a pretty cool Blog list that gives the name of the Blog and the title and the last time it was updated and an Icon to tell if it’s Blogger or Live Journal etc. I also developed a list of SF resources and some of the online webzines I read. I’m not quite done with that yet. For some reason the Blog list won’t let me enter Elizabeth Bear’s blog or S.I. Viehl’s Blog. I only want to include Blogs that are updated daily or at least a couple of times/week. No more Nick Sagan or Neal Asher type Blogs. Speaking about S.I. Viehl, her Stardoc books seem to be in first person. I prefer first person books. I’ll be reading those books as well this ear.

What else? Today is payday and I think I’m going to get the other 3 Stardoc books this weekend. I want to go in today and pick up the “Mission earth” book but I also want to meet up with Rob to get my vacation pay release form. Last night I asked Moe if he could get a bank report for me, year to date but all he could do was to get one since 2000. I wrote over $500,000 and banked something like $373,000 for a 66.7% bank. But I wanted the bank report from January of this year. I think I wrote something like $60K and banked $48K. Something like that. So far this year I put in 147 shifts. 26 of those have been Fridays. That’s been 121 full shifts and 26 Friday shifts. Or 484 hours at 4 hour shifts and 91 hours at 3.5 hours for a total of 575 hours. I’ve written: $82,583, divide that into 574 hours and that’s a line hour average of $144/l/h. Not bad but they want $200/l/h. The big number will be what’s banked. I also wrote up $11,430 in CC’s and if they all kicked in (which I’ve seen they all don’t) I’d say at least $10K of that is CC banked. Out of $82,583 written I’d say at least 50% of that is banked. If not a little higher but I’m low balling it. $41,250 which includes the CC banked. At 575 hours that’s $72-l/h. This means that for every hour I put in, I bring the company $72 bucks. More or less. In a 4 hour shift I bank about $280 for the company.

Anyway Bloggers, that‘s all for now

e. Jim