From my nephew, Jonathan, via email:

Check out this Kickstarter for a power monitoring device that straps on your existing power meter: http://t.co/Aykdtkab via @kickstarter

My wife and I bit the bullet, so to speak, buying smartphones tonight.  She got the Apple iPhone 4S and I got the Samsung Galaxy SIII.

Her iPhone sits in her purse while she plays games on her iPad 1 this evening and I sit here in the study typing on an old Compaq C501NR laptop computer while the Samsung phone is on the computer desk in the living room where my wife is also watching the TV show, “Leverage.”

Maybe tomorrow I’ll run some throughput speed tests of the AT&T 4G LTE network and later the WiFi hotspot capability using my iPad 2 and a Sylvania Android tablet as test subjects.

One never rests from one’s thought sets developed in previous occupational habits such as test engineer.

When I stopped looking at the rise and fall and rise and fall of daily readership levels, I found freedom in writing blog entries for the sake of a storyline rather than for the sake of making myself popular/likable by people I know only by their favouring my blog with a view and a like or two.

Ernest Hemingway died before I was born — his influence upon me is historical rather than living.  Same for Dorothy Parker.  Which leads to another disjointed thought…

Sadly, I must give this storyline a new direction, one which requires a day or two of concentration on esoteric subjects I know little about.

Talk to you soon…

A nod to Roy and Megan at Walmart; the team at Buenavista; Renee and others at Beauregard’s; Joe and Jenn at KCDC; Phillip, Jordan, Steven and Cedric at AT&T; the usual and new smiling faces at Publix; Theresa at Mapco; Allison at Raffaele’s (note: my mother taught one of the owner’s sons, a student of hers when she was a first grade teacher many years ago, to improve his English by encouraging the family to spend less time speaking Italian at home).

With so many teachers out of work across the country, is now a good time to perform a giant experiment in Chicago, getting rid of the old system and trying a new one?  After all, if the students’ performance is as bad as they say, would it hurt to throw out the broken system and start anew, bringing in a whole slew of nonunion teachers teaching/coaching an immersive education program that provides low pay but high bonuses for teachers whose students become more curious and make continuous improvement an ingrained way of thinking rather than a “must do” chore to survive one’s childhood years before getting out of the system and becoming whatever unmotivated/dropout students tend to become?

Oh well, that’s not where this storyline is going but I had to put it out there.