Sitting next to Disneyland

Today I write from sunny Anaheim, CA where I'm attending NRB, the annual convention for National Religious Broadcasters. The purpose of my traveling across the country is a business opportunity, but some of the participants were going to be here for the convention and I was given an access pass to the exhibition hall.

My father is also here and I've met a bunch of his friends and acquaintances. They are all very outgoing, so it's been a fun to flip the my internal switch and be "on."

The show itself is nice-very professional-and in years past I would have found some old friends from SpaceCom, but they are no longer uplinking religious radio programs. The evangelists and ministers, along with their support folks, are... interesting.

There is so much I could say, but I'm not sure I can do any of it justice, or that anything I write, whether positive or negative, praise or critique, would come out and still be honest. I am in interloper in a parallel world and I am not sure how to report on my experiences over here.

Old Friends

One of the people I still keep in (loose) contact with from the old gang at Purdue is Emily (Swaim). Back then she was just Em, now she's Mrs. Damson. Kristi & I went to their wedding a couple years ago in Indianapolis and really enjoyed the ceremony and trip.

I thought about this last week because they gave everyone a home-made CD of music. The first track are some nice words from Emily and Mike, and the following is just a great selection of songs. I really need to bring the CD in from Kristi's car so I can listen to it more often.

This week I received a very different message from Emily. Her father passed away on Monday after trouble with his heart.

My dad had been fighting an uphill battle over the last several months. We thought that after he entered the hospital 2 1/2 weeks ago, that we'd be able to get him back into good shape, get him a new heart and get him back home. He fought terribly hard, but ultimately lost the battle yesterday afternoon. His heart was down to only 5% of it working, and it just couldn't keep up.

They started a Memory Page for him, an online 'life story' for those of you familiar with Em.

Our hearts go out to her and her family in this time of grief.

Amazon.com--Sell Your Stuff

If you want to set-up an online store, there are competing opportunities from eBay Stores, Amazon zShops, and Yahoo! Stores.

If you don't want to go the trouble of setting up an online store, everyone knows you can sell items on eBay. It's a pretty simple process and if you have something other people really want, you can get a great price for your stuff. Also, it let's regular folks have the chance to earn a living off the wild-and-wooly internet without opening up a whole storefront (see above). But that being said, it's really just a way to have an online garage sale and I doubt any of my readers actually knows someone regularly making good money from eBay.

I have sold some of our stuff on eBay before and I used to take my books to Half Price Books. But I also got mad when I took my books there, I could take in 30 books and get back $4. I have taken three boxes of business books and been offered $20; it was depressing. And selling books on eBay seemed like a lot of work for just selling a book.

So, after years of seeing the 'Sell Yours Here' button on Amazon.com, I decided to give it a try. Wow! Not only is it super easy to indicate you want to sell something, the shipping is already calculated, the payment method is already handled, the money comes in regularly, and I sell more items quicker than I did on eBay! Honest, this thing really works. Take all of that, add in the fact Amazon.com sells much more than just books, and you've got a winning combination.

Network enhancing tool or just a toy?

I want a good home office set-up. I also don't want to throw away money in large chunks and do not want to spend the time to set-up a linux server.

Anyway, despite vowing not to spend money on my little network, I sometimes peruse the market for the little nitches I want to find. I was really happy to find Axentra's new HomeSeries Net-Box. It combines a bunch of things I want, including a good network based hard-drive, wireless access router, etc. But it also includes lots of bonus goodies, including easy set-up of an email and web server. Now isn't that cool!

The other thing I want is a small printer server allowing me to connect to printers via both parallel and USB.

And a new computer, or course.

Boilermaker Football

It was with a bit of sadness I read that Purdue's football recruiting class Ranks at #28. Which isn't bad when you considering the number of colleges in the country, but I sure would have loved to see a top 10 ranking. At least most of the Big 10 is worse.