OOOOO K sir I’ll let Senator Jim Webb know…

I was hoping for a town hall meeting but what I got was… “Well the Senator is going to Asia for a two week tour starting Sunday, and even the people who work here have not been told of a certain date for any Town Hall events”.  I asked the young man to pass on my “strongly opposed” sentiment to the Health Care bill and the Cap and Trade legislation – and the answer I got was “OOOOO K sir I’ll let Senator Jim Webb know…”  It truly sounded like the Senator’s aid through I was some kind of a nut.

I did fill out the message form on Senator Webb’s website.

“Senator I am really disappointed you have not scheduled any meetings with your constituents to discuss the health care issue.   Are you avoiding a public debate, or perhaps do you feel it is not important? I am not thrilled as a taxpayer to finance your two-week, five-nation tour of Asia “to explore opportunities to advance U.S. interests in Burma and the region”.   If anything sir I would have hoped you could seek out ways to advance U.S. interests here at home where there are grave concerns about our ability to maintain even this weak economy.  What could be more important than listening to the people who elected you?”

http://webb.senate.gov/contact/

And here is an interesting account of someone else who tried to get the same information:

http://swacgirl.blogspot.com/2009/08/jim-webb-has-no-townhalls-scheduled.html

The best example of a cowardly politician is Senator Mark Warner who is only taking moderated questions on Google – no meetings – no live response – in fact, so far no response…

Here is a typical question posed by someone in Richmond… “Sen Warner, you said during July you would answer our questions. It is now August, but I don’t see any responses. Also, you have no public meetings scheduled to discuss healthcare during the Aug. break. Are you afraid to face your constituents?”

After figuring out which button to push I submitted this question: “Senator, why are you so afraid to answer our questions about healthcare?”

BTW You have to log in with a (free) Google Account to participate http://moderator.appspot.com/?embed=#0

There does not appear to be a place on Senator Warner’s website to contact him by email – but if you want to call or write to the Honorable Senator Mark R. Warner;

101 W. Main Street
Suite 4900
Norfolk, VA 23510
Phone Number: 757-441-3079
Fax Number: 757-441-6250

-or-

459A Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Phone: 202-224-2023
Fax: 202-224-6295

http://warner.senate.gov./public/

here is another interesting blog entry about Senator Warner:

http://swacgirl.blogspot.com/2009/08/will-mark-warner-face-virginia-citizens.html

And next I went to Congressman J. Randy Forbes (VA-04) site… apparently Congressman Forbes has scheduled a meeting… sort of. It’s a free “Seniors Protection Workshop” to be held at the Chesapeake City Council Chambers on Wednesday, August 26th at 10:00 a.m.  It is sort of about health care, but not covering the current health care legislation. In fact is it intended mostly for senior citizens according to his web site.

(https://forbes.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=140880)

Here is the question I posed to Congressman Forbes:

“Are you scheduling any public town hall type hearings dealing with health care? Our two senators are apparently under their desk on this issue – one is fleeing on a two week Asia junket with no town hall meetings scheduled, while the other one is only taking questions through Google Moderator and since July has answered exactly none.”

I would like to make my voice heard – but so far I can’t find anyone to listen.  I mean literally – can not find anyone to listen… I am not just a frustrated citizen – there really does appear to be no one in Washington listening – here is a post revealing that with the notable exception of Democrat Tom Perriello,  pretty much no Virginia Politician has any plans whatsoever to face the citizens this summer: (it is a PDF file)

http://www.richmondteaparty.com/TownHallMeetingsAug2009-1.pdf

You people in Washington should be absolutely ashamed of yourself.

At the time I was the production Director for WFOG radio. The week preceding the convention as part of the pre-promotion I had the opportunity to interview Mr. Doohan by phone at his home in Redmond Washington. I tried to keep the interview interesting by focusing on Jimmy Doohan, and not just the Character he played on Star Trek – but you be the judge. Here it is, almost 18:00 unedited and real life. There is a point where he corrects my pronunciation of his last name – his son called to ask for money during the interview, this was the real deal.

The following week I toured the real USS Enterprise with some of the convention celebs. By some weird stroke of luck I remembered where I stashed some pictures I took during that tour. In this picture I am standing with Actress Terry Farrell from Deep Space Nine, Michael O’Hare the original Commander of Babylon 5, Herman F. Zimmerman the Chief Production Designer for Star Trek Next Generation and DS9, and another actress who’s name totally escapes me. But I think I did pretty good remembering Farrell, O’Hare, and Zimmerman after 15 years!

Subject: Explanation of how to get $25 off your Sonlight order (for a very limited time)

Dear Tom,

I am deeply embarrassed. Yesterday afternoon, in preparing my letter about five reasons to order sooner rather than later, we accidentally attached the wrong subject line to the email you received. I had prepared that subject line for a different email headed to a group of people who had never purchased from Sonlight before. I wanted to see if a special offer might help these non-customers place their first order.

The subject line for that email offered $25 off the recipient’s Sonlight order. The email these non-customers received specified a time limit on the offer, as well as a minimum order total of $250.

This morning I discovered we sent that subject line to everyone who has bought anything from Sonlight in the last two years!

Yikes … NOT what we had intended! Talk about expensive mistakes.

But I talked with John and Sarita, who said, “You gave your word. You must fulfill your promise … Since you’ve got lemons, do what you can to make some lemonade.”

So we’re going to do something we pray doesn’t completely swamp our computer system and warehouse crew. I can imagine it may slow our ability to process orders for a few days, but…

We have decided to honor the promise of my last email to you in the following manner:

Since you’ve ordered from us before, we’re extending the offer (originally intended for families new to Sonlight) to you for a very limited time. Place your order worth $250 or more (not including shipping) no later than 11:59 p.m. (MDT) tomorrow (7/23) and you will receive $25 off. That’s in addition to any Sonlighter Club discounts you may receive.

Just enter PRXDY in the box marked “Special Offer Code” at Step 2 of check out.

I hope this little bit of “lemonade” is a blessing to you.

Sincerely,

Tim Heil

Customer Relations Manager

Sonlight Curriculum, Ltd.

Each uses the same technology originally known as “Magnetophon” and invented by the Germans during the 1930′s. (more info)  The information is stored by passing a generated magnetic field to a ribbon of plastic tape impregnated with some form of ferrous material.  The little do-dad that generates the magnetic field is called a record head. The tape becomes magnetized in a certain pattern.   Then when passed in front of a similar do-dad called a playback head the magnetic field is transformed back once again into an audio signal.   In my mind this was a kind of magic– especially for the time.

Well the problem is that the magnetic tape is wound into a spool inside the cassette. Eventually the magnetism passes from where it is stored on the tape to the section it is wrapped around. At some point the magnetic field reaches a sort of equilibrium and the original sound or picture is not retrievable.  So the dozens of recordings I had stored away will actually fade away.

Not Ed Scales

I started running the tapes through my studio to get them in MP3 format and found some interesting stuff. Mostly old air checks of me in the early 80′s on the radio in Lakeland Florida. Routinely each radio announcer would record their show on a cassette deck that was wired to record only when the microphone was turned on.  In the jargon of the business it was sometimes called a “telescope” as it condensed an entire workday into a 30 or 40 minute recording. You can hear the song starting and then the tape jumps to the end of the song when the announcer next turns on the mike. The program director would then review your“telescope” to give you constructive critique – or in my case to tell me to stop talking so much.

The one below is pretty long – 45 minutes! It was a show I did on WQPD on a Monday night somewhere in March or April of 1983. I had to figure that out by some clues on the tape. A really talented high school kid named Ed Scales was my guest and we did several improvised “bits”.  Basically I got on the control room studio phone a pretended to talk to a character that Ed performed from the adjoining studio.  We did this live and without rehearsal. In fact in the one where I “interview” Maurice Gibb I had no idea what Ed was going to do. He came on the phone in a falsetto voice that totally cracked me up. Since Ed was in school I knew the recording was made before June. One of the last comments I make on the recording introduces the number one hit song of the day, Billy Jean by Michael Jackson. That was not released until February of 1983 – thus this recording had to be made in March or April.

The last eight minutes of the recording is the air check of the next announcer, Woody Boyer.

Then I turned on my flighty computer to find it had not reset text in an out of office message. I had been monitoring my email by blackberry  Thursday afternoon and Friday while traveling – but with the flighty computer turned off I did not know the auto responder function was still on until….  134 emails went out at 6:34am Letting everyone know I would be out of the office from December 19th 2008 through the 22nd.  Before I could answer back a did receive a lot of emails which let me know it was already 2009.

The day got better after that. (Well so far anyway)

I kind of feel like Movie Critic Richard Roper – one of the guys on the TV show At The Movies. Sometimes he comments on how the movie he was reviewing was so bad it was painful to have to sit through, but that since his job is to review the film, he had to do it. That–s exactly how I felt by the time I got to the so called social network site called tagged dot com. That one really sucks.

But not all of them are like that, and some are important to understand. I was talking about this topic tonight with Marty Walser, one of my colleagues here at Web Teks. He pointed out something about social networks that gave the topic clarity I want to share. There is a big difference between a true social network site like facebook, or myspace and one of my new favorite sites; del.icio.us. Sites like MySpace share thoughts. Sites like del.icio.us or LinkedIn share information.

Digg is another example of a social networking site that is about gauging the popularity of something on the internet. It–s sort of like eavesdropping on what people are talking about around the water cooler. Mostly people look up inane and innocuous things, but when you see a trend evolving it could be an indicator of a change approaching. I guess you can say it–s the 21st century equivalent of our hunter gatherer ancestors listening closely to the dark. Most nights nothing happens, but you want to be ready if a beast approaches.

O.K. – Back to Marty. He cracks me up with some of his comments– Today he was doing a usability report on a client–s corporate portal. We often are asked to evaluate sites to let the client know what might be improved to make a site more user friendly. So today’s Marty Quote of the day “every new click is a mystery– but I can’t put that in a note to the client”.

Now that’s funny

BTW my picture on MySpace is awful – and I have not taken enough time to figure out how to change it ;(

Social Networks: useful or enormous Waste of Time? by
Tom Anthony is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Marty Quote of the day: Those guys at (deleted name of company) are not The Brightest Tools In the Shed I just love a good mixed metaphor. Another Marty ism … He is not the Sharpest Bowling Ball in the Bag

When you say Web 2.0 what the heck are you talking about? Social Networking. But unless you dive in a little bit that pretty much is the same as saying flux capacitor. If you know what it means it has a lot of relevance, if you don’t it just sounds like common words strung together for no particular reason. By the way Doc Brown used his flux capacitor to get Back To The Future.

My position as Vice President of an eBusiness company means I have to know what Web 2.0 means. Not just that; I have to be able to explain it to people. Our company (Web Teks) specializes in strategic planning of business Initiatives which have some Internet or web based component. My particular niche is in media with a deep background in broadcasting.

With broadband now widely available this turbo charged World Wide Web is like every person in the world with access to a computer having their own newspaper, Radio Station, and Television Channel all at the same time. So with the media background in my hip pocket I embark today on a mission to question all things related to the business of the Internet and to the best of my ability explain it to anyone interested. To that end I have blogged these notes in my personal blog, and my stumbled in blog.

Next out we’ll look at some important 2.0 sites like del.icio.us, Plaxo.com, Linkedin.com, and jigsaw.com. Stand by — I think (and hope) this is going to get pretty good

Tom Anthony and Dick Marcinko

I wanted to take a second to let you know how frightening- no terrorizing a man Dick Marcinko is. Last night he spoke at the Virginia Beach Forum. I was very fortunate to have the chance to chat with Dick back stage for a few minutes, and of course personally he is a great person to talk to. He is also a very smart man. The freighting thing about Dick is not who he is, although he is the last person in the world you want to have as an enemy. The freighting thing was how he described with firsthand knowledge the extreme shortcomings of our national security. I picked up his book Rogue Warrior on the way to the show last night. It is an excellent book. Here is the link to Dicks bio and here is the short version printed on the Virginia Beach Forum web site:

You may know him as Demo Dick, Shark Man of the Delta, the author of the New York Times best-selling autobiography Rogue Warrior, the creator and commander of SEAL Team SIX, the U.S. Navy’s first and only counter terrorism command, or as the host of talk radios America on Watch. However you know Dick Marcinko, you’re going to be intrigued, entertained and maybe even a little provoked by his blunt take on national security, terrorism and the adaptation of modern technology.