Category: business

If you could go back in time and leave yourself a message, what would it be?

We have all had that dream or thought, especially when we think of all the stupid things we did as kids. Some of us wonder how we survived it.

While my book Echoes of Tomorrow deals with this prospect in a science-fictional way, we all know that time, at least at present, does not allow do-overs.

The difference between knowledge and wisdom boils down to one question:

Just because we can, should we?

We just lived through a pandemic that still has lasting effects on many. COVID was most probably an early attempt at biological warfare situated in China (and other countries) to give the United States plausible deniability.

That is most probably why there were so many Biden-era Democratic pardons, including Anthony Fauci’s. To make a virus even more dangerous through gain-of-function research is about as irresponsible as creating other weapons of mass destruction, i.e., nuclear weapons.

We will never know if the dropping of the first atomic bombs was the only way to put an end to World War II.

Through treasonous acts, several spies shared (or sold) nuclear information to the Russians, making technological adolescence a real and immediate thing.

Today we are creating AI and robots that if given weapons would make The Terminator look like Winnie the Effing Pooo!

While Echoes of Tomorrow addresses this as a theme, there is another novel I am currently editing in which mankind goes to Mars after making Earth uninhabitable. Unlike Echoes in Time, where aliens facilitate time travel, Quiet Dust is set in a future where humans have already been on Mars for over forty years. Subscribe to this blog for more info on when it drops.

There are theories suggesting that evidence of humanity will be erased over time. The reasons humanity may never make it off the planet in any meaningful way are as follows.

The Great Filter from the Fermi Paradox is the correct framing of the problem. Sagan’s technological adolescence is likely a real and significant component of that filter, perhaps the dominant one for civilizations that reach our stage. But it probably is not the only filter. The total improbability of a civilization reaching interstellar maturity is likely the product of multiple bottlenecks, with self-destruction during technological adolescence being the final and perhaps most severe.

The darkest implication is this: even if a civilization survives its adolescence, it may face recurring filters. Each new transformative technology (nuclear, AI, nanotech, or whatever comes next) reopens the vulnerability window. Adolescence may not be a single phase but a repeating pattern, each iteration more dangerous than the last. If that is true, then the two frameworks converge completely. The Great Filter is technological adolescence, experienced not once but perpetually, with the cumulative probability of survival approaching zero over sufficient time.

So, before I leave you for today, I have an idea that needs wings. It needs to get to Elon Musk, who has the means to make it happen.

This device would visit the earth once in a lifetime to remind those here not to be an idiot!

We sent two satellites, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, off into interstellar space on one-way trips to nowhere. What if, like Halley’s Comet, we created a device with a similar elongated orbit that passes by Earth every hundred years, making itself known? In that way, after we either blow the planet to bits through our hubris or our flat-out stupidity, we could send future inhabitants a message, much like we might send to our younger selves:

“Don’t do this, idiot!”

Why the future? Have you watched the news? Do you see how irresponsible the media has become and how violence seems to perpetuate into more violence?

Money for clicks and viewership for advertisements are more important than the boring truth.

Dehumanizing your political opponent will trigger the emotionally unbalanced to act, and politicians know this. Politicians are desperate and will do anything to keep power, including importing twenty million new voters. Power is money and those two are addictive, much like Felony Glitter…

I hold little hope for humanity, and I have to wonder if Elon’s vision of Mars has him thinking the same thing.

Please like, comment, and follow, as well as read Echoes of Tomorrow.

Authors like me need all the assistance we can get in order to provide more thought-provoking, entertaining novels for you, when you are not watching hypnotoad programming, designed to make you disbelieve your lying eyes.

my version of hypnotoad feeding the masses lies.

No Juice, No Problem, Candles still work.

🚨 About That Power Outage in Hunt County… 🚨

So, last week over 4,000 people lost power around 12:02 AM. The cause? Absolutely nothing to see here, folks. No clear explanation. Zero. Nada.And wouldn’t you know it—the outage just happened to be centered around Cash, Texas. You know, the exact area where a 285-megawatt data center is being proposed. But sure. It was probably just squirrels. 🐿️ Oh honey.We need a Nick Shirley investigating things around here. Speaking of which, where is the media?! When was the public meeting about this? Whats going to happen to property values? Is this Data Center going to improve our lives?

Here’s What’s Actually Happening

Core Scientific acquired a 265-acre site in March 2026 to build a massive AI and high-performance computing data center right here in our backyard—rural Hunt County, near Greenville.The Details:

70 acres of land (formerly owned by Telios)
Consulting with Cash SUD for water and Farmers Electric Cooperative (FEC) for power
ERCOT approved the interconnection back in 2024
Operations expected by 2027, full buildout by 2029 I am speculating its off 3805.

“Local Approval?” That’s Cute.

Here’s the kicker: Texas counties have virtually no authority to approve or deny these projects.As one county judge put it: “By the time I hear about it, they’ve already bought their land, so it’s not like they’re asking our permission to show up.”They “ask” us as a symbolic gesture. Meanwhile, folks still have “No Data Centers” signs in their yards. This has been in the works for a while, and someone knew before we did. Follow the money—there’s a LOT of development suddenly flowing into this area. High-occupancy housing, apartments, mobile homes… Greenville is buzzing.

The Good, The Bad & The Loud

If you moved out here for peace and quiet? Brace yourself.🔊 Noise: Data centers are LOUD. You can hear them for miles.💧 Water: They consume massive amounts of resources.⚡ Electricity: They get discounted rates. Will you or I? Nope. In fact, expect your bills to go UP.💰 Tax Revenue: Will it benefit us? Keep dreaming.

At this point, I might as well add CORZ to my portfolio and skip buying hearing aids—I won’t be able to afford them anyway.Thoughts? Drop them in the comments below. ⬇️

About the Picture: That is the cover for a book I wrote.

Nothing But Time

Thirty years.That’s what he gave them. Thirty years of missed recitals, cold dinners, and promises whispered into voicemails that were never saved. Thirty years of believing the corner office was the destination—not the cage.They gave him a gold watch. They gave him a cake. They gave him a handshake and a cardboard box.And just like that, the man who had built something… was nothing.

The merger was clean. Surgical. He never saw it coming.Now the house echoes with the ghost of a marriage he neglected. The children who grew up without him have lives of their own—lives he watched from the periphery like a stranger pressing his face to the glass.He traded everything for a seat at a table that was never his.And now? Now he has nothing but time.

Then the letter arrives.Charlie’s gone.His college roommate. The one who laughed too loud, dreamed too big, and once grabbed him by the shoulders and said, “You’re gonna wake up one day and wonder where it all went, man.”Charlie left him the farm.Sixty acres of overgrown fields, a farmhouse with a sagging porch, and a horizon that stretches further than any quarterly report ever could.

He came to bury his past.He didn’t expect it to save his life.

Nothing But Time

A story of what we lose—and what we can still become.

Featured Post

Timedok

What is it, and why does it have that name?

The premise is this: Years ago, I was one of those inquisitive kids who took things apart to discover how they worked. When I was old enough to push a lawnmower, I learned that many in my area didn’t like mowing grass. This was long before there was such a thing as a lawn service. Why? I fought to collect $2 for the front and $2 for the backyards. That includes raking, edging, and so on.

Pop refused to let me use the ‘family lawn mower.’ Had that been my kid, I would have encouraged it. Pop failed to see the value of teaching kids leadership through stretching their wings. The cost of that ‘family mower’ was nothing compared to the growth potential of his son…me.

Fate or God intervened. On the way home from school one day (via the alleys on garbage day), someone was discarding an old mower that had seen better days.

I brought it home, went straight to the library, and found a book on small engine repair that helped me fix the troublesome item.

The journey had just begun, and at the ripe old age of eleven, I had to learn not only about the care of a lawn mower but also about marketing and business.

I grew that business by purchasing used equipment at garage sales and, yes, being mindful of taking the alleys home on trash days…just in case.

Fueling my interest in electronics, I embarked on a self-taught journey into radio and TV at the age of eight. I proudly earned my first amateur radio license at thirteen, becoming a certified operator.

You guessed it: I purchased a broken color TV at a garage sale. I fixed it, and I had the first color TV in our household. It wasn’t just a TV, mind you; it was a Curtis Mathes console entertainment system. The $50 I spent back then I earned by mowing yards was a huge chunk of change for the 60’s.

In the days before the Internet, the library acted as my personal Google, where I could find answers to any question. In those days, computers and electronics were filled with more tubes than transistors, creating a maze of wires and glowing glass.

I built the transmitter for my ham radio activities from used parts gathered from cannibalized radios and TVs that I bought at garage sales or brought home on garbage day. One man’s trash is another’s treasure, and this was not lost on me, even at that tender age.

We only had a few channels back in the day, and they went off the air after the nightly news. Books were my escape from reality when not working on something outside of the home.

Fast forward a few years, and the world around us has changed drastically.

Church had become a prominent fixture in my life, providing me a sense of community and spiritual fulfillment. I only say that to weave the tapestry of the Timedok story together.

At church, my reputation for being able to fix things, quickly spread. Despite all the VCRs and other items I repaired for my church family, I never received any payment. I never once requested that of them.

To this day, I consider them family, and the bonds we formed then are still strong.

One of my friends approached me, holding a broken file marker date stamp machine, and asked, “Could you possibly repair this?”

I shrugged, and from that simple gesture, Timedok was born.

Since that day in 1995, I have repaired thousands of them, spending countless hours tinkering with their intricate mechanisms.

I stopped marketing the business because word of mouth alone keeps me busy enough. The machines that make it to my shop, after failed repair attempts from other ‘companies,’ always take the longest to fix. The reasons are simple, not just anyone can fix these things.

Even though the original concept design dates back to 1939, these machines are still indispensable.

Despite technological advancements, the need for them has not entirely disappeared, and unless there is a significant shift in government practices, it is unlikely to ever happen.

Every year since I became a dealer for Rapidprint, they have consistently increased the price on all their products by at least 2%. Those machines have increased from around $500 to over $1000.00.

Their competition has not followed suit in drastically raising their prices, which leads me to believe that Widmer will eventually gain a more significant portion of the market share as Rapidprint prices itself out of the business of file stamp machines.

Even though future price increases may occur, Timedok has chosen to keep its labor prices unchanged.

Over time, the cost of goods and services has been steadily rising.

The freight charges from Connecticut to Dallas for one machine are upwards of $65. These companies are likely facing financial difficulties and are increasing prices across the board to generate more income.

Small companies like mine were adversely affected by the economic downturn caused by COVID and the subsequent shifts in the business landscape.

Point of this blog post….?

If you need assistance or plan to buy a new one of these machines, be sure to do so before the end of this year. Right after you folks (the government) get your new budgets, they conveniently change their prices. dok At Timedok.com

When not working on clocks, I focus on my writing career because it complements my lifestyle.

Stay tuned for the latest updates on my novels and short stories and my work as the Executive Director of The Carrollton League of Writers.

My latest novel, Earth’s Last Hope, can be found at this link.

-Best

Featured Post

Honesty, Integrity, and Morality

When living in a new community, finding an honest broker becomes necessary.

One of the first things that I needed was a plumber. Let me begin by telling you that plumbing is not rocket science. I am not denigrating the vocation; most plumbers I know are successful because they have the right stuff when they have a job.

I also want to emphasize that plumbers, mechanics, electricians, and so on must make a profit.

If they charge $100 for five minutes of work, you are not paying for the five minutes but for the years of experience.

Some plumbing projects don’t require years of experience. A little common sense and research could be enough. I researched the problem and purchased the correct part and tool to replace the defective valve. I put the project on my to-do list.

Another project involved plumbing gas. I wanted a quote from a certified gas plumber.

I could plumb it, but leaking gas in the attic, wall, or house raises the experience quotient much higher. The shower valve’s worst-case scenario is it leaks water into a tub. Pick your battles and know your limitations.

The quote for the gas plumbing would have been free. I sweetened the deal with them. I told them that while they were here creating a scope of work and an estimate, they could change this valve for me. In that way, they could kill two birds…and get paid for their time.

I wanted to get a feel for their level of expertise and professionalism.

Other workers getting things set up for my eventual move witnessed the exchange.

Two young guys appeared instead of the older gentleman I spoke with at the plumbing company. One was most probably a plumber, and the other was a helper. This was obvious by their banter.

They focused on the valve, an ancillary project, not why I called them.

He struggled for 45 minutes. They used my valve and tool and presented me with an invoice for $215.

“What about the quote for the other work?”

“Oh…, I will do that,” he said. The quote wasn’t even an afterthought. He forgot about it.

He made notes and told me he would get back to me.

One of the other men working on another project stopped what he was doing and laughed. “You just got screwed.”

I nodded. “True, but guess who I won’t be using to do this major plumbing job!?”

They installed the valve, which functions, but did not install it correctly. A mechanical stop must be in place, but it is not.

When you hire people to represent your company, following up with your customers is something you should prioritize. Customers should test the ‘professional’ with something simple to see how they work, charge, etc.

When I tell the story to others, who ask if I know a plumber, they want to know about the quote. I never got the quote. The kid didn’t follow through.

“Are you going to call and get it?”

“Not from them. Even if it were free, I wouldn’t want them doing the work.”

Contractors should display some modicum of morality. Ethics are lacking, and the trend is not for the better. If he half-assed a simple shower valve install and charged like a seasoned professional, think about them running a gas pipe in the attic, walls, etc.

Featured Post

Open Letter to Zoom

As one host’s meetings over this medium frequently, the speaker might freeze.

The problem is, we don’t know if the speaker froze, we froze, and so on.

Solution… For the meeting host, we need a quick way to ascertain where the packet loss is occurring. I would suggest a simple meter placed by each member’s name in the participant’s list.

The meter could be faux lights (red, yellow, and green.) Make the thing large enough to give us some resolution as to the quality of the signals.

It might also be nice to have the ability to run a report of the same information. If one of the members is constantly having issues, we have some quantitative feedback we can give them.

With this information out there on the WWW, your competition might see it and run with it, claiming this brainstorm of an idea as their own. PFFT.

-Best

Featured Post

Open Letter to Oil Change Business’s

We have a crisis on our hands with a simple solution. To Date, I have not seen anyone offering this service.

It is illegal for scrap metal places to purchase stolen catalytic converters. HB 4110 in Texas makes the crime of selling or buying stolen catalytic convertors a 3^rd-degree felony which means time in jail.

That law went into effect on September 1, and yet the problem continues.

Here is the million-dollar idea…..

On your sign in front of your business, advertise ‘Free Engraving of your Catalytic Converter with Oil Change.’

The idea is to mark your property with your driver’s license, which will make the convertor even less attractive to the scrap metal dealer.

Since the threat of jail time doesn’t seem to stop the thief, just possibly the threat of time to the dealer would carry more weight.

If you had a little more on the ball than the other guy, you would have created stickers that would go on the person’s car window. These stickers would alert the would-be thief that the convertor is marked. The stickers would also be a reminder and advertisement of your place of business.

Even if you are not in Texas, businesses in other states can use this same technique to slow down the theft of convertors and increase business to your establishment.

I look forward to seeing how many companies follow through with this idea.

-Best

Featured Post

HB 196

Open letter to Terry Meza

Dear Terry, your bill HB 196 would seek to limit the homeowner’s rights to defend himself or his or her property. Your bill would also create a doubt in the would-be victim’s mind as to whether they are within their legal rights to defend themselves. A second of hesitation could get the victim killed. You are confusing the issue, conflating garden gnome’s with tangible property and or life.

In a life-or-death situation, the last thing the victim needs is doubt. If they are reasonably afraid for their lives, they should defend themselves to the fullest extent of the law…period.

Not long ago, this same type of thinking was pervasive in our now President Biden, who said at the time, ‘If a woman is going to get raped, she should pee herself.’

Your bill would make it easier for some attorney to go after the victim, and you and I both know this is not about ‘lawn ornaments.’ That is lawyer-speak to play to the emotions of the feeble-minded.

We all have choices to make. They can choose to steal and take their chances or decide not to steal. They can choose to rape or home invade or decide not to. We, the law-abiding, have our rights under assault by this Congress, currently attacking the second amendment, while we on a parallel front have lunatics calling for defunding the police.

If the police act in a way that contradicts the way they should, then more training and better hiring practices are what we should be advocating.

Adding to this problem, we have a massive influx of aliens who we know by their actions don’t respect our laws.

There is currently a rash of catalytic converters stolen from vehicles. The cost to repair starts at $1000.00 and could go as high as $4,000 if they don’t do any other damage while hacking it off your car. That is hardly a garden gnome.

Why don’t you create a bill that would fine the crap out of those that buy stolen catalytic convertors?

Removing the reward for theft of ‘garden gnomes’ seems like where we should be spending our energy.

I would require that all catalytic convertors be serialized. Those that bring them in for ‘recycle’ must provide identification, including utility bills, to prove that the identity was not fake. A log book should be created and maintained to insure that the ‘recycler’ is on the up and up. The former would take a Congressional act, and the latter could be implemented with an executive order.

-Best

Featured Post

Open Letter to Greg Abbot

With the latest power issues in Texas, one would think that we wouldn’t have these issues in a country like this.

“But it is cold.”

And, in the summer it is hot. The last time I mentioned to the city where I live, we had not enough water, trash pickup, and now electricity to add more businesses and apartments I was told to sit down and shut up. (in so many words)

It is all about taxable revenue. When I mentioned that to the city, they told me, “We have more churches than other cities, and they don’t pay taxes! We have to stay competitive.”

We have lost sight of the ball. When we can’t take care of what we have, we don’t need to add more.

Government is over-bloated and is more concerned about ways to keep their jobs and bring in more revenue than taking care of their constituents. Many of those are elected, and trust me, that can be remedied.

One cold snap and millions are without power. This incident was not even ice-related. It was supply and demand.

Maybe some child who knows nothing of economics or how the government works and thinks, might buy that. It is a crap argument. It is all about supply and demand.

In my line of work, we do something called a root cause analysis.

Why did it happen, and what can we do to better prepare for the next time.

We have not invested in the infrastructure or planned worth a damned for there to be power outages to the tune of millions of people because there is not enough supply.

Mr. Abbot, heads need to roll.

February and March are the cold months in Texas; the rest are hot and hotter.

We see California going through this because they have not invested in their infrastructure. I thought we were better than the Golden State.

You owe it to the people of Texas to do this root cause analysis and then tell us how you are going to fix the problem.

Platitudes, and turn off your heat or air and don’t run anything that uses electricity is not the answer. Controlled power outages are not the answer.

ERCOT needs to be held to account for this.

I have lived in Texas since 1962. This cold snap is not our first, and it will not be our last. Next Summer will not be our first days over 100.

If you want to attract more revenue in the form of a tax base, prove to the tax base that you have that you are worthy of it.

Pelosi wants a 911 commission to distract the country from its bumbling of issues. Maybe we should have a 911 commission to see how this happened. My guess is that you all already know, and knew it was a possibility. If that is the case, that makes you all negligent.

-Best

Customer Service 101

Your response should be crafted.

‘Recently, I took my car in for normal maintenance. Driving away from the shop, leaving from a red light, the engine stalled or hesitated. Calling the shop, their response was, “Those cars have Gremlins.”’

Even though they were obligated under warranty to fix it, I lost confidence in them immediately.

Finding another shop, I elected to pay them to fix whatever was wrong. Citing a potential catalytic converter issue, I reminded them of when the problem first occurred and then let them do their diagnostics.

The fault did not generate a check engine light. The lack of a ‘fault’ made the problem tougher to troubleshoot. If you have ever tinkered with old cars, the issue resembled a vacuum leak.

Finding a tear in a hose leading to the Mass Airflow Sensor cured the problem.

The ‘gremlin’ was the mechanic who did the original work and did not check to make sure his ‘cure’ did not introduce more problems.

While I am out a few hundred more dollars to another shop, finding an honest mechanic is worth it.

From plumbers to electricians and yes, computer professionals, it is OK to say ‘I don’t know.’

Customers would much rather hear you say ‘allow me to figure it out,’ vs. your (insert issue) has gremlins.

The original shop has lost me as a customer because the mechanic did not check their work and Gremlins.

No matter who you work for or what you do, you have customers. Identify them and treat them as you would want to be treated. Watch what you say.

-Best

The Old Gray Mare Ain’t What She Used to Be

This might seem like a blog about horses or livestock but we will be talking about technology, and how to breathe new life in to your old computers.

In 1946 they designed the ENIAC to be the end all be all in technology. Twenty minutes of Computer time would replace over 240 man hours where calculations were concerned. The economic model fell apart with the amount of man hours needed to maintain the computer, not to mention the parts, ‘tubes’ and the energy needed to power it.

Today in this modern era of technology we have something known as Hardware Asset Management. If your CIO gives you a blank stare if you talk with him or her about it, consider hiring a new one.

CFO’s hate surprises. Without asset management one quickly learns there are no good surprises in business.

The modern day desktop has a life cycle of five years and the laptop, three. What if there was a way to extend that life cycle for a minimum investment?

They rate components in computers in something known as MTBF or Mean Time between Failures. Notice that does not ‘if it fails, but when.’

Looking at the different components within a computer, one of the most fragile and arguable important is the hard drive. Next would be the power supply, and any moving parts, which would be the fans, drives and cd-rom.

How do we mitigate this to an acceptable level of risk, and push the envelope out one to two or more years?

Normal physical maintenance should be at the top of every ‘engineers’ duties.
·         Visiting with the users looking for clues about what they are dealing with.
·         Visual inspections of how the machines are installed and cared for.
·         Regular dusting of the CPU and other fans looking or listening for bearings, etc.
·         Frayed cables or broken tabs on network cables.
·         Non-authorized software.

Managers of those individuals should be mindful of updates, security and so on. License compliance is part of Software Asset management and not in the scope of this document.

Now what about extending the life cycle of a computer?

The secret is SSD drives. As developers constantly up the requirements for applications to perform, we cast aside perfectly viable computers for newer hardware.

What if?

What if we could solve some of those issues with a simple upgrade? SSD Drives are under $100 for a Terabyte drive. A disk duplicator cost around $40 or certainly less than one hundred dollars.

Taking out the hard drive, placing it in the source compartment of the duplicator and the new SSD drive in the target; in 4 hours’ time you have a solid state drive that is no longer subject to accidental jars such as in laptops. More importantly than this, is the speed issue. You also have a perfect clone of the original meaning, you have a backup should something happen.

SSD drives are much faster than regular hard drives and there are no moving parts.

The laptop I am writing this on, was a retired HP with an I 3 processor and 6 gig of ram. One $100 drive later this laptop performs like a new one. Yes, the Office applications are still 2010 but, I have Windows 10 and it runs just fine.
Boot up time went from over three minutes, to under thirty seconds.

Application loading time is incredible and if Windows needs to swap, it is swapping to memory and not a slow hard drive.

Bottom line, I have a perfectly good laptop pulled from the retirement pile, for $100 and four hours of my time.

Since the copy process is automatic, you put the two drives into the machine, hit copy and go do something else until it is finished. Actual human hours involved were less than 20 minutes.
The old Gray Mare now is running like a colt, and I can save the money I would spend on a laptop and new software for something else.

For an individual this is an easy decision to make. Multiply this by ten or a thousand employees. Could your P&L use the extra boost?

Like always, I am a consultant and would be happy to visit with you about how you are doing business, and if there are ways to improve upon them.

Bio:
I was working with computers before Bill Gates was a household name, and Steve Jobs was still a criminal working out of his garage, designing and building ways to scam the phone company. I met him while supporting Next Step Computers during one of my jobs years ago.
From before ‘Al Gore’ invented the internet, to performing disaster recovery strategies for large and small companies, I stay active. Reach out to me on Linked In, or through this blog.
-Best