Well, tomorrow is April. This country is a mess, but you don't need me to tell you that. Intellectuals must be taking bets to see which comes first in the United States, a dictatorship or economic failure. I think history has shown that the two usually go hand in hand.

Anyway, there's lots of money out there. I spent the whole day actually working, finishing up the huge mailing list for Astroland, getting a mailing out for Dancewave, a local dance group that is mailing out there schedule for dance classes and keeping up with the usual bookkeeping and answering phone calls and emails.

But what I have also been doing all day is listening to the music of Townes Van Zandt. There's something about him and me. Of all the people that have died (of course not including my dad), I think I miss him the most. I only saw him perform twice - but just those two times made me feel the kind of connection between artist and listener that can be so special. Not to mention that my favorite radio guy (and remember, I was once a radio guy - and this guy was my inspiration way back then) Vin Scelsa, had a record label job back in the late 1960's and early 1970's of accompanying Townes on the road, which as he said mostly consisted of making sure he showed up at his gigs somewhat sober. Anyway, I highly recommend everything you can listen to of his. And I am psyched that a movie about him is made and will be released this summer. I'm going to that one, for sure!

Today was a day of technical glitches. All morning my Verizon DSL account at work was acting very spotty. It wouldn't let me send mail, some websites worked but others didn't and I realized that not having the internet would be very disconcerting for business, what with the emails that customers send me with their files, not to mention the easy way it is to communicate boring but important facts, like you mailing is out, where's the check, etc. So I decided to go back a little to the phone, which was novel, even quaint, as our Attorney General is wont to state.

In any case, it must have been all the rain messing up the lines. The other thing I thought today is that we are much less anonymous online as we might think. I have been advertising my website on Google, and for some reason I see that ads at work but not here at home, which is a different online system. I wonder if Google somehow knows who is accessing it and pages out files accordingly. Makes me think that a person could be very easily duped if a bunch of phonied up websites were to be sent to his address - lets say one goes to look at the NY Times and a phony news story is put on that particular person's website.

Carrot juice with ice is nice!

So how did I spend my Saturday night this week? Well, I did something that I haven't done for at least five years... no, I didn't run 5 miles or stay out all night drinking... I stayed in the office and did a Windows 2000 installation from scratch. My Western Digital hard disk manufactured in 2003 died, which was highly unexpected, and I couldn't get to the CD Rom so I let it languish for a month or so (this is not my main machine). But one of the reasons for using that computer is that it serves as a backup for my main computer, and all of a sudden I got the fear of God in me thinking about what if my much older main machine died? I had to back up. So I bought a new hard drive, called my friend Richard Abel who reminded me that maybe there was a CMOS setting that was preventing me from seeing the CD and lo and behold that'w what it was, so I was in business as I had a Windows 2000 cd.

In the old days I would always install my operating systems, Windows 3 and even 95 were relatively simple affairs, not to mention all the DOS installs I did in the 1980's... But since Windows went the NT route with 2000 and XP, I figured that it would be too complicated and I've simply bought machines with everything installed.

Well, it turns out that with plug and play, and all drivers available for download on the net - things are simpler than ever! Even though I couldn't find my drivers disk, I was able to go to the Compaq website, find my model number, dowload all the drivers (from my other machine), load them onto this one (I had my boot disk fail on the machine I am currently typing on), load the operating system, add the drivers, and then, after everything was working (video driver, network drivers) I was able to go onto the internet and get the google toolbar, picasa, all the MS Windows upgrades to win2K, redownload Dreamwaver to go onto the web and adjust my website (www.selectmailbrooklyn.com), and I'm in business and better than ever. The machine is A LOT faster because of the vanilla installation. No Hewlett Packard bullshit programs, or Microsoft or AOL junk - just what I need.

I know this may not sound like a lot to you, but I'm real happy I can still do this!

My mother and my daughter taken a couple of years ago at Peter Luger's famous Brooklyn steak house. We're going back soon as Adrianne celebrates her 23rd. Oh yeah, I'm the guy.

Well, it has been a while since I posted, but I am thinking of adding this blog to my brand new business web page at www.selectmailbrooklyn.com. I think I will work on remembering how to do a blog before I link this, but I definitely have things to say, and not all of it political.

So let's see how this looks.