Here was my comment to an article reporting the Borders Books was on the verge of going out of business because the e-book has killed them:

What killed Borders for me is their decision to turn the store into a reading room.  I used to love buying books at Borders but all of a sudden I had to make my way through piles of people with no intention of buying anything, sitting in the aisles and spending their day reading.

I’d often see people with piles of magazines that they had taken off the rack, reading away like it was their living room.

One time I went in to buy a book on 3D animation and I couldn’t get into the aisle because a girl was sprawled on the floor with dozens of art books, copying the drawings.

Who needs this?

Now I sit at home, take my time looking through books online and end up buying on the Net; usually through Amazon.

As far as I’m concerned, Borders and Barnes and Noble lost my business when they decided to cater to the seagulls instead of the paying customers.

Adding a bit to this:

It really was uncomfortable buying books at Borders.  Since I’m a software engineer, I’d often head straight to the computer books section.  In every aisle, they had installed chairs facing in both directions.  When I’d be trying to look at the books, my …

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Here is an amazing video, taken from a helmet cam, that shows what it’s like to climb a radio tower.  It scares me just watching it and I can’t imagine what it must be like doing this for a living.

A story on the International Business Times website (http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/63228/20100917/american-recovery-and-reinvestment-act-arra-los-angeles-stimulus-wendy-greuel.htm”) shows what a disaster the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has been and why big Government has to go.

The article reports that Los Angeles received $111 million dollars in stimulus money with which they were able to create a grand total of 55 jobs.  Doing the math, $111,000,000 / 55 = 2,018,181, shows that the American taxpayers just paid over 2 million dollars per job in Los Angeles.  This is just unacceptable!

Even the city controller, Wendy Greuel, is not happy with this.  She says, “With our local unemployment rate over 12% we need to do a better job cutting red tape and putting Angelenos back to work.”  How nice of her to acknowledge this.

The Governments goal was to create 264 jobs with the money.  Doing another calculation, 111,000,000 / 264 = 420,454, shows a cost of over four hundred thousand dollars per job.  Even this seems crazy when you figure the average job probably pays about 50k and with benefits and overhead costs a company about $100K to maintain for a year.  Where is the other $300K going?

This is just another example of the total incompetence of Government.  The country would have been much better off if the money that was wasted on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act stayed in the hands of the taxpayers that earned it.

I recently installed a Roku HD-XR streaming media player and had a minor problem with the network setup.  Since I was able to figure out a solution to problem, I want to share it here to save anyone else some time if they run into the same thing.

If you’re not familiar with the Roku, it’s a streaming media device that allows you to stream a number of different Internet channels to your television.  You can use it to view or listen to content from Netflix, Amazon Video, Pandora, TWIT, MLB.Tv and a whole lot more.  The list of available channels is growing all of the time.

Connecting the device to your television is simple enough, simply connect audio and video cables from the Roku to the appropriate connections on your TV.  The type of cables you use will vary based on the type of television you have so you will have to consult your manual.  It should be fairly straight forward.

The Internet connection may be a bit more differcult for most people.  You have a choice of connecting the box using either a wired connection or a wireless connection.  If your television is setup anywhere close to your Internet connection or if you don’t have a problem running cable throughout your house, the wired connection is the way to go.  In most cases this will be faster and more reliable.  Roku …

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