Today is Poinsettia Day!
Today commemorates the day American botanist and ambassador Joel Roberts Poinsett died. He originally discovered the Poinsettia (Euphorbia Pulcherrima) in Southern Mexico.
Poinsettias are traditionally used as a decorative flower during the Christmas season. Mexicans believe the plants represent the Star of Bethlehem, which is one reason for their association with Christmas.
Also, there’s a story about a young boy who wanted to see a Nativity Play at a local church. He realized that he didn’t have a gift for the Baby Jesus, so he gathered some green branches. Others scoffed at his choice of gift – that is, until as he placed them near the manger and a bright red poinsettia flower bloomed on each branch.
10 Fun Things to do With Beer (Besides Drinking It)
This post was inspired by an article I read called “For What Ales You”.
A bad pun is always worth repeating 
1. Clean Copper Pots
I wish I could try this, but we haven’t owned a copper bottom pot for years.
Apparently, the mild acidity in beer is good for cleaning copper. Just pour a little bit into the pot, let it sit for a few minutes (maybe the amount of time it takes to finish off the rest of the beer), and wipe it out.
Common Craigslist Scams
Recently, I’ve been listing various items on Craigslist. I’ve been getting a lot of these replies:
From: craigslist reply
Re: item for saleIs the item still available? Email me at some-phoney-email-address@gmail.com
Sent from my iphone
One even went as far as far as including
Sent from my HTC One(TM) X, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone
In the signature.
Funny, eh? The idea that “sending” the request from a smartphone would lend some sort of credibility to their scamming ways.
You Can Keep Your (Insurance Policy/Doctor), Can’t You?
I had it in my mind that I was going to avoid being too political, but I can’t help it now. Here’s a story…
(By the way, I’m not going to use anyone’s name here. If you want to, you could do a couple searches and figure it out yourself, but it’s not my fault :))
Today my wife told me that the doctor’s office she works in ran into their first big issue with Obama care. The doctor is the only certified pediatric rheumatologist in the area. (Yes, the only one).
8 Secrets to Success in Life and Work
This was sent to me in PDF form by an internet marketer who goes by the name Peter Sz. I took the liberty of changing the layout and some of the text.
In 1997, when author Michael Jeffreys was prepping for an upcoming book, he took the time to personally interview 15 top motivational experts. After conferring with gurus like Brian Tracy and Dr. Wayne Dyer, to name a couple, he listed the 8 Secrets all of them agreed with. These concepts are still as “on the money” today as they were in 1997.
Tips for Using Time Stamps in ILE RPG
Some notes regarding timestamps.
Defining a Timestamp
A timestamp is stored as a 26 character field. But, the system looks at it as a special data type and enforces the rules it has set up for timestamps.
The format for a timestamp is is YYYY-MM-DD-HH.MM.SS.XXXXXX (Year-Month-Day-Hour.Minute.Second.Milliseconds).
An example would be ’2011-09-14-22.06.48.592000′ (Year: 2011 / Month: 09 / Day: 14 / Hour: 22 / Minute: 06 / Second: 48 / Millisecond: 592000) .
The default value for a “*blank” time stamp is ’0001-01-01-00.00.00.000000′.
In DDS a timestamp is defined with just the field name and a ‘Z’ in the data type column.
Advanced Google Alerts Tips and Tricks
Recently, I decided to explore using Google Alerts to come up with topics to write about (sorry, Zemanta, your suggestion email didn’t cut the mustard). As I was setting some simple alerts up (blogging, cycling, coding, etc.), I started thinking of other things I could use Google Alerts for – such as tracking certain website activities or competing businesses or sports teams or political issues – the list goes on and on.
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