What I have been doing lately?

Well I have been splitting my time between work and family mainly. At work I have been working on developing a couple of web base systems to enhance they way we use the web in house. A few months ago I started re-vamping our company's website as I learned PHP with MySQL. Now that I have a better grasp of the coding. Hopefully by spring I'll have that website redone again to modernize how people interact with it. (Web 2.0 and all that jazz) I am also re-working our Intranet to be more useful to our staff and students. My boss and I worked on a contacting system for people to sign up their email or cell phone to receive notifications when school is closed or delayed. It works great, just working the bugs out now, and then we might dump it on Source Forge to others to have. You see our current efforts here.

As for home I have been cleaning, cleaning, and cleaning. I took a bunch of clothes over to a hip consignment shop and they told me they didn't want any of my clothes since they wouldn't sell. Guess I'm too old for Plato's Closet. I ended up dropping the clothes off at the D.A.V. thrift store. I have built my second garden box (out of six) and clean the yard of leaves. If it stays warm next week, I'll build my compost bin out of wooden pallets and try to knock out some more garden boxes. Anyway that is what I have been doing and will be doing until something else comes along and distracts me.

Wal-Mart took a hit

There are reports (and here) that Wal-Mart sales have dropped 1% in their stores, with expectation that this holiday season will under perform. Other major retailers like Target reported sales to be steady. So it just people not buying at good old Wal-Mart. So it is a small victory for me since I have been boycotting Wal-Mart for the last two years. If you think Wal-Mart helps the local economy then dig around the web. Good starting places are Wal-Mart Movie, NPR story from 2003, Snapper says No to WallyWorld, etc.

"However, if you know that half of the containers flowing into China are empty and nearly all of the containers leaving China are loaded with goods," quoted from here.

Why is America so determine to becoming a nation of consumers instead of producers? We once made things you know, that was a time when we could stand up in the world and voice our opinions and the countries would listen. Now that we are just a customer to the world trying voice our opinion and the world is asking us to leave the store. Companies overseas are putting money into discovering new ideas, products, methods, etc while we continue to buy cheap DVD players and complain why gas cost so much. While Brazil is now totally independent of foreign oil and Iceland soon to follow. Sorry for the rabbit trail.

Go boo Wal-Mart, go Mom & Pop shops.