Every morning on the drive into work I see this cool railroad bridge off to the left, just for a little stretch of 59S. I used to see homeless people sleeping in it.

Here is a view off to the city from the same spot on the freeway.

Also this morning I drove alongside a company car from Humble Camera Center. They are located only a few blocks from where I live. They have done work for us in the past and are really nice folks.

On the drive home today I went past the Museum of Fine Arts. Across the street from the museum is this pretty church.

I have seen this truck several times on my morning commute into work. I wasn’t able to find a web site for the company, but I do like their logo.

I stopped by Asia Market on the way home from work tonight and picked up some Thai food for dinner. This is a really cool little place. They have a small menu but the food is consistently good. The market stocks an assortment of hard-to-find Thai food supplies and miscellaneous other stuff. It is located at 1010 W Cavalcade. Here is a Google map of the location.

This is what it looks like from the street:

Mikie and Dutch

After dinner, Mikie and Dutch played in the living room.

Today I started a 7-week class in Mindfulness that is being taught at Dawn Mountain Tibetan Temple here in Houston:

The class is being taught by Claire Villarreal.

Mikie and I got in a good cardio workout today at Lifetime Fitness. We did 35 minutes on some weird combination elliptical/stair-stepping machine, then did about 10 minutes of stretching followed by some time in the Jacuzzi. Nice!

Got in a strength workout today at the Lifetime Fitness in Atascocita.

Details

Warmup: Rowing x 00:10
Strength Training:
1. LF leg ext: 40/12, 40/20, 40/20 - still have left knee pain
2. TG leg curl: 50/20, 50/20, 50/20
3. FM chest: 50/20, 60/13, 50/12
4. FM lat: 60/20, 70/20, 70/20
5. CY st calf: 90/20, 90/15, 80/19
6. FM shoulder: 50/15, 45/11, 40/7
Stretch: 00:06
Jacuzzi: 00:10

Folks you have to be careful when transacting business online. I recently posted an add on Craigslist. I responded to an initial inquiry from a “BEDRA SMITH bedrasmith02@gmail.com“. This is what he/she emailed to me this morning:

Hello Again, Thanks for writing back. I am cool with you final asking price but I need it urgently. Let me know if you will accept a bank check payment as this is the only way I can make payment to you. I have just been transfer to head the IT section of our office in the London. I don’t mind offering you a extra $100 for holding it for me. I would have loved to come and take a look at it but I will not be able to do so due to the distance and my busy schedule with other important official obligations. You may reply me with your name and address also include your mobile phone # where I can easily get hold of you for a better communication. I will be sending the payment as soon as I received the information from you. As regards the shipment, I will handle the shipping expenses as I have already contacted Able cargo for the shipping of my other house items, they advised they can make the pick up from your address as soon as we have concluded the sale. I will be glad if you end this sale with me and delete the ad from Craigslist today. I look forward to hearing from you soon. Thanks. Regards,

Craigslist has a great page related to scams here: http://www.craigslist.org/about/scams

Lunch!

A few of us from the office had lunch today at Big Woodrow’s Bar and Grill in Houston. Ate some very spicy crawfish!

Joel Salatin

Excellent speech by Joel Salatin. Highly recommended if you are at all interested in the quality of our food supply.

Commuting

A few pics from my commute home today.

To recover each time I had to wipe the drive and restore from Time Machine. On the way back to Humble yesterday from an interview, I stopped by Fry’s on I-45 (Houston) and picked up a Seagate Momentus 7200 RPM, 16MB cache, 320GB drive.

I swapped drives this morning and took pictures of the entire process.

I did some further investigation and found that the problem was that I had never received last months bill (and so didn’t send them a payment for it).

They probably did issue the statement. I’m sure AMEX is very good about that. And the likely scenario is that the post office just failed to deliver it. No big surprise there (although our local postman is pretty good normally). What bothers me is that AMEX never bothered to let me know that they were expecting money from me. They have my email address. They have my phone number. Instead they just start slapping on charges. And this is to a customer who has never made a late payment, ever!

So I sent in a lengthy complaint via the AMEX web site. And then I went over the last several statements and found every company that billed services to me via American Express. I logged into my account for every one of those companies and changed the billing method to my Amazon Visa card. And after next month’s AMEX bill clears and I pay it, I shall cancel my American Express card and never do business with this company again.

• Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design, by Jennifer Tidwell
• Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design, by Robert Hoekman Jr.
• Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions, by Bill Scott and Theresa Neil
• Universal Design for Web Applications: Web Applications That Reach Everyone, by Wendy Chisholm
• Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition, by Steve Krug
• Web Application Architecture: Principles, Protocols and Practices, by Leon Shklar

And if you find any treasures, please consider adding updates to this post with your recommendations.