Tone Parsons

Yesterday, my company announced that we had purchased yet another company.

This one was a bargain at a cool $1.6 Billion (yes… that’s Billion with a capitol B).

When I was first hired here, our stock was worth about $3.92 a share. Today, it’s up $5 from Friday at $68.65. Damn… I wish I hadn’t sold my stock at $29.74!

One nice thing about the company we purchased… they’re in another country, so we didn’t have to deal with the SEC on the acquisition (you know you company is doing well when you have to get the FCC’s blessing before buying another company).

So… now you’re asking yourself, what do we do? Well… I’ll tell you… kinda. We offer products and services that you probably don’t use and sell them to companies that you probably don’t work for. If you’ve ever seen the utility guy (gas, electric, or water) come by, and you’ve seen that he has a little computer in his hand, well, we probably made it. There’s most likely a little module (an ERT) on your gas, electric, or water meter… we made that too.

If you live in Pittsburgh, Dallas, Richmond, or one of several other major cities… there’s probably a strange white box hanging off a light pole in your neighborhood… we made that too (it’ll read your meter as often as the utility wants… once a month, once a day, every 5 minutes… whatever). If the utility company drives a van around and it automatically reads your meters… yup, that’s us again.

Of course, I no longer have much to do with the money making side of things. I did in my last position (6 years as a Solutions Engineer). Now I’m a Senior Web Developer (and I’m much happier!).

I’m still working on ripping my music collection.

596 CD’s later… I’ve made it to the letter “R”. The last CD I did was Roxette – Look Sharp. There is, however, a rather bright light at the end of the tunnel. Once I make it through all the ones in my CD racks, I’ll hit the big ass piles that haven’t been put away yet.

On the a more positive note… I have over 10 days of music ripped so far (253.25 hours). It’s a pity that my iPod will only go for about 10 – 12 hours between charges.

Oh… and for those of you who were wondering about the bus stop saga (like you don’t have anything better to wonder about), yeah… I’ll be at the some one on monday.

I’ll be fine.

If you’ve read this blog during the past few months, you know I’ve been doing the mass transit gig. It’s been working out for me pretty well, my wife drops me off downtown in the morning, and I’m able to get home fairly quickly in the evenings.

The bus stop I use in the morning (Riverside and Brown) has a fairly rough crowd. It’s a group of guys who obviously do manual labor, and they’re pretty street smart. I knew they were rough… but I didn’t realize how much so until this morning.

Typically, I just stand there, minding my own business. Today, I said “good morning” to one of them when he walked up. This started a conversation that took me down the last road I ever expected it to. Apparently, he and the rest of the “rough crowd” that uses this bus stop all live in the same apartment building, which is just around the corner. It’s some sort of “halfway house” for the state. He complained that he needed to get permission to go to Wal*Mart just to buy toiletries.

I asked why he had to get permission. He replied that he just got out of prison and was on work release. The crime: murder.

HOLY FUCKING SHIT!!!

I’ve been hanging out with a convicted murderer (and several people convicted of unknown felonies) for the past 3 months?!?

Apparently, he killed someone in Seattle. He didn’t really go into the details and I didn’t ask him to fill in the blanks. WFT kind of reply do you give to a statement like that?

Thankfully, my bus rolled up at that point and the conversation ended there. I have no idea what the other people did… and I’m not asking. I am, however, going to try catching my bus from another stop.

This weekend was spent trying to clean up my music collection.

I’ve wanted all our CD’s ripped for quite a while. This way I can make burns of any/all of my music for the car, and more recently, for loading the iPods.

The first thing I did was take a long, hard look at my mp3’s. What a mess! I had duplicates all over the place, a bunch of songs that ended short, and some general garbage. So…. I scrapped most of them. Then I proceeded to grab handfuls of CD’s from our collection, in alphabetical order, take them down to my computer, and rip them, one at a time, to mp3 at 192kbs.

I was able to rip about 100 CD’s so far… but I’m only to the letter F (the last one I ripped was The Fixx – “One Thing Leads to Another: Greatest Hits”). I figure I should be done in a week or so, if I keep at it.

When ripping your collection, you discover quite a bit about yourself, musically at least. I’m apparently all over the place when it comes to music… and I have a lot of stuff that I forgot I purchased (sometimes more than one copy). I’ve got quite a bit of classic rock (CCR, Doors, Boston, Cream, etc.), a bunch of disco from the 70’s (ABBA, KC & the Sunshine Band, etc.), a ton of 80’s music, butt rock, glam rock, new wave, soundtracks, punk, break-beat, techno… hell, I’ve even got a bunch of “Christian” music in there.

I guess I’m not picky… if I like it, I buy it (and yes…. I have every single Depeche Mode CD released… plus 90% of the singles).

I figure I’ll be able to fill my iPod and then some when it’s all done 🙂