No matter what our kids and the new generation think about us,

WE ARE AWESOME! OUR Lives are LIVING PROOF!

To Those of Us Born between 1925 and 1970 here are some things we should remember, and others not so lucky might want to know:

TO ALL THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED THE 1930s, ’40s, ’50s, ’60s and ’70s…

First, we survived being born to mothers who may have smoked and/or drank
while they were pregnant.

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn’t get tested for diabetes!

Then, after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered
with bright colored lead-based paints.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, locks on doors or cabinets, and, when we rode our bikes, we had baseball caps, not helmets, on our heads.

As infants and children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, no booster seats, no seat belts, no air bags, bald tires and sometimes no brakes.

Riding in the back of a pick- up truck on a warm day was always a special treat.

We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle.

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle, and no one actually died from this.

We ate cupcakes, white bread, real butter, and bacon. We drank Kool-Aid made with real white sugar. And we weren’t overweight.

WHY? Because we were always outside playing… that’s why! We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on. No one was able to reach us all day. And, we were OKAY.

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride them down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.

We did not have Play Stations, Nintendos and X-boxes. There were no video games, no 150 channels on cable, no video movies or DVDs, no surround-sound or CDs,
no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet and no chat rooms.

WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth, and there were no lawsuits
from those accidents.

We would get spankings with wooden spoons, switches, ping-pong paddles, or just a bare hand, and no one would call child services to report abuse.

We ate worms, and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.

We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls, and although we were told it would happen- we did not put out very many eyes.

We rode bikes or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them.

Little League had tryouts, and not everyone made the team. Those who didn’t had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!

These generations have produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers, and inventors even The past 50 to 85 years have seen an explosion of innovation and new ideas. We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.

If YOU are one of those born between 1925-1970, CONGRATULATIONS! You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids before the lawyers and the government regulated so much of our lives for our own good

While you are at it, forward it to your kids, so they will know how brave and lucky their parents were. Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn’t it?

No! Tell me it’s not so…

In case you missed it there was a lunar eclipse the other night. It occurred from 5:27 to 11:06 UTC on December 21. This coincided with the winter solstice, which occurs when the tilt of the Earth’s axis is farthest away from the sun at its maximum of 23° 26′. The eclipse was visible as a total lunar eclipse in North and South America, Iceland and across northern Scandinavia.

I had the opportunity to view the eclipse from Hutchinson, south central Kansas. There was quite a bit of haze and light pollution here in town but I could see it well enough. It wasn’t clear enough for pictures though. I borrowed the one below from Greg Cantrell’s blog (thanks Greg!)
This eclipse was the second of two lunar eclipses in 2010, but the first total lunar eclipse in almost three years. The last total lunar eclipse was in February, 2008. The first lunar eclipse this year was a partial eclipse on June 26.

This eclipse was the first total lunar eclipse to occur on the Northern Winter Solstice, and Southern Summer Solstice, since 1638. It is only the second of these to occur in the Common Era.

There will be two lunar eclipses next year. Both will also be total eclipses and they will occur on June 15, 2011, and December 10, 2011.

[Photo courtesy of Greg's World, Copyright © 2010 by Gregory Cantrell. Used with permission. Shadow chart courtesy of Wikipedia, The Online Encyclopedia.]

In my role as a website consultant and e-commerce advisor I often referred to WordPress as the best choice and it seems I was right. Not only is it a good choice, or even a great choice, the people PACKT Publishing who handle these awards think it is the best and they said so with the most prestigious award in the field of Open Source projects.

WordPress beat out Drupal (by the slimmest of margins) and Joomla for the honors. WordPress has claimed the title of “Best Open Source CMS” in the past, a requirement for submission to be considered for the Hall Of Fame award.

Congratulations to WordPress for producing a product with such high quality and awesome functionality. It’s not just your auntie’s blogging platform anymore!

Trying to promote your business online? The first place to stop is the Reciprocity Network, a community of online entrepreneurs doing the same thing.

Recommended by the Online Selling Association, the Reciprocity Network is a community site where those selling merchandise or services online can participate in a social network, community forum, and a variety of marketing and promotion programs, as well as sharing concepts, ideas, and experiences with each other. It’s free to join. Be sure to provide your email address, website or selling venue URL, and add an avatar and you will be included in additional free promotions.

I got an interesting flyer from our “Neighborhood Applebee’s” — okay, they’re not really in our neighborhood but that’s how they seem to want to be known. Anyway, I thought I would share it here in case you didn’t get one.

It’s an offer of a free kid’s meal on three days, October 29th, 30th, 31st. It’s good for any child, ages 12 or younger, who is dressed in costume and accompanied by an adult who orders an adult entree. The free meal, the flyer says, must be selected from the kid’s menu.

The usual fine print said, “Not valid with any other offer or discount… Dine-in only. Valid only at participating locations.” I guess you should verify your local Applebee’s restaurant is offering the deal before showing up with a passel of hungry kids!

Happy Hallowe’en.

Often mis-attributed to Bill Gates (really, he never presented these at a high-school commencement speech!), and though obviously dated (Car phones? I had one of those!) these are, none-the-less, good advice every young person, and maybe those not so young, should read and take to heart:

Ten Rules For Teens

Rule No. 1:   Life is not fair. Get used to it. The average teen-ager uses the phrase “It’s not fair” 8.6 times a day. You got it from your parents, who said it so often you decided they must be the most idealistic generation ever. When they started hearing it from their own kids, they realized Rule No. 1.

Rule No. 2:   The real world won’t care as much about your self-esteem as much as your school does. It’ll expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself. This may come as a shock. Usually, when inflated self-esteem meets reality, kids complain that it’s not fair. (See Rule No. 1)

Rule No. 3:   Sorry, you won’t make $40,000 a year right out of high school. And you won’t be a vice president or have a car phone either. You may even have to wear a uniform that doesn’t have a Gap label.

Rule No. 4:   If you think your teacher is tough, wait ’til you get a boss. He doesn’t have tenure, so he tends to be a bit edgier. When you screw up, he’s not going to ask you how you feel about it.

Rule No. 5:   Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping. They called it opportunity. They weren’t embarrassed making minimum wage either. They would have been embarrassed to sit around talking about Kurt Cobain all weekend.

Rule No. 6:   It’s not your parents’ fault. If you screw up, you are responsible. This is the flip side of “It’s my life,” and “You’re not the boss of me,” and other eloquent proclamations of your generation. When you turn 18, it’s on your dime. Don’t whine about it, or you’ll sound like a baby boomer.

Rule No. 7:   Before you were born your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way paying your bills, cleaning up your room and listening to you tell them how idealistic you are. And by the way, before you save the rain forest from the blood-sucking parasites of your parents’ generation, try delousing the closet in your bedroom.

Rule No. 8:   Your school may have done away with winners and losers. Life hasn’t. In some schools, they’ll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. Failing grades have been abolished and class valedictorians scrapped, lest anyone’s feelings be hurt. Effort is as important as results. This, of course, bears not the slightest resemblance to anything in real life. (See Rule No. 1, Rule No. 2 and Rule No. 4.)

Rule No. 9:   Life is not divided into semesters, and you don’t get summers off. Not even Easter break. They expect you to show up every day. For eight hours. And you don’t get a new life every 10 weeks. It just goes on and on. While we’re at it, very few jobs are interested in fostering your self-expression or helping you find yourself. Fewer still lead to self-realization. (See Rule No. 1 and Rule No. 2.)

Rule No. 10:   Television is not real life. Your life is not a sitcom. Your problems will not all be solved in 30 minutes, minus time for commercials. In real life, people actually have to leave the coffee shop to go to jobs. Your friends will not be as perky or pliable as Jennifer Aniston.

Rule No. 11:   Be nice to nerds. You may end up working for them. We all could.

…and then, hopefully, when you are my age you will honestly be able to say, “Ain’t life great?” or, if you’re from Kansas, “Life’s great! Idn’t it?”

The Texas State Attorney General’s office has opened an inquiry to look into whether Google, currently the most popular Internet search engine, manipulates search results. Google, themselves, acknowledged the anti-trust probe in a blog post late on Friday following it being made public in a report by technology website SearchEngineLand.com which referenced the investigation by the Texas authorities.

Speaking about the inquiry Google’s deputy general counsel Don Harrison said, “We recognize that as Google grows, we’re going to face more questions about how our business works. As Search Engine Land first reported, we’ve recently been approached by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott’s office, which is conducting an antitrust review of Google. We look forward to answering their questions because we’re confident that Google operates in the best interests of our users.”

The inquiry has apparently been open since July and is looking into whether Google is “manipulating its paid and editorial results in a way that violates antitrust laws,” according to Search Engine Land. There have, they said, been complaints from three rival search companies — Foundem, a British price comparison site; New York-based SourceTool, a website run by parent company TradeComet; and Ohio-based myTriggers — which claim that Google’s algorithms deliberately demote their site because they are a direct competitor to the Google search engine.

Harrison explained, “The reality is that we don’t discriminate against competitors,” saying further, “Given that not every website can be at the top of the results, or even appear on the first page of our results, it’s unsurprising that some less relevant, lower quality websites will be unhappy with their ranking.” Was that a slam against the other sites?

Apparently European regulators also opened an informal investigation last February into similar allegations from three Web companies including Foundem. It seems these fellows have an axe to grind. Harrison suggested Google rival Microsoft, which is heavily promoting it’s own Bing search engine of late, was behind the various complaints. In his remarks he pointed out that Foundem was backed by an organization funded largely by Microsoft and that both TradeComet and myTriggers were represented by Microsoft antitrust attorneys. He went on to note that earlier this year a federal judge had dismissed a private antitrust lawsuit against Google filed by TradeComet.

Microsoft and Yahoo! teamed up last year in an attempt to surpass Google in the lucrative search market but have made only slight gains against Google, the Mountain View, California-based company which controls some 65% of the US search market and substantial segments of the world market as well.

Since indexing in generic search results is free it is hard to see how any such complaints can be substantiated. Google is a publicly held for profit corporation. Their database is not publicly held nor are promises made for any position in the search engine return pages (SERPs). This whole thing reeks of competitor sour grapes!

The whistle-blowing website Wikileaks is down, users have been reporting today. Repeated attempts to connect with the home page and other internal pages failed when I tried earlier this afternoon. The best I could achieve was a blank white screen.

The site’s outage comes just one day after it published over 90,000 classified pages relating to military and state department activity concerning the Afghanistan war and Pakistan. Rumors abound about the cause ranging from (likely) server overload because of the interest in the documents to (perhaps less likely) Pentagon, CIA, or NSA, interference with the site.

Many users on Twitter noted Wikileaks’ downtime:

@sethodell: Looks like @wikileaks site is completely down. Wonder if it’s due to today’s surge in traffic, or something else entirely?

@Sock_De_Jour: Wikileaks site is down. Pentagon hacking it? Or too much traffic? #p2

The website “Down For Everyone Or Just Me” confirmed the site’s outage, as did Wikileaks via its official Twitter feed.

@Wikileaks: WikiLeaks is tremendously overloaded. Please use http://bit.ly/9RlJQAless than a minute ago via bitly

However that link failed to work for me as well, resulting only in a page not found error screen.

Keep your eye on the news during the day for updates. Keith Olbermann (http://countdown.msnbc.com/) is bound to have it as his first story tonight. It will be worth a watch: 8 p.m. eastern, 7 p.m. central.