My Retirement Luau

We had a Luau last weekend at the Lake Worth Casino Ballroom to celebrate my retirement. It was a blast. How could we not have fun with Elvis in the house, a troop of polynesian dancers and singers, and a hundred or so good friends? That along with good food and drink made it a night to remember. I will post more pictures as they come in from everyone. A lot of people worked very hard to make this night possible and I cannot thank them enough. It was worth the 35 years of work to look around the room and see all of the smiling faces. Everyone had a ball. Click here for some fun photos from the party.



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Last weekend on June 7th, at 3 AM we became grandparents with the birth of little Kaitlyn Moreno Brown. She was 6 lbs. 3 oz. and 19 inches long. She is the sweetest little baby you ever saw. Are we a little bit biased? Well, maybe so but she really is a cute baby and so sweet. Her mom and dad, Rob and Mavis, are doing great. Here is a snapshot of the little cutie.




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The problem with being punctual is that there is never anyone around to

appreciate it.

Found a great free web portal. It has all of the standard features like Yahoo and other portals such as news, calculators, bookmark storage and others but makes its money with a different business model that allows it to not have banner ads and popups. It is very configureable and feature rich. Since we will be retiring in a month or two we will no longer have our business calendar available and I had to find a substitute. The site is http://www.myway.com and so far I am really happy with it. We are already using the calendar, which we can share with each other and family members, to schedule events that will take place beyond our retirement dates. By the way, in addition to my work countdown calendar at this location. I put a countdown calendar page up for Barbara. It is here. Check it out and follow our countdown to the big events.



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Still reinstalling software on my new system. It is running really well with XP but even though I thought I had backed up everything I had not. I am using this experience to create a CD with all of my registration keys, serial numbers, etc. that one needs to rebuild a system. Hopefully next time I do this it will be a bit easier because of that. One big advantage of running a two drive system with the applications on the primary drive and data on the second is that all of my data files stayed intact. Windows XP seems to be a big step up from my old OS which was Windows 98.

Upgraded my processor in my computer last night. Called my local parts suppier and gave them the model of my motherboard and they said I could upgrade from my Athlon 900 mhz processor to an XP1800 for $84 so I did it. Sure seems to be running noticeably faster now. Flight simulator runs smoother at a faster frame rate. Thanks Kiefer!

Tooth Fairy Project

I heard an interview with a university professor discussing cancer occurences in South Florida. He has been doing analyses of baby teeth for presence of radioactive isotopes such as Strontium 90. He made some really interesting observations based on his research that has become known as "The Tooth Fairy Project." He said that young children are much more succeptible to cancer caused by environmental influences than adults and as a result are like the canaries in coal mines that were indicators of low oxygen because they died before the miners were affected. The research indicates that cancer levels are 2 - 3 times higher than normal within 20 miles of a nuclear power plant. The radiation is distributed into the atmosphere and comes back to earth primarily as rain. Florida has a very rainy climate and so it drops back to earth fairly quickly around the plants. The most interesting thing to me was the suggestion by the professor that the number one thing that you can do to protect yourself from ingesting the radiation in your drinking water was to install a reverse osmosis water filtration system. Seems the isotopes are large enough that the RO membrane filters them out. He had a number of interesting observations that seemed really important to me. I found a link to a press release about his study which is at The South Florida Baby Teeth Study News Release. More information can be found at this site.