Seriously, who thought of this? Let the rhymes commence

There really is a website for everything.  Well, there is a site for word rhyming called Visual Rhymes. This site is so smart that it can even find rhymes for orange.  I always believed there are no English words that rhyme with orange.  Of course, the website shows the closest rhyme, but I think it is a bit rough, though it is technically correct.  Let me try to use the rhymes with orange in a bad poem that only Vogons will love.

Let me say how I love your skin orange.

Random pieces dogs will scavenge.

Keep your dogs away from that syringe.

Oh, o'er there the bad dogs whinge.

Watchout for the skintle to avoid a cringe

face from roughed up skin.  Oh, I love your skin orange.

Orange, orange, Oh, orange of color grand, 

sometimes impinge.

I did warn that it would be bad poetry.  As bad poetry goes, I'd say that was pretty good attempt and being really really bad.  So bad.  So very very bad. Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Sussex might be proud. Anyway, I'm not convinced it is a good idea to try to attempt rhymes with the word orange, even if there are words that are available for such as task.

Valuable lesson from my first professional job, or how much is a brownie point worth?

My first professional job was in Silicon Valley for a laser company.  My boss was Bob.  Based on my take of things, Bob was stereotypical for a guy named "Bob" in the professional realm.  I'll just leave that to your imagination.  Anyway, Bob was wise and taught this young pup a few lessons.  One that has proven exceptionally valuable is the concept of brownie points.

Brownie points are earned one at a time for doing someting that impresses the boss.  The first time I earned a brownie point for being cleaver (I can't even remember what about), Bob said to me something along the lines of,

Congraluations!  You've earned one brownie point.  It takes 1000 to cancel-out one "Oh Shit".

There it was; the formula that explained everything that happens on the job. 

1000b = 1M 

Do something impressive and you get quick praise "b".  Make one mistake big "M" and you are in trouble no matter how much good you've done.  Unlike your 401K, brownie points don't carry over from job to job either.  Get a new job - start over.  I hope this helps! :)

Senseless Sunday: Dog's life

1. A dog was killed by a meteor at Nakhla, Egypt, in 1911.^[1]
2. The tallest recorded bamboo is 130 feet high.^[2]
3. World's longest beaver dam is found in Alberta, Canada with a length of 2790 feet.^[3]
4. Adwaita, an Aldabra Giant Tortoise died at the age of 255 in March 2006 in Alipore Zoo, Kolkata, India. It was recorded the oldest Terrestrial animal in the world.

Toebzilla enthused with the TV

Opinion about epinions.com decline

epinions.com used to be a great resource to get real world, vetted and high quality customer reviews for all sorts of products from books to cars.  Contributing to epinions.com was actually minimally lucrative, as you got compensated for your product reviews.  Fellow members of the website would critique submitted reviews to help others improve the quality and review writing skills.  The higher quality reviews earned a larger share of whatever earnings were made.

I was never really sure just how the compensation worked, but over the years, I made less than $100 total from my nine posted product reviews.  My first review was posted in 2002 about my old Acura TL Type-S, for which I earned the coveted "Very Helpful" rating.  Over a period of one decade, that review has earned me a whopping total $20.

In the past, I've endorsed and recommended the use of epinions.com.  I frequently went there for reviews of products in which I was interested.  Then something starting changing in 2012.  I stopped using epinions.com.  I didn't really know why at the time.  It just happened.  Looking back, I believe it may have been because reviews were getting harder to find.  It was not that there was less of them, but rather the structure of the website had started changing for the worse.

Sometime this summer of 2013, I was writing a review for another product on Amazon.com and figured it was good enough to add to epinions.com.  I thought I might as well make my 3¢ a year. So, I went back to the epinions.com website and searched for the product.  It was a book.

I searched for the book and found a webpage that listed a bunch of sites that sold the book.  There was no product page.  In the past, the product page would come up as the search result.  This is where one would go to add a review.  But now, there was just a listing of other websites.  Sure, older products still had product pages, though you'd have to surf through the myriad of links to other websites in order to find them.  Much to my dismay, epinions.com had become an inferior online mall.  There isn't even a rewards program, like with higher quality online malls such as MyPoints.com.  epinions.com made itself completely irrelevant.

I guess some areas on the website are still maintained, such as electronics, where it appears to be a little easier to find the product pages for newer products.  It's just not enough to justify giving the website a second thought anymore.

Malpractice isn't a major reason for healthcare costs in the US, but there is a lot of other stuff that is