Tony Brewer

I recently bought a small laptop computer, hoping that I could take it on the road with me and get onto the Internet using the free wifi hotspots I’ve been hearing about.  I’ve been seeing McDonald’s restaurants and Panera Bread restaurants with big signs on their windows “free wifi” and I thought that I’d like to be able to pull into one of those places and log into the Internet and check my emails, maybe post a blog or two if I have the time, that sort of thing.

Well, today I pulled into four different McDonald’s restaurants, and only managed to get connected at one of them.  Even though I had found their addresses listed in a directory of free wifi hotspots, I could not get connected!  So I was very disappointed today with that lack of success!

It wasn’t very long ago that Teri and I bought a couple of new computers.  Our old computers were well over ten years old, so it was more than time to replace them!  You know that “they” say that a computer is obsolete as soon as you buy it!  Well, we two computers that were very, very full of files, and now we had two new computers that were almost empty!  We didn’t know what files we wanted to transfer from the old to the new, so we decided to buy a Portable Drive to copy all of the files from the old computers onto the portable drive, and then use the portable drive to copy the files we actually needed to be actively using onto the new computers.

What was great about the portable drive was that it was a lot less expensive than we thought it would be, and it was a USB and all we had to do was plug it in, the software downloaded automatically and it worked seamlessly.  It’s really small so we keep it in a desk drawer and we use it for backing up the new computers as well!  It’s really a great investment!

I was watching the news today (CNN) on television and was listening to a story about the recent salmonella outbreak related to the tainted peanut butter. The story was covering testimony in the case about how the peanut butter company had sent the peanut butter to a lab for testing, and that it had come back positive for salmonella. Then the company sent it to a second lab, and it came back negative, so the company decided to sell it.

The news story said that there is no law requiring any company to report to the FDA the negative test results, and since they had it tested a second time at a different and it came back negative that it was legal for them to sell it. If there ARE charges brought against the company for selling the products KNOWING that they were tainted, the maximum penalty is $1,000 and/or up to one year in prison! Eight people are dead, many sickened, and the maximum penalty is $1,000!

Today I was driving along a road and saw a “no littering $2500 fine” sign beside the road. How is it exactly that littering is a more grievous crime than selling tainted peanut butter that killed eight people? There is something wrong with THAT law, and it needs to be changed!