Tony Brewer

Teri bought a new dresser for the spare bedroom.  One of those kits in a box that you have to assemble.  I like to assemble things, its fun working with my hands, and I get a sense of accomplishment when I’m done.

It also gives me a chance to work with power tools!  I guess it’s a man thing, working with power tools.  I don’t get the chance to work with them as often as I’d like to.  I guess that’s one of the drawbacks to having a job where I have to travel so much of the time.  So when I get the chance to work with power tools, I want to be enjoying every minute of it! 

When we dropped in to see David, he was in the middle of a business call with his partner Jeff. They were talking about trying a pay-per-click service to drive more traffic to their website. I’ve never had any experience with that part of the Internet before, so I sat down and quietly listened; I found the conversation very informative. Apparently there are a lot of companies that sell pay-per-click services. Jeff was talking about one in particular, called bizzclick. While David and Jeff were talking, David pulled up the Home page to check them out.

David and Jeff agreed to do a little bit more research on the company, and David said he would go ahead and explore the advertiser to see what information he could gather. I made a mental note to send an email to Judy about the company to suggest that she check out their publisher page; Judy’s been talking about trying to find ways to monetize her blog and I told her that I’d help her out if I could.

Someone sent me an email this past week offering to pay me a couple of hundred dollars to do a “shopping detective” job. Without giving me any details, they requested that I send them my name, address, social security number, and phone number. There was no information at all about this so-called “shopping detective” company, and the return email address was simply to one of those free email places like hotmail or yahoo.

So I replied back to them, asking them to let me know more about their company. As you can imagine, they have not responded at all. I was hoping that I could gather more information so I could turn them into the authorities. Well, I at least reported them to their email servers as fraudulent. I hope no one is stupid enough to fall for their scam!

My aunt has decided to expand her business and start to recruit new people to her team. The job market where she lives has been quite depressed for a while, so she is confident that she will be able to hire people who are looking for jobs in Manassas or jobs in Gainesville.  I know that she is going to find some great new innovative ways to get the word out, and I wish her the best of luck in helping her local economy to recover.

My uncle was telling me about his run in with the TSA recently. He is disabled and uses a cane to help him walk. He had to fly to New England from Dulles to go visit his ailing elderly mother. The doctors were telling him that she might not live more than a couple of days, so he was in great distress.

Well on the way out the door to the airport he grabbed one of his favorite canes to take with him. At the airport, he was using a wheelchair to get around. The TSA agents were concerned about his cane – they called in extra agents and with much effort broke it apart and found that inside the cane was a blade that could have been used as a weapon. So they called the police and told the police officer to arrest my handicapped uncle.

The police officer refused to arrest him, and told the TSA agents that they were being overzealous; anyone could see my uncle was not capable of hurting anyone and it was obvious from his distress that he had no idea that the cane was anything other than a cane!

Poor guy – the TSA agents refused to give him his cane back, refused to let him go buy a different cane to use to get around. They DID let him get on the plane, but they were extremely unpleasant to him. Too bad some folks let power go to their heads, isn’t it.