Recycled Electrons - Blog of Keith Horowitz

How many of you have gone to a hotel, and then suddenly, your card-key no longer works? I am about to share a secret about these card-keys. You know the keys - the size and shape of a credit-card, along with that magnetic strip. After years of having these keys go bad on me, I wondered why I seemed to have bad luck with them. Yet, I didn't have bad luck every time - just occasionally - and I wasn't sure why. Is there anything worse than finally getting back to your hotel room, late in evening - figure you have enough time to get to the room to go to the bathroom. Your hands are full of the stuff you don't want to leave in the car. You manage to re-balance your stuff to get out your card key. Slide - red light. Slide again a little faster - red light. Or maybe your card-key doesn't show any lights at all. You have to trudge back downstairs to the front desk. Wait in line for a clerk to help. Or maybe you had to ring the bell to get the lone clerk to come out...

When I moved to Colorado Springs, things were booming. The city was a significant technology hub. Compaq, HP, MCI, and a number of technology manufacturers including Intel. MCI was the largest employer in the region by a giant margin. It was one of the factors that lead me out to Colorado Springs. Even after MCI took the major financial hit and shrank to the point where it was not even in the top 10 of employees in town, Intel was still doing well. So well in fact, that they were in the process of securing land near the airport to build a second very large manufacturing facility. Yet, those plans fizzled, and a couple of years later, Intel decided to close the doors to their large plant, right along a major avenue named for, and giving access from the highway to the famous park: Garden of the Gods. This large space stood off the road, majestically idle, waiting for some use. Eventually, there were some takers for the space: Everest College added a call center; the County combine...

Random song come up from my playlist: "Steal My Sunshine". Not the first time it has come up, but it does seem to come up rarely.  When it was playing on the radio in 2001-2002 time frame,  during my drive to-and-from Denver Tech Center, it was one of the newer songs that stuck with me. It stuck with me enough that I decided to order the whole album CD from which the song was featured. It turns out there are a number of songs of a style I do not prefer on the CD, but it is interesting to gamble on other songs on an album by a group. This song also fits into a category for me: songs that spell a word. I was thinking a while back, I should make a list of them - for some reason some of them stick out. (Ex: B-A-N-A-N-A-S) However, it turns out that the song isn't all new. Perhaps there was some subliminal influencing going on with this song. In a very ADD ("SQUIRREL") moment while listening to the song today, I decided I needed to view the lyrics. It ha...

Love the new TV series: "2 Broke Girls"! We've been wondering what the song behind the intro was for a few weeks now. I tried googling it the other day, without success. Tonight, we were watching How I met Your Mother from a couple of weeks ago on DirecTV DVR. And the end of the recording was the beginning of a 2 broke girls we had already seen - but it was still fun to watch again. The recording went through the intro and into the first commercial, just about to end and say delete, when I had an inspiration. I decided to try seeing if the song-identification app (V-Cast) would be able to identify it. Tried it once, no luck. Second time, BINGO!! It is a song called 'Second Chance' by 'Peter Bjorn And John'. I was able to confirm it by doing a search and found it on Youtube

There is a brand new online group for people interested in hiking in the Colorado Springs area: Awesome Hikes and Adventures Hosted on Meetup.com And I offered my help, and I am proud to be an Assistant Organizer!

Wednesday was sunny and in the 50s. But there was talk of a blizzard. It seems it was a rare case of a large amount of moisture coming up from the south at the same time as a cold from coming down from the North. Around 12" were expected in my area. But it was also supposed to be very windy - making that unusual amount of snow even more troublesome. Work sent out a note during the day that we should check the weather line before attempting to go into work. Well, about 11pm, the wind started picking up, but no snow. In the morning, I got up before 7. There was a lot of snow on the ground. The wind was blowing. It was still snowing. I called work's weather line. It said, work at 10, call again to be sure. Called later, the message said work at 12, call again to be sure. I called again - work was closed for the day. I had slept a lot of the morning. Boy did I need it. I went out for a short walk during lunchtime, to take some pictures (see below). I was well chilled...

So about 3 or 4 weeks ago, I got a call on my cell phone. It was about a timeshare place up near Vail. It turns out some geocache friends had given them my name and number. As first I was going to be upset at the friends for giving out my cell phone number and just tell the timeshare people not to bother me. But I decided to listen to the pitch. They were willing to let me bring the boys. So I thought, what the heck? It would be a change of pace for a weekend. So I let them come tell me about the setup and the deal. I talked about going through a divorce. It did not seem to phase the person giving me the details. So the plan was for this past weekend. An overnight Oct 21-22. I figured we might get to see some bright fall colors up in the mounts and maybe even get a bunch of geocaches. Friday - the highway to Vail got a lot of snow. That didn't bode too well - but I didn't fret it too much. Saturday morning, I checked the web-cams. Snow along the road - but the roa...