I’ve removed some of my creative writing from my blog here and put it on my profile at Booksie. I didn’t want to clog up my blog with creative writing, plus I have a few projects I’m working on which are a bit long for a blog format. I will make mention of any interesting posts at Booksie here, but you’ll have to go to Booksie to read it and comment on it there - along with all the other great creative writers that float around that domain. There will always be a link to my creative writing at Booksie profile under “Some Cool Links” on the side column in case you lose track of this post. If you want to read my latest short story, check out “Upstate”.

I’ve tried for a while to find a faxing service that will just let me get inbound faxes. The vast majority of online faxing services are tied to the idea that a user wants to send out faxes. Certainly, the biggest fax provider, eFax, is setup with this thinking. I’ve looked a few times and then got to busy to keep at it. But I think I found a good one.

All fax providers want to give you a “free trial”. I don’t know about you, but I hate free trials. Not that I’m smart enough to think of a better business model. But, nonetheless, I deplore free trials. But, they want to give you a free trial because many folks have still never sent a fax from their computer via modem, much less online. Once you see how it easy is, these companies hope you’ll sign up and start faxing everyone like a crazed loon.

There are many events in a man’s life which may rightfully be labeled important. In my own experience, I often look back to determine how these events have changed me, how they have shaped me, or how I have grown through them. Through this reflection, I recognize only one event significant enough to be labeled important, that is, life-changing. Although it can hardly be called a singular event, the raising of children, each day, is the most important event of my life.

Just got an email from Lee Macenczak, Executive Vice President of Sales and Customer Service. Delta seems bent on insulting my intelligence. Maybe everyone’s intelligence. With a title like that, Mr. Macenczak’s email smells full of spin and farce. They can always fire him, so I imagine that is why no real operatives at Delta signed their name to this public relations workhorse.

I’ve just finished reading Tom Rath’s Vital Friends: The People You Can’t Afford to Live Without. I have not read his prior bestselling “How Full is Your Bucket?”, but I found Vital Friends to be a remarkably informative book.

Just wanted to say a big thank you to all my consistent readers, as well as a warm welcome to newer visitors. Traffic to the Salberg.Org site has been way up as of late. In fact, as of COB (close of business) on Nov 7, traffic has increased beyond September and October’s total numbers. I look forward to meeting your expectations and keeping you informed, entertained, and hopefully at least a little off-balance - else I just wouldn’t be me, right?

Technorati : blogging, traffic

You gotta wonder about Delta SkyMiles. LifeHacker recently turned me on to a great new site called Points.Com. It allows you to easily swap and redeem points earned from one program to another. The site has garnered the cooperation of every major airline, and lots of major retailers, like Best Buy, Amazon, Target, and many others.

Ideally, when your crazy uncle gives you a gift card to a store that isn’t even in your town, you can now go online and swap that card for something you might more readily use. There are lots of online points earning programs that are exchangeable at Points.Com as well. I’m surprised no one has done this earlier.

I never once doubted my faithful Dolphins to, at the least, uphold the legacy of the legendary undefeated 1972 Dolphins. But, today they did it not only with fervor, they did it with an amazing display of showmanship and grace, leaving the fans at Soldier Field open-mouthed, stunned and wondering if they were in a dream.

I recently discovered a great little website called Portfolio Link. It allows you to very easily create a fictitious stock portfolio to see how good of an investor (or day trader) you might be. However, it is unique from other similar sites in some ways.

I initially had my fake portfolio on Yahoo’s Finance. However, there is no way to prove your merit to others with such a portfolio, because, for ease and convenience, Yahoo, like many other sites, allows you to go back in time and make changes to your portfolio. Thus, I could go back to Google’s IPO date and make a large purchase of its stock and then claim I’m a financial genius.

I finally had to retire my favorite Darth Vader logo that I used whenever I signed up with some site that wanted a photo upload. I have a pet peeve about my personal photo being a masthead for anything. I think I have some fear that some longtime reader of my site will recognize me from my photo when I’m walking in Walmart and walk up to me and start jawing my ear off about everything I ever said or wrote (even though they never bothered to comment). It might sound kind of paranoid, but when you’ve been around the world as much as I have, you quickly realize that 5 billion people or no, it is still a small world after all.

Several years ago, I designed a spreadsheet for grocery shopping in Microsoft Excel. The idea was that we would no longer forget certain things when we go shopping. With (now) six children, the human brain can only hold so much information. We’ve tried shopping in larger amounts and cooking in advance (known as freezer cooking), but for day-to-day life, when things get kind of hectic and we lose our ability to plan, we had to have a more consistent approach to fall back on.

Almost had a tire blow on me yesterday. The van had been pulling further and further to the right the prior day. Yesterday morning, as I got off the interstate, it was thumping rather loud and pulling hard - even at low speeds. I pulled over in an empty parking lot to check it out. Both tires looked fine and I was just thinking maybe it was totally out of alignment somehow. Just as I got ready to get back in the van, I saw this shadow coming from the inside passenger front tire. I thought some child’s toy ball had rolled up against my tire - which was really weird since the parking lot was empty and I was almost sure there was nothing around when I parked.

My home from my youngest days has been Melbourne, Florida. One of the earliest memories I have is the downtown library, its tall stacks of books, the groaning of the shelves under the weight of its contents, the small children’s section, the wooden card catalog with its smooth cornered drawers and cards typed with the occasional smudged printing from the librarian’s Selectric. Story day was the best, and the two man-made lakes outside were the wonder of every child. We brought our last crumbled piece of bread with the plastic wrapper that held the original loaf - throwing it to the ducks and the geese as they surrounded us. We’d walk with mommy around the lake, crossing over the little wooden bridge that was between the two lakes. The sun shone every day we were at the library and a trip home with armfuls of books was our just reward for being quiet.

A recent Wired Magazine story chronicles the adventures of Carly Fiorina, who most will recall, was the celebrated female CEO of Hewlett-Packard for six years before being asked to resign.It also examines her newly released book, Tough Choices, in which Wired Magazine says Ms. Fiorina claims that she was unfairly scrutinized as a women in business and opposed by people who feared the big changes she needed to make at HP. She labels herself a change agent and talks a bit about what it takes to be a change agent.

I found a cool little pocket Songwriter’s Rhyming Dictionary you can use when you are writing songs that I was giving to a friend of mine. You probabaly wouldn’t discover on your own a few of the following rhymes I found in this book:

Excuse: Syracuse (a - ha! And you’ve always wanted to write a song about the whining that goes on in upstate New York).

Moan: Dictaphone (I think this one speaks for itself - just ask any Dictaphone employee).

Oddly, the only two words that they say rhyme with Quiet are Diet and Riot, which makes me realize that the heavy metal band of the 70’s/80’s called Quiet Riot, despite the strange name, definitely chose the better of those two words.