tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-52336836833279599172011-08-25T02:02:58.301-07:00A blog with a wide range of topics. Food, Money, Science, Government, Adventure, Random thoughts and more. Not necessarily in that order.George Condithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888763818634242821noreply@blogger.comBlogger291100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5233683683327959917.post-35994155103614834132011-02-06T06:03:00.000-08:002011-02-06T07:34:49.677-08:00

I woke up this morning thinking about life. Not that all-mystical "Why am I here?" kind of thing. I was thinking about the decisions I've made over the past 45 years. Some weren't so great, while some have been absolutely awesome. I last wrote on this blog in March of 2009; almost 2 years ago. That's pretty pathetic for a guy who likes to write. I think I'll change the name of this blog to: "

George Condithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888763818634242821noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5233683683327959917.post-11863515436953303122009-03-12T09:22:00.000-07:002009-03-12T14:31:01.944-07:00

I haven't written anything on this blog in a long time. I think it's been over two moths. Inspirations for a good blog take time to build, and I hope this one has brewed long enough. I love Boise! I've made my bunk in places ranging from one coast to the other, but by far Boise has infected my heart. There are many reason's my wife and I choose to make this our permanent residence. Lots of sun,

George Condithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888763818634242821noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5233683683327959917.post-70328391487906491212009-02-03T20:07:00.000-08:002010-02-17T07:15:03.605-08:00

A caveman saw another walking up a steep incline on some round rocks, and just as his cave compadre stepped on one stone it rolled out from under him. This simultaneously elicited an uproariously hysterical laugh and helped invent the wheel at the same time. You'll get it in a minute.What you are reading this instant is an extension of my mind. As a matter of fact, everything we see that has been

George Condithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888763818634242821noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5233683683327959917.post-4485608752423889342009-01-31T03:32:00.001-08:002009-01-31T07:43:03.532-08:00

How many times has someone yelled at you to close the door? How many times have you yelled at your kids to close the door?I recently met a man who has a very helpful occupation. He tests your house to see how well it's keeping in the heat when it's cold outside, or how well it's keeping in the cold when it's hot outside. His name is Lee Cotten and he is the owner of Idaho Thermal Imaging. He has

George Condithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888763818634242821noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5233683683327959917.post-72385694755017744442009-01-25T02:45:00.000-08:002009-01-26T15:20:26.300-08:00

How do you detect the effects of quantum mechanics? Start with a metric ton of aluminum and make it very cold...Just what are the effects of quantum mechanics?, you ask and it's an interesting question. To discuss it we have to rouse Schrodinger's Cat, a thought experiment that has a cat in a sealed box with some uranium. Uranium decays and releases deadly radiation. Once the radiation is

George Condithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888763818634242821noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5233683683327959917.post-28458947416681259512009-01-20T04:16:00.000-08:002009-01-21T10:43:13.298-08:00

Now that all the hoopla is pretty much over, and it's time to get down to work, President Obama needs to be more specific. I've listened to the man speak, and he is an amazing orator. But I have to take issue with the fact that his speeches, inspiring as they may be, leave me at a loss in his vagueness. I've been listening to the rhetoric coming out of the new president. While the mere mention of

George Condithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888763818634242821noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5233683683327959917.post-44842980146986038272009-01-19T05:05:00.000-08:002009-01-19T15:25:55.224-08:00

I spent a great couple of hours the other day with the owner of J2 Recovery Services. He helps banks get cars and other things back from people who aren't making their payments. Its a pretty interesting business. Of the functions he performs for these lending institutions, skip tracing seems to be the most interesting. A skip trace is performed when creditors can't find the person who owes the

George Condithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888763818634242821noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5233683683327959917.post-6938646499672653222009-01-17T05:11:00.000-08:002009-01-17T09:22:56.434-08:00

I once had lunch with a professor from my MBA program. He has an extremely distinguished business career. He has worked for some very large and well known companies, and still does. He's well qualified from an academic credentials standpoint as well. There are few people I could find to get the kind of advice he gave me. His specialty is strategic planning. As a matter of fact, I found my niche

George Condithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888763818634242821noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5233683683327959917.post-87838478074580764872009-01-15T06:30:00.002-08:002009-01-15T16:10:50.551-08:00

Have you ever looked up at a billboard while driving and wondered why that particular advertiser decided decided on that particular billboard? Probably not. And have you ever wondered how that person knew that was a good way to spend their marketing dollars? Again, probably not. Someone put up a counter and counted the cars that pass by on a daily or weekly basis, figured out the average number

George Condithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888763818634242821noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5233683683327959917.post-86488275503497989812009-01-09T03:00:00.000-08:002009-01-14T14:37:47.476-08:00

What a fun week I've had. I've met more cool people this last week than I care to count, but I will if you call up an ask me. The beauty of all these connections is that in every case these folks are entrepreneurial, young, smart, and tough. The media would like me to think that there is a tough economy out there, but let me tell you it's no tougher than in 1978, 1988, 1997, 2001. Watching these

George Condithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888763818634242821noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5233683683327959917.post-43139500974762871962009-01-08T02:46:00.000-08:002009-01-08T04:47:42.923-08:00

I don't care what anybody says; bringing children in to the world it the one thing in life that makes it all worth while. Being a man, I realize that my gender has it a bit easier in this regard. Setting that part of the process aside, being someone's dad is the best job on the planet. As with any position in life it has it ups and downs, but the ups far outweigh the downs.  The responsibilities

George Condithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888763818634242821noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5233683683327959917.post-17822647456935985382009-01-06T16:36:00.001-08:002009-01-07T04:47:26.546-08:00

If you could be a hero to everyone you come in contact with during your daily life, what would that look like? I suppose, using the Socratic method, you would have to have a definition of hero. Perhaps you could use the dictionary, or some combination of the book definition and a historical or mythological figure by which to judge what is and isn't heroic. But regardless of some external

George Condithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888763818634242821noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5233683683327959917.post-25350916393052054202008-12-07T16:54:00.000-08:002009-01-06T16:36:16.205-08:00

 Back when I was a kid my Mom and her friends used to get together and mix up a big batch of salt dough for Christmas ornaments. They made all kinds of great things like, Santa, Christmas trees, Angels, and Wreaths. They used a garlic press to make hair and beards, and cloves to make the stems on the fruit of the wreaths. Then they would paint them with acrylic and seal them with poly-urethane to

George Condithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888763818634242821noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5233683683327959917.post-22470131660925751332008-12-04T08:33:00.000-08:002008-12-04T08:43:33.717-08:00

I'm sorry I haven't been writing. Well, actually I have, but not for this blog. School is almost over, and I turn in my second to last paper today, So I'm going to make a come back in the blogging department. While I have been learning new stuff everyday, there has been little time to commit it to this forum. What I have learned in this long hiatus is that priorities are important. Family, school

George Condithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888763818634242821noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5233683683327959917.post-16790120156929425582008-09-24T03:36:00.000-07:002008-09-24T05:43:14.139-07:00

I was sitting in Operations Management last night. It's one of my classes in the MBA program at Northwest Nazarene University. The professor was talking about the proposed federal bail out of the banking industry, and he said he couldn't get his head around the number 1 trillion. So I whipped out my handy dandy calculator and tried to come up with a way to help myself grasp  the enormity of this

George Condithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888763818634242821noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5233683683327959917.post-29863009101450598062008-09-20T04:33:00.000-07:002008-10-05T11:32:30.861-07:00

Twenty years of spending too much money has brought the financial market to its knees. Many say it was those greedy Wall Street types who took all those huge salaries of millions of dollars; sometimes after the company had been financially destroyed. Yes, this is probably some of the problem, but the blame for all these large lending institutions going belly up can be spread around.Consumerism,

George Condithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888763818634242821noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5233683683327959917.post-70024269918241434712008-09-18T03:24:00.000-07:002008-09-18T05:20:09.786-07:00

Black gold, Texas Tea or what ever you want to call it is one of the most useful substances the genius of nature has ever produced. Just open your eyes, and you can't miss it because it's in almost everything you can see. Just looking at my desk, I can see a multitude of stuff that is made from oil. Various parts of my computer, keyboard, mouse, digital camera, my magnifying glass, my son's

George Condithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888763818634242821noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5233683683327959917.post-1713560267227577532008-09-16T03:31:00.000-07:002008-09-16T05:22:57.346-07:00

I found out today that if you have a spare $10 billion laying around you can make your very own black hole. The LHC (large Hadron Collider), located near Geneva, Switzerland, is a machine designed to send a stream of protons around a big circle at ever increasing speeds in opposite directions, and then smash them in to each other. It's like a infinitesimally small version of demolition derby, but

George Condithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888763818634242821noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5233683683327959917.post-55585809787484451582008-09-13T06:30:00.000-07:002008-09-16T08:43:51.934-07:00

My wife has a small, but growing, cookbook collection. Her most recent garage sale find is the Culinary Arts Institute Encyclopedic Cookbook, by Ruth Berolzheimer. The book is about 10" x 7", and about 3.5 inches thick. It has almost every recipe you can imagine and many you would never think of, or want to. It was originally published back in 1950, but our copy is the 1962 edition. It's tabbed

George Condithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888763818634242821noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5233683683327959917.post-11652975618501926142008-09-10T15:33:00.000-07:002008-09-11T10:11:16.318-07:00

For the past couple of years we have been watching American automakers slowly being bled to death by the advance of evermore stringent environmental standards (not that I don't like clean air), unions with eyes for short term gratification, and the quality driven foreign manufacturers. On the face it looks as though a few are getting rich of  the backs of the many, but in reality the the big US

George Condithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888763818634242821noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5233683683327959917.post-71342765714809405822008-09-09T05:15:00.000-07:002008-09-09T08:45:14.577-07:00

I have a great research staff. Actually it's just my Mom. She sends me all kinds of interesting articles. This morning she sent me an article from the American Enterprise Institute by Leon Aron about what's happening in Russia. It would seem those wily Ruskies are up to their old tricks. Yep, right out of Stalin's playbook. The first paragraph of the article say it all.On June 18-19, 2007, a

George Condithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888763818634242821noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5233683683327959917.post-46840198425013192542008-09-05T04:32:00.000-07:002008-09-08T09:23:28.102-07:00

Last Sunday I wrote about panning for gold in the foothills of Idaho, and how I my interest was peaked due to an engagement party for a distant relative. I also had occasion to discuss another topic. It seems that one of the attendees was a Swedish gentleman who had immigrated to the United States permanently nigh on 20 years ago. One of the subjects that came up was Norse Mythology. I have

George Condithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888763818634242821noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5233683683327959917.post-82068672919645196532008-09-03T17:57:00.000-07:002008-09-04T13:15:16.461-07:00

Have you ever seen a bee buzzing around your flowers with his legs loaded with balls of pollen so large he could barely make it in to the air? I have, on more than one occasion,  seen these little fuzzy fliers so full that when they began to buzz, they actually had to walk of the edge of the pedal to find the open air. It was like witnessing an overloaded bomber going off the end of an aircraft

George Condithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888763818634242821noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5233683683327959917.post-303758407403173452008-09-03T04:51:00.000-07:002008-09-03T19:10:36.109-07:00

Today's post is a piece I was asked to write for Idaho Ad Agencies about my excursion in to the world of marketing. Hope you don't mind the extra click. Have a great day, and we'll see what I learned today later.

George Condithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888763818634242821noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5233683683327959917.post-90693290225536659462008-09-02T06:33:00.000-07:002008-09-02T09:53:51.975-07:00

I received an e-mail today from a friend who owns a ladies' shoe store. She was looking for advice about what to do with the summer inventory that didn’t find a home. The lines at Perfect Pair Shoes are very specialized and may be difficult to sell because of the high-fashion nature of the styles. As an early riser, I tend to wake, check e-mail and listen to the radio. Here in Boise, Idaho, Wall

George Condithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888763818634242821noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5233683683327959917.post-70259027380189003882008-09-01T06:33:00.000-07:002008-09-01T12:49:26.636-07:00

I found out today that the Labor Day holiday was started by a New York Labor Union back in the late 1800's. According to the U.S. Department of labor, many have doubts about who was first to create the "end of the summer" holiday. General Secretary of the the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, and one of the co-founders of the AFL,  is one such candidate. His name is Peter McGuire and he 

George Condithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888763818634242821noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5233683683327959917.post-18452535418421257612008-08-31T04:56:00.000-07:002008-08-31T07:55:34.312-07:00

I went to a party last night to celebrate an engagement, and wound up engaged myself. The host brought out a small vile of water with a few flakes of gold in it. He said he'd bought a couple of pans and just went in to the river up in Idaho City. He  asked a few folks along the stream how to do it, and in about an hour and a half he had about 30 dollars worth. Not a bad wage. I have lived here

George Condithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888763818634242821noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5233683683327959917.post-34617288152657900942008-08-30T03:49:00.001-07:002008-08-30T09:04:51.469-07:00

 I learned a new word today. My desktop dictionary defines Coup d'oeil as; a glance that takes a comprehensive view. It comes from eighteenth century French and literally means, "stroke of eye". Typically, this word is applied to the great military minds because they could look at a battlefield and know instinctively how best to proceed in battle. It is used in a book that was recommended by a

George Condithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888763818634242821noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5233683683327959917.post-17949553168228781312008-08-29T05:58:00.000-07:002008-08-29T09:07:01.293-07:00

We all know the old saw, "Know your history, or be doomed to repeat it." Wise advice. I mean if you don't know what mistakes were made in the past how is it possible to keep from making them in the future, or even today for that matter.  This is  the greatest of all human failings. Forgetting the time you applied the front brakes on your bike while making a turn has serious consequences the next

George Condithttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07888763818634242821noreply@blogger.com1