A Factory Story, Part 1

Apparently TV Land has stopped broadcasting Leave it to Beaver, so my son asked me to pick him up a DVD of the series, the other night. Not having much else to do, I sat through an episode where Beaver sneaks into the office of Mrs. Rayburn, the principal of Beaver's school. He's looking for a spanking machine in Mrs. Rayburn's closet, and is accidentally locked inside that night by the janitor. Mrs. Rayburn reminded me of a woman I worked for one time many years ago; Miss Elizabeth Hall. Miss Hall was the production manager of the Bulova Watch Case factory, where I worked one winter, right out of school, while deciding on a career goal. A charming, well educated woman, but certainly not one you would want to mess with. She could hold her own to any man, and the men respected her for it. In fact, she was Sag Harbor's first appointed female mayor, filling in for the last month of Hap Barry's term, who died in office February 1957. Miss Hall was a trustee at the time. For some reason, she chose not to run for reelection as mayor. Although it was never brought up in conversation, I suspect she found it difficult in the so called old boys network, as local politics were at the time.
So it was one October day, I found myself in Bulova's employment office looking for a job. The four story brick build sits on the corner of Hampton and Washington streets. Actually only the second story was used for producing watchcases. After entering the Washington Street entrance and walking up a flight of stairs, I found the employment office. There were about 260 employees working there in the early 70's. Women workers outnumbered men about 60/40. The pay was only $2.50 an hour. The hours were good, 8-5, Monday to Friday with an hour off for lunch. The factory closed the week between Christmas and New Years, and another 3 weeks in July. Of course there were no benefits what-so-ever. After a brief interview I was told I could start that afternoon at 1pm. To be continued:
Bulova about 1988 after it was closed
Washington Street Entrance
Lobby inside entrance to second floor
Stairway leading up to second floor
Brooken glass door to employment office on 2nd floor2005 photo of Bulova's employment office,2nd floor

Fixing up a Dump, Part 3

Well, work has been progressing somewhat on the house on Noyac Road. With a target date for completion being the spring of 2010, we have a year to go. The interior has been gutted to the studs. Outside we jacked up the old porch to where it should be. The locust posts were replaced by brick. The floor was ripped out and replaced with five quarter southern yellow pine. We saved the old porch posts and woodwork. The cracks in the post were filled with automotive bondo, the only thing that really works. The porch roof was replaced, as were the railings, that could not be saved. The sides of the house were reshingled also. Still to be done outside, is to install a bead board ceiling on the porch, and replace the exterior doors and windows. Wooden windows that match the old ones can be had for about 700 dollars each, and are much more efficient. You can't tell the new window from a old window from the street, I do however save the old glass itself, which is about 100 years old. The windows themselves are usually rotted out. We have cleared out the back property, and will be erecting a 40 by 60 foot barn shortly. This job is part restoration and part renovation. We'll post another look later this summer.The Old porch
And the new restoration

The patient almost succumbed

Man, was I pissed. A couple of weeks ago, I got hit with a particularly nasty virus. The computer that is, not me. I run XP because I like it. Vista does nothing for me as a operating system, and is a memory hogger. I also disable virus protection programs as they slow down performance. I do however use a free shareware program called Ad-Aware once a week to clean out the ad stuff that gets planted on the hard drive and use a pop-up eliminator on my web browser.
Well I got hit with a virus called Spy Protect 2009 that some retard/s placed on the internet. Contrary to popular believe, you don't always get a virus in the e-mail, but more likely off certain websites. No, I'm not going to tell you what sites I hang out at! Anyway, this virus throws pop-ups on your screen every few seconds stating your computer is infected with a virus, and to go to a certain website where for $29.95 you can buy the Spy Protect program to download and rid your computer of the problem. Basically, these retards have planted the virus on your machine and are trying to extort $29.95 from you to remove it. It makes your computer virtually useless you pay up.
If a local person pulled something like this on me, I would string them up by the nuts, and hang them off the North Haven bridge. But being on the internet, the perpetrators could be anywhere, even Russia, so I can't get revenge.
Anyway, I did a google search and found a lot people have forums and advice about this virus, along with at least six companies promising to get rid of this virus if you buy their software for 30 to 50 bucks. After reading the forums, I found most of the software programs don't even work on this virus and the companies are conartists
I could of just reformatted the drive and restored it to factory default. But I really wanted to save a lot of the data I acquired over the past year. So not having any dire emergency to fix it, and I have a little 8 inch netbook on my wi-fi netbook to check my e-mail, etc, I poked around for a while and finally found directions to remove the hidden files. Part of it involved removing several lines of code from the registry. Not really wanting to do this, I poked around the forums longer until I found directions to a free shareware site, where I could download their anti-virus program. I downloaded it, opened and ran it. Rebooted and now back in business. No signs of this virus along with over 600 other suspicious files this software has removed. The patient appears to have made a complete recovery.
Spyware Protect 2009 Sucks!