Decision Time On Satellite TV

I guess you have been watching with amusement the never ending marketing duels between satellite TV operators and cable television companies and you can no longer afford to sit on the fence and accept just any package either of these rivals is offering subscribers like you, right?

If so, then there is need for you to scrutinize closely what both the Satellite TV and Cable TV are offering before settling for the one you think satisfies you.

Note that you should always think of what will satisfy you first before thinking of what will satisfy the particular provider.

After all, it's all about you, right? You should come first in terms of enjoyment and cost.

So, if you are a subscriber to one of the two and are contemplating switching allegiance, do not rush into signing up without first considering vital factors like availability, picture and audio quality, programming choices, and the overall expense.

One positive fall out of the intense marketing rivalry between satellite and cable TV providers is the improved services and moderate fees charged by both competitors.

With cable television, type of channels and price you pay for the service depends largely on the region you live in.

One way cable subscribers can reduce the cost and get a good discount from the operators is to prove that you can get the channels you want for a lesser amount from satellite TV service.

In terms of programming options, satellite TV is miles ahead of its cable counterpart, but cable service make up for this shortcoming by having superior local programming content.

Unfortunately, anyone resident in rural communities like a good buddy of mine named Marvin might not be able to access cable TV services, so its fierce rival wins the battle here because it is the only option for such people.

But the victory is momentary for obvious reasons; if your locality lack a direct line of sight to satellites due to natural factors such as high mountains, etc, then it might be difficult to receive satellite TV signals.

However, if, and it is a big if, your satellite TV provider finds a way round the above problem you can be sure that you will be charged extra for the installation.

So this is an open comparison of the options available to any potential subscriber to either type of television service. The decision to settle for one is yours to make.

El Tajin - Magnificence in the Mexican Jungle

An ancient ceremonial center that the early Spanish explorers never found...

A United Nations World Heritage site and one of the most important archaeological sites in Mexico...

Off the beaten tourist path, in the state of Veracruz near the Gulf of Mexico...

A place of great beauty...

El Tajín.

The first sight of the ruins was astonishing. The emerald green of the grass and forest, the textures of the rocks, the soft grayness and coolness of the gentle rain, and the view of several pyramidal structures all combined to caress the eyes and invite exploration. We meandered around the huge site. Over 30 of the more than 160 buildings known to archaeologists have been excavated. The further my husband and I went, the more amazing the buildings became.

I gave myself over to being in a place with so much life and history, such a strong feeling of people of the past. It was grand to be there, and also a reminder of how short my own time will be, in the great scheme of things.

The city was both a spiritual and a political center - the two concepts were intertwined. In the Totonac language, tajín means thunder, lightning, or hurricane, all of which can occur mightily in the region, between June and October. The god of these forces was called Tajín by the Totonacs.

Scholars generally seem to agree that most of the site was built by the Totonacs, who occupied a large geographical area in this part of Mexico. El Tajín's epoch of splendor ran from about 800 to 1200 AD and probably involved a population of 25,000 or so, spread over a larger area than the site itself.

El Tajín was abandoned in 1230 AD, for reasons which are unknown -- perhaps an attack of the Chichimecas, perhaps something else. El Tajín was not located where it was for reasons of defense - the site is completely open.

By the time of the Spanish conquest, El Tajín was covered by jungle. In 1785, a Spanish engineer named Diego Ruiz was looking for tobacco plantings that the Spanish wanted to control, and he came upon the Pyramid of the Niches. As one of the brochures put it, he became the first European to see El Tajín. I liked that wording better than the more usual Euro-centric phrase, that he "discovered" it.

El Tajín has a number of ball courts, for the ritual game famous for its outcome of human sacrifice. I remember my horror when my family went to Mayan sites in the Yucatan when I was nine. Memories of that repulsion had made me wonder if El Tajín would give me the creeps. Far from it... the sense of civilization that I felt at El Tajín was very strong. Balance was a central concept for them, keeping the world in balance between the opposites of duality that some scholars see as a major part of the Totonac world view.

We wandered around, and found ourselves on a path going uphill through the jungle. Remembering a guidebook's warning about poisonous snakes in the thicker jungle, we stayed on the trail. Soon we came upon a hand-dug well, with a sign asking people not to dirty it as it was used for drinking. We had reached the far edges of the ruins, and there was a tiny house and cornfield. We wondered about the native peoples of Totonac descent. Did they live here among the ruins of their ancestors for all these centuries?

It was delicious to see so few other tourists around. It seemed that there were fewer than fifty at the whole site while we were there. A rainy Monday in February didn't pull the numbers that would have been there at other times, but still El Tajín is really off the beaten touristic path. Travel in Mexico in the off season has its benefits. Some friends of ours went to El Tajin at the spring equinox, and they reported that there were thousands of people there for special ceremonies.

Eventually, we wandered back to the museum at the entrance to the grounds. I chatted for a while with a young guard, who was also a student. He was extremely knowledgeable about the history there. I asked a more contemporary question, too: could we camp overnight in the parking lot? He assured me that tourists often did and there was never a problem. All we needed to do was come in around closing time and tell the two night watchmen that we would be there.

We had a pleasant evening in the motorhome, going through the many photos we had taken and reading a book in Spanish that I had bought about El Tajín. The dog food I had purchased came in handy. There were quite a few loose dogs in the parking lot and over by the souvenir stands. One pretty little brown bitch quickly adopted us, chasing off other dogs.

I wanted to feed two other little brown dogs, but even when I put out two and then three separate piles some distance apart, the bitch - whom we dubbed Brownie One - ran growling from pile to pile, managing to keep both other Brownies from getting much. When Kelly stepped out to turn on the hot water heater, the dogs were disappointed that the match he was holding was not something to eat. I briefly wished we could take Brownie One home with us, but I knew our two dogs at home wouldn't accept her easily. That night, she slept under the RV, and the other Brownies - were they her grown pups? - slept nearby. When a truck came through the parking lot in the wee hours, all three dogs vigorously protected us with their barking. Travel in Mexico involves seeing such dogs everywhere, and I greatly enjoyed getting to know these zestful dogs.

I wondered if we would have interesting dreams so near the ruins, but neither of us remembered any. Early in the morning, we saw people leaving the ruins to go to work and school, adding to the sense of the continuity of life. As soon as the site was officially open, Kelly took off for several hours with his video camera. I enjoyed a little more dog time and then roamed the site for a while myself.

Back at the entrance area, I had a question for a young man at the front desk with whom I had spoken the day before. There was another man with him, also in the white shirt and beige slacks that signaled they were employees of the site, which is run cooperatively by state of Veracruz and the National Institute of Anthropology and History.

I had noticed the enthusiasm of everyone working there, not typical stolid museum guard personalities at all. "Everyone who works here seems so interested in the site," I began. "Are you archaeologists?" I thought they might be graduate students.

No, said the older man, they weren't archaeologists. The younger one explained that they were Totonacs themselves. They spoke Totonac in their homes, from childhood. These great ruins were the creations of their ancestors. He said a couple of other things that I couldn't quite understand... I was getting better at following spoken Spanish, and they were speaking more clearly than most, probably from their exposure to other foreigners. But still I rarely understood 100% of a conversation.

We left El Tajín with a feeling of immense satisfaction, a sense of having been greatly enriched. It would turn out to be one of the high points of our entire Mexican trip.

There Are Beneficial Microbes, And There Are Others - Let's Talk About Them

You probably don't realize it, but your body is full of beneficial microbes, as well as those that are not very good for you.

It is thought that your body consists of about 10 trillion cells, and it's been claimed that there is at least ten times as much bacteria in you.

Microbes live in your skin, your gut, your hair, pretty much anywhere.

Here's an interesting truth about them, though.

The type of food you eat will influence greatly what type of microbes you have in your body. If you strive to stay healthy and focus on eating organic produce while making sure you keep a balanced diet with enough exercise, you'll see a lot of beneficial microbes, especially around your gut area.

If, on the other hand, you are a fast food fan and don't maintain a healthy life style, what you're going to have in you are harmful microbes that will get you sick in time.

They're wonderfully balanced.

See, microbes feed on each other. One type of microbes will produce excrement that another type will eat, so if you kill one type of microbes and eliminate it from your system, then the organisms that feed off of that microbe family will die as well.

This will in return cause the death of other microbes which will put your body in terrible imbalance.

There's more to this, though...

If your diet is not healthy, bad microbes will enter your system, and they'll damage your body.

I am not exaggerating.

One example of a bad microbe is E. Coli which, as you probably know, killed literally hundreds of people.

Bad microbes include viruses, bacteria and fungi and I am pretty sure I don't have to tell you how destructive they can be to your body.

The truth is...

... that pretty much every single condition you can possibly suffer from is caused by one of those three, so you'll do yourself a huge favor, if you focus on being as healthy as you can so that the good microbes in your body can get rid of the bad ones for you.

Your body will heal.

I am sure you've heard me mention before that your body has the ability to heal. If microbes can break oil leaks floating in the ocean down and make them completely neutral for the environment, they'll have no problem protecting you against that bad microbes that will occasionally enter your system.

You have to help them, though.

It'll not do you any good if you wipe the majority of good microbes out by being careless and not paying attention to what you eat.

And, if you kill those beneficial micro-organisms, there'll be no one to protect you from getting sick, and you'll have to rely on chemicals and medications to get you well.

As you most likely know, those chemicals will do more harm than good to you, they'll weaken your body and make it dependent on toxins and other harmful substances for health.

This is, obviously, never a good thing, so... ... don't destroy the beneficial microbes that are trying to help you. Help them and they'll take care of everything else in return.

Mexico Retirement in Merida - Warm, Comfortable and Affordable

Have you been thinking of retiring, but you'd prefer a warmer climate? "Sounds nice," you might think, "but I'm retiring on a budget, and I know the Florida beachfront doesn't fit into that budget." There's good news; a Mexico Retirement is becoming a more and more common option for Americans and Canadians who want to retire to a warm climate on a budget or are looking for luxury at a non-luxury price. Within the many options for retirement in Mexico, Merida Real Estate is an excellent location for various reasons.

The city of Merida a very attractive with a classic colonial downtown. Mexico Homes of all styles and price ranges are available in the Merida area. For a retirement with a bit of romantic, old charm to it, a home in or near the city center would be an ideal option. While the city of Merida itself is not directly on the beachfront, the port-town of Progreso only half an hour away includes beautiful modern homes as well as beachfront condos.

Merida is the center of the Yucatan in various ways. Besides being located within a couple hours of many of the areas famous attractions, such as the ancient Mayan pyramids in Chichen Itza, the awe-inspiring flamingo reserve in the Emerald cost, or the interactive Eco-parks near Cancun. The city also has several excellent golf courses. Large international stores (such as Walmart) and shopping malls complement the local markets and craft stores to provide a wide variety of shopping for all tastes and occasions. While the local Mayan specialities are excellent, Merida also includes everything from American fast food, to international European restaurants.

Merida also boasts the best health care facilities in the area, and even draws residents from other countries seeking modern, up-to-date and professional medical service. Roads and transportation in Merida are well planned and well kept up.

The city also serves as a cultural focal point for the Yucatan Peninsula. Local Mariachi bands, live jazz, street musicians and many other kinds of music add life to the city; arts and crafts can be found everywhere. Retirement in Merida will never be dull; relaxing yes, but definitely not without things to do. The best part about it all; it's a lot less expensive than living in the U.S.

To explore the possibility of a Mexico retirement, and to begin your search for the Merida real estate that will be most suitable for you, contact Mexico's top experts in real estate:

TOPMexicoRealEstate NETWORK; Mexico's Leading Network of Specialists for Finding and Purchasing Mexican Properties Safely

Precisely What Badminton Racquets Do the Professionals Use?

A popular question in any sports products store is commonly - "What badminton racquets will the pro masters employ?" And thus the best possible option I really could present anyone is in fact - "All of them." Whilst truth be told there are particular elements which pretty much all the pros do a search for in a racquet, at this time there is not any one particular racquet which pretty much all professional people favor. Each participant is completely unique and consequently possesses diverse specifications when picking out a racquet. Anything that performs well for one person is most likely a complete dud with regards to the next. Always keeping in mind, too, that the majority of the triumphs would depend certainly not so much on the racquet but the actual physical attributes of the player, right here are some of the points that the professionals have a look at when ever picking out a racquet.

If you require a racquet for control - Consider lighter weight badminton racquets if you're looking for additional control. Unstrung, the racquet ought to be around 85 and 90 grams, given the balance point is between 275mm and 280mm. Always bear in mind also, should you be the kind who would want to tape up the grip to really make it bigger, which could increase the weight to your racquet.

If you want a racquet for power - Try to find more heavy weight racquets, somewhere within 88 and 92 grams having a balance point of 285mm to 295mm. A more substantial weight racquet will have a reduced amount of shock and vibration when striking the shuttle.

If you need a racquet for power and control - Try to find racquets which possess a lesser amount of rigidity within the shaft. You'll be able to change the weight and balance of any racquet for increased control but particularly in case you are a novice player you are likely to obtain a lot more power when you have a far more flexible shaft in your racquet.

When shopping for badminton racquets, you should not even consider purchasing a wooden racquet nowadays, if you are able to even locate one. The newer racquets manufactured from aluminum, steel and carbon-fibers tend to be significantly lighter weight making for such a faster game now that if you decide to try to compete with a wood racquet you may as well just stand still in the center of the court.

When NOT to Get a Debt Consolidation Loan

You see them all the time. Those ads and websites that scream "Consolidate Your Debt & Save Big!!" Are they full of you know what? Can you really consolidate your debt and save big? The answer is: Sometimes, on both counts. There are definitely circumstances when it is the best course of action to consolidate your debt and lower your monthly cash outflow by getting a good debt consolidation loan. The key is knowing when that is, because there are also times when it definitely not the correct thing to do.

If you have gotten in a bit over your head with monthly bills, and many people have done just that, you first need to analyze your expenses and income. Where does your money come from? Where does it go? If much of your debt is credit card bills, you need to look at what you used the cards for. Was it emergency expenses such as car repairs or medical bills? Or do you have a consistent pattern of spending for things such as clothes, dining & drinking out, recreation, Internet purchases, jewelry and performance car parts / accessories? The latter can be considered non-essential consumption. While it does help the national economy in the short term, it does little for yours.

If you have incurred some emergency expenses that caused your credit balance to substantially increase, but it was an extraordinary expenditure, you may be a great candidate for a debt consolidation loan. You must realize that, if you obtain such a loan, the reason the interest rate is so low is that debt consolidation loans use the equity in your home to secure the debt. If you fail to repay the loan, you could lose your home. If the credit card bills are high due to emergency expenses, the likelihood of you continuing to increase the balance on your credit cards is fairly low. You can put the equity in your home to work for you to help your cash flow by substantially decreasing your monthly credit card payments.

If you have, and continue to increase your credit card balances through a pattern of spending, you are probably a poor candidate for a debt consolidation loan until you change your spending habits. If you fail to do so, you will continue to spend more than you take in every month. Once you get a debt consolidation loan, you will no longer have the equity in your home to bail you out. You could easily lose your home to foreclosure. You must decrease your nonessential spending each month. While it may be nice to buy a new outfit or go out with your friends every week, This qualifies as nonessential spending. You need to stop such spending until you get your credit card bills under control and increase your monthly income.

A debt consolidation loan is a great tool to help your finances, but only in the correct situation. Like every other tool, you need to use it in the right circumstances. Just like you wouldn't use a screw driver to pound in a nail, you shouldn't use a debt consolidation loan except in the proper situation.

An Amish Christmas Written by Cynthia Keller

A delightful and interesting story of a well-to-do family that suddenly, due to the husband's unwise decisions, became completely insolvent and lost everything they had except for one old automobile that had been paid off years earlier. What to do? How do you exist as a family and where do you turn? Meg and James Hobart, along with their three children, Lizzie, Will, and Sam had to face this reality shortly before Thanksgiving when a very irritated James turned on all of his family with a distinct attitude problem noticed by all. The family had always had a huge Thanksgiving dinner attended by many friends and Meg was busily preparing her plans for what, who, and exactly when the dinner would be served. For some time James had been bitterly complaining about any purchases the family made telling them the family could not afford all those unnecessary things they purchased. Just before the big dinner he broke down and told Meg that he had been "fired" in August and had not been able to tell her. He had invested all their money after his firing in some dismal investment company without telling Meg and they had lost everything. Everything was gone including the house, the savings, the investments, and their leased cars. The dinner went on but with a far different feeling by Meg and James. Corners were cut everywhere possible.

The next few weeks they disposed of everything, canceled all insurance policies, as well as anything due in the present or future. They packed and shipped all personal items to Meg's parents where they would travel to as soon as possible and live with them until they became able to go on their own once again. They squeezed into the old car and took off carrying only very personal items that they each wanted to still be in their lives. While traveling through Pennsylvania they had an accident with an Amish horse-drawn buggy forcing the car into a pole. As a result an Amish family involved in the accident came and helped all involved and made sure they were not hurt and took them to their home to get warmed up and relax from the accident.

The car was towed to a garage in a nearby small city and the Amish family invited the Hobart's to stay with them until the car could be repaired and then get on their way once again. Needless to say, the Amish life was far different from the life that the Hobart's had been used to all their lives-until the loss of all their possessions and finances. You never heard such belly aching from the kids. Lizzie, Will, and Sam couldn't put up with these people or the way they lived. No computers, no television, no-anything they were used to. The stay was extended because it was taking the repair shop a long time to get the parts and get that old car ready.

This story is a good old-fashioned story that fits in with Christmas time perfect and gives all of us that are spoiled having all the modern communication and living devices in our lives a lot of reflection. You will meet the Amish families and live with them and adjust to their style of living-or not! The Amish live a very simple family oriented life and are not afraid of manual labor. An excellent read for all ages.

Binge Eating and Self Esteem: Are You a Victim or a Victor?

It's one of those days when Murphy's Law is in full effect. You walk in the door and check your mail: more bills. Instinctively, you make your way to the refrigerator, open the door and search for "a little something" to eat. You spy a box of your favorite cookies, grab one and take a bite. The sweetness of the cookie evokes feelings of calmer, happier times. You savor the cookie, swallow it, then reach for another and before you know it, you've finished the entire box. "Well, now I've done it." you tell yourself, "I've ruined my diet and the day is now a complete waste". Your eye shifts to the leftover chocolate cake sitting pretty on the kitchen counter and you help yourself to a slice. Again, you delight in every bite but the dark, rich chocolate flavor leaves you wanting more. You cut another slice, then another, until the cake is gone. Feeling uncomfortably full, guilty and disgusted you berate yourself and create an all too familiar "promise" to begin anew.

Sound familiar? This is the pattern of a binge eater.

Binge eating Disorder is described by Health.com, as a "disorder which is a newly recognized condition that probably affects millions of Americans. People with binge eating disorder frequently eat large amounts of food while feeling a loss of control over their eating. This disorder is different from binge-purge syndrome (bulimia nervosa) because people with binge eating disorder usually do not purge afterward by vomiting or using laxatives."

Separately, The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, defines a Binge as, "A period of unrestrained, immoderate self-indulgence" and a Disorder as "An ailment that affects the function of mind or body: eating disorders and substance abuse." Exactly just how long of a "period" are we talking about: a moment, an hour or an entire day of eating? Today, it seems, everything has a "term" or is labeled as an "ism" or "disorder". Way back when, the Blues were just the Blues, but today it's a diagnosis of Dysthymic Disorder, which is a form of mild depression. What gives? I mean, what's the harm in a few extra cookies and a slab of cake when you're having a bad day or the Blues? There isn't much harm in it, until it becomes a pattern.

How and why does a moment of sustenance sensitivity turn into a full blown binge eating disorder? There is an underlying psychological reason for it: Low self-esteem. In a November, 2001 article about "The Costs and Causes of Low Self-esteem", Self-esteem is defined as "a generalized feeling about the self, and the view that it is the sum of a set of judgments about one's value, worthiness, and competence." Therefore, low self-esteem could be defined as the opposite: generalized negative, feelings and judgments about the self. Additionally, low self-esteem is the number one underlying cause for most other psychological maladjustments such as anxiety, obesity, and addiction; it is also a risk factor for suicide attempts, depression, teen pregnancy and victimization by others. As far as I know, low self-esteem isn't its own 'ism' or disorder just yet.

Whether accompanying emotions are happy, sad, angry, bored, anxious or lonely, when they are coupled with a lack of belief in one's self it's an easy excuse, in this case, to reach for food. Very often the after effects of an eating binge: guilt, self-loathing and just generally feeling bad about one's self can lead to false self-promises which in turn fuel the vicious cycle of a binge eater. Here are seven tips to make you feel good about yourself and eating again:

1) Will you be a Victim or a Victor? The choice is yours. Discontinuing any behavior begins with making a choice: The bottom line is this: if you choose to be worthy of good things and good feelings then you shall have them. Choose that you will not be guided by disappointments in your life but rather, achievements and you shall succeed. Choose to become healthy, and you shall be healthy. Choose to become happy, and you shall be happy.

2) Get a Life......Coach! When you want to become adept at a sport such as tennis, baseball, football or running you turn to a coach. It's the same thing when you want to make better life decisions. Unlike therapy and more like a kick in the pants, a Coach is available to help people succeed. Patrick Wanis, Author, Human Behavior Therapist, Hypnotist and Life and Fitness Coach suggests in his new book, "Get What you Want" that if one changes their inner world and beliefs about themselves that they will change their outer world. He states that "True personal power begins when we can control our inner world, when we can control the way we react, think and feel to what happens outside of us. And yes, the outer world does affect our inner world but the greatest news, the secret, is that our inner world also affects our outer world, what we experience and create in our life. When we master our mind and inner world, we master and shape our outer world."

3) If you are the active type, consider a fitness plan. Begin by finding the right Fitness/Weight-loss plan to suit your personality. There are actually fitness/weight loss programs that encourage binge eating. That's right - your eyes are not playing tricks on you. Fitness programs such as the Body for Life Plan, for example, allow folks a free-day, one day week to eat what ever you want, provided you put in the work. The idea behind this is that the body, after dieting and exercising can be tricked into a type of "starvation mode" which would slow down the metabolism and actually hinder a person's weight loss efforts. Having a day of over-eating tricks the body into not thinking it is starving. This plan is clever because it eliminates the guilt issue. Seeing the positive results of such a plan can only increase the likelihood of success and will bolster self-esteem.

4) Keep self-promises. Why make a promise to yourself only to put it off? Honoring self-promises shows love and respect for you. Keep the promises small and realistic and believe that you are worth the follow-through and with every promise you keep, you will further develop your self worth.

5) Find a metaphor and create a story. Discover a way to remind yourself of how you visualize your success by temporarily creating a story and disassociating yourself from the issue. This may allow you to experience more empathetic feelings by providing a clarity you may not have had before. For example, consider the metaphor of a caterpillar that fears the change to butterfly. Understanding the caterpillar's fear of becoming a butterfly and how it tries to control the change by eating less may uncover major underlying food issues.

6) Remember, you are not alone. It didn't take the recent smash hit documentary, Super Size Me by Morton Spurlock, to enlighten us that all of America has an eating problem. Well, maybe it did. Sadly, our appetites have somehow become directly proportionate to the extra large helpings we've become accustomed to. In a recent CDC report entitled "Overweight and Obesity - Contributing Factors" it states that "People may be eating more during a meal or snack because of larger portion sizes. This results in increased calorie consumption. If the body does not burn off the extra calories consumed from larger portions, fast food, or soft drinks, weight gain can occur." Therefore, it should be no surprise that a basic meal can leave us with the same, full, disgusted, feeling as an eating binge. A good thing to do to gain a better perspective on healthier relationships with food is to learn about how other cultures like Japan, Italy and France for example, feel about food.

7) Embrace food. Food isn't meant to isolate, it is meant to bring people together. By developing an appreciation of food, you will discover there is more than just the hand-to-mouth motion of eating. Once you will learn to savor, identify and appreciate a food's ingredients you'll develop a respect and deeper love of food. So if you have favorite foods enlighten yourself: learn about the food's history, its ingredients or its health benefits. My advice: take cooking classes. Cooking is a great way to explore and discover new foods. By learning to prepare foods, we also learn how they are meant to be served and enjoyed. Education does something wonderful for food in the eyes of a binge eater because food is no longer perceived as a daunting monster but rather as something to be respected and embraced.

A final word: if binge eating incidents are perceived as an issue to be dealt with rather than a disorder to be cured, especially where low self-esteem is involved, most episodes can be conquered by simply recognizing issues, changing behaviors and making choices. What may begin as a love affair with food, can and will easily morph into something entirely different when low self-esteem is an underlying factor. This despondent relationship with food can become a coping mechanism, or a short term fix to control emotions and gain control over one's life. I'm here to tell you, this doesn't have to be the case. We control food. Food does not control us.

I found a clever quote online by a guy named Jose B. Cabajar, which said "Forgiving one's self is self-acceptance." In the event that a binge is eminent, forgive yourself once it's over and move on. If you understand that setbacks are the backbones of breakthroughs, and you choose to outwit your low self-esteem you will become a victor, a champion of the one person who means so much to you - yourself.

Interview with Roland Hughes, Author of "The Minimum You Need to Know" Series

Today, Tyler R. Tichelaar of Reader Views is pleased to be joined by Roland Hughes, who is here to talk about his "The Minimum You Need to Know" series, which includes "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an Open VMS Application Developer," 1st Impression Publishing (2006), "The Minimum You Need to Know About Logic to Work in IT," Logikal Solutions (2007), and "The Minimum You Need to Know About Java on OpenVMS," Logikal Solutions (2006).

Roland Hughes is the president of Logikal Solutions, a business applications consulting firm specializing in VMS platforms. Hughes serves as a lead consultant with over two decades of experience using computers and operating systems originally created by Digital Equipment Corporation (now owned by Hewlett-Packard).

With a degree in Computer Information Systems, the author's experience is focused on OpenVMS systems across a variety of diverse industries including heavy equipment manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, stock exchanges, tax accounting, and hardware value-added resellers, to name a few. Working throughout these industries has strengthened the author's unique skill set and given him a broad perspective on the role and value of OpenVMS in industry.

Mr. Hughes's technical skill sets include the following tools that enable him to master and improve OpenVMS applications: DEC/VAX C, DEC/VAX C++, DEC BASIC, DCL, ACMS, MQ Series, DEC COBOL, RDB, POWERHOUSE, SQL, CMS/MMS, Oracle 8i, FORTRAN, FMS, and Java, among others. Being fluent in so many technical languages enables Hughes to share his knowledge more easily with other programmers. This book series is an effort to pass along some of his insights and skills to the next generation.

Tyler: Thank you for joining me today, Roland. Would you tell us first what makes your books stand out from other books about Java and VMS?

Roland: For OpenVMS, that's easy. There are no other application development books currently in print for it. There are quite a few systems management and integration books out there for it, but none focusing on application development or even language usage.

As to Java, I did not drink the kool-aid in Java Town, and you won't find my body stacked in one of the piles being discovered there. I work with Java when I have to. It is not, and should never be the language of choice for anyone serious about application development. My book on Java dives right into the hard stuff: Calling system services, using run-time libraries, reading and writing RMS indexed files, interacting with the user on a VT-320 terminal. You don't find any other Java books talking about such things because their authors don't grasp enough about the language to accomplish it.

Tyler: You said Java "should never be the language of choice for anyone serious about application development." Why is that, and why do you think other authors have difficulty grasping it?

Roland: One has to define first "serious application development." While the WEB may become a serious portion of income for many businesses, it should never be serious application development. All of the serious application development occurs on the back end. We now call this SOA. You put a tiny little WEB service up which makes a secure call to a back end process that actually does all of the work.

Java is unfit for back end server development for the same reason almost all 4GL tools were unfit. They are interpreted. OK, they are p-compiled and that is interpreted. You cannot get enough performance, robustness, and security from an interpreted tool set.

If you look at most SOA implementations now, they are putting little WEB services up which communicate via some proprietary messaging system to a pre-existing back end which was written in COBOL, BASIC, FORTRAN, or some other language the trade press has long forgotten about.

Your question is its own answer: "Why do you think other authors have difficulty grasping it?" They are authors, not professional software developers. They are paid by a marketing war chest that has funneled money to one of the large publishers. The large publisher gives them a $4k-$5k advance and tells them to drink the Kool-aid with this book. They also tell them they have to put out 5 additional books this year per their contract. Exactly how much skill, knowledge, and research goes into any technology book put out by a large publishing house? Zero. They are busy churning out oatmeal for the masses.

When I wrote "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" I took an unpaid year off to write that book. Had I been working for a publisher, that book never would have been printed. Assuming I was allowed to write it, the book would have been split into 9 different books, each one a watered down shadow of what the book I put out myself currently is.

Tyler: What do you think should be the language for application development and why?

Roland: That answer really depends upon your platform and the tool set you are working with. If you decide you only want to work with RMS indexed files, then hands-down DEC BASIC is the tool of choice. You must be aware that you have limited the size of both your application and your company by choosing to use RMS Indexed files rather than a relational database. Once a single indexed file starts spanning multiple disk drives it becomes very slow to access.

You decide, for whatever reason, a primitive relational database will be your data storage method of choice. You choose MySQL because it is free. You are limited to C/C++ as your development language on most platforms when using that database.

If you decide to use the best of the best in database technology, RDB on an OpenVMS cluster with fully distributed databases, you can literally choose any language supported on the platform, even Java as the Java book in this series shows.

In today's world, you choose your tools first: screen management, database/storage, messaging. Then you pick one of the languages that work with the tools you have chosen on the OS you choose to run.

Tyler: For the layperson, would you tell us a bit about OpenVMS and its role in the computer industry?

Roland: OpenVMS was and still is the most advanced operating system ever created by mankind. In the 1980's VMS gave the business world clustering and set the standard so high no other operating system has even come close to the implementation. There are a lot of OS's and vendors of OS's who will claim they have "clustering" but it is untrue. They have to spin a new definition of clustering, in most cases down to "we can spell the word clustering therefore we must have it." No version of Unix or Linux actually clusters. This is something Oracle is finding out the hard way with their RAC10 product and some much publicized travel site outages.

Were OpenVMS re-introduced today as a brand new operating system it would set the entire IT industry on its ear. Most of the IT industry is waking up to the fact that no matter how many $800 PC's you stick on blades, it is not a stable enough platform to run your company on.

Tyler: Roland, I must admit, I am not overly computer-savvy, and I find it difficult to communicate with IT people because of the jargon and the technicalities of technology. Therefore, I am surprised and pleased to meet someone who writes books about computers. What made you decide to be an author about technology?

Roland: It's the field I work in, and it is highly misunderstood. The industry has been reduced to 4-color glossies and MBA's making knee-jerk decisions based upon which product seems to have the most 4-color glossies in the press this week. We have to change that. There is a very troubling mindset in upper management that IT workers are just like the box stackers on an assembly line. This has led to a mad rush to off-shore IT and to flood this country with H1-B workers. Besides decimating the economy, these decisions are decimating business. From the 1970's through the 1980's a company's business edge was its IT department. This defined how your business ran and let you outrun your competitors. Now there is a trend to use the exact same software as everyone else. You no longer have a business edge, so MBA's enter a price war to outdistance their competitors. All a non-IT person needs to do is read the announcements from the SEC investigating accounting practices, stock options, and the rash of other scandals to see where price war mentality puts you.

Doomsday type people have been preaching we will eventually fight a world war in the Middle East over oil. If present trends do not change, we will fight a world war to get our source code and technology back long before we go to war for oil. Someone needs to put what we will need to recover from that war in writing long before it happens. They also need to point out that it is coming.

Despite what the off-shoring contracts say, many corporations no longer own their software. The data centers it is hosted in are in another country. If the owners of that center cut the network links, how does that company continue to function?

Tyler: Wow, Roland. I never thought about technology in that global of a way. What do you think is the solution to this situation? Is the situation something that companies need to solve for themselves or is government intervention required?

Roland: Businesses will not solve it for themselves. They have run headlong off this cliff and are too busy looking for another profitable scam that will let them avoid prison (like back dated stock options did for years).

Government intervention will happen, but not for any of the reasons you might think. Some incredibly large and stupid company (think Oracle or Microsoft) will have 70-80% of its source hosted on off-shore services (both of these companies have close to that in off-shore work now if you can believe the numbers floating around). At some point an entity or party with a fanatical national policy will take control of the government in that country and nationalize all of that source code. (Cuba did this when Castro took over, and other countries have done the same, so I'm not really stretching anything here).

Imagine what happens when those multi-million dollar Oracle products are no being sold as Alah-DB or some other radical name for $50.00/copy. Massive amounts of campaign funds get deposited to the re-election campaigns of all federal officials and congress declares war on the country that did this to protect Oracle (or Microsoft). Tens of thousands of your sons and daughters come home in body bags because corporations were both too stupid and too greedy to realize this off-shoring thing was a bad idea.

Take a look at GM and the other large companies off-shoring all of the software required for day-to-day operations. What happens when the third world country they off-shore to has the same thing happen? Unless GM forks over billions to "license" the now nationalized software, all of its plants and sales idle, putting hundreds of thousands out of work all at once. Same thing happens. Campaign contributions change hands and your children start coming home in body bags.

What scares me the most is that the off-shore companies themselves are going to force this to happen. Infokall, USTech, and the other large off-shore companies are built on a model of what amounts to slave labor. You are seeing articles in the business magazines about them complaining of talent sniping and a shortage of skilled developers willing to work for what they are willing to pay. Most of them are now opening offices in Korea and other countries which appear third world to Indian standards. These guys will pull out of their home countries overnight and open the door for some radical group to be backed by millions of now unemployed IT workers.

The move to Korea was really scary to hear about. U.S. troops have spilled blood there before.

Tyler: Roland, let's go back to your books. On your website, you state, "These books give IT people the information we actually need rather than the information the magazines say we need." What do magazines say IT people need that they don't, and why do the magazines have it wrong?

Roland: You have to understand how the "Industry Analyst" and trade magazine industry have operated for the past two decades to understand why neither are a good source of information. Both are funded by advertising dollars; both will deny it, but there it is. When a new product comes out and a vendor opens up its war chest, its first item of business is to become a paying subscriber to one or more of the "Industry Analyst" firms. This gets their product pitched to those in the IT industry subscribing to the service. It also gets Big-X consulting firms pitching the new product as well. Tons of articles appear in the weekly trade press stating how this new product is a Mega-Trend and the greatest thing to hit the industry since the semi-conductor.

This leads to knee-jerk decisions that launch countless "pilot projects" at various companies. These pilot projects all require some form of licensing for the product. The vendor then publishes this massive number of licenses being purchased (even if they are short term 120 day things) and suddenly it really looks like this is a train coming down the mountain at you. It's not. Until the new product replaces the actual core bread and butter systems at the company, it is nothing more than a flash in the pan. It takes a minimum of seven years to replace a core business system and have it settle in.

A core business system is defined as the complete flow: Order Entry, Customer Management, Inventory, Warehousing, Picking, Shipping, and Invoicing.

Let me put it to you another way. The language with the largest installed base in the world is COBOL. This is the language of many core business systems. There are millions of new lines of COBOL code written today and added to the billions of lines in production already. Exactly how many weekly or monthly IT magazines do you see writing articles about COBOL? None. It is a mature technology and doesn't have vast quantities of cash being dumped into its marketing.

Here is an interesting question for you to research on your own. Exactly how many college IT courses have COBOL as a mandatory course?

Tyler: Roland, I'm especially intrigued by your book "The Minimum You Need to Know About Logic to Work in IT." Your website suggests that logic isn't taught in college courses anymore, and consequently most IT people are unemployable. What do you see is the problem with IT college courses?

Roland: College courses are hamstrung by a lot of things, most of them fall into two categories: funding and tenure. I honestly thought that Y2K was going to fix college courses. There was evidence of it. Two years prior to Y2K hitting, a couple of forward thinking companies bought an IBM mainframe for a local junior college. They installed it and provided instructors. The governing body of the college was informed it would teach this course and actively recruit students for it. These companies knew that even graduating 50 students per term, they couldn't satisfy the need they were about to have inside of two years.

Tenure is a dangerous trap. It opens the door to some really lazy behavior. If you take a look at the college text market, the only books professors consider come completely packaged with test, scantron answer cards, overheads, and lecture notes. The instructor needs to add almost nothing to the course and in many cases doesn't.

Colleges don't have massive amounts of funding; even many of the private colleges only teach what they get for free when it comes to technology. Supporting a mainframe or midrange computer requires quite a bit of cash and special computer rooms. It is cheaper to scatter donated PC's around the campus and teach only what will run on them for free.

Colleges got trapped into trying to chase a market funded by a vendor war chest. When businesses said they needed IT professionals with WEB skills, colleges taught only the WEB skills. All of the other knowledge IT professionals were assumed to have didn't get taught. What you ended up with was someone who could design a really pretty WEB page, but couldn't communicate with the back end business systems or understand them. Why pay $65K/yr starting salary to a graduate like that when you can get the same unskilled person in a third world country for $10/day?

I have found very few colleges today that teach logic to IT people. The reason is that you can't make them understand how logic helps them if you aren't going to teach them the 3GL business system languages like COBOL, BASIC, C, etc. Logic is hard to understand in a point and click WEB world.

Tyler: Roland, when I introduced you, I mentioned that you are the president of Logikal Solutions, a business applications consulting firm specializing in VMS platforms. As a business consultant, if you were asked by a university that wanted to start an IT student program, to assist them, what would you do to make sure the students are prepared for the future?

Roland: They need to have the students spend their first three weeks (before committing to the program) studying the growth of off-shore companies, the labor rates being paid in those countries, and the unemployment rate among IT workers in the US. They need also to be informed of all the other career opportunities that are out there. They need to read the articles that have appeared in business and IT publications stating that IT workers are now "labor" and not knowledge workers as we were classified in the 70-80's.

Once the candidates have gone through that...assuming they start with 3-4000 for those first three weeks, they need to tell the one student that still wants to learn IT after all of that to go to another school.

Honestly, given the situation management has created in this country and globally, I cannot ethically recommend ANY college student to go into the field of IT. Until a tragedy of massive proportions happens, IT will not be a rewarding or well paying field. IT is currently not even respected by corporations anymore. MBA's sit through a one-day training course on how to create a contact manager using Microsoft Access, then get their certificate to manage IT projects. This is how we got where we are.

Personally, I do not think you will find an IT curriculum being offered at US colleges in fewer than five years. The last I read is that enrollment is down over 80% in IT programs nationwide. MBA's have themselves to thank. Some colleges have completely closed the curriculum and now only offer a few courses in WEB page design and Java coding for the WEB.

Tyler: What advice would you give today to students interested in pursuing an IT or programming career?

Roland: Right now, I would tell them not to pursue it. Become a water well driller or a diesel engine mechanic. IT is headed for a train wreck and we are less than five years away from it. The mad rush to treat IT workers like warehouse box stackers has lead to the beating down of IT salaries and massive amounts of fraud in the H1-B program. A small backlash against the off-shoring has already started with some high profile contract cancellations. The big hammer will fall when more H1-B workers get arrested by Homeland Security for acts of terrorism. After that happens, the H1-B visa will be abolished. Off-shoring companies will find themselves tightly restricted. You won't see thousands of IT workers slipping over here on vacation visas to work many months tax-free. IT workers will once again be respected as knowledge workers and salaries will reward those who know.

Tyler: Roland, what makes your books stand out and fulfill a need college courses have missed?

Roland: Logic is the fundamental tool of IT. If you do not understand logic, then you do not understand the fundamental principals behind IT. You didn't earn a degree; you were given one.

Tyler: Roland, I was surprised to learn your book "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" is the first book in ten years on the subject. With the way technology is so rapidly changing, how is it possible ten years have elapsed without a book being written on the subject?

Roland: That's easy. HP is the third owner of OpenVMS. It started out with Digital Equipment Corporation who created an OS that was 30 years ahead of its time. Compaq then bought DEC, and being a PC company, had no idea what to do with a midrange system. Finally HP bought Compaq. HP has had a really sad excuse for a mid-range OS for many years. You might have heard of it: HP-UX. They sink vast amounts of money into marketing that lesser product. If that money were put into marketing OpenVMS, the HP-UX product would disappear inside of three years. HP is able to perform only maintenance on OpenVMS and have the OS add millions if not billions to its bottom line.

The installed base for OpenVMS is large. Companies that use it know what quality is. They also know the up-time for an OpenVMS cluster is measured in decades, not hours like it is for a PC network. Some of you may have read the article in "ComputerWorld" some time back. When the twin towers fell, the trading companies which were using clustered OpenVMS systems in multiple locations continued to trade until the end of the trading day. They had an outage of less than 15 minutes while the cluster verified the other nodes were not going to respond, then recovered their transactions and continued on. No other OS provides that level of "Survive the Fire" design.

Put yourself in the shoes of upper management at HP. You've sunk billions into this HP-UX thing over the years. OpenVMS has a large and loyal installed base despite every company that has tried to eliminate it over the years. Doing almost nothing for OpenVMS still has it adding millions if not billions to your annual bottom line. If you push OpenVMS, your flagship HP-UX will vanish from the market place. Do you tell the world you were wrong or do you continue sinking millions into HP-UX hoping against hope that it will one day catch up to OpenVMS?

Tyler: In "The Minimum You Need to Know About Java on OpenVMS," your first chapter is "Why Java?" Will you answer that question for us?

Roland: That question is best answered by reading the book.

Tyler: Roland, overall, what do you think makes your series of books stand out from all the other books on Java and programming?

Roland: I wasn't paid to write them. I wrote these books on my own time and published them with my own money. I wasn't paid by some publisher to crank out six books per year aimed at the least common denominator of the marketplace. This left me free to cover the topics I wanted and knew needed covering.

Tyler: Roland, what do you find most rewarding about programming and writing about our ever-changing technologies?

Roland: Technology really isn't "ever-changing." That's a phrase the trade press has been cramming down our throats for decades. Technology is forever rehashing old and sometimes bad ideas. The most rewarding part about writing is being able to point out just what idea is being rehashed this week by the trade press and "industry analysts."

Tyler: Roland, you have been involved with computers and programming for twenty years, back to when computers were just becoming common items in households. You have seen a lot of changes in that time. What have you found to be the biggest learning curve in keeping up with technology?

Roland: Convincing MBA's that what they are seeing in a 4-color glossy isn't new technology, it is a rehash of technology that either didn't survive or shouldn't be rehashed.

When you read through this series of books you will find a section where I cover how PC's rehashed mistakes mainframes and midrange computers made a decade before. You will also find a section talking about how all of these "new technologies" which let developers link directly to databases from WEB pages is a one way ticket to prison just waiting to be punched.

Tyler: Roland, you seem to have a bleak outlook for technology in the next few years. If you had a crystal ball, what would be your prediction for what technology and computers will be like in fifty more years?

Roland: Fifty is a really long number to look out. DEC had the best minds in the industry working for it and they only looked 30 years out. There are really three potential outcomes.

Outcome 1: Greed and corruption win. There are absolutely no IT jobs in the US, Western Europe, or England. Only a handful exist in Russia. All IT work is done by what was once third world nations. They bleed us dry. The former technology leaders now have a culture that exists of two classes, MBA's and those making less than $30K/yr no matter whether they build houses or work at 7/11. The domino effect caused by losing the IT workers caused a complete obliteration of the middle class by wiping out the industries which relied on them spending money (expensive homes, $70,000 SUV's, movie and music industry, etc.). It's the second dark ages.

Outcome 2: The SEC saves the world. During a brief respite between industry wide financial scandals the SEC stumbles into an accounting cover up of off-shore project failures by a blue chip company. They begin a very deep and public investigation. Heads of the company go to prison and the gory story of how papering over off-shore failures was common practice rattles the investing community. A cursory inspection of all publicly traded companies turns up that the practice was wide spread. In a massive plea bargain, all listed companies end their off-shore contracts within a month, then begin an examination of what systems they have still actually working. The mainframe and midrange systems still running their core business systems even after the company publicly declared they had converted everything to $800 pc's running Windows or Linux turn out to be the only system still running. A decade of purging happens during which, students are paid to go to college for core IT skills: Logic, 3GLs, and relational databases.

Outcome 3: Greed alone wins. The off-shore companies working in India faced with having to pay real wages and unionized programmers flash cut their operations over to Korea and other companies in a week's span of time. Millions of disgruntled IT workers take to the streets. Extremist groups move in and recruit them. These are educated people with a little bit of money, not the usual extremist fair. One or more large US companies finds all of their software nationalized by a new extremist government. We end up in a massive war with the outcome uncertain. Everything we want can be destroyed by a bombing raid or simply deleted by the current government of the country.

Tyler: Roland, would you tell our readers your web site and what further information they can find there about your books?

Roland: There are actually two sites. For information about the current books they can visit http://www.theminimumyouneedtoknow.com. For information about other books or my company in general they can visit http://www.logikalsolutions.com.

Tyler: Thank you, Roland, for joining me today. It has been a real education. I hope your books become popular and lead to wiser and better IT decisions and work.