Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Tom DiFrancesca
Re-writing history — that seems to be a popular endeavor as of late. I’m quite sure, that 10 years from now, the history books will tell our children and grandchildren what a great president Bill Clinton was, and how he had an unblemished presidency.
Where am I going with this? If you jump over to
you’ll see that yet another attempt of re-writing history is taking place right now. The folks behind that Web site believe that George Washington was not the first president of the United States.
I reckon it’s taken over 200 years for someone to figure out that blunder — sure.
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RFID — by now, you’ve probably seen this acronym printed in dozens of newspaper stories, or heard it mentioned on the radio and television.
RFID stands for “Radio Frequency Identification.” It’s a method whereby a very small microchip, smaller than a grain of rice, is implanted in items such as clothing, retail packaging, etc. The retail industry is very interested in utilizing this technology — it wants to use it to track inventory, shipments, sales volume and such.
It all sounds very simple and legitimate — that is, until you realize that the clothing you wear could contain one of those devices. If so, one could be tracked, buying and spending habits recorded, etc. It all sounds too much like “Big Brother” to me.
What would be next, implanting the RFID device under our skin, so that all of our medical history could be carried around with us?
It seems that for every good reason that we can be given about the use of RFID, I can come up with at least two reasons it should not be welcomed with open arms. Microsoft is quickly becoming a “player” in the field of RFID technology, and the promotion of its use.
That scares me.
If you would like to learn more about RFID, just hop on over to
and read all about it. Of course, what you learn there is exactly what the RFID industry wants you to learn. If you’d like to see some of the information provided by the opponents of RFID, take a look at
and you’ll see that there is a lot of information for their case also.
Dig a little deeper, just go to google.com and type in “RFID” and you’ll find plenty of arguments in either direction.
I believe that it would be fruitful for all of us to stay informed on this topic. It is not going away, and it is certainly destined to personally affect each and every one of us someday.
• • •
How many times have you found yourself in a situation where giving someone a nice greeting card would really improve their day?
An occasion like that recently happened to me, but I was broke and could not afford a card. Also, unfortunately, I didn’t even have greeting card maker software on my computer.
What was I to do?
Luckily, I found
and, in just a few minutes, I was able to whip up a nice little card, customized with my own message. All I had to do was print it out, fold it neatly and then give it to the recipient.
Another quick remedy brought to you by the World Wide Web.
Tom DiFrancesca III is a freelance columnist and a resident of Clovis. He can be reached at
