Yeah, it’s been up a few days, but I’m just getting to it, okay? John Gruber has come around, much as I have recently, to the notion of PowerBook-as-main/only-system, a concept Lee has been a proponent of for some time. John also has an in-depth review of the latest 15-inch PowerBook, outfitted just as I would like, with his usual attention to detail.
It’s Monday evening, and I’m still sore from the neighborhood tree planting from Saturday morning. Eleven ten-gallon trees to go in the neighborhood’s greenbelt area. Seventy homes, with an average of two adults per home. Seven people showed up, including myself. Yeah.
An interesting tip I picked up from No Plot? No Problem! shows an innovative use for all that spam that gets collected for me. This one writer keeps a list of names that show up in the From field of spam e-mails, so she always has a pool of character names to pull from. I really like this, since usually when I’m working on fiction, I can come up with two or three good character names, then I start really pulling stuff out of bodily orifices. A simple text document in BBEdit now has 305 names, one per line, and the built-in Kill Duplicates filter ensures I don’t have the same name twice.
Tag: rant
Am I the only one that thinks the new “It’s the network” series of commercials for Verizon Wireless are actually more annoying than the old “Can you hear me now?” commercials?
Update: Okay, I am forced to admit to a redeeming quality of these commercials. Tom’s passionate defense of them as funny via IM made me laugh. “Perhaps goth angst doesn’t translate to Texan” has to be the IM quote of the day.
Alternative title: My Moron Moment of the Day
Of course, I have no one to blame but myself.
Each election cycle, Denton County, in its infinite wisdom, changes the polling place for our precinct, and apparently for all precincts in the county. This election was no different. So after finding out we would be voting at Bridlewood Elementary, I set off to vote.
I have passed by the Bridlewood development several times, but have never been inside. There is a golf club as part of the development, and part of the fairway parallels Bridlewood Boulevard. I followed my Yahoo! Maps directions, and turned off the main road to get to the school. After navigating a couple of turns, I find myself on Remington Park Drive, the street the school is on. I’m doing about 30, and slow to 20 when I hit the school zone, which starts near the top of a rise. As I begin to crest the rise, I see the school on my left, and a red sign with “Vote Here” in black and a large white arrow directing me in to the school’s parking lot. I come down the rise, put on my blinker, and turn left in to the school parking lot. Then I hear the “Whoop!” of the motorcycle’s cop siren. He does a single blast, and that’s enough to get my attention.
I pull over to one side of the aisle I’m on, wondering what I’m getting stopped for. It couldn’t be the school zone speed limit. I was doing twenty. I know I was doing twenty, because I’m fastidious about keeping it at twenty while in a school zone. Did I bump up to 22, maybe, coming down the rise? He’s going to give me a citation for that? These are the thoughts running through my head as he walks up to the window.
Driver’s license, insurance, I hand them over. He checks to make sure the insurance is current and hands the paper back. Then he asks if I know why he stopped me, and I tell him, no, I don’t. “You missed a stop sign back there, Mr. Turner.”
I did what?
Yep, never saw it. Sure enough, as I was leaving the school after I voted, there it was. Just on the down slope of that rise. I allowed my attention to laser-focus on the school and that “Vote Here” sign, and I totally missed the stop sign. (Stupid developer, putting a cul-de-sac right there in the middle of a down slope…)
So now I get to do the payment + defensive driving course (hopefully I can do the video version) thing, to keep this off my record and from affecting my insurance. It’s not good to be unemployed and broke, and have to cough up money because you were stupid. So again, totally my fault for not paying attention, and this voting experience could have been better.
On the totally geeky side of things, the officer had a handheld computer which allowed him to scan in my license info–thanks to the handy magnetic strip on the back–then punch in the violation, then I signed on the screen a la signing for a package from UPS or FedEx. He punched another button, and a paper version of the citation rolled out of the top. Nice to see the Town saving a little money by doing away with cases of duplicate/triplicate citations. I’m sure there’s a time savings, too, for the officer when he turns in the citations at the end of his shift. If I had to get a ticket, pretty nifty way to have done so.
It rains nine months out of the year in Seattle. So why oh why would you replace an aging dome with an open-air stadium? Collective stupidity?
(Alternative title: There’s an reason the word “anal” is in “analyst”)
Apple quadruples its profit, but the stock takes a ten percent-plus dive because the company “missed” the number of iPod sales stock analysts —who are not employees of Apple, do not sit on the Board of Directors, and who are not Apple executives— said they thought the company should have sold? They sold 6.4 million iPods in a three months. How many Rios did Creative sell in the last three months? Oh, that’s right, they canned that music player.
Hold on, it gets better.
Those same analysts, who are poo-pooing Apple for failing to sell as many iPods as the analysts thought they should have sold, seem to think Delphi is a good buy. No wonder monkeys are just as good at the stock market as these guys.
[With thanks to John Gruber, and Matt Deatherage and W.R. Wing on the MacJournals-Talk list.]
Attention Steve Levy and the rest of ESPN’s anchors:
USC did not win the national championship in 2003.
USC did not win the national championship in 2003.
USC did
not
win
the national championship in 2003.
The Trojans did not play in the BCS national championship game for the 2003 season. The BCS was created to determine a single national champion. For 2003, that national champion is LSU.
USC is not a two-time defending national champion. If you continue to insist they are, then I expect you to also refer to Auburn as a current defending national champion.
Note to self: do not join the clueless Authors Guild.
I echo Gruber’s sentiments regarding the decision of the Authors Guild to sue Google over Google Print. For one, an author can choose to exclude his work in a fairly simple process. Second, as an aspiring author, were I to publish a book, I would love to see it read by as many people as possible. If Google Print helped me accomplish that, so much the better.
My employed friends almost daily remind me of the travails of life in corporate America. I’d still like a job, thanks.
An unsolicited copy of the premier issue of Men’s Vogue arrived in the daily post.
What.
The.
Hell.
???
The time has come. We made the decision to transition our two year-old to a “big boy bed.” Not an actual bed with a frame and headboard, mind you; we’re just throwing the mattress on top of the box springs on the floor. Parental common sense: it’s fewer inches they will fall when they roll themselves off the edge. Parental common sense, part deux: it’s shoved in to the corner, cutting the number of edges available for rolling off in half.
So we took advantage of the Labor Day sales this holiday weekend and went mattress shopping. I thought I would pass along some helpful hints, should you find yourself in this situation. (Which you will, eventually, unless you enjoy self-induced spine curvature because you’re still sleeping on the mattress you took to college with you nearly twenty years ago.)
Forget comparison shopping. Mattress stores will sell the same brands, but it will be impossible for you to compare models. Why? Because the mattress manufacturers and retailers are sadists, that’s why.
Manufacturer X has a nice medium-range mattress, which is in demand by three different retailers. So Manufacturer X has three separate tags identifying this mattress for Retailers 1, 2, and 3. Therefore, when you are in Retailer 2, and looking at Mattress X2, you have no idea it’s the exact same mattress as the X1 you saw at Retailer 1. And so on. So forget comparison shopping.
Throw the price guarantee back in their face. All three of the retailers whose doors we darkened offered some form of a price guarantee: matching, 110% of the difference, etc. It’s totally laughable, because of the lack of comparison-shopping ability consumers have when it comes to mattresses. They know you’re not going to find the Sealy Posturepedic X95J Super Sleeper any where else, because it’s not called the X95J Super Sleeper any where else. It will be called the F4 Dream Cushion, have a different fabric covering it, and you’ll be none the wiser.
So when the sales person mentions the price guarantee while you’re browsing, you can laugh and tell him he is full of it.
Hire a babysitter. I’m sure a neighbor would’ve been happy to watch our son for a couple of hours, but I didn’t think about this until after the fact. Consumer Reports recommends lying on a mattress in the store for 15 minutes to get a definitive feel for its comfort. Obviously the anal-retentives at CR have never gone mattress shopping with their Thomas the Tank Engine-obsessed two year-old in tow. One is unable to lie on a mattress for 15 seconds as the aforementioned two year-old tears up and down the aisles, running his Thomas and Percy trains over the mattresses as he goes.
In the end, buying a mattress is still a gut call. We didn’t want to go cheap, but we didn’t want to spend a grand on a set, either. We were looking for something in the middle, that would get him to his teenage years. Hopefully, we have succeeded.