At first it was a compliment…

When we drove up to the rental car guy we thought he paid us a compliment when he said, “No one from Tennessee would ever steal a car.” It made me think that all over this great country of ours, Tennessee is respected for the quality of her people. Until he said, “A horse, maybe.”

Damn yankee.

Forced upgrade to cooler toys

So I’ll admit I’m a gadget person, I’m always craving the latest toy or dingus, but this time it wasn’t me who wanted to upgrade. For the longest time now I’ve had a venerable Motorola StarTac that was fine for my mobile phoning needs. But alas, everything must come to an end, and the transmitter or somewhatever piece of internal circuitry went kaput. I’m actually a little suspicious of Verizon in general, because I had taken the StarTac in last week for them to look at it, they upgraded the firmware and handed it back to me and it was fine… It wasn’t. The next week I took it back, they did a more thourough inspection, and lo and behold, a busted phone. They told me it would be 150 dollars to fix it. So they went and told me to look for a new phone. I went to look at the choices, and much to my surprise, and much to my dismay, they had removed the StarTac display that had greeted mobile phone users for years. “Discontinued,” they told me. They had them for sale for 50 dollars when I took the phone in the first time.

Bottom line, if they had really inspected my phone the first time, I would only be out 50 bucks (the reduced price of the remaining StarTacs). Instead, I’m out $200, and all the accessories (the car charger, the desk charger, the hands-free kit, the blender attachment). I don’t think you can even get a blender attachment for the new phone.

But the new phone is pretty cool.

Those Special People

I had the good fortune tonight to dine at one of my favorite establishments, Cracker Barrel. As I walked in, I noticed that the man in front of me was still smoking his cigarette. He brazenly approached the hostess and asked for a table for three…smoking. I just shook my head and thought to myself, “Gee, sir, you must be pretty special to just be able to ignore all of the rules of civilized society at will.” I pointed this out to my friend Michael, who added “I wonder if he would like me to pull his car around to the handicapped space out front, too?”

As we were leaving we saw the man get into his car.

His car that was parked in the handicapped space out front.

Time is money, professor proves

http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/05/29/time.money/index.html

The most important thing to note about this article are these hard, immutable facts:

The study found that the typical cost of cooking dinner, including the value of time spent and the value of the ingredients, was �10.77 ($15.72) for men and �9.81 ($14.30) for women.

The average cost of ordering a take away meal was �5.01 ($7.31) for men and �4.96 ($7.24) for women.

So therefore it’s cheaper to eat out than to prepare a meal. Less than half.

Suddenly, I am justified.

By George, I think I’ve got it…

After a bit of experimenting, a bit of HTML coding, a bit of patience, I think I’ve got the format the way I want it. Now It’s just a matter of coming up with something interesting to say.

That may take a whole lot more time.

Something New, Something Different…

Well, another month, another experiment. I’m going to try and start publishing this page using the Blogger service. This will allow me to publish more easily to my paltry weblog. There are several reasons why I haven’t been updating it recently, mainly because I was tied by geography to when I could update the page. Now, I can update from anywhere whenever the mood strikes.

There are still a few things I have to figure out, like how to customize the page to look like I want it to, but that should be pretty easy to fix.

Please be patient while I experiment.