Month: June 2011

Netflix Recommends

I have never been happy with the recommendations that Netflix suggest for me. I know I’m partly to blame because my tastes in movies is very eclectic so pinning down my taste is difficult. They still are not too accurate even after they have split up the recommendations by genre. This last set of recommendations struck me as so far off base that it was comical.

On occasion I will sit on one end of the couch and Watch Instantly while Donna sits on the other end and watches TV. This past weekend as I perused the available titles I noticed one that stirred something in the deep recesses of my pea-sized male brain – Naked Ambition. It is a documentary about a photographer that wants to shoot a coffee table book about the porn industry. He travels to the AVN Awards (Porn’s version of the Academy Awards) and photographs actors, producers, fans and sex toy makers. The name of the book is “An R-Rated Look at an X-Rated Industry” and the movie, like the book, feature nudity, but no actual pornography and turned out to be quite interesting.

When I was done watching I rated the movie 3 Stars meaning I liked it and this is what the screen flipped to:

Thomas the Tank Engine? Blues Clues? To the left of them it is asking how often I watched Steamy and/or Social & Cultural Docs. Is that what they consider Thomas the Tank Engine, Steamy? Blues Clues is a Social Documentary?

Perfect Tweet

I had an idea for a blog post and if I was in the mood I know I could have stretched it into a couple hundred words, but I wasn’t, so I turned into a tweet for the MMC.

I have come to the conclusion, from swapping between the Sonata & Miata, that the Miata’s steering wheel is too big for the size of the car.

Exactly 140 characters.

Gobble Gobble

The other day I posted my favorite picture I took at Saturday’s MMC event, but here is my favorite one taken by someone else: The Turkeys of Edgefield


(left to right) John, Stacey, Denny, Tom, Me & Rudy.
Thanks Patti!

101110111000

On the way to Columbia today the Purple Whale passed through the 3,000 mile mark. We were going there to do a little geocaching and we ended up finding 3 caches and not finding three caches. And as expected one of the ones we didn’t find was the reason for the whole trip (this might be a blog post of the future.) This evening I washed the Sonata, so it would stop being jealous of the Miata which got a bath on Friday.

Peach Parade

The Miata got a sponge bath in the garage last night in preparation for the MMC’s participation in the Ridge Peach Festival in Trenton today. I send out an email to the Club stating that Donna and I wouldn’t do the parade without at least 6 cars and that is exactly how many showed up at the meeting spot for our drive to Edgefield for breakfast.

After breakfast we lost a car that wasn’t doing the parade thing, but fortunately there was one car waiting at the intermediate meeting point to bring it back to the required minimum. Donna had originally planned to walk up to the main viewing area and be a spectator because creeping along at 3 miles an hour in the hot sun is not something she cares to do, but the weather was unseasonably cool enough (upper 80’s) that she ended up riding along and throwing candy to the crowds.

The picture above is my favorite of the dozen or so photos I snapped today on the event. I captured a float behind us setting up before the start of the parade in the outside rearview mirror of the Emperor. I could tell they were a church group because the shirts the adults were wearing said on the front “Do you know Jesus?” The back read in big letters, “R U SUR”. I couldn’t make out the fine print, but hopefully it explained the missing E at the end of SUR or maybe the Bible book or passage demonstrated by the Wizard of Oz. It was an off the hip shot and I didn’t realize that I had captured the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion checking the Miatas out until I got home and downloaded the pictures. You can see the all the photos taken over on the MMC Website.

Started up, went down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran?si?tions since 10/24/08: 1039

How To Lose A Customer

The other weekend we had dinner at the local Fatz Cafe. We have been eating there probably every couple of weeks for a while now. Donna likes their Chicken & Rice Soup and the menu is varied in the usual casual dining manner to keep the entree choice fresh at each visit.

The food quality has been mostly pretty good, but this time the C&R Soup looked and tasted like it came from the bottom of the pot and to make matters worse the crab cakes she ordered as her entree was mostly tasteless bread crumbs. When we got home Donna went to the restaurant’s website and filled out the survey that has become standard on any receipt for anything you buy.

A couple of days ago when we got home from work, a regional representative from Fatz Cafe had left a phone message that he had read her complaints and wanted to talk to her, so he left his phone number. She called the number and of course got his answering machine where she left a message back. We then went out to dinner (because of the ongoing dead oven issue.) Well, you know what happened next, Mr. Fatz Representative called while we were away and left a long apologetic message and saying that to try and win our business back he was going to mail us a gift certificate to the restaurant.

In today’s mail there was an envelope from Fatz and sure enough there was a gift certificate inside. It was for the amazing sum of five dollars. $5!!! What a slap in the face. Five bucks is like a large soft drink and the tip…Donna shredded the gift certificate.

We won’t be going back there anytime soon.

Short & Sweet?

Have you heard of the Tweeter thing? Apparently all the hep cats are using it, so I thought I would try it out with the least techno savvy group of folks I know, the MMC. I opened an account for the Club and emailed every member the log in details and instructed them to tweet away.

In the intervening 24 hours there have been two tweets, both mine and both 24 hours ago. I do subscribe to a Google alert for the word Miata, maybe I should pick one of those links each day to tweet about. For now I’ve got a widget for the Master’s Miata Club tweets in my left outside sidebar.

Maybe I will create my own account for over there. That way when I can’t produce a whole entertaining post (like this one for instance) I can probably come up 140 characters.