Year: 2011

All The News

We don’t get the local paper, we get our news through Yahoo (Donna) and Google (Brian.) On the Google News page there are the main stories on the left and in the right hand column there are headlines from various news outlets. These headlines get tailored to your tastes, both content and source, after time and to fill up tonight’s post I will give you excerpts, and then a link to, from 4 New York Times articles that I have interesting in the last week.

1) A more accurate description than ?100 percent natural whole-grain oats,? ?plump raisins,? ?sweet cranberries? and ?crisp fresh apples? would be ?oats, sugar, sweetened dried fruit, cream and 11 weird ingredients you would never keep in your kitchen.? – How to Make Oatmeal . . . Wrong

2) As anybody who has ever worked in any institution ? private or public ? knows, one of the primary ways employee effectiveness is judged is the performance review. And nothing could be less fair than that. – Why Your Boss Is Wrong About You

3) Consider what?s happened with lighting over the past three centuries. As people have switched from candles to oil-powered lamps to incandescent bulbs and beyond, the amount of energy needed to produce a unit of light has plummeted. Yet people have found so many new places to light that today we spend the same proportion of our income on light as our much poorer ancestors did in 1700… – When Energy Efficiency Sullies the Environment

4) The affected men were, in each case, those who?d trained the longest and hardest. Spending more years exercising strenuously or completing more marathon or ultramarathon races was, in this study, associated with a greater likelihood of heart damage. – When Exercise Is Too Much of a Good Thing

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 963

Kaia

Another Marshall Alexander creation.

It is 57° and raining in Aiken right now and the little red square ■ tells me it is 44°. By clicking on the square, I get the weather page for Alexandria, Virginia, where it is cloudy now, later tonight & tomorrow it will be rainy and mild. You know, now that I have complained about it, I’m almost hoping that they never fix it. The little red square ■ creates a kind of armchair tourism, whisking you away magically to different destinations. I only wish tonight it would have taken me to Oahu where our surfer girl is from.

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 963

Monster Commute

Our commute is by no means monstrous at 6.5 miles, but there are some folks out there have long or tough or long and tough ones, well, for those of you, here is your very own steampunk mode of locomotion to make your trip a little more pleasant.

Random Temperature on Weather.com Update. Last night I got this response:

We understand the frustration, I can assure you the issue is being worked on and a fix is soon to come. We appreciate your patience and value your business.

Thanks,
TWCi Customer Support Staff

Right now it is 56° in Aiken and the little red square ■ reads 28° (the temp in Fairview, MI.)

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 963

What Goes Up

Must come down.

We have a co-worker who has been lusting after a New Camaro Convertible ever since the concept version appeared 4 years ago. It is practically all he talks about. He has been running the same Camaro Convertible Concept screensaver on his work PC for nearly that long. A couple years back I found a Matchbox version of the car of his dreams (orange with black stripes) and it has sat on top of his monitor peacefully until a few months ago.

When we moved into the new area with its lower cubical walls, his Matchbox car became visible to passersby and a target for messing with. If this person’s obsession wasn’t so pronounced and he didn’t make such a big fuss about it being moved it probably would have stopped after a few days, but it was just so much fun. The weekend before last when he wasn’t around, someone tied it up so it was hanging about 2 inches down from the ceiling. On Monday morning the fellow’s reaction was priceless, he kind of stamped his feet and moaned. “Why won’t people just leave it alone.”

That move actually backfired on all of us who enjoyed his reactions to his car being moved an inch or two or rotated 90°, because he decided to just leave the car hanging, making it more trouble than it was worth to mess with it. The car stayed right up there until today. The department manager came in this afternoon and told him to take it down. Which prompted the best reaction from him yet, he whined, “But I didn’t put it there!”

The manager wasn’t just picking on him, I was told to take down the Stubby Rocket that I had hanging from the ceiling too. To be fair, his boss, the Plant Manager, has this rule that nothing should be higher than our low cubical walls.

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 963

More Randomness

For the past several years we have paid the Weather Channel online for a service called Weather Gold which removes all the ads from our weather page and allows us to view a more recently updated local radar image. I’m not sure how long it has been going on, but there is a small red colored temperature in the upper left hand corner of the page that never matches what our current temperature.

For the longest time it seemed like it was only a couple degrees off, but more recently the gap has gotten larger. The other day it was 64° here and the red number read 12°. Out of curiosity I placed the cursor over the number and it turned out it is a link. I clicked on it. I was taken to a weather page for Rochester, MN. If you reload the page it changes cities. I’ve tried it four times this evening and I have made a tour of the south, Saint Petersburg, FL, Charlottesville, VA, Charleston, SC and Montgomery, AL.

On Thursday, after several minutes of hunting and having to create a login I managed to write Customer Service :

The Weather Channel Interactive Support
Ticket Information:
Ticket #: 1409-3170291
Date Created: 3/3/2011 2:11 PM EDT
Issue:
Issue Type:
Details: In the upper left hand corneer of my WeatherGold page there is a small temperature reading that is different from my home city’s temp. When clicking on it it takes you to the weather page of a random city. Why?

I’ll keep you posted…

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 963

Plugging Away

I would like to tell you the reason that I did not post anything yesterday was because it was National Day of Unplugging 2011, but it wasn’t, it was pure unadulterated BA. And if it wasn’t for me stumbling on news of this event I probably wouldn’t have written anything tonight either.

But now that I’m here I will update you on my day. Breakfast at the same old place, clothes shopping for the niece and nephew in WA at the Kidsignment Sale, followed by book shopping for the wife and I at the American Association of University Women Books ‘N’ Things Fair. We stopped at home to off-load our booty and then finished our outdoor activities with the weekly grocery shopping at Kroger after brief stops at Rite Aid & Home Depot.

The afternoon and evening were spent watching TV and eating.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 963

Merely An Observation

I know that folks who live elsewhere are paying a lot more than we are here in Our Fair City for gas, so this is not a complaint. We filled the Emperor up with gas tonight and it cost $3.389 a gallon for 10% ethanol premium grade. And that price is with the 10¢ off because of our Kroger shopper’s card. We filled the tank 12 days ago and the cost was a “mere” $3.039 a gallon. That is an increase of 11.5% in less than two weeks.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 962