Rants

Close, But Not Exactly Right

Last night we went out for dinner at Ruby Tuesday where we both opted to try something from their special summer menu. Donna chose the Bourbon Salmon with spaghetti squash and grilled green beans. I went for the Caribbean Chicken and instead of my usual salad and potato I chose the grilled green beans as well and broccoli. When dinner was served I received green beans and mashed taters. Maybe the waiter heard me mentally contemplate the potatoes before saying broccoli, but, hey, I like mashed potatoes, so I ate them.

For this morning’s breakfast at DD we ordered the usual. My coffee with muffin and Donna’s hot chocolate with two wake-up wraps, one ham, one bacon. The first three items we get at the register and then have to wait a bit for the wraps to cook. When I say usual it is so usual that they usually get Donna’s wraps going when they see the car pull up in front of the store. When they called out the wrap order I thought I heard them say, “Sausage wrap and ham wrap.” When Donna pulled them out of the bag, turns out I heard right. Hey, up until a couple months ago she used to order that combo, so maybe they just misremembered.

In both cases we didn’t complain, except amongst ourselves, because sometimes it’s just not worth the hassle.

Blast From The Past

I’ve been kind of slack on the blogging around here, with nothing much interesting to write about, I thought maybe I’d fill this spot up with a scintillating post from 10 years ago. Back in 2003 this was actually two blogs The Miata Diaries and Brian’s Daily Rant and I posted something on both every day. I hoped to find something good and I struck out, apparently it was kind of a dull day then too.

From Brian’s Daily Rant:

When Will I Watch A Movie Again?
It has been two weeks at least since I’ve watched a DVD. Right now there are 4 Netflix rentals on the coffee table waiting a spin. ( Rabbit-Proof Fence, Moonlight Mile, Spirited Away and Adaptation ) Also stacked up there are 3 other movies from my Co-Worker DVD Swap Club: Pork Chop Hill, Tuck Everlasting and K-19. Plus on top of those I have A Brother From Another Planet that I picked up in a truck-stop in rural North Carolina for $4.88. I guess I\’m going to have to take a break from writing in 3 blogs and reading 10 for a night or two…

From The Miata Diaries:

House Cleaning Day
Did a little sprucing up around here, very little, but I feel better.
1) This site is now a proud member of the Blogging Brians, so I added a link to the left.
2) I got rid of a stale weblog that hadn’t been updated since like March from the Mortal Blog list and added Blogumentary, go check it out.
3) This page’s extension is now PHP instead of HTML. I snagged a script that allows me to keep a constantly updated set of stats in my search for ET and installed it on the left. Thanks Sam Ley.

Purchased Today: $0
Money spent since 03/03/03: $923.63
Started up, still up.
Top Transitions since 02/02/03: 166

The money figure was money spent on the Miata and of course I was keeping track of the top transitions back then too.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1241

Mutt And Jeff

Tiring of rabbit ears, Mohu Leafs, preamplifiers, Magic Fractal things and still not being able to get the FOX station, we broke down and re attached the TV umbilical cord.

I called on Thursday to sign up for Atlantic Broadband’s Limited Service which gives us all the local channels and their sub-channels, a couple of shopping channels, a couple religious channels, etc and the weather channel for about a third the cost of our old service. They were also running a special deal with the limited, for a year I could get it and their super-duper high speed internet for about $15 more than we are paying now for their mid-tier internet.

We set up an appointment for Saturday. It conflicted with a MMC event, but it was better not to have to take off from work, so… Because it was a weekend we were told that someone would be at our house between 8AM and 4PM. Because we are literally a stone’s throw from the local office we got lucky and a little after eight they called and said they were on their way.

We thought great, we might get to go bowling and have lunch with the group after all. We should be an easy job because the infrastructure was all in place, all we needed was a splitter in the box on the outside of the house and the trap removed on the pole across the street.

When the Tech, Brian, showed up with his trainee, Brent, they thought it was going to be easy too. They had a wireless router and a cat5 cable in their hands. When I told them I didn’t need that, I needed the limited service added and the bump in internet speed. Brian, who probably played pulling guard on his high school football team 10 years ago and has gone to fat, rudely demanded to see the PDA from Brent, who was probably the AV guy in high school twenty years ago. Brian looked at his paperwork and saw that it said what I said; he started swearing half under his breath at the girls in the office and their level of stupidity. Brent, who was standing behind him, rolled his eyes at me and later apologized. The two of them kind of bickered about what to do about the fact that the modem was mine, but their paperwork said I had an old one. When they finally agreed on who was going to do what and they finished up, we had TV, but the internet wasn’t working. The modem failed to reconnect properly. It would run through the front panel light sequence until almost the end, and then start over again.

Brian called for tech support and Brent took this opportunity to go sit in the truck and get away from the bad vibes. After about 15-20 minutes they got a internet connection, but the guy on the other end of the line said that he was reading a kind of big loss in signal, Brian said that he would change out the line from the pole to the house. The ladder come off the truck and The Lockhorns go about re-running a new piece of coax from across the street to the house.

When they come back in, the internet comes up, but at my old speed, 8Mbps up and 3 Mbps down. Brian explains that while he was up on the ladder a moving truck came flying down the street, ran over the cable they were pulling down, drug it down the street and in the process broke the port it was hooked to. They called in a maintenance guy to fix it, so when he does that; the speed should go way up. They are going to go on to their next call. Total time on scene was 2 hours 15 minutes. Bowling is out, but if we wait awhile and drive over we can still get a seafood lunch with the MMC.

I was inside setting up the TV channels and Donna was playing on the internet. The longer she surfed the slower it got. When it got below dial-up speed she called me in. The modem lights were acting accordingly, but now we lost all connection. I rebooted the modem and it went back to the whole “getting so far and starting over again thing” and never hooking up. I called the support line and after 5 minutes on hold, got a tech on the line. He tried a few things on his end, I rebooted the computer, and we unhooked the cable and power from the modem, waited a minute and hooked it back up. Still no dice. About that time, the maintenance guy showed up with his bucket truck. It took all of two minutes for him to do his thing and off he went.

The help desk guy stayed on the line with me the whole time and once the maintenance guy left, we tried one more time to disconnect the modem and restart it. When that failed he said there must be something wrong with whatever the first two guys did this morning. The only thing he could do for me now was to put in a call for them to come back. When I asked for an ETA he couldn’t give me one. Seafood in Augusta was now off the table, so Donna stayed home and I went to Moe’s for takeout.

Without our usual episode of Frazier from Netflix to watch at lunch we popped in a DVD to watch a movie. After the movie was over I went in to check something on the computer and the modem lights indicated we had an internet connection. Sure enough, we were online. I ran a speed test and we are now rocking a 40Mbps download and 3 up! Somehow it fixed itself. I hooked it back up through the router and everything is back running.

Big Brian showed back up about 3:30 and I told him we had magically got going. He got his meter out of the truck and checked the signal strength, he ran a speed test, shrugged his shoulders and left.

That was fun.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1240

How Was Your Day Dear?

There was a decent sized piece of the crust (the best part) missing off of my Coffee Cake Muffin at DD this morning. Donna said it looked like someone or thing had taken a bite out of it, but I could see it on the shelf, so it must have fallen off when the counter person grabbed. I wanted to ask for it, but felt that might have come off as a little bit weird.

There were ZERO chicken pieces in my container of General Tso’s Chicken. I should receive a full response via email from the Windsor Foods people within three business days…

Tatiana Maslany was robbed by the Emmys. She was not nominated for lead actress in a drama series. Nor was she nominated for any of the 6 supporting actress roles she played in a drama series.

The new Real Yellow Pages AT&T phone book was on our front door step when we got home. I wonder how long they are going to keep producing these things? A three quarter of an inch thick book can be reduced to a small post-it note on the fridge. We need like two numbers out of it, the SCE&G power outage hotline and customer support for our internet service provider.

Filled up the Sonata with gas this evening and I accidentally selected Supreme instead of the required Regular fuel, thereby negating 30 of the 50 cent savings we had accrued at Kroger.

Late Update: The paper towels were back in the remodeled men’s restroom. Donna said they never disappeared in the remodeled women’s restroom.

Salt Lick

Out behind our plant in a wooded spot, co-worker Mark has a trail camera where he captures photos of the wily white tails that live out there. Tired of capturing just one or two deer per photo he started to seed the ground in front of the lens with something called Deer Crack to create an irresistible mineral lick. Within a day or so he was capturing 5 or 6 deer in each frame.

Last night was the monthly MMC Dinner Meeting over in North Augusta at a Ryan’s Buffet. It was lightly sprinkling when we left the house and by the time we got to US1/78 (AKA: The Aiken-Augusta Hwy) it was raining pretty hard. And for the entire second half of the trip it was coming down in buckets, so much so that 40MPH seemed like a dangerously high rate of travel. I wish we\’d taken the hint and turned around.

We had the worst meal we have ever had, as far as we can remember. My salad was fine (although the kitchen help should learn to slice the onions and bell peppers instead of whacking them to bits with a cleaver), but it went downhill from there. The green beans were cooked to complete water loggedness and the corn had no discernible flavor whatsoever. The piece of steak I got off the grill, when cut into, looked medium-rare, which is fine when it is a nice cut of meat, but this must have been cooking over the low temperature side the grill for several hours as it had the taste and texture of, pardon the cliché, shoe leather.

Donna’s meal was no better; she stopped eating her soup after a couple of spoonfuls, with the piece of white fish she tried getting dumped in that bowl shortly afterwards. And after listening to me grumble about my meal, she tried to help by sharing some of her skinless chicken breast with me. Which after one bite I learned was a clever ploy to rid herself of this, so dry it was crunchy, bit of poultry. We both agreed that if there was a predominant flavor that did show through, it was sodium chloride, salt.

Even dessert couldn’t save it, as her cake, although covered in soft serve ice cream, still was almost too dry to eat. My chocolate chip cookie was stale and somehow they managed to remove the every bit of flavor from a crumbled Oreo cookie and Cool Whip mixture.

The meeting itself was a nearly typical MMC meeting in which the Treasurer announces our bank balance, we briefly discuss past events and then quickly go over the upcoming events, what set it apart were the elections of new officers. The current President has held the post for several years now and has wanted to find someone else to take the reins for at least the last two years, but no one wants to take the job. This year when he asked for nominations there was the usual silence and looking at the floor, just when it looked like he was ready to sigh and reluctantly accept the office for yet another year, his wife nominated someone else. It was quickly seconded and the nominee had the choice of being a schmuck or accepting the job. He took the job, but only under the condition that we actually get someone to fill the VP spot (for the last few years Sarah Palin has held the position in absentia.) One of the newer members stepped up and agreed to fill the #2 spot on the ticket.

The meeting broke up and as we left the “party room” heading for the door I noticed that the restaurant was pretty full and there were families in line at the cash register to get in. With the food tasting so crappy and it not really being cheap (for the two of us it almost $30) the only explanation I can come up with is that this place acts as a human salt lick.

Started up, went down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1237

Big Papi Is Not Screening My Voicemail Anymore

We’ve decided to go ahead and keep the cheap Verizon phone we bought on vacation and just let the AT&T Pay As You Go account expire. The per minute charge is the same, so no loss there, but I did have to reenter the 70 odd contacts we had accumulated on the old phone into the new phone which took some time. At least with Verizon I could enter them offline in a CSV file and then import them in one fell swoop. Trust me, that was a huge time saver as it might have taken forever using the phone number pad.

My only real downside to the swap is I can’t find a way to get a free ringtone on the phone. With the prepaid plan you can’t add an attachment to a text message or email and you can’t use their Verizon Cloud or Backup Assistant Plus to load a media file to the phone. The only ones you can get are the ones for $3 in the Verizon store!

Though I do kind of wish I could get Big Papi’s voice back as the intro to the voice mail again (even if I could find the recording, I’m sure there would be no way to use it on the new service, if I can’t get anything but their approved ringtones on the phone.)

Magic Antenna?

Magic HDTV Antenna

No combination of rabbit ears, pre-amplifier and fancy Leaf antenna will allow me to pull in the signal from the local FOX affiliate reliably, which is supposedly closest tower to me. This is not really a big deal until football season rolls around in a couple of months when FOX carries one to two games every Sunday. In the mean time I have not given up hope of finding a do-it-yourself HDTV antenna that will do the trick. Last week I stumbled on a neat idea on instructables that looked like it was worth a shot, the Fractal Magic DIY HDTV Antenna. I even had all the pieces needs to make this baby in house.

So yesterday evening and tonight I put this magic antenna together. With just the Mohu Leaf hooked up we get the big 3 networks and their 4 total sub-channels for a total of 7 channels, with the Fractal Magic DIY HDTV Antenna – only 4. CBS and it two extra “really old TV show” channels were gone.

The antenna was magic alright, it made 2 sheets of plain paper, a 10×18 inch piece of poster board, 10 feet of speaker wire stripped of its insulation, a couple of crimp connectors, 6 foot piece coax cable and 2 hours of my time disappear.