Rants

No Dam Blogging On Monday

Last night I didn’t watch House and I didn’t download the torrent today either. The show is now officially dead to me. It started a couple weeks ago with the dream sequence show, during which Dr. Taub showed up to deliver a machine gun for blowing up something while driving a Hyundai Sonata. At the next commercial break, guess which car company had the first ad? Right, Hyundai, you get 20 points. And ended with the movie/musical very special Greg falls off the the wagon into a bottle of vicodin because Cuddy might die and she rewards his mis-guided concern by breaking up with him.

Instead of House, I watched something more “exciting”, the last couple of innings of a spring training game between the FRS and the MFY. I did not recognize a single player name mentioned for either team.

The rest of last night and then again tonight was spent vacation planning. We are going on another trip out to the west coast. Nine days of visiting western Washington, western and central Oregon with a brief foray into northern California (as long as the radiation levels are not too bad.)

Started down, went up, still up.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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AstroGnome

I’m going on a slight papercraft kick these next few days. There is a good reason and I will share it with you later, so just hold on to your britches. Here is a link to yesterday’s Darth Vader and today’s AstroGnome if you are interested.

House has jumped the shark, I can’t pinpoint exactly when, but it has a lot to do with the whole Huddy thing. Castle has also jumped the shark or should I say Nuking the Fridge and I can pinpoint when that happened. The take off for the jump was last week in Part 1 when our “heroes,” instead of solving the usual MOTW (Murder of the Week), are tasked with saving New York from a dirty bomb, complete with a big bright red digital countdown clock (probably purchased from ACME.) The jump’s landing occurred in Part 2 this week when Castle and Beckett* had not just one, but two, near death experiences where they could have professed their mutual love for one another, but didn’t.

* There really should be a cute abbreviation for this relationship, but I can’t seem to find one on the net. Maybe because when you combine their last names you come up with Caskett which is not really romantic. Well, let’s try it with first names, Rickate. Hmm, sounds like rickets. Guess maybe that is why there isn’t one…

Started down, still down.
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Dam

Donna and I piled into Joan’s car this morning and drove back to up to the Modoc Trail in McCormick County to find the one that got away last weekend. We had received an unsolicited hint from the CO after he read our DNF log. We might have just chalked this cache up to a loss and moved on, but this is the first stage of a multi with about 16 stages that takes you on a tour all around the state of South Carolina. We figure we have lived here long enough that just maybe it is time for us to explore the place a bit and see what this state has to offer.*

*Imagine this sentence rendered in the sarcasm font.

The hint turned out to be no help because it told us to look somewhere we had already looked, but we had to give it try anyway. Seeing as we drove all that way and came up empty handed we tried a couple more caches over by Thurmond Dam. The first one we looked for was listed as kid friendly, so we figured we shouldn’t have any trouble with it. Wrong, apparently it was adult un-friendly as we came up empty handed.

There was one other cache, a short three stage multi, that was also on the South Carolina side of the base of the dam. Stage 1 was easy, but at stage two you needed to get a date that was to be found on top of a stone column for the coords for Stage 3. Unfortunately there was no plaque on top, just a metal lid with a padlock covering the column. We got the north coordinates by counting the flood gates, but still needed the two digits of a day in July 1980 to add to the last three digits in the Stage 1 west coordinates to get the final stage’s west coords. Being patriotic Americans we started by plugging in the number generated by using July 4, 1980. That took us to the middle of the parking area for a boat ramp. Hmmm, no good. So I created a waypoint for the first of July and then another for the 31st. Because we had the north coordinates the cache had to lie somewhere on a line between July 1st’s waypoint and the 31st’s waypoint. Knowing that, and reading the clue, it allowed us to make the find, with Joan making the actual grab. Time constraints sent us home after this so we could up our Find/DNF ratio.

This afternoon the Emperor got a transfusion and had his socks swapped with his gloves (oils change and tire rotation.)

Started down, still down.
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Summer’s Here

No, not summer weather, spring weather is just now sneaking in, but bathing suit season has arrived in the form of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition.

What started as a few page diversion from the mid winter doldrums has morphed into an extravaganza! There is no sports involved anymore (and no, you can’t count comely female athletes in bikinis as sports content), for that you get a separate regular issue of the mag.

I glanced through the issue and it took all of five minutes, because if you have seen one swimsuit issue you’ve seen them all. Dazzling warm weather locales; check. Incredibly expensive suits on supermodels; check. Girls with nothing on but incredibly painted-on replicas of of incredibly expensive suits; check. Girls with nothing on but shells; check. Girls with nothing on, but hiding behind strategically placed palm fronds; check. Random erect nipple or two; check. And unlike playboy when can actually say with a straight face, “I read it for the articles,” the only words in the magazine are two page “stories” on how arduous it was to shoot photos of nearly naked supermodels in each dazzling warm weather climate.

And now there is no real reason to buy the magazine off the newsstand if you aren’t a regular subscriber, just click on that cover photo there and off you go to the web site where there are more more photos than on paper, with videos too.

And like all things that start small and become wildly successful, it has sold it’s soul to commercialism in an effort to make as much money as possible. There are more ad pages than swimsuit pictures…I tossed out two of those smelly fragrance ads, 4 pages for Lexus, 8 pages for Direct TV before giving it up as fruitless. And now it is not just ads in the magazine, Nissan made several TV commercials that feature it’s very ugly Juke and swimsuit models.

Started down, went up, still up.
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