Rants

The End Of Reality

We were up early this morning to ride the tandem to work, but as we started down the drive way something was wrong. The back tire was flat. Seeing as this ride was optional, we just parked the bike and Plan B was implemented, drive the car. Because we were early instead of finishing breakfast and heading right to the Bogardusmobile there was some time for TV watching.

During a break in Sportcenter I surfed the channels until I stumbled on VH1 playing an old Beatles tune, “With a Little Help from My Friends.” Wow, VH1 is back to playing music. They, like their big brother station MTV, seemed to have abandoned playing music videos in favor of other crap, including “reality” shows, nice to see them back to music videos again.

Wait a minute, that’s not the real John, Paul, George & Ringo, its a computer generated facsimile. Turns out it is a video-slash-commercial for something called Rock Band, which as best I can figure is a cross between karaoke, air guitar, your TV and an expensive gaming console. So much for back to reality.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKRyKVDvO6U

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 347

Keeps Getting Better

Tried to print something this evening and my free for buying a laptop Dell 720 printer wouldn’t print. Wouldn’t turn on. Zippo. I measured the output voltage at the terminals of the transformer, it is supposed to be 30VDC, it read zero.

I can take a chance on some fly by night outfit and buy a new power cord/transformer for around ten bucks with shipping or I could just go ahead and buy a new printer. There is a dealer on Amazon that is selling the same Dell 720, new, for just $39 including shipping.

Or I could get something else in the $50-60 range, but what? Our printing needs are minimal, an occasional receipt for an internet purchase and the Miata Club Treasurer’s Report once a month. Color is not required at all. Anything fancy I do it at work where I have access to everything from a letter sized color laser to a 36 x 48 ink jet plotter…

Started up, went down, back up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 344

PayPal Bonus

A couple weeks ago I had an unauthorized charge show up on my PayPal account. I only had a little over $10 in there, the charge amounted to about $35 and because my checking account was linked, they took the overage from it. I disputed the charge with both PayPal and the merchant and they both agreed I was wronged, so my money was returned with in a couple days.

I basically only use PayPal for an occasional eBay purchase, but in the past I’ve used it for snap deals found on the net, so a credit card is also linked. After digging through the PayPal help pages I discovered that they could do an instant transfer from my checking because I had that CC listed as a back-up source. Wanting to ensure that they couldn’t just yank money out of my checking account again, I removed the credit card.

Well, because someone had used my account without permission PayPal had me do a couple of things before they would let me access my money again. One of which was change my password and another was to change my security questions. Both were no brainers and easy to do.

The third thing they wanted was to confirm my address. This was the sticky one. The easy way to confirm my address was to link a charge card to my account. Nah, don’t want to do that, that’s what got me in this mess in the first place. There is another way, PayPal could mail a code to my snail mail address that I could, when received, enter into their site. Trouble was I didn’t meet the requirements for this option, because I had a dispute within the last 3 months.

I stewed for a week figuring out what I should do.There were no worries about anyone getting any money out of the account during this time because it was frozen while we confirmed my address. The plan I came up with was to confirm with a credit card and then once I had access to my money, pull it all out and close the PayPal account.

To make sure that the card, and consequently my address, were good they were going to charge the card $1.95 and then promptly refund it. I forgot all about the whole thing until about 5 days later when I got an email from PayPal saying they were giving me a bonus. I thought, wow, that’s nice, must be to make up for the hassle I’ve been through, they added a dollar ninety five into my account.

Hey, wait a minute!

I checked my CC online and sure enough they had no trouble withdrawing money, but they never refunded the card. They turned around and credited my money into my PayPal account and called it a bonus.

That cinched it, I transferred my measly $60 back into my bank and I’m shutting down my PayPal account.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 300

Another DNF

Nope, didn’t go geocaching today. Nor yesterday either for that matter. The F in this case stands for finish, not find. We started to watch a movie from 2001 called Happy Accidents that stars Marisa Tomei and Vincent D’Onofrio, but stopped after 15 minutes. It seems like we are on a streak here with not finishing movies. In the last six weeks we have received 16 discs from Netflix and we have DNF’d 6 of them or almost 38%. The ratio is even worse because there were 6 discs of West Wing which are golden to us, so if we forget about WW the ratio jumps to 60%!

The search for good movies for us is kind of like geocaching. The stars of the movie are the coordinates and the blurb on the Netflix page is the cache description. Roger Ebert’s Review is the hint and all those reviews on the Netflix movie page equate to the logs of fellow geocachers. With all that information, finding a good movie should be easy, but sometimes you just can’t see it.

The car has sat in the garage all day because we rode the tandem around town early this morning paying 3 bills and saving $1.32, so I was going to title this post “The Emperor’s Day Off”, but there is now a possibility that we may have to make a run to the store for some essentials that were missed the other day when we did our weekly grocery shopping.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 292

Insect Food

About two weeks ago I got two insect bites on both sides of my right leg just above the knee. They itched, swelled and oozed clear stuff, staying that way for about three days until a scab formed. I’ve never reacted to mosquito bites that way, so I guessed they were from a spider, but whatever they were from they were unpleasant.

Then a week ago I got bit 4 times. Back of the right side of my neck, about four inches further down on my back, near the waist on the left side and on my left ankle. I don’t feel the initial bite, but then I’ll notice something itching and scratch a bump.

Those four had just about cleared up when on Monday morning I had an itchy bump on my left forearm. Then later that morning I noticed an itch under my left arm and then one further down the back on the same side.

It is just me, Donna hasn’t been bothered a bit. They could only be coming from a couple places, my dresser or I’m getting bit each time we venture into Hitchcock Woods. My plan of attack to combat this issue was to wait until I had had been bitten enough that my body developed an immunity to what ever was feeding on my, but it didn’t seem to be working. So last night my wife saiid let’s take everything out of my dresser and wash it. Then in the morning you can spray the drawers and everything down with some bug spray.

Washed, sprayed, replaced, we’ll see how it works out.

Started up, went down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 283

Tim’s Crossing

Tim's CrossingWe went for a hike in the woods this morning real early to beat the heat and to be home before Stage 1 of Le Tour started at 8:30AM.

This objective was to retrieve the small cache, “Jump At Your Own Risk,” we placed last week and move it to a different spot in the woods. We also wanted to place cache #2. The second one is titled “Out West” because we placed them in the western part of the woods and it is filled with some of the inexpensive souvenirs we brought back from our trip out west last April.

Yesterday evening we needed something to watch on TV so I poked around on Encore & Starz that came with our Tour de France digital package and found the third Pirate movie on one of the channels. When I first attempted to watch this movie back at the end 2007 I could only stomach 19 minutes of it. In the back of my mind I have always wondered had I bailed too early on it because people said it didn’t get good until Captain Jack Sparrow made his entrance. Wonder no more. We came in somewhere near the middle of the movie and lasted about 5 minutes. What a waste.

To make up for it this afternoon we watched the one and only TDPM on our copy of the DVD.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 280

Sick & Tired of Feeling Sick & Tired

We are packing up our cough medicine, decongestants, expectorants and throat lozenges and going on a day trip. We have been threatening to go to the Concord Mills Mall for several weeks now and it is high time we did.

Donna needs a new pair of hiking boots, so a trip to the Bass Pro Shop is in order. We’ve both had a hankering for the spicy food at Razzoo’s just across the parking lot from the BPS. As an extra incentive Clunk (or is it Thunk?) is racing his Miata, AKA POS, at Lowe’s Motor Speedway at NASA Firecracker Run. We are going through geocaching withdrawal too.

So we are loading up the Miata. Film at Eleven.

Started up, went down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 277