Rants

Love/Hate Relationship With The Internets

I love the net. It is a vast repository for everything from diamonds to dreck. I mainly like it for the reason that I don’t have to remember stuff anymore. Brain storage space, now at a premium because of age and heavy abuse of mind altering drugs as a teen, does not have to tied up remember that Jon Provost played Timmy Martin on 178 episodes of the TV show Lassie from 1957 to 1964. And things like, “Although it has been the subject of many spoofs and misquotes, the one situation that Timmy never needed saving from in the entire history of the show was falling down a well.” That’s what IMDB is for. If I ever need to know how to change the fuel filter on my car or how many red Miatas were made in 1993, Miata.net will remember it for me. I don’t even have to remember what happens to me anymore, that is what this blog is for.

I hate the net. The main reason for that is spam. It is light at the home address because I rarely use it on the net. It is just the opposite for my work email. Somewhere along the line that address got sold on a CD and I get about a hundred pieces of crud every day. Fortunately it is stopped before it gets to my inbox by a service the company subscribes to called Postini. I check the MMC‘s email and because we have a yahoo.com address 99.9% of what comes in there is the usual replica watches, male enhancement and free gift card junk. My gamil account gets a bunch too, 27 so far today, but 26 were caught by Gooogle’s spam filter.

Today I received 2 emails at my gmail account purportedly from eBay about “Item Number: (300192365929) Zulu – scarce Stanley Baker signed autograph.” Could this be because of my furious bidding for Lost: Season2 DVDs on eBay? Doubt it, my registered eBay email is still the now defunct brian@mr-miata.com… Both emails contained the right letters to my gmail address, but did not include the dots in between the letters. Do you have a “.” in your gmail address? If so, try sending your self a note by leaving out the dot. Worked for me.

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/08: 15

Lost Capability

When I went to watch The Incredibles the other day there was a section of the disk that held some set up routines for optimum THX viewing. What the heck, I’ll give it a try. The video portion was a piece of cake, but the audio section was a disappointment. My decade old Onkyo receiver has 5:1 Dolby processing, that I have had working in the past, but for some reason now there is no sound at all from the rear surround speakers. No big deal, they aren’t in their ideal placements for that total immersion feeling anyway.

We have a JVC DVD player and we have a JVC TV that are about 5-1/2 years old. JVC used to have a system called Compu-Link that hooked up their electronic components, so that when one did something that effected another setting automatically changed. Whenever we used pop a DVD in, the TV would turn on and change to the video input the DVD was hooked into. Notice I said used? Stopped working the other day. It is no big deal to push a couple buttons, but when you are used to having it easy…

When I hit the Powerball tonight I’ll probably go out and buy one of those all in one box systems. Of course if I actually did win the $71 million I could hire somebody to come in set up a killer media system.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/08: Six

Chinese New Year

1-1-2008 Enchanted CeilingToday’s sky was as uneventful as yesterday’s, but I decided to take a photo anyway. I went out on the deck in mid-afternoon and recreated, as best as possible, lat night’s Last of 2007 Enchanted Ceiling picture. Now I have to take precious minutes of the new year and post them to the site.

Rambo? How old is Stallone?

How do they expect to sell me on the merits of High Definition DVDs or Blueray Discs by broadcasting clips of movies into my living room on my analog TV?

You would have thunk it was a religious holiday with the amount of places that weren’t open today. Because it was a relatively nice day, sunny, mid 50s, we decided to walk the mile up to a shopping center and get a pizza. Roma Pizza was closed. No problem, there is a Moe’s on the other side of the parking lot. Problem, they were closed too, so we kept walking. About a half a mile further was a shopping center with a Japanese restaurant and an Indian one too. One of those were bound to be open. Nope. We had one last hope before settling on a sub sandwich from the deli of the grocery store that was on the way home. It didn’t look open, but the OPEN sign was lit. We tried the door and entered the Jade of China. Fortunately the Year of the Rat starts on February 7th and not January 1st.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/08: Zero

Only 5 Shopping Days Left

The AlleyDowntown Aiken was alight with 2,000 luminaries this evening. Donna and I went down to wander around and bask in their glow. This photo was taken in “The Alley” which cuts from Laurens St. to Newberry St. and is littered with some of our nicer and more popular restaurants.

Tonight also starts the beginning of five days off for us. Tomorrow we use the last of our vacation, then the weekend and finally Monday & Tuesday are holidays. We are hoping for rain because we have several DVDs that need watching, but not too much rain because we also would like to go for a walk or two in Hitchcock Woods. Maybe even get in a tandem ride.

Started down, went up, back down, up again, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 501

Took The Air Right Out Of The Sails

Augusta's Christmas Tree on the CommonsOn our way home from dinner out with friends tonight we detoured through the “valley” to see some Christmas lights. At one point going through a neighborhood Donna said, “It sounds like you picked something up in a tire.” I slowed a bit, but after a few seconds the sound went away, so I shrugged it off. About 10 minutes later as we were accelerating away from a traffic light, the back end of the car squirmed. When I shifted into second, it did it again and we could tell we had a flat. I limped ahead another 100′ or so into a small lighted parking lot.

It took a couple minutes to clean out and disassemble the trunk to get down to the spare. Jacked up the car and swapped out the flat tire for the bitty compact spare. Fortunately the regular tire and wheel fit back into the trunk, but only because there wasn’t any air in the tire and then still it was a tight squeeze. Because of the time, our only chance to get it fixed was if the tire center at Wally World was still open. It was on the way home, but although Walmart is open 24 hours, the tire center part must close their doors at 8:00 PM because it is dark when we get there.

The only good thing about this puncture is at least it is in the center of the tread area, so I can get the LTS to put a plug in the tire tomorrow. The tires are getting worn, but there is enough tread still left to possibly get me through until early spring. Just for the record I checked to see how many miles I have on these tires and it turns out I’ve got 30K on them. I wonder if the T1R is supposed to wear better than it’s predecessor the T1S? Because I was usually only able to get 25K or so on the older model Toyos…

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 496

19 Minutes

When I took POTC:At World’s End out of the sleeve I noticed the running time, 2 hours & 49 minutes. Yikes, that’s nearly three hours, may have to split watching it into two nights. Well I needn’t have worried about the running time, at 19 minutes in, I hit the eject button.

What started with a surprisingly good romp of a movie, then in the second turned into something trying too hard, by the third had turned into a pompous Mad Magazine satire of itself. It took George Lucas 22 years to screw up the Star Wars franchise, it took Gore Verbinski three short years to sink the Pirates of the Caribbean.

Forget the endless line of dirty people heading to the gallows, when 4 would have done to let us know that Lord Cutler Beckett was bad and needed his comeuppance. I could almost overlook the fact that they make Ms. Swann undress to make sure see wasn’t hiding any weapons (of which she had as many as there are clowns in a circus car) when Barbossa walks in with a long bulky coat and fluffy hat that could hide 9-pounder cannons. Why does Barbossa tell Captain Sao Feng he needs a ship, how did he get to Singapore? There are nine pieces of eight? But most incredibly, Jack’s a Pirate Lord? He’s lost his ship what seems like a half dozen times and got eaten by a giant squid!

I think tomorrow I’ll watch POTC:The Curse of the Black Pearl to cleanse my palette.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 496

Somehow I Don’t Think This Is What They Had In Mind

Wanting a drink for the afternoon that had a little flavor, I opted for something out of the vending machine instead of from the faucet today.

Lipton Diet Green Tea with Citrus
CONTAINS: Water, Citric Acid, Green Tea, Natural Flavors, Sodium Hexametaphosphate (To Protect Flavor), Phosphoric Acid, Potassium Sorbate and Potassium Benzoate (To Preserve Freshness), Ascorbic Acid (To Protect Flavor), Aspartame, Acesulfame Potassium, Calcium Disodium EDTA (To Protect Flavor), Caramel Color, Yellow 5, Blue 1.

Somehow I don’t think this is what they had in mind when health professionals recommended consuming Green Tea. I’m betting it was more like “tea + water = drink.” I could only stomach 2/3 of the 20oz bottle before giving it to someone who claims to like the stuff.

It has happened sooner than I thought. Five episodes. It is funny in moments and interesting occasionally, but pretty repetitious. Person gets sick. Doctor treats person, person gets sicker. Doctors find obscure and rare disease, treat person. Ack, person gets sicker. Doctors run lots of big dollar tests. Treat for a different ailment. Person gets sicker still, requiring surgery. Doctors stumble on simple solution. Person gets better. We will probably finish the other three episodes of House on the DVD before sending it back.

Now we need another TV show to watch.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 496