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New Phone Book

I ducked my head into the mailroom this morning on the off chance I might have got something. Turns out I did and so did everyone else. All the mail slots had new AT&T Real Yellow Pages® phone book. And just like I do every year when that happens, I have to rein myself in from running through the halls shouting, “The new phone book’s here! The new phone book’s here!” I bet there are quite a few people around my age who fondly remember the 1979 movie The Jerk, starring Steve Martin, who have to fight off the same compulsion too.

Navin R. Johnson: The new phone book’s here! The new phone book’s here!
Harry Hartounian: Boy, I wish I could get that excited about nothing.
Navin R. Johnson: Nothing? Are you kidding? Page 73 – Johnson, Navin R.! I’m somebody now! Millions of people look at this book everyday! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity – your name in print – that makes people. I’m in print! Things are going to start happening to me now.

As I always do, I check to see if I’m in there. Yep. Not page 73 though, Bogardus, Brian & Donna appear on page 11.

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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 725

That’s Entertainment

Le Tour started today with the Prologue Time Trial. A zippy little 5.5 mile jaunt around the Dutch town of Rotterdam. Lance Armstrong is in 4th place 22 secs back having completed .25% of the total mileage of the race. I know Lance is fourth because it was posted on Google News (from the New York Times) in the Entertainment Section.

We hit the road this morning with the intention to check out a possible location for the MMC Breakfast drive we lead later this month. Destination was the Ten Governor’s Cafe in downtown Edgefield. Of course there was some geocaching involved too. After we found a couple of them at Exit 11 of I-20 we were going to drive to Exit 1 where we had planned to start the breakfast run, but we were getting hungry, so we opted to head up the Bettis Academy Road to US25 thereby shortening the trip by 20 minutes or so. A couple miles up the road we passed by a small airport community where folks have a giant garage, otherwise known as hangers. We actually know somebody who lives in there, someone from our old Aiken Bike Club days. As we drove by we both noticed the small white building with a couple of cars out front that had a sign that said Airport Cafe! We’ve driven this way numerous times, but never noticed that before. We looked at each other questioningly and Donna said, “Turn around.”

There were maybe 6 tables for four inside and two of them had people at them. We picked one of our own and sat. It was two person operation, her (waitress/cashier) and him (cook), so service was kinda of hit or miss, but the food was hot and good tasting, plus cheap. It certain fit the bill of Club’s Breakfast Drive originator. We may be the biggest group they ever dealt with, but I think we found our spot. Next weekend we may go check out the Ten Governor’s Cafe as a back up plan.

We looped through Trenton (1 find), Edgefield (1 find, 1 DNF), back to North Augusta via Martintown Rd (3 finds) and on to the Greenway (5 finds.) One of the Greenway caches was the last of the Bread Crumb series, The End of the Trail – North Augusta. Donna wanted me to just say as little as possible so as not to raise the ire of the CO, but you know me:

Last Saturday we didn’t have the minutes portion of the hide’s coordinates (we did have the degrees & and the decimal minutes portions) and because we thought we had done this one earlier this year we walked right by the cache. After we gave up trying to remember where we were before we headed home. It was there we realized we *hadn’t* done this before and what we were remembering was the final of the Color Code Series…

I plotted out about 10 different combinations of possible locations of the final using any north & west minutes that kept us in North Augusta, but figured the best chance of finding it was near the end of the Greenway, close to where the Question Mark showed. And that is where it was.

Thanks for the series. My wife and I thoroughly it enjoyed it and will wonder for a very long time what the heck were those containers for the finals.

I hope I didn’t knock off the scab…

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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 714

Friday Night Clean Up

On our First FTF we were almost second. Someone else had searched for it earlier in the day, before us, and logged a DNF. They are very new at this, only 4 finds so far, so I can understand how they might have missed it, the cache is covered in pine straw under a bush. At four finds I’m sure we would have had trouble too.

I did the right thing and called the cable company, so now I have all the HD Channels I can stand and none of those tiresome movie channels.

And check out this Greg Peltz’s blog for some more awesome “steampunk” Star Wars images. Hurry before he gets a cease and desist letter from George Lucas…

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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 712

It’s Digital Cable Month 2010

Stopped off at the cable place on the way home from work today. Saturday the Tour de France starts and to get Versus, the network that carries the race, we have to upgrade to the Digital Plus tier. It costs and extra $20, but it is worth it for the three weeks of Phil Ligget and Paul Sherwin narrating the bike race and watching the beautiful French countryside glide by. While my CSR was filling out the “paperwork” I picked up a channel guide and noticed something called “Value HD” which offers most of the usual cable channel’s HD versions. I asked her how much more would that be, $4.95 came the reply. What the heck, we have a HDTV this year, it’ll be worth the extra five spot to try it out.

We got home and quickly realized that we had no real place to put converter box. It is a lot larger than last year’s model which fit on top of the tube TV. At first I figured I’d place the flat screen TV on top of the converter box, but it was full of holes for cooling and I didn’t want to melt the TV’s plastic base. Even if there was room, I couldn’t place the box sideways because there were holes there as well. Next we thought that we could just place it on the floor in front of the armoire, it’s only for a month. I doubted the remote would work with it there without having to hold it high over our heads to get the proper angle to clear the coffee table. Didn’t matter, the cables weren’t long enough. It ended up on the empty shelf to the left of the surround sound/DVD player, the only down side to this is we have to keep that door open when watching TV. Small price to pay.

The remote they gave me didn’t match the instruction sheet they gave me, so at first I couldn’t program the cable remote to operate the TV. That meant we now needed two remotes, one for channels and one for volume. I did a internet search for the model number of the remote and found several helpful sites that would offer me the manual – for a fee… But then I decided to RTFM and there on page 3 of the cable company’s booklet were instructions for the remote. Now we are making progress.

I then started surfing through the HD channels and of the approximately 40 available it seemed like every 4th or 5th was viewable. That’s no good. So I then checked to see if we could get Versus, the whole reason for getting the converter box, and we could (unfortunately it isn’t offered in HD though.)

As always the Digital Plus comes free with the half dozen of each Encore and Starz movie channels. I checked them out seeing if I could find something to watch and as I surfed them I kept on going past and discovered that I could also watch all the premium channels, HBO, Cinemax & Showtime.

So, should call and complain about the missing HD channels and take the chance that when they correct that they will also yank the free premium movie channels? or should I keep my mouth shut and enjoy the movies and learn to live without the missing 2/3s of HD channels?

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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 710

2:30AM

I’ve been listening SKY.fm’s Solo Piano Channel as my background music at work recently and as the name inplies it is just piano music, no vocals, no nothing else. Most of the time it is just what I like have going, but occassionally there will be a song played that stands out, both in a bad way and in a good way. As a bad example, try Rainbow Connection played at about half the pace as Kermit singing in the first Muppet movie. For a good example try 2:30AM by Tom Grant (a 30 second snippet.)

When I first heard that song I felt I had heard it somewhere before. After burning up numerous brain cells trying to come up with it, I finally did. There was a small scene in the 1996 movie The Fabulous Baker Boys (probably most famously remebered for Michele Pfeiffer singing “Making Whoopee” atop a grand piano in a short red dress) where she comes down to the ballroom early one morning at the resort and Jeff Bridges is quietly playing a jazz tune, right there that’s the song.

At least I was sure I did. Dave Grusin was responsable for the soundtrack and there is no mention 2:30AM in anyplace I looked on the web. The Tom Grant tune came out on an album released in 2003, so was Tom influenced by the tune in the movie? Or maybe I have misremembered and the songs are nothing alike. I own the DVD of the movie, I guess I’ll have to pop it in the player and find that scene.

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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 686

Decimal Steps

Summer is here in Aiken, SC. This weekend the temperatures were supposed to hit the upper 90s, maybe even break the century mark, so earlier in last week Donna and I planned a weekend getaway into the state’s northwest corner where it is mountainous and cooler, plus we could finish up those final 2 counties and 3 DeLorme pages for those geocaching challenges.

As the weekend approached, like all good sailors, we kept a weather eye out on what was in store for northwestern South Carolina. It looked like there was not much relief to be had up there, maybe 4 or 5 degrees cooler with just as much a chance of afternoon showers, so on Friday afternoon we decided to save the couple hundred bucks (and I’d forgo having cinnamon buns for breakfast) by staying home.

Saturday morning we went for a bike ride and grocery shopped returning home by 9:00AM and not leaving the house again except for my trip to the mailbox to pick up the latest Red Envelope full of Law & Order: Season 1. Amazing who has popped up so far in guest starring roles; Samuel L. Jackson in a brief bit as a defense attorney, Philip Seymour Hoffman in his first credited role as an accused rapist, the future Lt. Van Buren, S. Epatha Merkerson, as a mother of a mistakenly shot child and TDTVS’s Harold Perrineau as a young drug dealer.

Sunday we stayed outside a little later, through lunchtime (although the top was up for the last couple of hours) doing some geocaching. We headed over to North Augusta to search for some on the Greenway, an old abandoned railway bed now paved over into a biking/walking trail. We started at one end and after we found one right near the beginning, we were quickly distracted by a cache down by the river, which led to a couple in a new park around some old ponds, which then again led to a new section of the Greenway which parallels real close to the Savannah River and we never really made it to the actual Greenway Greenway.

With our t-shirts soaked with sweat, looking like Jack & Kate after a trip into the island jungle, we called it quits and headed back to the car with 8 finds. Realizing that put us at 458 total Donna said we need two more to make it an “even” four hundred and sixty. We snagged one in a small park outside the Greenway entrance that we had DNF?d a couple of weeks ago then another in a park that we have passed a hundred times and never been in. When I got home and logged that last one I noticed that there was a second one in that park as well. Good thing we didn’t realized that at the time, because if we found it, we probably would have had to find 9 more to make the total even again?

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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 677

New Phone

Well it is not really new anymore, we’ve had it for over a month, I’ve just never got around to writing about it, ’til now.

We’ve had a pay as you go cell phone from AT&T for some time now (it was still Cingular when we got it.) While we were genuinely happy with it, it was quite small and for those of us who grew up when phones had dials, phone numbers that started with words for the interchange and big handsets we never got used to not having the mouthpiece anywhere near our mouths.

Plus, whenever it would get dumped into Donna?s purse when on, it would come out with a display full of random numbers and we were afraid it might accidentally call someone in Kenya. The keys would get pressed from the phone being jumbled around inside there. It did have a key lock function and we tried using it, but it was more of a hassle before we were always forgetting to unlock the phone before trying to dial someone.

The solution to both those issues was to get a larger flip phone, but for pay as you go customers there is no phone upgrade path. I hunted and hunted around on the AT&T website and couldn?t find any way to do it. I then called their customer service and was told that it just couldn?t be done.

This time when we got down to zero minutes on the phone we thought, what the heck, there are only like 2 dozen people who know our cell phone number anyway, why not just but a new pay as you go phone with a new number? So we picked out a $50 flip phone (Samsung A167) that came with $30 worth of air time.

When the new phone arrived there was a large bright yellow sticker on it that says something to the effect, “ATTENTION AT&T customers just transfer the SIM card from your old phone to this one.” Cool, maybe that will work for me. I plugged the old SIM card in the new phone, turned it on and nothing happened. Not actually nothing, the screen displayed a line of text that roughly implied, ?Sorry Sucker.” Sigh.

So I took out that SIM and put in the one that came with the new phone and went online to the AT&T site and registered the new phone with the same contact info as the old phone and waited. It was supposed to take 30-45 minutes for the $30 airtime to get credited to my new account.

After an hour I checked to see if the minutes were there and they weren?t. For the heck of it I logged into the old phone?s account and what do you know there was $30 worth of airtime! So now we have and old phone we don?t want to use with big minutes and a new phone we want to use that has zero minutes.

Ever the tinker, I take the new SIM card and put it in the old phone. Turned on the phone and it works, no minutes to really test it, but when I check the Own Number in the phone?s menu it reads the new number. So I put the old SIM in the new phone and it works! In spite of everyone saying it can?t be done, it was, I have successfully upgraded my AT&T pay as you go phone.

Now if I only hadn?t erased the contacts of the old SIM in the process of looking to donate it to Cell Phones for Soldiers?

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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 675