Year: 2004

Hello G Force Cable

On the night I had cable internet installed I had to call the tech support phone number to set up an email address. Some one helped me nearly right away. The next two times I called, I gave up after waiting 5 or so minutes. The paranoid side of me figured that they know when somebody is being installed so the first call get answered. After that they’ve got you, so you can be safely ignored. The other 2 times were evenings, which I figured were peak times, so I thought I might try in the day. This call would be the proof or dis-proof of my theory. I guess I’m just paranoid, I got a quick answer today.

As if I must always have set amount of email addresses, to replace the recently departed Brian_the_Red@bigfoot.com address, I almost signed up for one of these, world’s longest alphabetical email address. Instead I opted for Brian_the_Red [at] gforcecable [dot] com.

Bye-Bye Bigfoot

Way back since whenever I’ve had a bigfoot.com email address. It was a thing of beauty whilst ISP hopping in the beginnings of the internet revolution. It was free and I could forward and distribute and all kinds of other helpful stuff. Over the last decade bigfoot?s free services have dwindled, a victim of their own success. For about a year or so now I have been limited to 25 pieces of email a day. Trouble with that is, with the increase in spam a person had to be lucky to be in the top 25 to get a message to me. I stopped using the address, but kept checking for old times sake. Today I terminated my account. The end of an era.

While following the steps to end my association with bigfoot, not once, but twice I had to click OK on a screen that warned: “By terminating your Bigfoot For Life account, you will no longer receive offers from Bigfoot’s Promotional partners. However, you will also have to forego the benefits of using any of Bigfoot’s services which are available only to those with active Bigfoot for Life accounts.” Did they ever think that maybe it was those promotional partners junk mail that made the service unusable?

Happy Birthday Diane

My little sister is 47 today. Hope you got our silly little card. Hope you didn’t eat too much cake and ice cream. Hope you celebrated more than I do for my birthday. Usually the day itself it is no big deal for me because it is near the end of a month long holiday that Donna and I call birthanniversarydaymonth. It runs from Donna’s birthday at the end of August, through my birthday towards the end of September to our anniversary at the end of September. It is 30 days of hijinks, dining out and rampant spending on ourselves and each other. I can hardly wait until it happens again….

Palace Coup

In the little over a week since Tech Day and my bemoaning the lack of sound improvement the new muffler made, it is starting to come around. Getting just a little throatier. Still dead quiet at idle and cruise (which is good,) but it sounds a bit better under acceleration now. If it improves just a bit more I can forget all about that intake business.

On that very same day I named the car, The Emperor, but have not been able to refer to it as such since. My guess is that it may now be what the car calls itself, but to me it has no name. I’m just not the type of person to name inanimate objects. I feel that this is my biggest failure in Miata geekdom, on par with my inadequacy to obtain sci-fi geekhood because I haven’t been able to read (nor watch the movie of) Frank Herbert’s Dune.

Curry Shrimp

Donna’s mom has been our designated cook every since she moved in with us back in May of 2000. I like her cooking and Donna, well as we all do, loves her mom’s cooking. Not only because she grew up eating it, but it means she doesn’t have to do it. Mom is famous for picking a recipe and starting to cook it, before checking if all the ingredients are in the house. Most of the time she will find something that will substitute, but other times she just fakes it and adds anything. For tonight’s meal, when she came upon a missing ingredient, she just didn’t put anything in its place. As a result the meal came out a little bland; it is tough to make Curry Shrimp, without any curry power…

Here’s A Couple Of Them

They are fresh, not really new experiences. They mirror my previous experiences with these same places, so you would think I would have learned my lesson, but I am dense.

The first is Wal-Mart. We were in Hilton Head and needed one item and wanted another, figuring we could get them both at Wal-Mart we went there. Hoping that it would be different, but it was not. It must be corporate wide, because it was Saturday night, prime Wal-Mart shopping time, they only had 4 checkout lines running and there were at least 8 people in each line. We placed our purchases on an empty conveyor belt and walked out.

Second was at my old friend Popeye’s here in Aiken. We have had the worst luck at lunch time during the week, but we figured it was Sunday, might be different. What do you think? Right, same old song and dance. Both Donna and I love the food, but it is such a pain to get anything. They had a total of 3 employees handling the Sunday lunch rush, 1 counter person, 1 drive-up person and 1 cook! Not only that, but the cook was deep frying each person’s order separately or something because it was taking a long time to get each person’s order to them. So long that they asked you to sit down and they would bring it to you. This is smart, now the time that would be better spent making or taking orders was spent delivering food to customers. I vowed never to return. Who am I kidding, I’ll probably go back, I think it makes the food taste all that much better if I have to suffer for it.

Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho, It’s Off To HHI We Go

Time to go pack the trunk with our custom fitted luggage for the weekend get away to Hilton Head Island. It is a semi-working trip as Saturday morning I will taking condo interior photos so the web site can get updated some. Hope to snap a couple new Post Office pictures for that gallery on the trip too.

Picked up the framed new caricature tonight. I’m going to hang it on the same wall as the old one. They are going in a vertical arrangement and I can’t figure out which one I should put on top. Should it be the new one as the top would be considered a position of dominance, or should the new one go in the lower position as that is more eye-level? Stay tuned….

I really should be out with the California Duster and/or Quik Detailer erasing the pine pollen dust off the car in prep for the trip, but instead I sit here typing away.