Life of Brian

After our morning’s shopping both Donna and I needed a little snack. At the exit road of the shopping center was a little gas-n-go place, so we pulled in and got me a Coke and her a bag of chips. As we leaned on the fender of the car we both could smell charbroiling hamburgers, mmmm. Sharing the building with the quick shop was a Backyard Burger place.

It was a little early for lunch at 10:15 AM, but we had an early breakfast. The smell of cooking burgers was too much, we were now hungry. Dang, they didn’t even open until 10:30. We left and started our way back to Aiken. As we drove we tried to come to a consensus as to what to have for lunch when we got home, but we kept coming back to those burgers.

So we drove around Augusta aimlessly for a while and by the time we got back, the Backyard Burger place was open for business. We were actually their first customers of the day and it took a minute or so before someone came from out back to take our order which consisted of two 1/3lb. burgers and a small fountain drink. The fellow gave me a receipt and told me my ticket number was 134, the time was 10:34 AM. I almost made a smart ass remark about good thing he gave me a number, what with all the people in here, I’d hate to get the wrong order, but held my tongue. I sat down and Donna went off to use the rest room. It seemed like it was taking her a while, but they had a TV in the corner, so I watched some inane college football pregame show for a bit. Donna came back and we chatted for a few more minutes, we were still the only ones in the place. What could be taking so long? Finally, not wanting to shout out “134” to a nearly empty room and/or perhaps to give himself something to do, our order taker brought the two burgers to our table.

While tasty, the burger was not really hot or fresh and it should have been considering the amount of time it took to get it to us. I think the patties we were eating were probably the ones we smelled cooking at 10:15 and they had been lazing about under a heat lamp for the last 40 or so minutes.

I signed up for web hosting yesterday with HostGator. Last night I had no problem logging in to my Cpanel. I even uploaded a php snippet that sent anyone stumbling on the .net site right over to this, the .com site.

Today I received an email saying asking me to call HostGator’s support line. They had an issue, the recorded IP address location from where I signed up was several hundred miles away from my home. I explained to the nice lady on the phone that I had signed up at work and all our internet goes through the corporate servers in St Louis, MO. After confirming my information, she said I would get another welcome email.

I never got that second welcome email and now at home this evening I can no longer log into my Cpanel nor is the web page I uploaded yesterday showing. mr-miata.net is 404. I went to the support site and opened a ticket stating pretty much what I said above and went and had dinner. An hour later I checked back on the ticket and it was still listed as open. Right below it was another ticket that they had started saying my domain was on hold and it read like this afternoon’s email.

Called the support number again and got a nice fellow who was true to his word, within a minute of him saying he would send me a new welcome email I heard a beep from my Gmail notifier. Trouble is I now have to go change the name servers at Yahoo’s Domain Control Panel to the new servers and wait for internet propagation.

Enough about me…

A co-worker purchased a Kodak EasyShare digital camera about 3 or 4 years ago. He thinks he probably spent about $300 on it and it has served him well, up until he went on vacation last week when it quit working. Nothing happens, when he turns it on the power light comes on and then just fades out.

Today he called the support line at Kodak to find out how to return the camera for repairs. The woman on the phone told him that they don’t repair those anymore. But that all was not lost, if he returned the defective camera to them in a couple weeks he would receive a voucher entitling him to a big discount on a newer re-manufactured Kodak digital camera. He was given an address to send the camera to and a list of four different cameras and what they would cost with his discount.

After hanging up in order to get an idea of which camera he would get and its feature he did a little internet research. The first model he looked at on the Circuit City website had a price there of $180 which the Kodak folks had offered to him at $220. Nice discount, more like profit for Kodak. The other three cameras were priced the same way, the new camera was considerably cheaper on the street than Kodak’s re-manufactured camera direct from them. This left a slightly bitter taste in his mouth. Guess who won’t be buying a Kodak digital camera this time around?