Daylight Savings Time ends (or is it starts) tomorrow morning at 2:00AM. So tomorrow at this time it will be this time.
Don’t forget to set your clocks ahead 23 hours tonight before you go to bed or you will be late (or is it early) for church on Sunday.
Called Tracfone customer service today at lunch and was lead through a series of steps, one of which was restoring factory defaults, and when nothing worked the barely understandable CSR said I am turning this over to our tech department. If it doesn’t start working by 1:00PM call back. Here is your case number. Tonight, still nothing so I tried to call just now and got a busy signal. Waited a few minutes and tried again. This time the phone rang and it was answered by a recording that announced, “Due to high call volume, you call cannot be completed, please try again later.”
Last weekend regular gas was going for $2.42 a gallon. Yesterday it was $2.29. In the business section of today’s paper there was an article titled, “Oil Companies See Record Profits in 4th Quarter.” Do you think that the sudden drop had anything to do with public relations?
Is it just me or do the new GM minivans look an awful lot like the Mutt Cutt van from the movie Dumb and Dumber?
Donna and I have an occasional need for a cell phone, so last year we started looking about for the cheapest way to get a cell phone that met our needs. We really didn’t need to sign up with one of the big guys for $30 a month and a hundreds of anytime minutes. Nor did we want a two year commitment with substantial penalties to bail out earlier. After doing a bit of internet research on the pay as you go type phones we settled on a company called Tracfone.
The smallest minutes card you can buy is 40 for $19.99 and it is good for 60 days. If you don’t use the minutes they just roll over, but you have to buy another card in 60 days or your service will be discontinued. Because we use so few minutes our bank of airtime is up over 100 minutes. So no matter how you shake it, it’ll cost us about $10 a month for a cell phone.
Recently Donna’s mom decided she wanted a cell phone too. Her use will probably be less than ours so we bought another Tracfone. For $30 you get 20 minutes and a Nokia 1100 phone. It arrived last Thursday. I went online and activated the phone. Unlike the last time for us, this phone didn’t get up and running with in an hour. The support section on the web site said give it 24 hours and if it doesn’t come up call. I left it on overnight and hooked to the charger. By morning the battery was full up, but the signal strength meter was flatlined. Being a good boy I decided to wait out the 24 hours, even though there was surely something wrong with the phone. (Our phone is the same model and when they were side by side, our signal strength meter was full to the top while the new one showed nothing.)
Friday evening I called the support phone number and explained that my phone was not working. She could see on her computer that I had activated it, but told me it hadn’t been 24 hours. When I said sure it has, her response was not 24 business hours. Huh? “What’s a business hour?” I ask. There are 8 business hours in a day she replied, so according to them I had only been waiting for my phone to start working for 8 hours. WTF? Knowing what the answer would be before I asked, I said, “I suppose Saturday and Sunday don’t count?” “Right,” she said. I tried to explain about the lack of signal strength so there was zero possibility that my phone would be receiving any kind of power up codes, she would have none of it. When I put on my most exasperated voice and said, “I’d like to say thank you..” Before I could finish with, “But I can’t.” She promptly replied, “You’re welcome. Have a nice day and thank you for calling Tracfone.”
Sixteen business hours later – now it is this past Tuesday evening. I call the support phone and get a recording saying that I should try back in 48 to 72 hours due to problems associated with Hurricane Wilma. Sheesh. I’m calling them tomorrow.
I apologize for last night’s entry. I started typing out the story when I realized I didn’t have a spell checker built in to the browser like at home. I copied what I had so far in to Word and finished the story. I then corrected the spelling and any of the suggested grammar errors. A quick copy and paste into the browser, followed by publishing.
I never did read what I posted on the web, until tonight when I got home and told my wife what I had written and she wanted to see. I called up the web page and started reading along with her, I noticed a mistake, then another and another. When I noticed the misspelling of sandwich was exactly like what it was before I corrected last night I knew something was amiss. The fact that there were several paragraphs missing on the end made me realize that when I thought I pasted the complete and edited story back in from Word, it didn’t get there because that is exactly where I was before trying to fix things. Oh, well, I guess I’ll leave it alone as a testament to my scattered thoughts.
On one of our wayward wanderings in search of food yesterday we passed right by a auto repair shop with this interesting bit of Roadside America parked outside. Today on our way to lunch I made sure I had the camera.
The Holiday Inn Express here has got a “Business Center” that has free access to the Internet. Don’t tell ’em that this ain’t business, OK? I’ve even got Radio Paradise playing in the background….
Bad news is that they also have MS Word installed, so I really have no excuse for not finishing up the Master’s Miata Club November newsletter.
But first I have to tell our dining out stories.
Last night for dinner we ended up eating a lot later than planned because as it turns out after you get north of Rock Hill, SC (unless you go into Charlotte, not take the by-pass like we did) there isn’t anyplace to eat until you get to Albemarle. There was a Sagebrush steak house a block past the motel, so we ate there even before checking in. The food was better than the one that went out of business in Aiken, but nearly as good as the one in Rock Hill. Topping off the experience was the least personable waitress known to man. Seemed almost a shame to leave her a big tip, but what the heck ASCO was paying for it…
Today Mark and I asked the instructor where we could get a good hamburger (ie. not fast food) for lunch, he recommended 2 places as possibilities, Kathleen’s Kitchen or Rosebrier. Directions were given and they sounded similar except (I thought) one was left and one was right at a light about a half a mile down the road. Mark was driving at I was navigating. We made the first few way points just fine but went straight where we supposed to turn. I noticed Kathleen’s Kitchen on the left as we passed it. Mark made a circle around the block to get back to KK, but after all that, it wasn’t open! Well, if Kathleen’s Kitchen was left, the other place was to the right. We headed right on the look out for the Pizza Hut that we were supposed to turn at to find Rosebrier. We drove. And drove. And drove some more. When the speed limit went up to 55 and civilization (as much as there is in Albemarle, NC) faded we decided to hang a U-turn and go back. For grins we drove on by Kathleen’s Kitchen and maybe a 1/4 mile past was a Pizza Hut. Woohoo. We found Greenbriers. The hamburger was good, not great, but a lot better than Hardee’s, et al. So much so, that maybe that is where we will have lunch tomorrow. They had a decent choice of other sandwiches to choose from too.
One good thing came out of our extended wrong turn though. We drove right by the place the motel clerk said was good for seafood which had planned on getting tonight. And it looked like they were doing a good lunch business.
I have been forgetting to put it in that is all. Last time I remembered was last Monday, well you didn’t miss much, it hasn’t changed.
It might change this week though, forecasting upper 30’s for a couple of overnights.
I’m off for the next couple of days. Going to the tourist hot spot of Albemarle, NC and will be without internet access, so there may be an empty spot in your internet life until Thursday. Only I won’t be visiting the Reed Gold Mine, myself and ASCO’s CNC Programmer will be going to school to learn GibbsCAM.
Sometime earlier this week I received a certificate in the mail that entitled me to a $35 gift card just for test-driving a new MX-5 Miata. So guess what we did Saturday morning? Right.
The interior is not as bad in person as it looked in pictures, for that matter the same can be said for the exterior. The gauges are trendy in that they start at the 6 o’clock position, but are easy to read and they shouldn’t ever be hidden because of the Miata’s first ever, tilt steering wheel. Kudos’s to the return of a real oil pressure gauge (although I didn’t really notice it.) The seats felt uncomfortable because they have tightened up the seat bottom bolsters making the seat narrower. I bet that you would get used to it after a while though. The car is larger inside, but really only on the driver’s side. I could actually get comfortable with the seat forward one notch unlike the current car. There is even a bit more headroom with the top up. They kept the 50/50 weight balance, but in and effort to reduce polar movement by getting as much weight towards the center of the car as possible they moved the engine back about 3 inches. To do this they moved the exhaust manifold to the opposite side of the engine than the current car and it encroaches on the passenger side of the interior. Not only is there a swelling of the center tunnel, but also the foot well has been pushed back. Donna is 5′-2″ and with the passenger seat pushed back all the way, she cannot stretch her legs fully out! I remember back in July when I sat in one at the gap it felt very tight on the passenger side and attributed it the center tunnel intrusion, but I see that it wasn’t just that. She was not uncomfortable, but just a little crowded. I would be uncomfortable on a trip over there though.
The door tops are marginally higher, but you can probably rest your elbow there comfortably. Although, for whatever reason, during our test drive I don’t think mine found its way there. The Z-fold top doesn’t tuck down as far as the current one, it stops about shoulder high, thereby filling in between the seats. The larger seats seem to block more from the back too. It all adds up to the interior being more encompassing, makes you feel like you are sunk down in the car. The steering wheel has audio controls in the spokes and looks like it was pulled from a Mustang, not a high point.
Exterior-wise, the fender flares are still polarizing; sometimes they look geeky and other times not so bad. The front looks a little too cute; it reminds me of Nemo, the clown fish from that Pixar movie of a few years back. I’m sure the after market will take care of that in due time (a nice set of shark’s teeth in the mouth might help.) There were several things that glared out at me in the pictures I’ve seen that I didn’t like at all, head lights, marker lights, tail lights, third brake light, but standing next to the car in person, they didn’t really bother me. One thing that really bugged me in the pictures I saw of the car with the top up was a funny hitch around the window. Made it look like it was coming undone from the frame or something. Turns out to be an extra folded seam along the edge of the top (hard to explain) that is a rain rail. Once again it didn’t seem so obvious in person. The Z-fold top with one center latch is trick. The no boot thing is nice, sorta, I don’t like the looks of the empty spaces that show on each side, they’ll probably make a nice spot to catch falling leaves.
They had a new black car parked right next to a black ’05 Mazdaspeed and you can tell they are related, but the newer one is larger looking. Not MG Midget to MGB larger, but more like a younger brother who grew up with better nutrition. It is still very much Miatalike, but with each passing generation of the car it creeps further from its roots. When we went from the first generation car into our current 2nd generation vehicle it seemed more grown up. It had a little more power and a little more torque. It was quieter, both inside and out. The interior was much nicer in looks and materials. Plus they added all those power goodies that we take for granted in cars now days. The new Miata is probably about the same incremental step up from our current car, as it was from the first generation Miata we used to own before. I’m not so sure that is a good thing.
Donna may have said it best. While chatting with the salesman afterward, she told him she didn’t like it, “It felt a lot like riding around in that Mustang convertible we rented a few years back.” If that is the case, it spells doom for us lovers of raw rear-wheel drive sports cars, but maybe success for Mazda as the car may attract a more mainstream buyer.