Rants

The Return Of Procrastination Man

I will be on vacation next week and away from the PC so there will be no blogging, but more importantly it is the week I would normally be doing the Master’s Miata Club’s newsletter. That means that I need to do it this week, because I have to mail out the newsletter with the October meeting location before I go away. Because when I get back it will be too late. I should mail it out no later than Friday, which means I had better get busy, but instead I sit here blogging and reading other blogs. I’ll probably go ahead and update the Club’s web page with photos from this weekend’s event while I’m in full delay mode. No sense hurrying when I’ll have all day Thursday to do it. 🙂

Word Scambler Thing

Sitll oeinptarg on the psot-gap ehpuoira.

Ntohnig btroehed me at all tdaoy. Eevn wehn my bsos ddeeicd taht I sulohd go aeahd and snped the day rintceearg a carht for an oictapl cpaotmraor ienstad of sennpidg $100 and buy a new one. Deosn’t he rebmeemr waht my hluory rtae is? The one I mkae wlil look etlaxcy lkie the pchrasued one, but wlil lsat nworhee naer as lnog. Mnie wlil be pretnid on a lewor qliauty flim on our ikenjt ptletor as oposped to the myalr wtih watreoporf ink and pttoirecve flim of the psorislfanoely preducod one.

Wrod Sbmelcrar Tnhig

Oreo Quality Control

My snack for the week was Oreo cookies, Double Delight OREO Coffee and Cream to be exact. My wife packs 5 in a plastic sandwich bag for me to enjoy at my morning break. In each of the last 4 days there has been one cookie in my bag that has had one of the chocolate wafers on upside down, that is a smooth side is showing and the imprinted side is towards the filling. For some reason I don’t remember this little non-conformance occurring with such regularity.

I’m sure in the beginning these defective cookies were destroyed. Then, as with the rest of manufacturing America, cost became more important than quality. Slowly things migrated from throwing them away, to giving them to charities to allowing a certain percentage to make into consumer packages. Now with each passing quarter the total of non-conforming cookies allowed has been increased.

Soon somewhere in the corporate halls of Nabisco a decision will be made to eliminate the embossing of the words OREO and the Nabisco logo altogether. It will be cheaper all around and then it won’t matter at all which way the cookies come together. To keep the identity they will have to spray the likeness of these logos on with some food dye or something.

Oh, and they will call it “New and Improved” too.

Comment Spam

We get annoying phone calls selling us stuff we don’t want. We get regular mail flyers full of stuff we don’t want. We get tons of spam emails for stuff we don’t want.

I got hit with a new one yesterday and until someone comes up with a clever word for this, I’ll call it Comment Spam.

It wasn’t random at all. If you search my rant site for the word cholesterol you get one hit, it’s in the post they left the comment on. Notice that I had accidentally mis-spelled cholesterol. If you search for the correct spelling, there are no hits. in the comment spam they too spell cholesterol wrong, with an “al” on the end. I never get a link or even the name of the supplement, so was this a random act of a random person who stumbled on my site?

I’m Not A Gearhead

But I would like to be able to do the “easy” stuff on my car. Changing the oil and rotating tires has become second nature. I’ve done the brakes, i.e., change pads, bleed them, etc twice now. I would like to change out the transmission fluid and the differential oil, but to do these you need both a 23mm and a 24 mm socket. From a quick search on the web these will run me $15 a piece, plus $10-15 for the 1/2″ ratchet. Then a oil pump would make this easier to get the oils back in these hard to reach places, another $5-10. Not to mention the cost of the fluids. Probably be cheaper to get the Mazda place to do it when they change my timing belt in a couple weeks.

Tell Me Again Why I’m Eating Here?

They have been doing this for as long as I remember, so it must be working. The Tums commercials always take place in a diner. The customers, the counter person and the look are different, but there is always some schmoe with gas or an upset tummy taking some product other than Tums. Someone will offer him advice on the best antacid to solve the problem. In the one I saw tonight the counter man told our sufferer to ask a counsel of experts and points to a trio of beefy Johnny Lunchpails at the end of the counter. The three of them are clutching their chests and bellies while, literally swilling, from a Tums container.

Maybe, just maybe, you wouldn’t have those gastrointestinal problems if you found another place to eat.

I Hate Tuesdays

Spent the morning driving around town snapping pictures recognizable (at least I hope recognizable) as being in Aiken county with just a bit of car showing. They were done using a disposable camera with a built in flash, so I have little idea exactly how they will turn out. They are for the First Annual Aiken Drive By Photo Contest. You can enter more than once, so I think I will grab another entry packet when I turn in the first tomorrow.

It was weird being off work today because we treated yesterday just like a regular Sunday – had lunch with our regular group, watched an X-Files episode and I even trimmed around my beard. So my dysfunctional mind is frantically trying to categorize what today was. Oh well, soon it will be morning and I’ll be able to classify tomorrow as a Monday.