Rants

Really?

P1010152

Geocaching.com has been running a promotion something or other event all month, that if you find a cache or attend an event on any day in August you will be “awarded” a unique 31 Days of Geocaching souvenir. Just to be contrary, we have avoided going caching all month, but could put it off no longer, so we went out this morning and did a little searching for hidden ammo cans using satellite signals.

After caching we changed from our sweaty T-shirts and went out for lunch at a Ruby Tuesday in nearby North Augusta. They open at 11:00 AM and we were there about 11:30, so there were hardly any people in the place. Just three tables were occupied and all threes were right next to each other and right next the hostess station. Sure enough when she showed us to our table it was right next to everyone else. We asked her nicely if we could move a little further away from all the other diners, so she led us a couple more steps along, skipping just one table.

There were like 40 empty tables to choose from, but here we were all grouped together. It is not like we are totally anti-social, but we would have liked to dine and have a conversation without having to talk over, or listen to, other conversations.

As we sat looking over our menus, before our server even arrived, the hostess came in with another group and sat them right behind us, filling in the one spot that we had skipped over. Donna looked at me, I shook my head, we stood up, walked right around her and folks she was seating and exited the restaurant.

We drove back to Aiken and stopped at the Applebee’s near our house. There were maybe 6 groups of people eating there already and they were all spread out evenly through out the restaurant. When the hostess seated us we were led to an empty table 20′ from the next closest diners. There, was that so hard?

Started down, went up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1251

Jack Reacher

KillingFloorWe were in the book store on Saturday looking for some summer reading and I was so desperate to find something I would enjoy that I picked up a Jack Reacher novel, Killing Floor.

I have read all the Jack Reacher books and chew through them like I used to with Robert B Paker’s Spenser novels. Because I was sure I has already read this book I kept waiting for the moment when I would go go, “Oh yeah.” But I’m now more than half way through and that moment hasn’t come. Did I miss this book in the series or is it because it was written in 1997 that I’ve completely forgotten it? I’m thinking I just missed it, but the light of recognition may still go off in the next couple hundred pages.

This is a reprint of the very first Jack Reacher book and it has a new introduction by the author Lee Child that tells how he came to write and why he chose the genre, an anti-hero and how he came to name his protagonist. It also has a new round yellow circle on the front cover that reads “See Jack Reacher now in his first major motion picture.”

The introduction adds nothing new if you have visited the Lee Child’s web site, so what I really wanted was what he was thinking about with the much smaller Tom Cruise playing his 6’5″, 250 pound creation. I have heard that he publicly said he was happy with Cruise in the role. I recently had an opportunity to watch the movie and passed on it just because I knew I couldn’t be so charitable.

I’m Insulted

Early this week they put clear lucite sign holders on every single table in the cafeteria. Inside each one is a flyer calling for volunteers to sign up to be a First Responder. Every one in Maintenance is already trained to do this, but they are looking for a few more good (wo)men. They also put one on each of the six tables in what management refers to as the break area out front or what everyone else calls the smoking area.

For the last couple of days they have been putting up wall mount versions in every restroom. There is one on the wall just above every urinal and one on the inside of each stall door. I figured they were going to fill them with more of the please be a First Responder sheets, but they remained empty. Until this morning.

The ones in the Men’s Room out in the Turned Parts Department, near where my cubical is, had advertisements in them this AM. One of the urinals had a Viagra ad over it, while the other had one for Vesicare and each stall had an Ex-Lax ad, one vintage and very modern.

Once word got out about them, people were going in just to look, conversations ensued as to whether they were for real or was someone just having fun. Seriously, how could it have been anything but a joke. I know sales are slow right now, but would the Valve Store really try and make up some of that money by selling ads on restroom walls?

I’m insulted that no one asked me if I had anything to do with it…

Close, But Not Exactly Right

Last night we went out for dinner at Ruby Tuesday where we both opted to try something from their special summer menu. Donna chose the Bourbon Salmon with spaghetti squash and grilled green beans. I went for the Caribbean Chicken and instead of my usual salad and potato I chose the grilled green beans as well and broccoli. When dinner was served I received green beans and mashed taters. Maybe the waiter heard me mentally contemplate the potatoes before saying broccoli, but, hey, I like mashed potatoes, so I ate them.

For this morning’s breakfast at DD we ordered the usual. My coffee with muffin and Donna’s hot chocolate with two wake-up wraps, one ham, one bacon. The first three items we get at the register and then have to wait a bit for the wraps to cook. When I say usual it is so usual that they usually get Donna’s wraps going when they see the car pull up in front of the store. When they called out the wrap order I thought I heard them say, “Sausage wrap and ham wrap.” When Donna pulled them out of the bag, turns out I heard right. Hey, up until a couple months ago she used to order that combo, so maybe they just misremembered.

In both cases we didn’t complain, except amongst ourselves, because sometimes it’s just not worth the hassle.

Blast From The Past

I’ve been kind of slack on the blogging around here, with nothing much interesting to write about, I thought maybe I’d fill this spot up with a scintillating post from 10 years ago. Back in 2003 this was actually two blogs The Miata Diaries and Brian’s Daily Rant and I posted something on both every day. I hoped to find something good and I struck out, apparently it was kind of a dull day then too.

From Brian’s Daily Rant:

When Will I Watch A Movie Again?
It has been two weeks at least since I’ve watched a DVD. Right now there are 4 Netflix rentals on the coffee table waiting a spin. ( Rabbit-Proof Fence, Moonlight Mile, Spirited Away and Adaptation ) Also stacked up there are 3 other movies from my Co-Worker DVD Swap Club: Pork Chop Hill, Tuck Everlasting and K-19. Plus on top of those I have A Brother From Another Planet that I picked up in a truck-stop in rural North Carolina for $4.88. I guess I\’m going to have to take a break from writing in 3 blogs and reading 10 for a night or two…

From The Miata Diaries:

House Cleaning Day
Did a little sprucing up around here, very little, but I feel better.
1) This site is now a proud member of the Blogging Brians, so I added a link to the left.
2) I got rid of a stale weblog that hadn’t been updated since like March from the Mortal Blog list and added Blogumentary, go check it out.
3) This page’s extension is now PHP instead of HTML. I snagged a script that allows me to keep a constantly updated set of stats in my search for ET and installed it on the left. Thanks Sam Ley.

Purchased Today: $0
Money spent since 03/03/03: $923.63
Started up, still up.
Top Transitions since 02/02/03: 166

The money figure was money spent on the Miata and of course I was keeping track of the top transitions back then too.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1241

Mutt And Jeff

Tiring of rabbit ears, Mohu Leafs, preamplifiers, Magic Fractal things and still not being able to get the FOX station, we broke down and re attached the TV umbilical cord.

I called on Thursday to sign up for Atlantic Broadband’s Limited Service which gives us all the local channels and their sub-channels, a couple of shopping channels, a couple religious channels, etc and the weather channel for about a third the cost of our old service. They were also running a special deal with the limited, for a year I could get it and their super-duper high speed internet for about $15 more than we are paying now for their mid-tier internet.

We set up an appointment for Saturday. It conflicted with a MMC event, but it was better not to have to take off from work, so… Because it was a weekend we were told that someone would be at our house between 8AM and 4PM. Because we are literally a stone’s throw from the local office we got lucky and a little after eight they called and said they were on their way.

We thought great, we might get to go bowling and have lunch with the group after all. We should be an easy job because the infrastructure was all in place, all we needed was a splitter in the box on the outside of the house and the trap removed on the pole across the street.

When the Tech, Brian, showed up with his trainee, Brent, they thought it was going to be easy too. They had a wireless router and a cat5 cable in their hands. When I told them I didn’t need that, I needed the limited service added and the bump in internet speed. Brian, who probably played pulling guard on his high school football team 10 years ago and has gone to fat, rudely demanded to see the PDA from Brent, who was probably the AV guy in high school twenty years ago. Brian looked at his paperwork and saw that it said what I said; he started swearing half under his breath at the girls in the office and their level of stupidity. Brent, who was standing behind him, rolled his eyes at me and later apologized. The two of them kind of bickered about what to do about the fact that the modem was mine, but their paperwork said I had an old one. When they finally agreed on who was going to do what and they finished up, we had TV, but the internet wasn’t working. The modem failed to reconnect properly. It would run through the front panel light sequence until almost the end, and then start over again.

Brian called for tech support and Brent took this opportunity to go sit in the truck and get away from the bad vibes. After about 15-20 minutes they got a internet connection, but the guy on the other end of the line said that he was reading a kind of big loss in signal, Brian said that he would change out the line from the pole to the house. The ladder come off the truck and The Lockhorns go about re-running a new piece of coax from across the street to the house.

When they come back in, the internet comes up, but at my old speed, 8Mbps up and 3 Mbps down. Brian explains that while he was up on the ladder a moving truck came flying down the street, ran over the cable they were pulling down, drug it down the street and in the process broke the port it was hooked to. They called in a maintenance guy to fix it, so when he does that; the speed should go way up. They are going to go on to their next call. Total time on scene was 2 hours 15 minutes. Bowling is out, but if we wait awhile and drive over we can still get a seafood lunch with the MMC.

I was inside setting up the TV channels and Donna was playing on the internet. The longer she surfed the slower it got. When it got below dial-up speed she called me in. The modem lights were acting accordingly, but now we lost all connection. I rebooted the modem and it went back to the whole “getting so far and starting over again thing” and never hooking up. I called the support line and after 5 minutes on hold, got a tech on the line. He tried a few things on his end, I rebooted the computer, and we unhooked the cable and power from the modem, waited a minute and hooked it back up. Still no dice. About that time, the maintenance guy showed up with his bucket truck. It took all of two minutes for him to do his thing and off he went.

The help desk guy stayed on the line with me the whole time and once the maintenance guy left, we tried one more time to disconnect the modem and restart it. When that failed he said there must be something wrong with whatever the first two guys did this morning. The only thing he could do for me now was to put in a call for them to come back. When I asked for an ETA he couldn’t give me one. Seafood in Augusta was now off the table, so Donna stayed home and I went to Moe’s for takeout.

Without our usual episode of Frazier from Netflix to watch at lunch we popped in a DVD to watch a movie. After the movie was over I went in to check something on the computer and the modem lights indicated we had an internet connection. Sure enough, we were online. I ran a speed test and we are now rocking a 40Mbps download and 3 up! Somehow it fixed itself. I hooked it back up through the router and everything is back running.

Big Brian showed back up about 3:30 and I told him we had magically got going. He got his meter out of the truck and checked the signal strength, he ran a speed test, shrugged his shoulders and left.

That was fun.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1240

How Was Your Day Dear?

There was a decent sized piece of the crust (the best part) missing off of my Coffee Cake Muffin at DD this morning. Donna said it looked like someone or thing had taken a bite out of it, but I could see it on the shelf, so it must have fallen off when the counter person grabbed. I wanted to ask for it, but felt that might have come off as a little bit weird.

There were ZERO chicken pieces in my container of General Tso’s Chicken. I should receive a full response via email from the Windsor Foods people within three business days…

Tatiana Maslany was robbed by the Emmys. She was not nominated for lead actress in a drama series. Nor was she nominated for any of the 6 supporting actress roles she played in a drama series.

The new Real Yellow Pages AT&T phone book was on our front door step when we got home. I wonder how long they are going to keep producing these things? A three quarter of an inch thick book can be reduced to a small post-it note on the fridge. We need like two numbers out of it, the SCE&G power outage hotline and customer support for our internet service provider.

Filled up the Sonata with gas this evening and I accidentally selected Supreme instead of the required Regular fuel, thereby negating 30 of the 50 cent savings we had accrued at Kroger.

Late Update: The paper towels were back in the remodeled men’s restroom. Donna said they never disappeared in the remodeled women’s restroom.