Rants

Optional Equipment Shown

I’ve been watching a lot more television than I used to lately and the down side of this is commercials. Theodore Sturgeon was probably a little optimistic about the percentages as they pertain to TV ads, it is more like 99% are crud.

The ads always show stuff in a positive light, except for prescription medicine which have to go on and on about the possible side effects. Car commercials have some rules too, but do their best to find their way around them. If you advertise the starting price of the car, you have to show the price of what it would cost to buy the car featured in the commercial. They show this much higher price in the fine print at the bottom of the screen and it only appears for milliseconds. This price is always considerably more than the base price of the car by thousands of dollars. The current big price jump champion is the new Nissan Murano with a base price of $26,330 with a price as shown of $38,930, nearly 50% more expensive.

A way to avoid showing this greatly inflated cost is to not mention the base price of the car at all. But to be fair if you are not featuring the base model of the car in the ad, you have to place this helpful little phrase in the fine print for a few milliseconds — Optional equipment shown.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/08: 30

Lost Out On Lost

Tonight was the February meeting of the MMC. This month it was in Augusta and the big item on the agenda was trying to figure out what to do for our 15th Anniversary dinner later this month.

The one person committee had it narrowed down to 5 different restaurants in the three different cites on 3 different nights. The haggling lasted until nearly 9:00 PM with nearly twenty differing opinions on when, where, and how much. It was as difficult to reach an agreement as it was for the SALT talks. Believe me, in the middle of it, it felt as if it was taking as long too.

By the time we got home there were less than fifteen minutes to go in tonight’s episode. I sat in front of the PC, but Donna couldn’t resist the call of the siren and headed in to watch the last bits. I’m going to wait until tomorrow and watch it online at ABC.com.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/08: 29

Netflix & The New Throttling

For the 4th time in 3 months a disc we have rented from Netflix has not been available at our local distribution center. The British detective show, I can understand not being real popular in SC, and having to come from Chicago, but House, season one disc three? Discs 1 & 2 came from Columbia, how come #3 wasn’t there? I bet #4, 5 & 6 will be there.

Even though Netflix has lost a 2004 class action lawsuit for throttling (with legal feet dragging it is still not settled), I have no real recourse because they changed their user agreement to allow high volume renters to be “smoothed.”

What is really galling is the fact that when a disc is “not available” at my local distribution center they have to wait a full day before it can be shipped from the next closest center. Isn’t this all done via computer? Netflix knows what I want next, how long should it take them to get the word out? I kinda figure email would be pretty much instantaneous…

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/08: 26

Oh Well

We really wanted Roma Pizza to work out for us. It is a mile away from the house, so it makes a perfect distance for walking to, having a meal and strolling back from. We have been there three times since they opened a few months ago, the first was about a month after they opened. The last was last Friday.

On our first visit the service was spotty, which we chalked up to teething pains. The pizza was great, right up there with our old favorite Ferrando’s.

On our second visit the pizza was great, as was the service.

Last Friday when we walked in, the hostess grabbed two menus and looked over towards the bar area and asked a woman sitting there, was Missy in yet. To which the woman, possibly a manager or owner said, “She’ll be here momentarily.” We were seated at a booth and off the hostess went without further word. We really didn’t need the menu as we knew what we were getting, a five topping pie, two garden salads, water and a sweet tea. We sat for a few minutes and wondered among ourselves what momentarily meant. After a while a waitress appeared and stopped at the booth behind us and asked the occupants did they want anything else, as they were finishing up. The waitress didn’t even look our way, obviously she wasn’t Missy. We had now been seated for a good five minutes and we had gotten not so much as a somebody will be right with you from any of the 4 restaurant employees in sight. Not even water yet. We then decided that we didn’t feel like waiting for Missy any longer, so got up to leave. As we headed for the door, Donna said, in a voice loud enough to be heard by nearly everyone in attendance, “I guess we’ll have to go somewhere else to get waited on!” The hostess replied, “OK.” I kept on going out the door, but Donna turned around and gave the hostess a piece of her mind before joining me in the parking lot. We went to Krogers, bought a Digiorno Frozen Pizza, went home and ate it.

We were boycotting Ferrando’s because they closed the location we liked in downtown and opened a store on the south side. And while the new spot is actually closer to us, it is less convenient and always crowded making getting a table hard. But tonight when we wanted “real” pizza we went to Ferrando’s. But we went early, almost right after work at five o’clock and it was a smooth experience.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/08: 21

Love/Hate Relationship With The Internets

I love the net. It is a vast repository for everything from diamonds to dreck. I mainly like it for the reason that I don’t have to remember stuff anymore. Brain storage space, now at a premium because of age and heavy abuse of mind altering drugs as a teen, does not have to tied up remember that Jon Provost played Timmy Martin on 178 episodes of the TV show Lassie from 1957 to 1964. And things like, “Although it has been the subject of many spoofs and misquotes, the one situation that Timmy never needed saving from in the entire history of the show was falling down a well.” That’s what IMDB is for. If I ever need to know how to change the fuel filter on my car or how many red Miatas were made in 1993, Miata.net will remember it for me. I don’t even have to remember what happens to me anymore, that is what this blog is for.

I hate the net. The main reason for that is spam. It is light at the home address because I rarely use it on the net. It is just the opposite for my work email. Somewhere along the line that address got sold on a CD and I get about a hundred pieces of crud every day. Fortunately it is stopped before it gets to my inbox by a service the company subscribes to called Postini. I check the MMC‘s email and because we have a yahoo.com address 99.9% of what comes in there is the usual replica watches, male enhancement and free gift card junk. My gamil account gets a bunch too, 27 so far today, but 26 were caught by Gooogle’s spam filter.

Today I received 2 emails at my gmail account purportedly from eBay about “Item Number: (300192365929) Zulu – scarce Stanley Baker signed autograph.” Could this be because of my furious bidding for Lost: Season2 DVDs on eBay? Doubt it, my registered eBay email is still the now defunct brian@mr-miata.com… Both emails contained the right letters to my gmail address, but did not include the dots in between the letters. Do you have a “.” in your gmail address? If so, try sending your self a note by leaving out the dot. Worked for me.

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/08: 15

Lost Capability

When I went to watch The Incredibles the other day there was a section of the disk that held some set up routines for optimum THX viewing. What the heck, I’ll give it a try. The video portion was a piece of cake, but the audio section was a disappointment. My decade old Onkyo receiver has 5:1 Dolby processing, that I have had working in the past, but for some reason now there is no sound at all from the rear surround speakers. No big deal, they aren’t in their ideal placements for that total immersion feeling anyway.

We have a JVC DVD player and we have a JVC TV that are about 5-1/2 years old. JVC used to have a system called Compu-Link that hooked up their electronic components, so that when one did something that effected another setting automatically changed. Whenever we used pop a DVD in, the TV would turn on and change to the video input the DVD was hooked into. Notice I said used? Stopped working the other day. It is no big deal to push a couple buttons, but when you are used to having it easy…

When I hit the Powerball tonight I’ll probably go out and buy one of those all in one box systems. Of course if I actually did win the $71 million I could hire somebody to come in set up a killer media system.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/08: Six

Chinese New Year

1-1-2008 Enchanted CeilingToday’s sky was as uneventful as yesterday’s, but I decided to take a photo anyway. I went out on the deck in mid-afternoon and recreated, as best as possible, lat night’s Last of 2007 Enchanted Ceiling picture. Now I have to take precious minutes of the new year and post them to the site.

Rambo? How old is Stallone?

How do they expect to sell me on the merits of High Definition DVDs or Blueray Discs by broadcasting clips of movies into my living room on my analog TV?

You would have thunk it was a religious holiday with the amount of places that weren’t open today. Because it was a relatively nice day, sunny, mid 50s, we decided to walk the mile up to a shopping center and get a pizza. Roma Pizza was closed. No problem, there is a Moe’s on the other side of the parking lot. Problem, they were closed too, so we kept walking. About a half a mile further was a shopping center with a Japanese restaurant and an Indian one too. One of those were bound to be open. Nope. We had one last hope before settling on a sub sandwich from the deli of the grocery store that was on the way home. It didn’t look open, but the OPEN sign was lit. We tried the door and entered the Jade of China. Fortunately the Year of the Rat starts on February 7th and not January 1st.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/08: Zero