brian's daily rant

Thursday, February 28, 2002

Packing

We are going away for a weekend - 2 nights and a day really - yet the trunk of the Miata will be fuller than when we take a 2 week vacation. Do we really need all this stuff? Books and magazines that we will never read. 4 shirts each? Camera, we have been there a dozen times before what more could there be to take pictures of!?! It is going to rain anyway we probably won't even veture outside.

I know I gotta have the laptop, how else will I do the daily blog thing. Gotta have our own showerhead, no possible way should any place be allowed to call themselves a resort if it has a water saver showerhead.

Wednesday, February 27, 2002

Red Lobster

Wednesday is one of only 2 nights I actually watch some TV. So tonights rant came from a commercial, again. But the is time the rant is for just the product. I love the Red Lobster commercials. The older ones for the crab leg promotion where it showed people's legs frolicing in the surf, cool. And the recent one with this guy looking at a lobster in an aquarium and makes his hands mimic the lobster's claws is just great. But I still don't want to eat there. The value just isn't there for me. My idea of a seafood meal is flaky whitefish batter dipped and deep fried with malt vinegar on the fries....mmmmm. That's right, Captain D's - Long John Silvers - Arthur Treachers, $5 and I'm smiling.

Tuesday, February 26, 2002

Cadillac CTS Commercial

Must be the same maketing folks that did the Chey Impala I ranted about awhile back. Boomer aged guy driving a cherry 60's vintage Cadillac Seville Convertable. They show him breaking out of a traffic jam and then while cruising down a two-lane backroad he is passed by a new CTS. If you thought the Impala was angular, this sucker has got F-117 Stealth Fighter angles. No one, and I mean no one who appreciates that vintage Caddy would want this new car!

Oh yeah, new car is silver with heavily tinted windows....

Monday, February 25, 2002

Silver Cars with Tinted Windows

What is it with that combo? 99% of car commercials use that look. Is it silver=quicksilver=fast? I don't think so....
Professional blogger on a closed Web Log. Do not attempt.

Sunday, February 24, 2002

That Hosting Company

Down again. Didn't come back up until nearly 11:00 AM this morning. I surmised from comments at yesterday's Miata Club gathering that the website was unreachable yesterday...I forget all about checking it until this morning. Then the only reason I notice is I want to link a picture in a Miata.net post. I've got a tool called Karen's Net Monitor that will check if your site is up at predetermined intervals, but I keep forgetting to run it. Go get it, it's free. If you use That Hosting Company it is an essential.

Saturday, February 23, 2002

The Last Wheel Rant

Washed the car this morning. There staring me in the face when I washed the wheels were the dozens of scratches Andrew the Chucklehead at Firestone presented me with earlier this week. I had been telling people that they were not noticeable from 5 feet away. Well, after washing, I was wrong, they are noticeable from that distance.

Probably only by me though. I hear you out there, "They are just the things that you put tires on aready! Deal with it." So I am going to get over this, right now. No more on the wheels. Promise.

Friday, February 22, 2002

Here Is One Reason

They scratched my rims all to hell, but it is now my problem to fix. I have to take it to someplace to have them repaired. I have to bring in the bill to get reimbursed. They are happy because as far as they are concerned they have appologized and offered to fix problem. They know that it is more than likely that I will not go to the trouble to get it fixed. So they solved their problem, not mine and feel OK about it.

The last thing the manager Carl said to me is, "Next time you come in we'll take a little something off that bill too." I didn't say it, because I'm not that way, but I thought to myself, there won't be a next time.

Thursday, February 21, 2002

(Almost) The Last of the Firestone Store

The last, because I'm not going back there even if they are the last tire store on the planet. When manager Carl told me $280 on the phone the other day, he meant that is what they were giving me for my old tires, not the total bill. Cost for the tires, $360. Live and learn. They found me 4 matching valve caps and when they asked if I wanted them to put them on, I declined, who knows what would have gone wrong with that simple procedure. As far as the scratched rims, I got the same response I got in December, take then to Master Fabricators in Augusta, they can get the scratches out and then bring them the bill and they will pay for it. There are so many reasons this sucks I don't have time to write about it now, hence the almost in the title. I'll save it for another rant....

More Firestone Store

After my last experience with these guys in December, I went out into the garage latter that evening and checked the lugnut torque, the air pressure and condition of each wheel.

The torque wrench only registers in the tighten direction so I couldn't tell what they were torqued at, but they did come with about enough pressure as you would expect. I had hoped that they got it right, because when I dropped of the car, I gave them my broken adapter and told them to use this to take the aftermarket wheels off the car. When both pieces of the adapter hit the fellows hand, he remembered me. I then gave him the don't use the impact wrench speech. He then told me that wouldn't be a problem this time, as they now use a "torque stick" (I assume that this is some sort of torque limiter.)

The air pressure was even all the way around at 32psi. Using my gage I dropped them all down to an even 30 psi. Curious thing though, when I went in to get the tires, all 4 wheels had those little chrome domed shaped caps, now 2 wheels had them, one had a chrome flat topped cap and one had nothing. Sigh....

Two of the wheels had no scratches on them, that is in addition to the 2 or 3 gouges along the perimeter of each wheel aquired from these folks in December. One wheel had a new inch long scrape in the middle of the polished lip area and the other, yikes, it looked like it was a loser on the BattleBots show. Must be a dozen or so new scratches and dings. While none of these marks are visible from more than 5 feet away, up close they look horrible and I will be reminded of those idiots at the Firestone Store every month when I wash my car.

Wednesday, February 20, 2002

Firestone Store

I had to replace my my 1-year old tires on Christmas eve. All they had in a performance tire in stock in my size were some Bridgestone RE-910's. After driving with them for about 4 weeks I realized they were not the tire for me. For me the Miata has always handled above my fear factor, but with these tires the car loses traction before I lose nerve. Had the manager, Carl, at the local Firestone Store order me a set of 4 Bridgestone S-03 Pole Positions their top of the line street tire. He said that he could get them for me and on the car for $262. Well after nearly a 2 week wait I had them installed tonite. When I went to pick up my car the fellow behind the counter didn't know what to do, he couldn't intemperate Carl's pricing instructions and he couldn't get a hold of Carl. His computer showed a "nomal" price to me of $655! They finally let me have the car as long as I promised to call Carl in the AM and work out the price. Maybe I should just wait for him to call me. :-) The stinking tires ought to be free after what I had to go through on Christmas eve. Read these:
Miata Net Forum Post #1 - Where Did the Air Go, Part 3 and
Miata Net Forum Post #2 - Don't ever let them use the impact wrench

Tuesday, February 19, 2002

State Farm Insurance

Stopped in to pay our bill this evening on the way home. We didn't mail it in because it was incorrect. Several months ago we paid off the loan against our policies, but it still showed that we owed on them on the bill. When we asked about it they said, "Gee, it shouldn't be on there. Let's look in the computer." When they looked they found that when we thought we paid off the loan, we just paid off the principle, which is all their computers show. Apparently the fellow who helped us didn't know that they were supposed to call and get the actual up-to-the-minute payoff figure. Turns out we owed the interest for the amount of days of the month til the date we paid. $37 for Donna and $800 for me. HUH! The loans were for nearly identical sums, the payments were the same, the pay offs were the same. What happened? One of the friendly State Farm Insurance agents in the office called the regional rep and spent the next 1/2 on the phone with him/her and straightened it out. I only owed $37 bucks too.

Monday, February 18, 2002

Two-man Luge

What is up with that. How do they stay attached to one another while flying down the hill? I hope it is velcro and not some sort of physical connection.

Sunday, February 17, 2002

Cry Baby Canadians

You got your gold, now go home.

Saturday, February 16, 2002

Blog Envy

I'm not worthy. When you go to the blogger home page over on the left are "Blogs of Note" and "Recently Updated". I decided to check some out. This looks interesting, I'll just try this one.....
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I'm back. I clicked on one which lead to another and another and another and here it is a hour later. LoriLoo, GlassDog, Mighty Girl which all came from b-may. This is good stuff. My little rant thing is lame-o. I'm not worthy.

Friday, February 15, 2002

Taco Loco

Family night at El Rio. Donna wanted Mexican food for supper and who am I to argue. She, I and her mom decided to split the Fajitas for two. Just in case eating a bowl of chips and salsa before hand wasn't enough, we ordered 3 tacos (1 ea) to go with the fajitas. The fajitas were good, but the tacos sucked. Is it my fault, were these real mexican tacos and I have become so used to the americanized versions that these didn't taste good to me? Estoy apesadumbrado, give me a Taco Bell taco anyday over theirs.

Also, I wanted a Dos Equis Amber Lager with dinner. Nope, they were out. 6:00 PM on a Friday and they are out! I only hope that Miguel was on his way back from el almacén de licor.

Thursday, February 14, 2002

Sounds of Silence

Where the heck did my sound go? Had it earlier, uninstalled the Return to Castle Wolfenstein demo and the beta video driver I needed to run the game and after rebooting, silence ensued. Rebooted. Restarted. Uninstalled the audio driver, rebooted, re-installed the audio driver, rebooted and still nothing. The sound has stopped working before, but a simple reboot has restored it. I smell a format coming on...

Totally weird. Right after I posted the first part of this to proof read before publishing it, my PC spotaneously rebooted. One second I was looking at this screen and the next it was black. I let windows run the scan disk and it told me I had a lot of truncated files in the temp directory with blog in them. Well no shit, that is where I was when you interupted me. What is doubly totally weird, my sound works now....

Valentine's Day Bonus Rant

This is our 26th Valentine's together (25 as a married couple.) We have gotten to the point where a simple exchange of cards is enough of a celebration. While relating this to a co-worker, he said, "Please don't tell me everyday's like Valentine's Day so we don't do anything special. If I hear that one more time I'll puke." I didn't want to see him ruin his shoes so I kept silent....

Wednesday, February 13, 2002

One Twist Too Many

Law and Order, the orginal, is one of a few TV shows I still watch regularly. I usually tape it, because it is so much better to fast forward through the commercials. We normally watch the tape on Fridays with dinner as we wind down from the work week. For whatever reason, we didn't watch it then, we watched it tonight. They usually keep me guessing until the end by using plot twists, so it is hardly ever who you think it is.

Tonight they needed to link a guy to some money used for paying someone to kill his mistress. No matter how hard the DAs looked they couldn't find a connection. They finally got the guy's wife to come forward with a bank withdrawal form that made it look like he had gotten the money from one of his kids colege funds. The jury convicted him because of it. Afterwards the assistant DA noticed the similarity between the wife's handwriting and the signature on the withdrawal slip. The DAs confront the wife to see if she will admit to fabricating the slip. No way will she do it. They are left to beleive that the wife set up the husband. Neat trick. Too neat I say. First thing they would have done is get the police to verify who actually withdrew the payoff money (if there ever was money withdrawn.) And even if they didn't because it was the final nail in this guy's coffin, certainly his defense laywer would have checked out the slip.

Tuesday, February 12, 2002

Sleep

I wish I didn't have to sleep. It is already 10 o'clock and I still have a ton of things I want to do, not need, mind you, but want. Last night it was after midnight before I got to bed. Work day get up time is 6 AM. That was not nearly enough sleep for me, I need 7 hours to feel rested, with 8 or more hours being great.

Monday, February 11, 2002

Chocolate & Carmel Creme Savers

Nabisco missed the mark on this flavor. Yuck! 3 out of 4 ain't bad, though. The first flavor was Orange & Cream. Just like those Creamsicles you got from the Good Humor Man. Next was Stawberries & Cream and while there wasn't any childhood association to anything, they were just as good as the Orange. 3rd was Raspberries & Cream, mmmmm, delicious. So when I noticed a new flavor, Chocolate & Carmel I bought a bag. One taste and I knew we had to back to the store to buy a different flavor. If you are in the neighborhood, stop in I'll give you a nearly full bag of C & C.

Sunday, February 10, 2002

3,000 Miles to Graceland

Was it about the good Elvis battling the bad Elvis? Or were they just giving Kurt Russell slightly good things to do so it would be OK for him to end up with the girl in the end. Courtney Arquette Cox can't cry convincingly. Kind of interesting movie, but what's up with the over the top gunplay? After the final shoot out scene, where like 16,000 bullets have been fired, 2 dozen bodies have been blown up or shot off scafoldings, Kevin Kostner has been hit with like 30 bullets, one federal marshall looks at the other and says, "Make sure everyone's OK?" Huh? Was that comedy? Oh well, at least they had some cool cars and some cool Elvis jokes....

Saturday, February 09, 2002

Glass Paint?

I have installed a set of those all-the-rage-among-the-kids indiglo gage faces on the Miata. Got them to sort of go with the blue face of the new in-dash MP3 Player. The dash used to have green backlighting and all that is left of it is the light shining on the ODOs. Decided to make it blue to match. Pulled the dash apart and popped out the bulbs. Removed the green plastic condoms and exposed the bare bulbs. Started to apply the blue glass paint I had bought this afternoon. Didn't stick too well, but I kept at it. Two coats later it was time to put them back in and try it out. They lit up sort of blue. SH$T. Pulled the dash apart again. Fortunately because the paint didn't stick too well it was realatively easy to remove. Put the bare bulbs in and now I have white light illuminating the ODO which is better than the green stock or aqua painted.

Friday, February 08, 2002

Olympics

Kind of a weak rant, but it is all I got tonight. Professional players are now allowed in the Olympics, coporate sponsorship is rampant, and about every third or fourth Olympics are on US soil because we are the biggest TV market for them and that is where the money is. The only thing I like about them anymore is the skin-tight lycra the women wear for some sports and the skimpy costumes the ice skaters wear. And I may not have that pleasure much longer, in this week's issue of People magazine there is an article about them asking the ice dancers to tone down the sexuality of their routines.

Thursday, February 07, 2002

Music from The Sopranos

Bought the first volume and loved it, nice mix of pop, standards and rap. The theme song alone was worth the price of admission. So when the second volume came out, I bought it. This one is a 2 CD set. After listening to it a couple times I have come to the conclusion with a little better weeding out of selections, it would have made a fine one CD release. It was really stupid of them to add a couple minutes of dialog from the show too. There are about a half dozen different Mafia mouth ones run together. What they should have done was give us one selected Tony - Dr. Malfi session. Plus I will never forgive them for mucking up Henry Mancini's "Theme from Peter Gunn" with Sting doing Every Breathe You Take...

Wednesday, February 06, 2002

More Chicken Stuff (pun intended)

A couple of days ago I ranted on chicken tenderloins and in it I mentioned we eat more chicken. I meant in as the royal we, meaning all of us, but I also meant me and my household. We buy some frozen foods from a company called Schwan's. Donna's brother drives a truck for them in the Seattle area. When Donna's mom moved in with us she decided to start ordering stuff from them. We order some of the frozen vegtables and in the summer we get some of those little ice cream cups. We have tried of few of the other things as well. The chicken breasts are a big time saver, the are always so moist and tender. Never really paid attention to the box before, but for some reason today it caught my eye. Right there on the side of the box was (italics are theirs) - Unbreaded, Boneless, Skinless Chicken Breast Filets with Rib Meat Containing up to 12% of a solution.

What does that mean? Nowhere on any of the 6 sides of the box does it say what the solution is that they have stuffed in there. It is item number 502 in case you want to see if they tell you want the solution is on their web site.

Tuesday, February 05, 2002

SPAM

Oooh, here's an original rant, but this has a twist. Decided to go through and delete my old mail. This is an irregular event to be sure. First I dumped everything that was older that 2 months. This still left me with 1032 messages. For the heck of it I decided to see how much of that was spam. Carefully poked my way through and highlighted all the ones that came in unsolicited and hit the really delete button. Guess how many emails are in the deleted folder now.....743. That's just for 2 months! The biggest chunk is the Lockergnome newsletters, I get 4 a day every weekday (135). Next is my daily re-issue of Calvin & Hobbes (53). Next with 43, is myself from my work address, I send things home so I will remeber to do them later. Then I get an email from netflix everytime they ship or receive a DVD (25). Then there are the 3 or 4 weekly newsletters covering HTML, freeware, etc. The rest are from friends, family, Miata Club business and Bicycle Cub business. That's a lot of email...

Monday, February 04, 2002

That Hosting Company Part III

From 9:30PM on Sunday, 2/3 until 4:45 PM today, Monday, 2/4 the Club web site was AWOL. Email still worked and you could still get to the That Hosting Company website. This was different than the last few episodes, usually everything disappears. That is still no consolation to the thousands, well maybe hundreds, how about tens, would you beleive the 1 person trying to get to the Master's Miata Club site in that time frame.

Sunday, February 03, 2002

Chicken Tenderloins

We are eating more chicken than ever before. Mostly the breast meat. First it was split breasts, then boneless breats and then we got breast strips that they called breast "tenderloins." Where was the rest of the bird going? Cat food, I hope.

I usually bring a microwavable "TV" dinner to work and every chicken dish is made with a breast. But recently they have started to throw in a dinner or two made with the thigh meat, but they are being are being sneaky about it. They are now calling the boneless thigh meat, chicken tenderloins. Fooled me once..

Saturday, February 02, 2002

Fancy Resturaunts

Why is it at fancy resturaunts they always serve you small portions on a big plate? Is that to make the food seem more special, by making you think it is so rare that you are lucky to be getting any at all? Then because cretins like me don't get it, they sprinkle froo-froo stuff all over the open spaces so the plate won't seem as big....

Friday, February 01, 2002

Geocities.

Geocities hosts my little Barndoor Fan Club site. I registered the domain with Yahoo and it is about to expire. Tonight for the first time in a year the site was unreachable, I had exceeded my bandwidth allotment! I guess everyone was checking in to see if they had won the Winter Photo Contest. Or Geocities is cuting back on the bandwidth to get me to upgrade to the GeoCities Pro $8.95 a month level instead of my current free with ad status.