Aimless Wandering

So I’m working in one of our classrooms today and watching MSNBC as the House of Representatives debates the bill regarding the President’s redeployment of troops in Iraq.

I’ve got to say I’m stunned… Shocked…. Amazed..  What has blown me away?  As Representative John Boehner finished speaking on the floor of the House, somebody’s cellphone can clearly be heard ringing!

Are you kidding me?  Congressmen (and women) are certainly important people, but WTF?  You have staffers, let them answer your phone.  If it’s that fricken important your staffer can come and get you!  There shouldn’t be any reason that ANYBODY needs to have a cellphone with them while on the floor of the House of Representatives, or for that matter in either chamber of Congress.  However, if you that inseperable from your phone, at least turn the ringer off!  Set the thing to vibrate!

Then again, is anybody really going to sit in either the House or the Senate while it’s in session and yack away on their cellphone?

I like the ringtone on my phone, yet I almost never hear it…  Why?  Because I find myself in front of classes, in meetings, etc and so I normally leave my phone on vibrate so that I don’t disrupt what’s going on around me and call undue attention to myself.  It makes sense to me, but apparantly doesn’t make sense to the folks in Congress…

So I’m playing with the news feature on the Wii, it’s quite cool. You can zoom around the globe and news stories from around the world show up as little icons that you can click on. It’s not perfect, stories from Birmingham AL show up in Birmingham England, and I didn’t know there was a Stuttgart Arkansas, but there is… Of course it shows up in Stuttgart Germany, but what’s a few thousand miles between friends right?

Anyway I wouldn’t have noticed the Stuttagart Arkansas error if it wasn’t for this story from the AP that showed up on the Wii (in Stuttgart Germany)

“Train Hits Pedestrian Talking on Phone”

Stuttgart, Ark - A woman eating from a bowl and talking on a cell phone walked past a railroad crossing gate and into the path of a freight train, police said Monday. She later died.

Investigators suspect the incident Sunday was an accident but have suppoenaed the 26 year old woman’s cell phone records to find out whom she was talking to.

“She wasn’t paying attention,” Lt. Mark Duke sad.

Gee, you think? It was hardly going out on a limb to make that conclusion! With that difficult case under his belt, I hear Lt Duke is next headed to assist OJ with locating “The Real Killer!”

It’s been a while since I browsed through the photos at the US Navy’s Safety Center. Right after I was there the last time I realized that I should have let you come up with the captions… So after a new visit to the site for some fresh fodder, I bring you the first photo of my caption contest, click on the photo for a larger version:

Now, my prize budget is quite small… As in non-existant. The prize is envy… As in the winner of the caption contest will be envied by those who couldn’t come up with as amusing a caption as the winner.

Rules: Since this is my site, I’m the judge, and my decision is final. However, bribes will be accepted, just make sure they’re good ones!

Ok, so not really road rage, but there are parts of my commute that really aggravate me.

 Now, those of you with really long and arduous commutes probably have no sympathy for me.  Heck until we moved out here, I probably wouldn’t have any sympathy for the annoyances of my commute.  I mean how bad could it be, 20 to 25 minutes along a mostly 2 lane (one in either direction) road.  Plus there’s really no traffic to speak of pretty much ever.  So you wonder, how could I get upset with a cake commute like that.

Well as we head out of town along the road through the farms, the speed limit gets progressively faster.  It starts at 25, moves to 30, then 35, 40, 45, and then you reach a sign that says “End 45MPH Zone.”  That’s it.  Nothing else.  Coming home we have the exact opposite, depending on where you join the road, there’s no posted speed limit until you hit the 45MPH zone and then it decreases incrementally down to 25MPH as you approach town.

  Now, it is posted throughout the county, and may even be a state law, that the speed limit is 55MPH on all roads unless otherwise posted.  That means that when you encounter the “End 45 MPH Zone” sign you should speed up to 55MPH (maybe 60 shhh…). 

Unfortunately either many drivers just get easily spooked by the two lane road they’re driving, don’t understand the law or whatever, but instead insist on driving this road at 10MPH or more BELOW the speed limit!  It would be fine if you could pass these people, however on this particular 7 mile stretch of road, there’s only 3 passing zones and traffic is often too heavy to safely pass.  It’s quite frustrating to be stuck in a line of 10 cars behind some goober in a beat up Aerostar who insists on driving 30 in a 55 zone….

One of my favorites though will be the folks who do 50 all the way into town…  Driving slower than the speed limit as we reach town, and then speeding anywhere from 5 to 20 miles ABOVE the speed limit as we go through town…

I know, lame compared to folks who spend 45 minutes in bumper to bumper traffic on a freeway every day…

Dear Prospective Comment Spammer,
If you take a few seconds to peek around this site (or the Cruise Planners site, or even the wife’s site) you’ll notice that while I don’t have many comments, I also don’t have a single piece of comment spam. Save yourself the trouble and go somewhere else because you’re crap isn’t welcome here…

For the sleaze who’s starting your spam with “Please don’t delete I need money bad” I’m still not going to let your garbage through. Unless you plan on giving me 98% of the money you make from your comment spamming efforts, I don’t want to know from you. I need money too, but why should I let you use MY site to make money for you?

Oh, and while I like people visiting this site, not everyone is welcome. As other spammers have discovered, I’m not afraid to block your access to my site.

Consider yourself warned…

So after being shown with lots of small words and big pictures that the $10,000 car with the 20% interest rate that would cost MORE a month than the car he just had repossesed was a monumentally bad idea. PLUS being provided with a list of several other options that made significantly more financial sense… Mr. Dumber Than a Box of Rocks goes out and gets the $10,000 car!!!!

I’m done with this moron., there’s a point where there’s just nothing more you can do. Thankfully I should be rid of him in about 36 hours, at which point people who get paid much more than me can decide just what to do with this bozo…

In the meantime I’ve decided to launch a campaign that will insure that all of the bathrooms on campus are spotless and adhere to the highest sanitary and cleanliness standards. You know, I’ve tried, but I just can’t think of anybody who could possibly be a better candidate to spearhead this program than Mr. Dumber Than a Box of Rocks. Now this cleanliness and sanitation initiative my only last for the next 36 hours…. but I’m ok with that.

So I’ve got a problem child who works for me. He’s been working for me for the last two months, and hopefully will be gone within the next two weeks. As the wife knows, he’s been a constant source of frustation for me since he started working for me.

He’s given us some doozies in the last two months, and some day many years from now maybe I’ll write about them… But today… today has just pushed me. I REALLY want to pull him into my office, close the door, and scream at him until his hair turns white, but well that would be unprofessional. So instead I’ll vent about it here on the net, because that’s just SO much more professional!

A little background on problem child, last week his car was repossessed and he lives a good 15 miles away from work. He claims that he had no warning what so ever, and that he just got up in the morning and the car was gone. Yeah ok, sure… He also tells me that he has been a month behind on his payments for the past 6 months or so, but that he had spoken to the bank and it was “ok”. Oh wait, it gets better…

He calls the bank to try and figure this out and is told that he was actually 3 payments behind, which he “guaranteed” wasn’t possible. I quickly told him that his “guarantee” wasn’t worth spit since the last time he guaranteed something to me he was so incredibly wrong it was mind boggling. It turns out that he was in fact 3 payments late because “I guess my wife missed two payments and didn’t tell me.” Gee, you think! He actually managed to tell me this with a straight face too!

Turns out to get the car back the bank wants $12,000, since he gets about $1,200 a month and lives paycheck to paycheck, he’s obviously not going to come up with $12,000 and he tells the bank to keep the car…

Ok, so now the genius goes car shopping. He’s got a wife and two kids, a 15 mile commute, no car, and mass transit doesn’t operate where he needs to go, so he needs some kind of transportation… The in-laws are offering them a $2k loan, so at least he has that going for him. Supposedly the only car he can find will cost him over $10,000 and the dealer wants to charge him 20% interest on a 3 year loan! As bad as that is, there’s more… The payments on the car he had repossessed were $240 a month, the loan on this car will cost him….

wait for it….

$350 A MONTH!!!! AND THE IDIOT THINKS THIS IS A GOOD IDEA!!!! HELLO!!!!! You couldn’t pay the loan on your last car so your going to get another car and pay EVEN MORE MONEY FOR IT!!!

Not only that, but the fool actually tells us that he can’t find any other car. 10 minutes on Craigs List and we found 7 cars in the area that probably run well for UNDER $1,000. Even worse, we had to show him the math proving to him that THIS was a better deal than the one we was about to enter in to!!!!

URRRRGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!

I’ve got to say that I’m quite frustrated by the drunken sloth who makes the selections for “featured podcasts” over on iTunes.

We’ve now had the podcast going on the Cruise Planners site for several months, there’ve been some hicups with getting the right feed and the right album art into iTunes, but all of those problems have been fixed for at least two months. We regularly update the podcast, publishing a new show at least once a week, although we normally put up two shows.

So then why is it that we can’t get the show featured in our category on iTunes? The other podcast that comes up when you do a search on “The Mail Buoy” is featured, this dispite the fact that the show is not updated very often at all, the last show was on Dec 9, which was the first update since September. On average they do a show once every month or two, but they’re a featured podcast.

Better yet, of the 90 featured podcasts in the Places & Travel category, 14 of the featured podcasts are Disney related.

Just like Google’s search algorithm, the method iTunes supposedly uses to select featured podcasts is “secret” however unlike Google’s search algorithm which works quite well, iTunes’ feature selection sucks…

So the other day, I was walking through one of my classrooms where we typically have a TV on.  The TV was tuned to CNN, where a reporter in Colorado was breathlessly reporting on an approaching snow storm…  At the bottom of the screen, the banner Developing Story was plastered along with the headline “Winter Storm Strikes Rockies.”

Snow?  In Colorado at the end of November?  No way!  Shouldn’t it be 85 degrees and sunny in Colorado this time of year?  Sheesh!  It’s the freakin’ Rocky Mountains, it snows in the Rockies!  Why is a snow storm in Colorado news?!?!?  Now, if we were talking about snow in Florida that would be a different story, but Colorado?  Come on!

Can I just say that I really hate it when the bozos who work the drive through interrupt me when I’m trying to place my order…

Really, I know what I want when I place my order. If I wanted cheese with that I would have told you to put cheese on it, and since there are other things I want you to do to my burger (after you drop it on the floor and spit on it) I would appreciate it if you let me give you all the details before you tried to lump in all the add ons.

I understand that part of your job is to hustle folks through the system, but trust me Ms Accented Garbled Speaker if you shut up for 15 seconds you’ll get all the pertinent details of my order and won’t have to waste your time and mine asking stupid questions… Even better, if you actually paid attention to what I told you as I placed my order you would hear me tell you I wanted a medium coke. Which means you wouldn’t have to ask me what kind of drink I want even though I already told you!

Then again, there’s probably a very good reason why you’re 35 years old and working the drive through at the local Burger Hut.