Category: Opinions

What I think about things

Confessions of a Waitress: I Hate Your Damn Kids

Yep, this pretty much says it all from the waitress’ (waiter’s) point of view.

As one of the patrons who has these little terrors all around no matter what restaurant I end up in I side squarely with the author on this one. With much more money (or extended credit, I’m really not sure) than courtesy or common sense, folks are increasingly taking their kids with them to under the impression that it will “teach them social graces” or that they can continue to live life in exactly the same manner as before their children were on the scene.

If I want to avoid screaming sports fans (sometimes I might like it) I don’t go to sports bars, if I want to avoid naked women (actually this has never been a concern..) I don’t go to strip clubs, if I want to avoid cigar smoke, I don’t go to humidors. But there is NO PLACE that I can go to avoid someone inflicting their progeny on others. There doesn’t appear to be any price strata or any social environment that folks won’t bring them to.

C’mon parents! These kids have the attention span of a gadfly and the social graces of Godzilla. What makes you think that they can endure an hour-long meal that you feel that you’ve earned for yourseves? The parents are the cause, but the kids are the symptom. If you want a pleasant, classy meal out. Leave the kids behind. If you can’t, well… sorry, you really should’ve kept it in your pants…. your life has changed.

Overzealous Marketing is a Turn Off

PICT3615.JPGPictured at left is a picture of the SIX (count ’em – six!) solicitations to purchase Christmas greeting cards from AOPA’s Air Safety Foundation that I’ve received in the past couple of months. I like the ASF and, in fact, did purchase some (darned expensive!) cards last year from them. They do good work to promote education and safety for general aviation pilots. But their marketing group has run amuck! One solicitation is sufficient to remind me or at least entice me to purchase their wares. That’s all I need. Two – maybe one last month and another this month – I would find somewhat wasteful and in bad form. But this is just silly. They are ALL addressed to the same name and address (AOPA only has the single identification for me) so it’s not like an accidental duplication has occurred. While I was considering ordering the cards again (this week is when I order such things) I’m feeling peevish and may spitefully go elsewhere for my holiday cards.

On top of this I find it insulting that last month I began receiving reminders for my annual membership which will be due at the end of FEBRUARY 2008 (that’s 5 months advance soliciting if you’re counting).

Lest I single out only AOPA, last year NRA started pestering me for my next renewal – get this – one month after I had just renewed.

I no longer subscribe to any physical magazines beyond those included in my various association memberships, but my wife does. And the common practice there is to no longer include expiry information on the address label and to start pestering you well in advance of the actual renewal time while providing you with absolutely no reference as to the actual expiry date. I find this practice distasteful and this was a strong motivator when it came time for me to consider whether or not to renew my own subscriptions. Michelle definitely likes the tangible reality of a physical magazine and so insists on continuing to receive these relics. This is the ONLY reason that I continue to patronize them.

I presume that these aggressive marketing tactics (FUD) work, but I prefer to be a client to be wooed rather than an adversary to be conquered in my relationship with organizations.

Send me ONE notice ONE month before my membership / subscription is about to expire. Give me all the information I need on that reminder – The date of expiry of the current membership or subscription and the date I should renew by in order to prevent a gap in service. Send me ONE reminder after my membership or subscription has lapsed in case something was lost in the mail or in my filing system. After that please go away. You will only incite my ire by sending me solicitation after solicitation. I’ve made up my mind and your pestering will not change it.

Also, don’t screw me over on the price – my loyalty should not be an excuse for you to take advantage of me. One of Mich’s magazine subscriptions (Oh hell, it’s “Yoga Journal”) offered me a renewal rate of only $19 for 8 issues (one year). However heading over to their web site and signing up anew nets me 10 issues plus 2 “gifts” (pdfs that I’d picked up the last time I renewed) for $16. How am I supposed to trust them after that? It’s only a couple of bucks but nobody likes to be taken. I think these industries need to learn what “Starbucks” and many others are learning. It’s all about the customer experience. Your customer needs to feels like they’re being taken care of (and at $5 for a cup of coffee that better be *some* experience). It is no longer merely about the product, rather the experience surrounding its acquisition is now on par with value of the item itself.

Product Recalls – Why not use what’s already in place?

RecallI was listening to Clark Howard recently and he was citing some staggering statistics regarding product recalls and the terribly low response rates. One of the items, some toy purchased through Target, had sold about 200,000 units yet the response rate for recalls was only 700 HUNDRED (!) returns.

This is pretty dismal, especially in circumstances where safety and health are at issue. Most people don’t spend their free time scouring product web sites or looking for product mentions on the evening news, assuming they even watch the news… or are in the room for the one, tiny mention of a recall that might come on… assuming that the station that was on even carried such stories… etc, etc.

I was then thinking about how our credit card providers feel perfectly comfortable sharing our personal information with “interested third parties”. I would suggest that the VAST majority of folks purchase items these days with either credit / debit cards or checks (nothing I can do for those cash purchases). The retail outlets that have been informed about product recalls are pulling merchandise off of their shelves. They also keep computerized inventories of their products. They further have access to when items where purchased as well as what credit card or (now with those instant checks) what checking account number was used in the purchase of those goods.

What we now need is a system (it should be a very simple system) whereby the retailers automagically notify the financial institutions regarding the recalls. All of the pieces are there. Now the consumer, rather than (more likely in addition to) the inane notices on their credit or banking statements, they can also have notifications of any relevant recalls.

This is even easier for online users as they usually must provide an email address or they have some kind of financial-institution-associated mailbox that can notify them the next time they log onto their account.

Admittedly there is plenty of opportunity for mischief. As you know I don’t have the greatest trust in our financial institutions to not abuse such a ripe potential “cross marketing” vehicle. But perhaps we can find a way to minimize their abuse and this can help to get the word out.

James Randi explains homeopathy

Wow! Pretty succinct… well as succinct as 14 1/2 minutes can be. But a very good description of Homeopathy nonetheless.

When I was younger I explored a lot of alternative practices and was very seriously considering entering the field as well. Fortunately, my grades in university in computer science were so much better than my grades in my pre-med subjects that they convinced me that my forte really lay in programming and analytical pursuits.

There is so much to know in this world that you often have to pick your authorities for the things you don’t have the time or inclination to pursue yourself. You end up trusting folks’ word and believe that they know what they are talking about. Of course, implicit in this is the assumption that they have either done the research themselves, reviewed the research first-hand or that their choice of a trusted authority has a good handle on the subject.
Homeopathy, was something that I was never able to reconcile with reality. The testing modality assumed “energies” that could not be measured and treatments that relied on “vibrations” or “energies” that could not be detected or explained.

The premise of “like cures like” was a wild stab in the dark from a pre-science era and was pretty cool reasoning for its time. But with the advent of the scientific method, understanding that perhaps 60% of anything you’d see a doctor about will fix itself ultimately anyway, and knowledge that the placebo effect is quite a powerful one, it seems clear that folks need to weigh the efficacy of such a questionable and unproven modality. Especially one that can be so expensive.



I *do* rather wish Mr. Randi had taken a few moments to explain Avagadro’s number a bit more carefully. Basically, Avagadro’s number expresses how many molecules would be contained in a quantity of a substance whose mass in grams is equal to it’s formula weight (thanks Wikipedia!). i.e. a mole of Carbon-12 atoms would be 12 grams. So his argument for the odds of finding even a single molecule in the quantity represented is modestly tainted

De-cluttering our home and our lives

Garage SaleWe’ve been a bit busy for the past little while. In the post renovation euphoria, we realized that we really like the quasi-minimalism that we had in our newly re-invented rooms. We can find what we’re looking for and we like the feeling of lightness that comes from just knowing that there is not a mountain of *stuff* either behind the closet doors or filling up the drawers in the desk/cabinet/you name it.

Add to that Mich has been watching various home improvement shows and eventually zoomed in on “Clean Sweep” and has even ventured so far as to buy the “Clean Sweep” book (It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff) and started taking it’s philosophies to heart.

So we’ve been working our way through the house re-evaluating EVERYTHING. We’ve been discarding old papers that at one time we thought were so important – who really cares about those pay stubs from 15 years ago? And re-evaluated our “time capsules”, which are boxes of items that we didn’t want to get rid of for one reason or another and thought that they’d be interesting to us many years in the future. We went down from 4 time capsule boxes to 1. It *was* a little interesting going through some of the items we thought were so precious 15 or 20 years ago, but it was much more cathartic evaluating them and either selling, giving away or discarding them.

On the whole, digital pictures and smaller mementos to trigger memories of good times past are sufficient for our purposes.

Our neighborhood has a couple of garage sales a year – where the homeowners association does some advertisement and folks know to come through ’cause there will be a lot of sales concentrated in the area. So we participated in the one that was held last week and divested ourselves of a BUNCH of stuff and cleared a modest profit as well 🙂

Combining this de-cluttering with the philosophies embodied in our focus on “Getting Things Done“, we’re finding ourselves much clearer in our expectations for our free time and our lives and goals in general.

We picked up DVD storage pages, the kind that fit into a 3-ring binder, and we’ll be collapsing our DVD collection down from a couple of shelf-fulls to a handy binder size. This AFTER culling the collection for the garage sale.

Today we’ll finish assembling the shelves we picked up yesterday and complete organizing the back room we’ve designated as our “storage room”. We have no basement and there are some things that you simply do not want to store in a shed or the garage (Christmas items, party supplies) and so we’ve designated a room in the house that will host such items. But only after a THOROUGH vetting – do we really want/need to keep these things?

It takes a LOT of energy and effort to work through this kind of project, the renovation was a good shaking-up / taking off point for us. Hopefully the momentum from this effort can roll through the rest of our life as the satisfaction of finding what you need when you need it as well as being pleased with how your place looks is almost beyond description.

Yes!! It’s about time!! Real Journalism trying desperately to cut through the crap!

I don’t watch TV newscasts anymore. But if more people sided with Mika Brzezinski, especially so-called journalists fronting the major networks, maybe we could have less Paris Hilton, Anna Nicole and other drivel and focus on topics that actually *do* affect us. Such as our continuing rape at the gas pumps, the travesty of the Patriot Act and whatever legislation your Municipal, State or Federal representatives are dreaming up today.

Go MIKA!

Electric Guitars and Lunch do NOT mix

I don’t really understand what it is with restaurants lately. Maybe they are trying to stand out from the crowd, maybe the manager is away and whoever’s left is trying to assert themselves, I can’t really say. But I eat my lunch at pretty modest to upper-modest restaurants.

Don’t get me wrong, I like a lot of music with guitar in it. I’m a closet Prince fan, I like Pink Floyd and my exercise playlist has some very lively music in it. But when I’m out at lunch at a restaurant like Applebee’s I just don’t think that the music should be noticeable to me.

My definition of “Noise” is sound that stands out from the environment. That can be anything from the person who doesn’t understand how to use their cell phone (hint, let the phone pick up your voice and transmit it, you don’t have to get it to the listener all by yourself) to the kid crying from boredom next to me at a $40 a meal restaurant. It’s just not part of the expected ambiance.

When I go out for lunch I usually want to talk to the person I’m with and maybe I want to wiggle my toes to the beat of some pleasant music. What I DON’T want to do is have to wait for breaks in between guitar solos to try to ask how my companion(s) like their meal.

Let’s save the hard core stuff for uber-trendy restaurants that cater to the 20 somethings or the Emo crowd. If I want to stare at my companions with no hope of conversing, I’ll go to a club in Buckhead fully anticipating and expecting that this will be the environment that I will enjoy.

But, and I think I speak for most folks in my demographic (30-50’s, middle class, 9-5 job) that, if I never hear another guitar solo at lunch, it will be far too soon. 😉

Bottled water has its uses

I recently saw an episode of “Bullshit!” where they addressed the issue of bottled water. I have no real issues with tap water except that it occasionally picks up an odd taste the day after a rainstorm. And my refrigerator water filter eliminates that quite handily. I see no value and a rather an incredible expense in purchasing bottled water.

I am not a conspiracy theorist and can not bring myself to believe that all of the municipalities throughout North America are quietly colluding to poison or otherwise harm us through suppression of testing results on our drinking water.

That said, I do buy bottled water now and then. I find it really handy to have a disposable container that I can use for exercise or at work until I feel that it’s probably no longer really sanitary and then I can chuck it and start using a new one.

I think folks’ perception of what is sanitary vary widely and many would disagree with my take on it. But for me, I typically reuse such bottles for about 1-3 months before I feel the need to swap them out.

On my desk at work they are much better than open containers for keeping dust out of my water as it can sit there for days between sips. When I exercise the handy nozzle keeps it from sloshing water all over as I’m trying to take a swig while running or cycling (or even staggering around after X reps of free weights).

In the past I used sports bottles and those would get REALLY grimy before I’d do anything about them – but they are a nuisance to wash and I’m pretty sure that they are largely impossible to sterilize without either melting them or imparting the sterilizing agent’s taste to them. The bottled water is actually MUCH cheaper than buying new sports bottles, much more flexible so they’re easier to squeeze water into your mouth with, and you don’t feel bad discarding them after you’ve reused them 30, 60 or 100 times over.

My current exercise water bottle I started using when we had relatives over here in the middle of April. I exercise 3 out of 4 days and use that bottle every time. Maybe in another month I’ll feel the need to replace it.