What I think about things
I had a friend visit a while back who railed on against Pachelbel’s Canon whenever it aired, he really disliked it.
After seeing this, I now know why. You know who you are.
Personally it’s still one of my favorite classical pieces, but to each his own…
Don’t forget to go to the “About Marc” link on the right to find my wishlists and buy me lots of great stuff for Christmas!
I’ve decided to embrace the retail delight that is Christmas and not let all those sour old religious traditions interfere with the true meaning of the season: Retail Sales
There is always Easter if you want a Religious holiday. Christmas is just too much fun for all these controversies and politically correct issues.Â
There is only one type of gift certificate/card/coupon that I must confess to really liking. That’s an Amazon.com gift certificate. You can apply it against your account, see the balance and then use it for any purchase from Amazon or any of their affiliates. For me, this is a good thing because I’m always buying stuff from Amazon.
Otherwise, I cannot think of a more terrible idea than taking good, honest money and exchanging it for something that is more limited. Gift certificates are typically good in only one brand of store, can expire, are often forgotten about and frequently obligate the user to spend their own money in an effort to use the complete value of the certificate. Store brand gift cards are in the same boat.
The newer “Visa” gift cards (I presume MasterCard, AMEX and the rest have similar deals) are supposedly as versatile as a regular Visa card but they aren’t. I have a $60 Visa gift card that I received as part of a promotion for switching my natural gas provider.
My first attempt to use it was in a gas pump. That failed miserably since it’s not a real Visa card and there isn’t any PIN associated with it to allow you to use it like a debit card.
I then was able to successfully use it to purchase lunch one day. So I stuck with restaurants as they seem to know how to cajole the cash out of them.
Keeping my receipts so that I’d know how much was left on the card I went for lunch one day and tried to use the remaining balance on the card and found it was declined (not a great hardship as I was already going to have to pay for about 1/2 the meal cash anyway). The waiter was pretty good about it, he tried several different amounts on my behalf knowing that I was just trying to drain the card but to no avail.
Just now I checked the card balance and last 5 transactions and find there’s a charge on the card that brings the balance down to about 87 cents. I can tell you that I’m not about to bother trying to use the card to claim 87 cents! I’m also a little dismayed that I can’t pinpoint that extra charge. It was only for $8.40 and I have some other receipts that I want to go through, but the novelty of the card is such that I’m pretty sure I remember every time I used it (3 times)…
Anyway, that’s where I’m back to my Amazon gift certificate or just cash (giving or receiving). As I think about it, I suppose for other folks who shop at a particular store a lot maybe it’s like Amazon is for me. They’ll use the value of the card in a couple of weeks and be the happier for it.
But I suggest that, for the vast majority of cards and certificates, they will be lost, forgotten, expired or otherwise unusable benefiting only the retailer and not your intended gift recipient.
Clark Howard was also warning that some of the gift card suppliers actually charge you to let you know your remaining card balance.
I just posted a review of the iLuv that I picked up from Amazon back in September.
In case you’re interested you can find it here.
You’ll see the review as from “Marc B”.
Now this is an idea I can get behind. This school in Burleson, Texas is actually teaching both the faculty and students to take action in a variety of situations.
My favorite, if a gunman comes into the room, rather than cower and wait for them to decide your fate, they are being trained to throw anything they can get their hands on at the gunman and to rush him.
There is some controversy about this approach, but I’ll leave that to the proponents of left and right ideals to argue. For myself I believe that the folks in the situation are best off taking control away from the bad guy. And if they are all encouraged that this is the best approach I believe the chance for a successful outcome is much greater than if one or two people try to go it alone.
I have to wonder what the long term impact is on a hostage victim after having acquiesced to a gunman’s demands and having had to just sit there and wait for their fate to be decided for them. Some may argue that “at least they’re alive”, but that is just for the lucky ones who weren’t butchered. Both in Columbine and in plenty of other incidents, many of those who handed over their fates to obviously hostile people paid for that acquiescence dearly.
I think everybody who travels has their own story about the arbitrary and laughable measures implemented by the TSA as it tries to show that it’s “doing something” to keep us all safe. Here is a Boing Boing article that purports to show how completely implausible the “liquid explosive threat” really is.
The more we de-emphasize science in schools and ignore scientific achievements in our society, the more we’re going to get policies and decisions based on fear, superstition, pseudo-science and myth. It’s the twenty-first century, surely we can shuck some of our most primitive instincts and stop cowering in the dark, fearful of being smitten by magic means.
We have a congress filled with lawyers, Political Science and History Majors (all of which are necessary to some degree) but virtually no science majors, it’s no wonder they can be swayed toward creating hysterical legislation.
A little fun and a lot of thinking should go into consideration of “The Flying Spaghetti Monster” alternative theory of creationism.
Wikipedia’s explanation is here.
When folks start taking things a little too seriously, a parody is usually good for gaining a little perspective on things. Religion is no different. While obviously tongue-in-cheek it is just as difficult to “prove” that The Flying Spaghetti Monster does not exist as it is to disprove the existence of any other diety – i.e. impossible.
You may seek to dismiss it out of hand but remember, other religions were viewed as upstarts and nutty when they were first conceived. Time, more than anything else, is what gives them credibility…
Who knows what the future holds for the pastafarians. Some day we may all be sitting around saying grace ending with “RAmen”.
Here is a collection of quotes from various U.S. representatives on firearm ownership.
A couple of days ago I contacted Vonage due to an inoperative router. I was 50/50 on whether I’d continue using the service or not, having in the past waded through the mire that is their Indian tech support folks and their written-in-stone scripts I was ready to just cancel my account if there was going to be a lot of hassle.
Realizing this, they offered to just send me a replacement router and I agreed. Problem solved. Or so I thought…
Last night, I got home from work a little late and saw something large on my front porch. I was expecting Vonage’s router and possibly a DVD from Amazon so I took a peek and this is what I saw:
Yep, 28 routers were waiting for me. Here’s another shot:
All of them were addressed to me.
I opened one of the boxes up and found there were two welcome packages, one inside and one outside the Motorola VT2442 box that was within the Orange DHL / Vonage branded shipping box. I suppose that means I received 56 of those CDs.
This morning, for fun, I decided to photograph the routers and make an animated GIF of them. While I was in the middle of this, I heard a truck on my driveway. You guessed it. They delivered another Vonage router for a total of 29!
I’m not sure if I have any more routers en route. I checked the DHL shipping notification that Vonage initially sent to me and it only indicates shipment of a single router and that it was delivered to me this morning. I suppose that’s the one I’m supposed to use as the one I randomly chose to open and set up is associated with a number that is completely unknown to me (yep, it works just fine). Good thing I’m honest.
For your entertainment and amusement I present my animated GIF below (Click it to see a larger moving image):
I’ll be contacting Vonage later today to see what needs to be done. Ironically, the Vonage CSR I originally dealt with only hesitently asked if I’d be willing to return my original non-functioning router (I was). There was supposed to be packaging for me to do so included, but so far that is not the case.
I just took a closer look at the packing sheet from inside the shipping box I opened last night and there I see the person to whom the router was originally destined. That one was headed for a fellow in Wichita Falls, Texas.
I just opened the one I received this morning hoping that it really was mine but it’s supposed to go to a guy in Terre Haute, Indiana.
This could be a long search. I’m not sure I want to open all of these boxes. Mind you, from the tape on some of them (including the one I received today) some of them have already been opened before. I’m wondering if they went to the wrong locations originally too..
When I saw this posted in boingboing I knew that my future would hold something like this.
I have no idea if the production hybrids of the next 5 or so years will be anywhere near as slick as this mini-cooper but everything about it appeals to me, no mechanical brakes (just torque up those wheel integrated electric motors to maximum), phenomenal gas mileage and a stylish bent.
Here is a link to the actual treehugger article if you have problems with the boingboing link above.
