I have a “thing” against cards.  You know, the kind you send people for various reasons like birthday cards, Christmas (holiday?) cards, thank you cards, get well soon cards, happy graduation cards, Valentine’s cards, etc.  Most people get a card, glance at it, determine whether or not the pre-printed text was either witty or touching enough, determine whether or not the personalized text was witty or touching enough, then throw the card away.  Some save it for a few days, then throw it away.  Most who don’t throw it away within a few days, throw it away when cleaning out junk.

Cards are a preposterous waste of natural resources, money, and manpower.  It is on the order of driving an SUV, that’s how wasteful it is, in my opinion.  How many tons of trees are cut down, chemically processed, manufactured with all kinds of dyes and other crap, and then sold and immediately thrown away every year?  How many stamps are wasted sending cards most people will FORGET about in less than a week?  How much crap does a mailperson have to schlep around, especially in February, May, June, and December?  When you open a present, do you really care about the card?  The card opening and reading is usually the most perfunctory thing about the entire process.  It’s some obligatory nonsense that we all pay lip service to because it’s somehow “polite”.

Cards must go.  Hallmark must be forced to innovate with more electronically savvy products.  We must save the trees!  Save the backs of our mailpersons!  Save the gas that schleps the useless cards around!  Save millions of children from the unbearable task of reading a card they could give a rat’s ass about because the PRESENT is BEGGING to be opened!

Cards must go!  Cards must go!  Cards must go!

A friend of mine has a food fetish and has channeled some of that passion for food into his food blog. Recently, I’ve had a little debate with him about one of his assertions. The specific post can be found here. If you read the comments, I’m “relativistboy”.

It has me thinking more globally about quality in America, though. It’s not just food where the standards of acceptability are unacceptably low.  It’s practically everywhere from home furnishings, automobiles, consumer electronics, et al.  And I’m not going to even get started on civil services, public officials, public works, etc.
Why is the bar set so low? Why does the average American buy a poofy sofa velour from Levitz while supposedly the typical Dane buys sectionals from places like this?  Is it purely cost?  Or is it convenience?

VW employees are going to have to start giving up some quality of life time.  I’m crying them a river as we speak.  Hopefully no one will drive into it.

The advent of the in-car GPS navigation system has forever changed the way people find places they’ve never been to before (and, if you’re like some people, re-find places you’ve been to on several occasions).  But, as great as they are, you really need to continue to pay attention since, you know, the car still doesn’t drive itself.

Which is why I find this story really very peculiar.  What do you suppose was going through their minds?  “Oh dear, mum, the motocar is telling me to head into the river, but I see that the bridge is, in fact, not in working order. What to do? What to do? Well, it’s a little computer so surely it must be correct.  We’ll see how it goes, guvnah.  Tally ho!”  Ummm, NO!  The car is – IN FACT – not intended to ford the river by itself.  Not even the Range Rover, friend.  Not even the Range Rover.

5. “I’m rubber and you’re glue”
4. “I know you are but what am I?”
3. “That’s not the rule”
2. “I’m tellin’ on you”

And the #1 phrase that is bearable only coming from a kid….

“I’m the decider”

Addendum:  Wordpress doesn’t seem to be able to count down even if I do the counting.  Lame.

An electrical part on our refrigerator broke sometime last Sunday evening.  We noticed last night that the freezer seemed a little warm and assumed that the door must’ve been left slightly ajar during the day.  When the stuff in the freezer seemed even more melted this morning, we knew we had a problem.

So I called the refrigerator repairman from Sears (since that’s where we got our fridge).  They said we were scheduled for an appointment somewhere during the hours of 8am to Noon.  Super.  It, naturally, wasn’t until 2:45pm that someone actually showed up.  Nice.

The repairman replaced the part and the fridge seemed to work fine after that.  Not a warranty replacement, so it was a “bargain” to get out with just a $275 charge.  The only problem is that the stuff in the freezer was so thawed that it could not be refrozen.  It’s actually nice to chuck out a bunch of stuff that was just taking up space in the freezer.  I highly recommend just such a purge to everyone, regardless of the working order of your freezer.  Probably be useful once a year.

The only bummer is that there was about a month’s worth of frozen breast milk in there for little Zoe.  All that had to go.  Now Zoe is at risk for not getting a full year’s worth of breast milk exclusively.  We’re not very happy about that, but the lactation consultants were quite clear about tossing the milk. 

Y’know, I think I like mucking around with the blog infrastructure more than actually writing the blog.

One of the things I’m going to be messing around with shortly is adding InfoCard support to my blog.  I’ve asked Kim Cameron for his WordPress InfoCard code and I can go and get my cert to get it up and running.  Pretty exciting!  Now all 2 of you who send in comments may need to sign up for an InfoCard!  Spam be gone!

I’m also trying to figure out how to get dynamic traffic info on this thing.  I’m probably 80% there.  Whee!

Eggs that are pan-fried somehow (either stirred, scrambled, or something similar) and a touch of soy sauce.

I have been pretty bad at blogging lately. It’s not even that I didn’t have ideas, I did (e.g. “12th man b.s./seattle bandwagon jumping”, more Oprah bashing (it’s even a draft waiting for publish), hardware reviews (e.g. PocketDock, HeadRoom Micro headphone amp), and other miscellany). But I just don’t feel motivated to type since I do way too much of that at work. Oh well, except for the Super Bowl stuff, none of this is especially time-dependent.

James Frey emailed me with some suggestions for my “about” page. Let me know what you think about his suggestions:

About

I was born just as the mortar given by Josef Stalin himself to Kim Il Sung exploded next to my mother. The mortar took her life but fortunately I was saved. I was found by a platoon of GI’s and they took me in as their own for a few weeks as they fought on the front lines of the Korean War. I remember them dropping me off at an army hospital near the front as they rotated off the front line. I was given to a couple of doctors to raise. I remember that these doctors had a distillery in their tent. They had a cross-dressing friend, but none of them felt it was all that strange. Of course, I was too young to remember all this, but this is what I suspect to be true since I have video tapes documenting all of this from my younger days (“video tape” being the technology of the times, I suspect).

After the war, I lived on the streets artfully dodging my way through the streets of London. Or maybe it was Paris. I’m not quite clear on that now, but it’s a tale, I’m sure, that is equally valid in either of the two cities. But I’m quite sure that during my stay in London (having been sent there by my aunt’s only sister) at my eccentric uncle’s flat, I discovered a very curious wardrobe that appeared to be a gateway to a magical land.

Having had all sorts of marvelous adventures during my youth, it was time for an education. As I noted before, my parents had perished and I was living with a most unfortunate uncle who, after discovering that I was mucking about in the back of his wardrobe, locked me in the attic which doubled as my bedroom. Luckily for me, one evening a great owl flew in and dropped off my acceptance letter to school! Hoorah! I was picked up by a flying car and sent off to gather myself an education. Let it be noted that I paid for this schooling with an athletic scholarship – I’ve got good hands.

Once educated, it was time for me to get into the “real world”, as they say. You know how it is when you’re striking out on your own. Well, I had to find a place and ended up in this house with 6 roomates. Oddly, none of them knew each other and – might I add – they were all asses. So here we are, seven strangers living in a house. If I had more time I could tell you what happens when 7 roomates stopping being polite and get REAL nasty with each other. If only I had it on tape!

After 16 long years of that – really, it went on about 13 years too long – I decided it was time to do something else. At this stage of my life I felt that I really had to do something with myself; get a career; have a family. But, alas, that was not to be. As I was crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a luxury liner, I met the woman of my dreams. After living in the shared house for 16 years doing nothing, I didn’t really have any money – or skills, really – and so all I could afford was a room in steerage. And I only got that on a lucky hand of Texas Hold ‘em. Well, I got on this boat and was minding my own business until I saw her – the woman I would one day make my wife. She was, naturally, up in First Class (ain’t it always the way, brother), but I was clever and just a skosh charming and soon we were macking it up in the back seat of a car (long story)! Unfortunately, the ship we were on had the bad luck of hitting an iceberg, and I died.