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.

I’m fascinated by all of this Tom Cruise scrutiny lately.  One of the things that we’ve discovered about him is that he’s something called an “Operating Thetan 7″.  It’s like you have to have 100,000 experience points to attain that level, or something.  You get +10 to score with a Hollywood hottie and you get $20,000,000 gold pieces per film otherwise it’s not worth your time to collect the loot.

Unfortunately, I think with every level up you get -1 on Intelligence even though you gain +2 on charisma.  And such is how it is with Tom Cruise.  It’s all very strange.

Still, the buzz on MI:3 is pretty good.  Even Jeffrey Wells has given it the go-ahead sign.  So has Kevin Smith, though he also liked Star Wars – Episode III so take this with a grain of salt if you’re so inclined.  I count myself as a Kevin Smith fanboy, but his glowing review of SWEIII was just so disappointing.

Not that it matters much to me anyway since it’s unlikely I’ll catch this in the theaters. Since having kids I think I’ve seen all of a half dozen movies in the theaters and most of those have been due to Work Morale Events.  It’s just another in a long line of DVDs to rent from Netflix.

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.

“Rockin’ in the Free World” by Neil Young

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. 

What do these two fictional characters have in common?  A cuddly, strangely anthropomorphized sidekick (e.g. Chloe O’Brian and Boots respectively)?  Or could it be an amazing ability to traverse vast amounts of distance in what seems to be an amazingly short amount of time?

Nah, it’s neither of those (though readers who guessed either should give themselves a pat on the back and perhaps reassess their T.V. watching habits).  No, it’s not those two things.  It’s their incredible bags! Those bags are what every man or woman dreams of carting around with them.  They contain just about anything you need in just about any situation you could think of.  Need to fly over a canyon?  Backpack has a hang-glider for you!  Need to diffuse a thermonuclear device? Jack’s bag has just the trick!  And there’s next to no bulk to these magical napsacks, it’s as if you weren’t carting around literally tons of equipment!

I want a bag like that.  Do you think they sell them at REI?

Next up:  Diego’s little computerized animal encyclopedia versus Jack’s totally rockin’ PDA.

The Wife has been jonesin’ for a new laptop lately. I selfishly bought her a Dell Inspiron 5150 a couple of years ago, mostly because it sports a whoppin’ 3.2 GHz Intel CPU. Unfortunately, it’s also a boat anchor and this is what she mostly hates about it. It’d be one thing if the GPU were upgradeable, but I don’t believe it is so I’m stuck with some crappy ATI video card that won’t do games very well, which is about the only thing that would make the phat CPU worthwhile. Stupid buy on my part.
So I’m looking for a replacement laptop in the Ultraportable category (not even gonna touch the UMPC here). The Sony TX series is priced WAY out of control. The Alienware Sentia series looks interesting, but starts to get pricey when you add in the options, and the Dell M710 comes in at a good price point when you find it on sale, but is very uninspiring in just about every other category.

Except now you can get Apple hardware and dualboot XP. How cool is that? Very tempting for the gadget fetishist in me to get the nice Apple hardware yet sacrifice none of the app interop. Plus for things like movies and photos we can get the user-friendly goodness that Apple leads in. It’s going to be hard not to consider this a viable replacement laptop option moving forward. I need to run the numbers now.