Tuesday, November 28, 2006

The Land That WiFi Forgot

Sorry I haven’t posted much, guess I haven’t been in the mood. The nice weather kept me away for the weekend, and now that a horrible cold front is moving in, I’ve been plagued with the most awful sinus headaches. Seems Indy isn’t the only one affected by barometric pressure. In fact, I was watching some of my previously recorded “Shark Week” episodes and saw a segment where they tagged a bunch of baby sharks and monitored them. Every day they would frequent certain feeding grounds until they all disappeared at once. Turns out that was right before a huge storm hit the coast. They concluded the sharks were responding to barometric pressure cues that told them to seek deeper waters for safety. So, see, I’m not hallucinating. Now if I could just get the turtles to tell time or something, I might get on Stupid Pet Tricks.

Went to Evil-Mart to get my holiday cards ordered, and it was a mess. They had this nice kiosk that you were to load your CD into and then create your order using a touch screen. (The germaphobe in me just LOVES touch-screens. And those little stylus pens for credit cards at the self-swipe checkouts. Am I the only one that sees the whole ‘swipe it yourself’ phenomena as this huge CYA by the retail industry to never touch your stolen credit card? Sorry, never saw the card, so I never noticed the 300 lb. white male using Ming-La’s missing ID…I must applaud the folks in Las Vegas, however, they frequently asked to see photo ID and that was just great with me)

Anyhoo… I couldn’t get the screen to progress and called the teenage boy over. He was very nice and explained they had massive problems with this Fuji machine, but that Cheap-Mart did not have a contract with them so they refused to provide training to the employees on how to use the machine and if it didn’t work, well, heck, Cheap-Mart wasn’t going to pay for a service call, now were they?

I give the kid ten points for honesty and courtesy. We decided the best thing to do was just put my CD in an envelope and send it in like a canister of film. Let’s see what happens! If you don’t get a Christmas card, you’ll know why. Once I have them in the mail, I will try and post the picture here on my website as well.

I have some things to do, like update this template, but I do want to let you know about a Libertarian website you should check out, The Libertarian Guy (tm). I’ll be adding him to the blog roll soon! Really.

It’s just so frustrating with my dinosaur dial up connection. I can’t get DSL or WiFi in my area, and it’s getting very discouraging. Downright daunting to do absolutely anything on line, even shopping. Don’t get me started on how much YouTube I’m missing in life. Must get faster life!

This brings me to mention that I did my holiday shopping online, thank you very much, Amazon.com. Not having to trek to the post office: Priceless.

They have this neat new feature where you can enter friend’s birthdays and what you have sent them so as not to repeat any gifts. Very nice. I can store names and addresses and send gifts across the country with only a click. Very convenient.

However, they really do need to work on the whole ‘gift suggestion’ area. What part of “I bought you a ten-dollar CD” says my next suggestion should be to buy you a $400 mix master? Or $250 iPod? Sorry kids, I’m not that wealthy! You’ll have to wait for the second season of Arrested Development to go on clearance before you get another gift.

Oh, and my personal best laugh? The $879 SLR digital camera they suggested as a great gift for my mom. Gee, I want that for myself, but can’t afford it; so if you think I’m giving it to the woman who returned last year’s gift of a cell phone as “Too Complicated to Figure Out”, you’re nuts.

Happy Clicking and May You Understand the Technology of the New Year

No comments: