I received a lot of wonderful Christmas presents this year. I keep coming back and looking at these, however.
They are gloves that let you operate a touch capacitive screen. With the weather we are getting here in the Northeast, they are actually pretty handy (sorry, that was an awful and unintended pun ... but it's too late to go back at this point). If you are looking to get some on the cheap, +CNET posted this article a couple of weeks back.
It's not the concept of the gloves that brings me so much joy; it's the packaging.
I think more products should be designed with this feature in mind. These gloves work great!
My phone is a Nexus 4. The joys difficulties of purchasing this device have been described in a previous post. If you prefer to relive some of the highlights in all of its auditory and visual glory, feel free to numb your mind with this:
There is a reason I went through all of this hassel ... I was tired of paying a butt-load significant amount of money to Verizon Wireless each month.
My Verizon Bill
My wife and I shared a plan that included data for each of our smartphones. The total was about $174 a month, or over the course of a two-year contract, a grand total of about $4,160. I don't call that many people; why was I spending this much money? I'm a teacher; how could I afford to pay this much money?
Recently there has been a lot of buzz about getting away from mobile phone contracts and going the prepaid route. Even +TIME ran an article this past summer. I researched a number of options, from MetroPCS, to Straight Talk, to Ting. Every plan has its pros and cons, most notably being network coverage. If you are thinking about making this switch, look in to how good the networks are in the area(s) you will be using your smartphone.
I seldom go over a 100 minutes of voice in a month, and my wife does not use nearly as much data as I do, so being potentially throttled after 2GB would not be an issue for her.
So here's the math. At a total of $90 a month, we would be saving $84 a month from what we were paying Verizon. That comes out to us paying $2160 over the course of a typical two-year contract, or an overall savings of $2000!
Making the switch was an obvious choice once I put down my calculator. I still harbored some hesitations, however. First, we still had six months left on my contract. Canceling our service with Verizon would cost us an early termination fee on each of our two lines, totaling about $300. If you look at the $84/month potential savings pushed over the six months remaining on my contract, it is still a good deal.
My second, and bigger concern, was the need to pay full price for a smart phone when going into a prepaid plan. This is why AT&T and Verizon contracts look so enticing. They subsidize the cost of phones, so they only charge you $200 for an iPhone or Galaxy S3 that would otherwise cost $700+ off-contract. When expanded over the cost of two phones, they are offering a savings of over $1000 for premium devices. If you want a lesser smartphone, well they are almost giving those away. It is not until you consider how much AT&T and Verizon are overcharging for their actual service before you understand why they will sell you the phones for such an attractive price. They are making up for their costs (and much more) in the end.
I like my toys, so I knew I needed to buy high-end phones if I were to be happy with any changes. The thought of shelling out $1400+ so that we could make the switch to T-Mobile was not very appealing, even though my calculator assured me that we would be saving money in the end. When Google announced that they would be selling their Nexus 4 phone for $350 (16GB version), my sticker shock at buying two new phones went away. I could buy two Nexi (Nexuss? Nexuses? Nexusus? Nexum?) for the cost of one iPhone5 or S3. This sealed the deal. I won't argue that a Nexus is as good of a phone as either of those two devices, but I dare you to tell me that either an iPhone or an S3 are worth twice as much as a Nexus 4.
So I made the jump! Here is the money comparison of how much we would pay if we bought two new phones and stayed with Verizon, versus getting the two Nexus 4s and going with the T-Mobile prepaid plans.
Click to make larger.
So I'm happy with saving our household about $1400 over the course of the next two years. My next step is to get my wife off of the $60/month plan and switch her to the $30/month plan I use. As I mentioned before, 100 minutes of talk time is not a concern for me.
My T-Mobile Account Activity
I am almost half-way through my first month, and I have only used twenty nine twenty-nine minutes of talk, and that was during the holidays! My wife does spend more time on the phone, but is still very reasonable. Her use is usually between 150-300 minutes a month. T-Mobile charges ten cents per minute of overage. So if she goes on the 100 minute plan, she could get charged $20 of overage fees on her chattiest of months, or a savings of $10 per month of what she is now paying on her unlimited talk plan with T-Mobile. So next month, we will be cutting even more off our mobile phone bills.
My final piece of information comes for those who have gripes about the Nexus 4. Yes, it's internal storage is capped at 16GB. That seems to really affect those that play a number of different games on their devices. With the amount of high speed data I can access each month, cloud storage of documents, pictures, music, and movies works great for me. I've even pinned about six gigs of music onto my phone so that I won't be streaming my favorite playlists while navigating, and there is still a great deal of room left over. I guess if you need to have Madden, FIFA, and GTA on your phone, then you need a different device.
You are correct if you think that the Nexus 4 does not get an LTE signal (what Verizon and AT&T call 4G). The HSPA+ signal I get from T-Mobile is plenty fast enough for me, and it beats the pants off the 3G signal I got off my old Verizon phone. I just set my personal record with 14.4mbps down and 3.7mbps up (admittedly at a very off-peak hour).
If you have no idea what those numbers mean, you can see from the picture above that the top speed test of my phone taken from T-Mobile's wireless signal are not far off the bottom set of numbers on my list, taken from my Comcast wifi router. You will just have to trust me when I state that these tests were all taken from inside my apartment, and at a distance of about ten feet from my wireless router.
So let me conclude this very lengthy post by stating this: you are probably paying too much for your smartphone service. Do some research into monthly, prepaid plans and check how good the service is in your area from a variety of different providers. Check into the costs of unlocked and unsubsidized phones or see if your current phone can be or is already unlocked. Finally, check to see how much it will cost you to break your current contract. My guess is that the numbers add up if you are willing to make a switch.
I am a Google fanboy ... I have admitted as much several times on this blog. My heroes at Mountain View recently put my faith to the test.
My first smartphone was the original Droid. I had been a Verizon customer since the company first merged in 2000 and absorbed my contract. I was tempted by the early iPhone, but when my cell provider was going to offer a smartphone that would seamlessly integrate with all of the Google products I was using already, I took the jump.
The phone was great, and I eventually upgraded to a Droid 3 when it was time to re-up my contract. Over the past few months, however, my phone was hanging a great deal. It couldn't handle all of the processes that I was asking of it, and it's 3g speeds were feeling a bit stifling. I have lost count of how many times I had to pull the battery out of the back in order to force a reset.
While my technical frustrations were mounting, I became more aware of just how much I was being gouged by Verizon on the monthly family plan that I shared with my wife. It became clear that dumping Verizon and going with a pre-paid plan was going to save us a ton of money. The hitch was that I was still under contract, so I'd be on the hook for a pretty hefty early termination fee. Also, a prepaid plan requires one to pay the full (unsubsidized) price for a phone. I'm not one to skimp on my toys, so I was looking at forking over around $700 for a premium device. I would then have to double that figure because I probably could not get away with getting a great phone for me and a brick for my wife. So the cost of two new phones and early termination fees were keeping me reluctantly handcuffed to Verizon.
Then Google announced the Nexus 4. I will admit that it is not an iPhone5 nor a Galaxy S3 (depending on if you're into werewolves or vampires), but at $350, I could buy two for the price I would have to shell out for just one of those other phones. The Nexus 4 would certainly be a huge improvement over the Droid 3 I was ready to throw against the wall at any moment.
So that was the nudge I needed to jump from Verizon. At that price, I would actually be saving money by getting new phones and switching plans. I doggedly tracked Nexus news online and was ready to pounce when it went on sale.
Rumors came out that the phone would go on sale at midnight Pacific time, on November 13th It would only be available from Google's online store, however. I'm on the East Coast, so that meant 3am for me. I knew there was a lot of buzz about this phone, so I set an alarm and was ready to mash the refresh icon on my browser. (I wanted to live like an iPhone fanatic for a while.) The rumors turned out to be partly true .. the phone went on sale in England, Germany, and Australia, but not in the U.S. Just as it became clear that I got up at a God-awful hour for no reason, something weird appeared to be going on. The Internet was glowing with reports from where the Nexus was on sale; it sold out in just minutes. How was that possible?
Another bit a news popped up before my groggy eyes that morning. The U.S. sale of the Nexus was scheduled to open at noon Pacific time later that day, 3pm for me. I knew it would be a race.
I was at work and slipped into my desk at 2:55pm. I gave myself a few minutes to get comfy, load the page, and start the refresh process. The problem was that Google's servers were already overloaded. They put the phone on sale early. I didn't have a chance, and before I could even get Google's page for the Nexus to actually load, it had sold out. I was a little bitter at Google at that moment. It wasn't really their fault that I got up so early, but clearly they were having trouble with the online retail side of their operation. They also had a fair amount of warning from what happened in smaller markets earlier in the day. It was hard to believe that Google, of all companies, could not get an online market to handle a high demand and did not have enough product on hand to at least last an hour.
It took two weeks for Google to get the Nexus 4 back in stock and make it available for order once again. It was to be November 27th, again at noon Pacific time. There was the same buzz online as before. People were bitter that they could not get their phone when it first went on sale, and it was clear that there would be another rush when the gates opened. Google, however, had weeks to revamp their servers and handle the flood.
So let's see how it went.
I got to my desk (even earlier this time) and Google had not released the phone, yet. After clicking and refreshing for over an hour, however, it became clear that Google could not handle the demand for this phone once again:
I had never been so frustrated trying to buy anything in my life. All I wanted to do was give them my money, and they would not let me (Sorry, I'm not that big of a Futurama fan, so I'll leave the obligatory meme photo out.)
The best thing I did that day was to eventually get the phones I was able to click on into my online cart. I could not process the order, but I had to walk away from the computer and actually address the rest of my life. When I went back to my computer around 8:00 that night, I saw from my news feeds that the Google store had eventually calmed down and was now accepting orders. I went back to my cart and ordered the two phones, and much to my relief, I was able to pay. Better yet, I was placed on a 2-4 week shipping notice, instead of the 9-10 week notice some people were reporting.
The phones arrived two weeks later, on December 12th, and I was pretty excited. I still cannot shake how distasteful this whole experience was, though. Hours of my life were wasted to get my hands on these things. What is amazing, is that the phone is STILL SOLD OUT. If I were not so determined to get these things, I'd still be throwing money at Verizon and using a clunkier phone.
The Internet is letting me down this morning. I have this distinct memory of Charles Barkley during a locker room interview. He's reading a newspaper and going over Michael Jordan's stats from a previous game. Barkley interrupts the reporter asking him questions and says something like, "He took fifty shots! ... Fifty shots! I could score sixty if I took fifty shots. ... Fifty shots!" Chuck must have been speaking about Jordan's sixty-four point game against the Magic on January 16th, 1993.
Unfortunately, I cannot find any video or even mention of Barkley's line anywhere on the web. Maybe I'm imagining it, but the recollection is pretty clear.
This elusive/imagined scene popped into my head after reading about Jack Taylor's performance for Grinnell College last night. He took 108 shots!!! He took seventy-one three pointers!!!
I really need to have that Charles Barkley footage now. If anybody knows where I can find it, please send it along.
There are times that I want to talk politics and foist my personal beliefs upon others. I try not to do that publicly, and I don't think this is an effective forum for that. I do have a strong wish, however, that the leaders of our country have a basic understanding of science, and the they appreciate some of the fundamental laws of nature that govern our existence. I do not understand why issues surrounding evolution and global warming are being debated, for example. So my draw jaw just dropped when I read this tweet from @minutephysics.
So I discovered today that my young daughter calls bananas "nah-ma-nahs."
I haven't stopped smiling since. Now before you think that I am some sap who melts every time his daughter does something cute ...
I'm smiling because I haven't been able to get that song out of my head all day. This may be my favorite ear-worm of all time. How can you not bop your head all day with this stuck between your ears?
I am clearly immersed in the Google Universe, totally willing to serve up my personal information in order to receive the “free” products that come from Mountain View. It makes sense, therefore, that I am a Google Voice user. In fact, I’ve been using the service for over two years. The integration with my Android devices, often humorous voicemail transcriptions, the ability to receive voicemails and SMS on my desktop, the ability to seamlessly text from my laptop ... these features have been, and are, great. The one hangup that has been bothering me, however, has been the call forwarding. One of the killer features of GV is the ability to give out a phone number and control what device actually rings when someone dials that number. The setup and interface are simple enough, but it never really worked the way that I envisioned.
Let me digress a little by giving some background about why this service appeals to me. I teach at a boarding school in New England. My life is made infinitely easier if students and parents can communicate with me easily. However, I am reluctant to hand out my home phone number or, even worse, my cell phone number to an adolescent. I am just as hesitant to hand this information to the parents of an adolescent. These are not populations that have great track records of recognizing and respecting boundaries. The answer for me has come from GV.
The school where I work does not provide phone lines for individual faculty members. With GV's call forwarding feature, I can publish my GV number and choose what happens when somebody calls me. If I am home, I can make myself available to parents and students by forwarding any calls made to my GV number to my home phone. If I am in the office or away from campus, GV can push calls to my cell phone. If I’m on vacation or out to dinner with my wife, I can turn off call forwarding all together, and any calls to GV go straight to voicemail. All I need is a web browser and a few mouse clicks to change these setting. People who want to contact me only need a single phone number. An added bonus comes from the fact that any voicemails or texts that come into my GV number go to my cell phone, my tablet, my home computer, and my office computer. I’m ok being bombarded with asynchronous communication. I can control when I respond to those. It’s the live phone calls that I want to direct.
So here is the problem I ran into. When I was home, I would have GV forward calls to my home number. This worked great, unless people called my real cell number. My cell phone would ring, but if I did not pick up or I silenced the call, GV would forward the call to my home number. This would happen even though the incoming call was not directed to my GV number.
Imagine trying to put your infant to sleep. You forget that your cell phone is in your pocket. There is a soft ringing and buzzing that suddenly enters the room. You nimbly switch the child into your other arm and in one fluid motion, you execute the perfect in-pocket thumb swipe, silencing your phone. Before your can even crack a self-congratulatory grin for barely disturbing the babe, the phone in the next room instantly begins to blare. Damn you Google Voice!
What this meant to my friends and family (the people who actually know my real cell number) is that when they tried to call me, my cell phone would ring four times. If I did not answer, GV would then forward my call to my home number, which would ring four times. If there was still no answer, then the call would go to voicemail. Who waits for eight rings before leaving a voice message?
Now if you go to the settings of Google Voice and choose to edit a forwarding number, you see a link title “Show advanced settings.” (Settings>Phones tab>Forwards calls to:>Edit>Show advanced settings) Under the Forwarding Options you are given two choices: “Ring my other phones before going to voicemail” or “Go straight to voicemail.”
Ah ha! Problem solved! Clearly I do not want my other phones ringed when somebody calls my cell phone directly, so all I have to do is set it to go directly to voicemail. Errr … maybe not. Because after I changed this setting, the issue persisted. So I combed the interwebs and found that I was not alone in my GV travails.
After some more hunting and clicking, I discovered that in the Groups & Circles tab of the GV settings, one can set the call forwarding options for individual contacts or groups of contacts. For some reason, when I looked into these groups, both my home number and my cell number were checked, meaning calls were being forwarded to both. Ah Ha, Again! If I uncheck my home number in the Groups tab within the GV settings … problem solved? (Settings>Groups & Circles>Edit)
Not so fast, my friend! (Sorry, it’s a Saturday, and College Gameday was on this morning.) Despite going through this whole rigamarole, and finding two solutions within the GV settings that seemingly addressed my issue, nothing changed. So back the the forums and complaint boards I went, and came across this post in the sub-cockles of the internets.
It appears that when you setup GV on a cell phone, it automatically enables call forwarding directly from your carrier to the GV number. Whenever anybody calls your cell number, your cellular provider automatically forwards the call to your GV number. If you have call forwarding turned off within GV, or have calls set up to be forwarded to your cell, then everything works as expected. If however, you have call forwarding set to go to a different number (home, for example), then you run into the problem I had. Somebody calls your cell, your carrier forwards the call to GV, and GV then forwards it to the other number. Four rings for your cell, four rings at the forwarded number, then voicemail.
So I have taken my home number out of the loop. When I want GV to forward a call, I have it go to my cell. If I want some privacy, I turn GV off all together. Now my cell behaves normally when friends and family call it directly; students and parents can get a hold of me when they dial my GV number; I still get all of the other functionality of GV; and when my wife calls me from home using her cell phone, the phone next to her does not start ringing for no apparent reason. I don't have great cell service in my apartment, and I can no longer overcome that by having GV calls going to my land line. I still get the calls I should, and that's really the point of this exercise.
Rainbows are pretty neat ... really. I know I'm going out on a limb with this one, but I'm OK with rainbows. Aesthetically pleasing, often a surprise, and as a physics teacher, I take great pleasure in boring all those around me with unsolicited monologues about the refraction of light and Snell's Law.
Snell's Law, of course, named for famed Dutch astronomer Willebrord Snellius. I think the surname "Snellius" could only be improved upon by a truly outstanding first name, like "Willebrord."
I have to say, that Kirsti here may have taken some of the magic out of my rainbow enjoyment:
There's something about an eight-round, tactical shotgun that distracts one from the serenity normally associated with rainbows. It's almost like watching a pegasus and unicorn fight to the death.
It's real, and it can be found on A&E. Now for those not hip to the cable abbreves, A&E once stood for "Arts and Entertainment." You be the judge.
You know why Kentucky Fried Chicken changed their name officially to KFC, right? They wanted to get the word "fried" out of their name, and what they were serving could not legally be called chicken. Likewise, McDonalds can't call their beverages "milkshakes," because they do not contain any milk. This is why they are limited to the word "shakes" on their menu boards. Sadly, these are all false claims, if one is to trust Snopes.com. If you can't trust Snopes, then is there really a Nigerian prince that needs my help? (KFC link; McDonalds link)
We do have unequivocal proof, however, that A&E no longer deals in either the arts or the entertainments. According to their own website, the top shows on A&E are currently:
First, and maybe foremost, A&E published a list containing six items, and readers of this blog know that this can be unsettling.
I have lost a few hours watching Storage Wars and I am now a little fascinated by Duck Dynasty. The word "entertainment" is a bit of a stretch, though. The word "art" does not even enter the equation.
So now my DVR is currently filling up with gems like this:
If you take anything away from this post, let it be these words from A&E's website as they quote one of their biggest stars:
Don't forget to follow me on your Twitter-witter do-hickie.
Please note the Twitter link on the top of A&E's homepage. They can be followed @aetv.
So my NCAA bracket got crushed a week ago, and my bird crap over/under did not go particularly well. Nobody has yet to take me up on my next snowfall over/under, however. April 10th is still the date. Any takers?
The interwebs were abuzz about this startup at the beginning of the month, and the pitch made sense to me. I hate electric razors, so I progressed from the dual blade I had as a teen, to a Mach 3, to a Gillette Fusion. Two, three, and now five blades! The Spishak Mach20 was next for me. A package of twelve Fusion cartridges cost about thirty-six dollars, or a year's membership to the Dollar Shave Club (if you include shipping). I have been spending a great deal of money on razors. Now there are folks out there that have all sorts of tips about extending the life of razors, and I could probably make a single cartridge last a month. I have a problem, however, spending more time cleaning and primping my razor than I do actually using it to shave. I don't clip coupons, I don't buy the day-old donuts, and I do not soak my razors in rubbing alcohol and hang them upside-down on a daily basis, only to rub them against some old denim a few times a week. Disposable water bottles and batteries irritate me, but I'm ok with some disposable items. Top of my list: razors and diapers. So I jumped on this Internet bandwagon.
I don't know if I was annoyed or encouraged when I got an email saying that due to heavy demand, my initial shipment was going to be delayed. It took almost three weeks for my razors to arrive. The ironic part was that I stopped buying my old razors, and had to make my final cartridge last longer than I normally would. As a result, I was second-guessing my decision on a daily basis. I could save money by stretching out the cartridges; it wasn't that difficult. Just as I was about to give up hope, the razors came yesterday.
They look pretty dull compared to the shmancy razor I had been using for the last several years. Less than half the blades in each cartridge; no ergonomically designed, super-cool grip; not even a plastic holder for the handle and box of cartridges. The new handle feels pretty flimsy. I felt like I got what I paid for. A dollar's worth of shaving equipment. After actually shaving, however, I felt better. It's a good razor. Nothing great, but it does the job. In fact, I think only having two blades is less irritating to my skin than the what I have been doing for the last decade. So I'm happy again and feeling better about being on the bandwagon.
What I now know, is that if you are paying more then three dollars a month on razors, you're doing it wrong. This option could not be easier, but if you are a name brand snob and want a more intimidating looking razor in your hand each morning, it's not hard to make them last. Find a way to keep the blades from rusting, and they'll stay sharp much longer than you think.
I also now appreciate just how much of a sucker I am for advertising. I thought my DVR was protecting me from most commercials, but clearly Gillette dug their claws in me, and now this new startup.
My first car. A 1996 Ford Explorer Sport, bought used shortly before starting my first job out of college. Four-wheel drive and horrible gas mileage, it was a great car for a single guy that seldom needed to drive very far and lived in a time of moderate gas prices.
After a couple of years, the ignition system began to stick, so you had to jiggle the key just right or risk dislocating your thumb to start the thing. My wife once walked back from the grocery store because it refused to budge. That was the end of that car.
My lottery dreams at the time always involved the car, or cars, I would buy. After repeatedly watching chase scenes from Ronin, I was hooked on an Audi S8.
Though it lacked the twelve cylinders of Audi's W12, it was still a beast. Once Volkswagon teamed up with Lamborghini to modify a V10 and stick it in the Audi S8, fantasies became even more vibrant.
Well, the Audi was out of our price range, so we settled for a four-door Explorer. Not as peppy, but we did get an unnecessarily inefficient, V8 model. It was a great car, but then came our move to Connecticut. We needed two cars and gas prices were on the rise. The SUV was exchanged for a pair of Ford Foci. The combined engine sizes of the two cars was smaller than the engine of the one Explorer we just got rid of (as well as the combined car payments).
It seems that I have been turned into a closeted environmentalist by our current cars. Yes, the cars are a little cramped. Transporting the family and required accessories for any extended vacations is a real-life application of Tetris. On the other hand, I really like getting over thirty miles to the gallon. Even though I am no longer commuting, it is nice to only have to fill the tank once a month.
So the S8 is no longer in my dreams, though I still watch Ronin on a regular basis. I do think I would look good in one of these, however.
Whiplashing acceleration while still maintaining that family sedan vibe ... oh, and no gas tank. Maybe Elon Musk will give me one for promoting his product. If that's too much, maybe a couple laps around the Earth ... for giggles?
I don't know if my lottery dreams are getting more or less practical.
You can almost smell the fryolators and urine cakes from here.
If the Walmart truck pulls forward a little, I can cut across two lanes, nudge the Prius out of the way, hop the curb, and Bingo!
There are worse things than being stopped in traffic. For example, being stopped in traffic while just inches past the exit ramp to a rest stop located three lanes over.
Face it, when you are stopped in traffic, there are three possibilities that can occur individually or in combination. You are hungry; your legs/butt are sore and you need to stand up for a while; and/or you need to go tinkles. While your vehicle is in motion, these are minor irritants. When stopped on a three-lane parking lot, they become a big deal. To be so close and yet so far from a solution to all of these problems, well it just seems cruel.
So now you know how I spent part of my vacation. Anybody interested in starting a business venture with me? If we design it right, we can get the waste products to power the car, or at least the air compressor.
Several years ago I bought a bundle of cedar shingles. Soak one in water for an hour or so, throw a piece of fish on top, and then drop on the grill. Dinner is done. Be careful not to attempt this with painted or stained shingles. Vinyl siding is also a bad idea. (Consider that my public service announcement. PTH is all about helping the people.)
If you insist on eating something green with your meal, I have another recommendation.
A bonus to this menu selection will come from your body breaking down and excreting the mercaptans found in the asparagus. It is strange to me that only some people note the post-asparagus odor while visiting the loo. There seems to be a debate about this issue. Some feel that only a portion of the population break down the chemicals in asparagus to produce a foul smelling waste product, while the rest of humanity is unaffected. Another argument is that everybody produces the odiferous compounds, but only certain people are actually sensitive to the smell. Rest assured, science is on the case.
Maybe I should do a blog post on what happens after you eat beets.
Hard for me to write anything right now. I've picked Florida State to make it to the National Championship Game. After a poor showing in the first round, they are now losing to a rather mediocre Cincinnati team.
OK, they just took the lead, but I should go. I'm not feeling particularly good about this.
Let me begin by congratulating Chris Hall and his Lehigh brethren. I never doubted the outcome.
Though the Missouri loss has been a blow to my bracket, I am still in better shape than I was this time last year. I had already lost a good chunk of my Sweet 16 teams by this point. As far as other wagers go, I would have lost my bird dropping over/under.
The car lasted three days, not the four hours I originally proposed.
I did manage to do some more research about my daughter's birthday present today.
Perhaps if I win one of the pools I'm in or I convert my next snow over/under. I'm currently ranked 1,160,933rd on ESPN's Tournament Challenge.
I think a down payment is in order. I can at least start clearing off a spot on our coffee table so that the little one has a place to admire her new toy.
There were no childhood dreams of blogging. When I undertook this venture a couple of weeks ago, I certainly had no aspirations of becoming a tire blogger. But here I am, posting my third post about tires in less than a week's time. Mother is so proud!
As I was stuck in a tire store for three hours today, it struck me. I was captive. I could wander around the shopping plaza, but without a functioning car, I was not going far. I grabbed a bite to eat, walked up and down the aisles of the neighboring RadioShack, but eventually came back and sat in one of the hard plastic chairs next to the entrance of the tire store. I endured it. The invasive stench of vulcanized rubber, the elderly woman sitting two chairs down from me that was just audibly mumbling to herself for forty-five minutes, the running commentary from a ten-year-old watching an NCAA tournament game on the 17" TV in the corner as if his entire family's savings were riding on the fourth grade pool at the local grammar school, the waiting ... the waiting, I just sat there in that stiff, little chair. I had my smartphone, and intermittent 3G service, but one can only check your Twitter feed and Google Reader so often before the mumbling old lady thinks you're crazy.
Customer after customer came in. Some came in carrying flat tires. Others inquired about the cost of replacement tires. Others brought their cars in for balancing and/or alignment. Each was given the same line, "The (service) normally takes about an hour, but today it would be more like ninety minutes." For the most part, those predictions came true. After two and a half hours, however, I asked about my car. Apparently the car that was undergoing alignment before mine took much longer than expected, but I was next in line.
At some point while permanently pressing my backside into that chair, I came upon the idea. What a great location for selling something. People might temporarily wander away from you, but they will always come back. Now others have clearly though about this, because "No Soliciting" signs were taped up in several locations. What if we took this a step further? What if we started a cult and used a tire store as a front?
The science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard is often quoted as saying, "The way to make a million dollars is to start a religion." So let's do it. The easy part is coming up with the rules, ceremonies, and sacred text. The tough part is converting people to your faith. So I say, let's use tire stores! If we're lazy about it, we could just sit in the waiting areas of various tire stores and quietly preach "The Gospel According to Akron." Heck, Old Lady Mumbles might have been trying to do that to me today. But if we are to be really ambitious, I suggest that we actually invest in a store of our own. At the very least, people are in the store for an hour, and every now and then, some poor schmuck like me is stuck there all morning. We would have complete control over the environment. Suggestive music will be played over the store's speaker system. Tires will be stacked in awe-inspiring geometries. What better location to bring people to our way of thinking? If conversions are going slowly, hallucinogenic gases can be piped in to make our "customers" more pliable; the stench of the tires will certainly cover up any other unnatural odors. As a hook, we can offer "buy three tires and get the fourth tire free" deals to new members of our church or "free tire rotations" for the faithful. As our numbers grow, we can franchise to new locations around the world.
Who's with me?!? Let's get ... Oh, my car's ready. Gotta go.
Have you ever reflected back upon something you just completed only to discover some horrific mistake you made but had previously overlooked? Say, for example, you are a heart surgeon. As you are stitching the patient up after a lengthy procedure, you replay the operation in your head. Just as you are knotting the last suture, you realize that you left a sponge in the patient's chest cavity.
Yesterday afternoon there was another spam attack on President Obama's Google+ page. I thought back to the previous blog entry I wrote on the subject ... and it hit me. I had written about just such an event and claimed it occurred at 4:00pm EST on Monday. This cyber attack did not happen at four o'clock Eastern Standard Time; it happened at four o'clock Eastern Daylight Time! 4:00pm EST did not exist on Monday. It existed the previous Monday, but not this past Monday. How could I forget Daylight Saving Time? How could such a surgical sponge be left to fester in my blog post? (Too hyperbolic?)
Daylight Saving Time is a creepy concept to me. Tonight, stay up to 1:59am, be a rebel. I promise you that a minute later will be 2:00am, and the minute following that will be 2:01am. Check for yourself, if you don't believe me. This past Sunday, however, that did not happen. Time went from 1:59am to 3:01am in a span of just two, short minutes. What happened in between? Was it 2:00am and 3:00am simultaneously? Yes! It's the Schrodinger's Cat of chronology. Where did the time from 2:00am to 2:59am go? Was there a rift in the space-time continuum? Does the arbitrary shift from Standard Time to Daylight Saving Time contradict everything we learned in physics?
I understand the concept behind Daylight Saving Time. Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant from Stuff You Should Know did an excellent podcast explaining the history and rationale behind saving daylight. Long story short, it seemed wasteful for people to be asleep while the sun was up only to have the sun set early in the evening. The remedy, push the clocks ahead so that our daily schedules better match the solar schedule. I don't understand, though, why we fall back? Why not just save daylight all of the time? Wouldn't it be nice to get off work and still have a little sunlight left on a December evening? Are decreased productivity at work and the increased number of deaths caused by sleep confused drivers necessary every time we switch our clocks?
If you are a resident of American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, or the US Virgin Islands, I apologize for wasting your time. You have no idea what Daylight Saving Time is, and you have little need. If you are a resident of Arizona, you do not observe Daylight Saving Time either. I can only assume that your legislators are too concerned with upholding the rights of all of your fellow citizens to be bothered with such trivial issues. Instead, you keep your clocks the same and switch what timezone your state belongs to twice a year. That's much less confusing for the rest of us. How will our boarder protecting militia members know when to meet up with your boarder protecting militia members?
My favorite part about Daylight Saving in Arizona ... the Navajo Indian Reservation in Arizona does observe Daylight Saving Time.
As promised on Monday, I took the plunge. I declared winter to be officially over, and took off the snow tires. I was (and still am) worried convinced that this was a rash and premature act ... a simple over-exuberance compelled by a spate of delightful weather. (I have not used some of those words in a while and felt the need to throw them in.) I have been encouraged to see that a number of individuals I respect have made similar pronouncements.
Chris Hall (of ChallTech fame) has declared the beginning of the Summer of 2012 from the campus of Lehigh University (I'm sure your boys will do just fine against Duke.)
Khaliq Gant (of Social Blendr fame) has not stored the snow tires, but has taken equally daring measures. He also seems to possess a talking wardrobe.
Finally, the ghost tweeter for Walt Frazier (of New York Knickerbocker fame, Just For Men pitchman, and star of a title role in this post) echoed Khaliq's sentiments just a few hours later.
Emboldened by such a noble company of men, I have decided to take my taunting of Mother Nature a step further. I got my car washed today. Step at me, Horae!
So this is for the two people on Google+. Chinese citizens have been spamming President Obama's Google+ account for the last couple of days. Here's how it works. Google+ allows a maximum of 500 comments to be made on any one post. Whenever the White House publishes something to +Barack Obama, the comments get flooded with Mandarin. It generally takes just a few hours to reach the 500 comment maximum, at which point anybody else that would like to add their thoughts is shut out.
It was posted yesterday at 3:37pm. There were a handful of comments, mostly anticipating the onslaught that was about to happen. Then at 4:03, it began. You can see from the image below that the comments come in serious waves.
These are all public posts, so I don't feel the need to cover up the user names of anybody here.
It seems that a number are Chinese nationals using this forum as a virtual occupy movement. By repressing the ability for Americans to comment on President Obama's actions, they are illustrating what it is like to live under the thumb of their government. Perhaps people in China think that Americans actually use Google+, care about what the President has to say, and will be devastated if they cannot post their opinions online.
The rest of the comments fall into two other categories. The majority seem to be Chinese kids playing a game. It looks like they are trying to see who can post the 500th comment. It's kind of like making a stopwatch stop at exactly 1.00 seconds. The other comments come from Americans that are irked about having this public forum so brutally spammed. They repeatedly post comments asking people to stop (thus ticking the watch closer to 500), or ask that the comments be flagged as inappropriate (so the overlords at Google can supposedly block those Chinese accounts).
I like these requests the best. American citizens are asking that a public protest against an overbearing government be squashed so that Americans can post comments about President Obama's dinner pictures and his picks for the NCAA Women's basketball tournament. Granted, this is not a Woolworth's lunch counter we are talking about, but the irony is a little thick.
So I say... let's play along. First, join Google+. Next, follow +Barack Obama. (This is not a liberal / conservative thing. It's a social media game, like FarmVille. The only people you annoy are uptight Americans, instead of your friends.) Now wait for a post from the White House and comment away. Let me know if you hit number 500.
This game is also more fun if you comment in Mandarin. I use Google Translate and then copy and paste.
