Mario Marathon 4

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What can I say?! I really got into everything that these guys were doing last year in support of Child’s Play, so it pleases me to no end to see that not only are they doing it all over again this year, but there’s a good chance that this year’s marathon will crack $250,000 in total donations over the life of the project.

That’s a quarter of a million dollars for charity, for a bunch of guys sitting around playing Super Mario Bros!

In a word – incredible.

So as the numbers go thus far, the gang is currently floating just over $42k at about 28 hours in (you can see some cool graphs of their progress compared to other years at mmstats.net). The final total last year was $82k after 109 hours (4.5 days!) of gaming, with a 3-year running total of $122,931 raised for Child’s Play.

That said, I’m calling it now … Mario Marathon 4 is going to bring in a whopping $127,000 this year.

Let’s make it happen, people!

Forever Torn About Tipping

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I’m not sure if I’m ever going to feel 100% comfortable with tipping.

It’s not that I don’t necessarily think that the recipients deserve said gratuity (sometimes), but there’s just so many different scenarios – as soon as I think I’ve got them all under wraps, along comes something new to throw me for a loop all over again! Last year, our ginormous road trip had us staying at a lot of hotels that required valet parking, something which I’ve hardly ever had to deal with before, and even one particularly upscale establishment in Washington, DC that basically required the use of the hotel staff for just about anything … including when I wanted a simple, ordinary bucket of ice, which really bugged me, but I got through it just the same.

Today’s situation that I encountered most certainly threw me off guard, namely because I do it all the time and have honestly just never given it a second thought up until now.

Specifically – are you supposed to give a tip when you’re picking up a pizza for carryout at a pizza parlor???

My gut instinct at first was no, but then I remembered that recently I came to terms (thanks to some friendly feedback via Facebook) that it’s still decent to tip a couple of bucks when you pick-up a to-go order from someplace like Chili’s or Applebees or the awesome Chinese place nearby that I don’t indulge in nearly enough these days. The logic there is that the same wait staff normally waiting tables, where people usually tip at, also have to take time to put together the to-go orders as well. And so while I don’t give 15-20% or more like I would for good service sitting down, I still feel justified in adding a couple of bucks to the takeout receipt for their efforts.

Should I be classifying my pizza tipping experiences into this very same bucket?!?!?!

Mind you, I don’t think I’ve ever tipped at the counter for carryout before, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I shouldn’t be! And I know that technically those credit card machines just spit out receipts with the Tip line on them because the restaurant is setup to do them for everybody … but what if there’s a handful of people/suckers who do give a tip for carryout orders simply because there’s a line on the slip to do so?

Help me, Internet! I don’t mind tipping for good service, but I also don’t want to be taken like a fool with an open wallet…

Legoland Florida Continues to Take Shape!

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Although admittedly I don’t think we’ll be going there all the time like we do with Disney World today, watching videos like this is getting me pretty excited to see how Legoland Florida is actually going to turn out…

Just seeing them haul those gigantic models off of the trucks, with each one taking up entire pallets a piece – MiniLand USA all by itself is going to be something to see when this place is finally done in only a few short months now! It also makes me wonder about some of the more operational questions that I guess I’ve never really even considered before. Namely, how do they keep all of the models clean??? I mean, Downtown Disney has a bunch of outdoor displays and theirs never really look dirty, or even all bleached out from constant exposure to the sun, for that matter. Maybe just like how Disney steam-cleans the streets in the Magic Kingdom every night, they also have people to hose down the LEGO models and keep them looking fresh, too!

As for the sun, I can only imagine that they have to keep extras on hand just in case something gets broken, or eventually to swap things out to account for general wear and tear. I would love to learn more about that kind of stuff if they have any sorts of behind the scenes tours once they open!

Here’s another neat, considerably longer video that LEGO themselves produced to give people an overview of what to expect out of the new park…

In particular, I love the slogan at the very end – “Legoland Florida is the park that you would build if you had fifty million bricks…”

I really need to buy a UPS.

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We had our second power outage in 48 hours this morning, and apparently now my Linksys Gigabit switch no longer works.

Admittedly it was kind of old, and ultimately I know that I should just be grateful that none of the actual computers got fried, but it still sucks because my home network felt just a little bit cooler because I actually had two PCs that could talk at 125 MBps with each other!

Anyways, I wish I had some extra money this week because unfortunately it’s something like this that tends to serve as a grim reminder for me that really bad things could happen when my computers aren’t properly setup. Part of it is that whenever I look at Uninterrupted Power Supplies, they do always tend to be pretty expensive – a good one is over $100 and realistically I need two to cover both my desktop PC and my home server. I’d love to be able to splurge and pop for one of the super-beefy, rack-mountable ones that could support everything by itself, but that’s not really very realistic when I don’t have a rack to actually put it in (maybe my next house will have a data center!) and the price tag is a bit higher, too.

It’s funny – for a short while I somehow ended up on APC’s mailing list and I would get fliers in the mail from time to time reminding me of all the other uses for UPS’ around your house as well! Which initially doesn’t seem like it would be much, but we’ve got two pretty big fishtanks that have filters running in them 24×7 that could use it. They may not need to run all the time, but being down for an extended period of time would be bad, not to mention if they’re not primed properly when the power comes back on to just resume pumping water, I can easily see one burning up trying.

But trying to stay focused on computers … whatever it is, I desperately need to finally act on this and do something soon because Florida just has way too many power outages during the summertime because of all the thunderstorms for me to lose my PC altogether on account of me not wanting to spend $150 on a fail-safe!

I also still need to get a backup solution lined up once and for all – something that covers both localized as well as online redundancy. Of course, that also costs money, but maybe we can try to fish it out of the couch cushions somewhere and make July officially backup and secure your home computers month here in the Sevener household!

Somebody please hold me to that – it seriously needs to finally happen here sooner than later…

Is it time to switch from cable to IPTV???

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It’s not like I have anything against cable or anything – I’m just trying to figure out how to save us a little money this summer after getting our latest electric bill that’s rapidly approaching the size of one of our car payments!!!

And yes, we did suck it up and turn the air up a few degrees in our initial response, even though it seems really hot around here, but anything helps, right???

I guess that’s why I just have to wonder if there’s anything that can be cut from the entertainment portion of our budget. I mean, we pay a lot of money each money between our bills to Bright House (cable) and Verizon (cell phones), not to mention also maintaining a Netflix subscription AND lately we’ve been hitting up the theater a lot because there are actually movies worth seeing up on the silver screen for a change! It probably doesn’t help that I’ve been working so much lately that I personally use almost none of our cable and Netflix subscriptions, mainly indulging on nights out at the movies with the wife when I’ve made sufficient progress in my mind to have “earned” a night off.

There have been a couple points where I’ve pondered the thought of whether we could just give up our cable package and switch to a pay-as-you-go service like AppleTV or Amazon or something, but I feel like the interface itself would be counter-intuitive about how I do watch TV when I have the time, and how my wife typically watches as well. We’re both big channel surfers, often times settling on just random, stupid stuff to pass the time (or in my case sometimes act as background noise while I’m writing), and so I’m not sure that it would be the same knowing that each crappy show is costing $2.99 a pop.

Another big problem is that our preferences really are spread out across all of the services, which prevents us from simply dropping one and keeping the others – most of my seldom TV watching is stuff on the movie channels, which we pay extra for and you can’t just get by themselves, and yet we couldn’t exist on Netflix alone either because sometimes I want to just watch something stupid now – not in a day or two. And yet we still like to keep Netflix around because it’s cheaper to use them for big name movies when they’re first released than paying $4.99 to watch them On-Demand.

Although admittedly the current disc at the top of my queue has technically been sitting here for a good two months now, meaning I could’ve just bought the damn thing several times over by now!

I guess I’m just picky, and the penalty means that I’m paying ridiculous bills to three different companies for the privilege each and every month. Anybody out there have a good success story about breaking away from cable tv without sacrificing selection?

One more thing…

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Oh yeah, and just a quick P.S. for anyone who may be reading this for the purpose of any birthday gift brainstorming for anyone who might have their special day coming up in a little over two months, just consider this the digital equivalent of me leaving the JC Penney catalog open on the kitchen counter as a subtle hint of what might suffice…

I’m not too crazy about the human side of the conquest, but I think the different alien sets in this series look really cool. I did already pick this one up because it was cheap and I wanted to see how they looked out of the box, but now that I have, there are definitely several that I wouldn’t mind adding to my collection!

I think the mothership alone is pretty darned rad…

Kids Like Toys, *I* Like Toys…

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So I was in Target looking at toys (among other things) earlier this evening when I exchanged a couple of text messages with my wife that I thought were kind of comforting:

Scott: Is it bad if it’s the toys that get me excited about having a kid more than anything else? 😉
Sara: Not at all

For the record, this was the picture that I had sent along with my text…


I mean – Fisher-Price mixed with Dungeons & Dragons … where was this stuff when I was a kid?!

Those not directly in the loop might be interested to know that while we’re not currently pregnant, we’ve been trying for a little while, which I don’t really want to talk about publicly here because it’s a bit too personal, but oddly enough I will talk about the decision simply to want to have kids because it certainly hasn’t been an easy one for me to swallow at times! I honestly go back and forth about it a lot – part of me is excited about all of the amazing experiences to look forward to, while another is scared out of his mind about being ready to take on that kind of challenge and the fear of possibly having to leave other things behind.

I do find that focusing on all of the positive, fun, exciting things does help to sway the balance, though, and so yeah, one of the things in particular that I’m looking forward to doing eventually with my son or daughter is getting just as much into their toys as they are. I’ve already got the LEGO collection started before they even get here, not to mention as seen above, there are just some really cool kids toys and video games and doodads and whatnots available out there these days! A lot of kids grow up playing with other kids, but not so much with their parents … you can tell them in the store simply by the ones who are enjoying the toy aisles with their kids* vs. the ones who are griping just to pry the kids away from them.

I want to be a fun Dad who plays with his kids, and who always makes time to play with his kids, and who encourages them to goof off and be creative and have fun as opposed to stiffeling it or telling them to “Calm down!” all the time. When we finally buy our own house, we are gonna have the mother of all playrooms in that thing, just filled to the brim with every toy and building brick and age-appropriate video game their (or my) hearts could desire! I’ve got such great nostalgia for all of the LEGOs and GoBots and Voltron lions and all of the other amazing toys that I enjoyed myself growing up that I really look forward to sharing all of those awesome memories with the next generation, and maybe even trying to figure out some of these new-fangled toys if we’ve still got any time left, too…

* Note: It’s kind of funny because I actually witnessed a positive version of this firsthand on this same trip, which did stand out to me because unfortunately I normally only ever hear the opposite. A little kid was picking out toys in the LEGO aisle and his Mom was actually pointing out that he still had money leftover if he wanted to get something else, or that he could even pick a set that was a little bigger! In fact, she was even helping to teach him how to look up the prices with one of those self-scan machines they have at random around the store, which was cute because I was actually blocking the machine sending this vitally important tweet and I overheard her say, “We can go check the price over here, but we have to wait our turn first…”

Maybe it seems silly to notice something as simple as a Mom actually enjoying time with her son, but it does seem like far too often that I overhear parents making their kids sound more like a burden than a blessing, and I’m sure it is tough at times … but toys of all things won’t be one of those struggling points for me, mark my words!

I’m also going to try really hard not to yell at them while we’re at Disney World – you know, the Most Magical Place on Earth, too, but that’s a rant for another day… 😉

It’s Not a “Survey” If You Tell Me How to Answer!

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Generally I’m a fan of companies actually asking for customer feedback, and although I honestly don’t really respond to them very often, I think the newfound trend of soliciting feedback at the bottom of your sales receipt in exchange for a couple of bucks off your next purchase is a neat way to encourage people to give you a few minutes of their time.

That said, I think it completely defeats the point of asking for said feedback when the customer’s “reward” is conditional on them giving you the kind of feedback that you want!

This happened to me earlier this afternoon when picking up a few things from PetCo for Cleo to chew on after losing multiple pairs of shoes and several power cords to various devices over the last couple of days! Admittedly, it caught me a little off guard at the register because the cashier was extremely perky and talked really fast, but as I repeated it to myself while walking to the car, it just didn’t sit right with me…

“Call this number on the back and if you give us all 5’s, you’ll get $2 off your next purchase with us!”

Now it’s hard to tell if this is just her own shtick for explaining the survey or if she’d actually been coached to do it this way by her bosses, but it’s kind of sad and pointless for a company to gather customer feedback if it does so in a way that only garners positive results. Essentially this is just bribing customers to tell them they’re great for a $2 coupon, which is too bad because ultimately good, honest feedback should be a lot more valuable to a company than meritless pats on the back.

Of course, if the company doesn’t actually have any intent of acting on the responses anyways, then maybe it’s just better that they think they’re doing great in the first place…

🙁

Planning the Trek to Michigan

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A week or two ago, the wife and I started tossing around the idea of going up to Michigan to visit my family this year for Christmas. A number of current and future life changes seem to indicate that this might be the right year to do it, so assuming she can procure the necessary approvals for time off from work, that’s the plan.

Today we started kicking around the next great decision – to fly or to drive.

Originally I had just assumed that we would fly up, noting that airfare prices are actually “normal” right now (~$250/each), although we’d need to buy soon before the prices start skyrocketing. I even did some extra math and realized that for less than the price of a rental car for a week (we fly into Detroit, which is still a good 4 hours from our final destination), we could take a puddle-hopper to one of the regional airports farther north that would be a bit more reasonable for someone to just come pick us up. It’s not like we really need a vehicle of our own for the week that we’ll be there.

Driving, on the other hand, is an entirely different can of worms with both pluses and minuses.

The Good:

  • It’s cheaper, and we don’t need to come up with most of the money until just before the trip.
  • We can bring Cleo (I know we could technically on a plane, too, but we’re not jerks.)
  • Travel time gives Sara and I some always-needed bonding time.

The Bad:

  • Doubling our travel time (22 hours drive time vs. 6-8 hours flying + 4 hours driving)
  • Not sure how Cleo would handle a long-distance road trip.
  • Wintertime driving in Michigan SUCKS.

I think the only thing that honestly has my concern is really the last one – I haven’t actually driven in the ice and snow for a good 8 years now and the idea of slipping around on the freeway or some back road in Sara’s little car doesn’t exactly sound like “fun” to me! Which I guess is kind of weird because I used to drive trucks for a living up there before I moved to Florida, but still … BIG TRUCK has a lot more weight to it than LITTLE CAR! Then again, it’s like Sara said – we give ourselves plenty of time and just take it slow if we start to hit inclement weather. I mean, she went to college at a school that was on the shore of Lake Ontario, so I suppose she’s experienced her share of horrible, blizzard-like conditions, too!

Still, I can’t help but picture us re-living scenes from A Muppet Family Christmas about 20 hours into this journey…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGzX5eAm1aw&t=4m34s