Thief Gets His Own Billboard After Robbing Advertising Agency
http://arbroath.blogspot.com/2008/11/thief-gets-his-own-billboard-after.html
Where’s the Pets.com Sock Puppet’s Bailout?
American Airlines Now Charging Fees to Non-Passengers
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/american_airlines_now_charging
Caught this little guy attempting to scale the walls of Casa de Sevener last night…
Never seen anything like this one before – he was a good couple of inches long and moved pretty slow. Name that bug!
I sooo can’t wait to re-format my PC right now – it’s like it doesn’t even understand the concept of “multi-tasking” anymore. Copying photos over from my camera is physically painful at this point.
This afternoon I put in the new power supply and hard drive, and it’s running a lot quieter, so now I just need to get to a point where I can wipe everything and slowly re-install applications as I need them…
I can see already that this is going to make getting work done this weekend a little more difficult…
http://www.handdrawngames.com/DesktopTD/Game.asp
This year’s festivities were rather nice – quiet, relaxed, and somewhat lazy, but nice. It was the first in three years that both Sara and I got the entire day off to spend together, so we basically laid around the house all day watching whatever came on TV, playing computers and then later Mario Party on the Wii, and then finally eating like kings (…well, king and queen…) before calling it a day. At this point there’s probably only one or two loads of dishes left to do in the kitchen from our feast, so all in all it was a good Thanksgiving.
As for the rest of the weekend, Sara’s working so my goals are pretty much write and get Christmas lights put up. Granted, there are probably several other smaller items that I need to get taken care of, too – order Christmas cards, get some packages ready to mail out, clean the hell out of this dirty house – but all else still falls behind the other two because a) Christmas has really got me fired up this year, and b) it’d be nice to get this whole writing thing underway before I’m forced to make another thinly-veiled New Years resolution about it!
Also – black Friday shopping? Couldn’t really care less this year, actually. You would never, ever catch me up at the crack of dawn to go shopping – I don’t care how many percent off everything is, but in years past Sara and I have gone out in the evening after everything calms down a bit to at least see if there are still any worthwhile DVDs up for grabs, but after looking through the fliers and whatnot, this year I really don’t care if we go or not. Mind you, we’ve been a lot more lax on our DVD purchases over the last year to make possible the wedding and Sara’s going back to school, but even still, I just didn’t really see anything that appealed all that much to me.
I do still have a couple of items that I need to pick up at Wal-Mart so there’s a chance that I might do that tomorrow evening to allow for a quick browse of the $4 bin, but I have a feeling it’ll be a quick one. Besides, apparently I’ve got work to do this weekend! 🙂
One last thing before I hit the hay – mail-in rebates are really starting to bug me … I think because I’m starting to read them for what they really are…
I just finished filling out a rebate for some Corsair memory that I bought from Newegg. I thought I got a really good deal – that is, until I sat down and read the terms of the rebate. I actually bought two different products – one came with a $40 rebate and the other with a $15 rebate – so originally I was expecting a total of $55 off the original cost of my order.
Wrong.
Maximum rebate $40.00 per household.
There’s a bunch of other legal jargon included as well to prevent you from splitting up the items between a couple of different people to still get your money’s worth. And on top of that, the rebate must be submitted within 21 days or it’s void … AND the check will take 8 – 10 weeks to arrive! Seriously, why do these guys even bother offering a warranty if they’re going to be so jerky with their terms?!
I thought I remembered seeing some legislature a while back that made mail-in rebates illegal in certain states, thus forcing them to only be able to do rebates at the point-of-sale, but I can’t seem to find links to anything worthwhile this late at night. It really makes me wonder just how much requests gets lost in the shuffle or rejected back due to some stupid rule written in the fine print.
Despite the form saying I can’t claim them both, I’m still going to submit for the entire $55 and see what happens – nothing I can lose at this point. I’ll let you know in 8 – 10 weeks if they follow-through with the jerkiness that the rebate form itself suggests…
Wow – aside from various links, and that whole election thing, I really haven’t blogged much in a while.
It’s kind of crazy just how, well, crazy things have been since the wedding, but I guess that’s what happens when you basically take off of everything for upwards of two weeks in a row! Life has been real up and down since then, between dealing with a wedding vendor’s payment after we got back because they turned out being real jerks to our refrigerator breaking down, and even Sara missing a bunch of work because she did something real bad to her back / hip that still hasn’t completely healed several weeks later. The impending holidays and their own financial burdens certainly aren’t going to help any, but just for the sake of my sanity, let’s not talk about that right now…
Hmmmm, so what else can we talk about???
Love Me Some Pumpkin!
I guess the site technically isn’t even done yet because as of inserting that link there was still a placeholder or two in the template, but despite not getting where I want to be with the rest of my writing, I’ve been having a little fun with this pseudo-project lately and I think that oughta count for something! Ultimately I’m not entirely sure how much longer it’ll last, namely because pumpkin novelties tend to be cast aside to make room for gingerbread and candy canes right around this time anyways, but for a two month run, I think I still covered a fair number of posts and I’ve still got a few up my sleeve before the time is up.
It’s still up for debate what I’ll do next when things do wrap up on the pumpkin front, but I think that I’ll probably keep it open with the idea that if, by chance, something else pumpkin-related appears on the radar, I can still write about it, but otherwise this idea really stemmed from a similar candy-related site that I’d still like to do with Lori if we can get the ball rolling on it.
Other Writing in General
It’s just hard to believe how quickly I got so far behind with everything because although technically I missed two, maybe three weeks due to the wedding, in reality that’s still an awful lot of catch-up to do … especially when a few new features came to mind that I wanted to introduce at the same time. I’ve still got a plan and I made a little bit of progress towards it this weekend – just not as much as I would’ve liked, obviously – but I know it’ll get there eventually. Maybe by Christmas??? God, I hope not! Still, with a four day weekend coming up and possibly a little motivation from what I did get done this weekend, I have my (updated) goals – now it’s just a matter of getting somewhere near them.
And I’d probably feel even more confident about meeting those goals if it wasn’t for…
…Christmas!!!
What else can I say? I’m really excited about Christmas this year. I know that money’s going to be tight, but I’m just really looking forward to everything that the next six weeks or so has to offer – baking Christmas cookies; actually sending gifts out on-time this year; Sara and I are even doing our very first Christmas cards together – I don’t think I’ve done a card in, like, 3 years! Then there’s all of the holiday events over at Disney – Candlelight Processional, the Osbourne Lights, possibly even Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party if I can weasel it out of our finances. I’m also hoping to do a few extra special things on the blog of my Disney site (that one’s not completely finished either … bear with me), and I always have a good time with the humor columns that come out of this time of year. Not to mention next weekend I’m going to shoot for getting our lights put up outside, and maybe even the tree … and you know, I’ll probably be in the mood for baking after Thanksgiving and who can really put up their Christmas tree without cookies baking in the oven?!
So there’s the challenge for this holiday season – enjoy Christmas 2008 to its absolute fullest, while also getting my writing where I want it to be, spending time with Sara, and not driving us into bankruptcy during the process. Also, if I could possibly not gain any more weight during all of said madness, that would probably make my resolutions a wee bit easier come January.
If only it were that easy…
Here’s a really good read about the evolution of the music industry – I think for the most part a lot of the same tenets apply to other publishing methods as well…
http://topspinmedia.com/2008/11/grammy-northwest-musictech-summit-keynote/
Weekly Address from President Elect Barack Obama via YouTube
Granted, a quick afterthought lead me to google and then realize that technically the President already does a weekly address for the radio, but this just seems like a nice step forward in embrace of a technological future. Hopefully with any luck, this is a sign that we’ll see a whole lot more utilization of online resources with this new administration in the days to come.
Baby Monitor iPhone App Calls You When Baby Cries
I think the only thing better was one of the comments, “And then someone calls and wakes the baby…” Maybe the app disables incoming calls or at least mutes the ringer volume? Otherwise, well…