This cheered me up:
http://www.robandelliot.cycomics.com/archive.php?id=225
Also, why world records are stupid…
Schoolgirl Smashes the World Record as She Lets 25 Snails Slither Across Her Face
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1050667/Schoolgirl-smashes-world-record-lets-25-snails-slither-face.html
“Her previous personal best was just nine.”
Me thinks they need to strive a little higher over in the UK…
Sweden Recalls Poison Recipe
Swedish Magazine Recalled After Faulty Recipe Poisons 4
http://www.canada.com/theprovince/story.html?id=c12e1890-3b2b-4ca5-add7-001ce38a413b&k=96800
Remind me never to go over to Sweden for dessert…
Mackinac Island photos
I was going through photos and found an old set from 2006 that apparently I forgot to add to my galleries. These were from a trip that Sara and I took with my Mom, Lori and her husband (at the time) when we came up to celebrate my grandparents’ 60th wedding anniversary that summer. Mackinac is sort of an iffy place for me – I love a lot of the scenery (see below) and whatnot, but the town itself is odd – like, “We’re an old-time town that doesn’t have motorized vehicles and does everything the old fashioned way, but don’t forget to pick up lots of souveniers before you leave!”
Of course, now I live in the tourism capital of the world and frequent one of the top destinations to boot, so I guess that doesn’t mean much coming from me anymore! Still, I hadn’t been to the Island for probably five or six years at that point, and even then the trip was a quick one for a wedding, so I thought it would be fun just because it would give us all something to do! Anyways, I don’t really know where I’m going with this, so just click on the photo if you want to see the rest of the gallery…
Feel safe yet? How about now???
Commuter Flights Grounded Thanks To Bumbling TSA Inspector
http://www.aero-news.net/index.cfm?ContentBlockID=340a79d6-839a-470d-b662-944325cea23d
“The brilliant employees used an instrument located just belowthe cockpit window that is critical to the operation of the onboard computers,” one pilot wrote on an American Eagle internet forum.”They decided this instrument, the TAT probe, would be adequate to use as a ladder.”
…
TSA conducts routine spot inspections of aircraft parkedat commercial airports, according to agency spokesman Elio Montenegro. “Our inspector was following routine procedure for securing the aircraft that were on the tarmac,” Montenegro said, adding the inspector was attempting to determine whether someone could break into the parked planes.
dry toast for two, please?
I regret to inform you that after both being visited by the Ghost of Village Inn Meals Past either last night or this morning, Sara and I have been forced to change our collective rating from “Eh, not bad…” to “Avoid unless you enjoy the taste of your own stomach acid.” Consider yourselves warned.
hmmm…
Today was kind of a weird day.
I was actually going along pretty good, despite being fairly tired because I was up late again last night working on a website … and then the phone rang. Early afternoon, Sara managed to get herself a flat tire out in the middle of nowhere and didn’t have a spare (don’t ask me where it went!), so I left work for lunch to go wait with her until the tow truck guy showed up to get her to a tire place. Well, many, many hours later, we finally took back the keys to her car in exchange for $160 (they ended up replacing two tires) and several hours of our time. Sadly, by that point it wasn’t really worthwhile for either of us to go back to work, so we called it a day and went home.
Also, we’ve both been battling indigestion all night – thanks, Village Inn! If you ever find yourself hungerin’ for the Mexican Breakfast Quaesidilla, just say no.
Also also, apparently there’s some tropical storm alive and kicking down south of us in the Gulf of Mexico. Personally, we’re really not all that worried about it, even though they’re talking about mandatory evacuations for some of the lowest flood zones tomorrow morning if she veers back in our direction. Maybe it’s just because we really haven’t had a bad storm in so long, maybe it’s because we live far enough from the coast that we don’t really have to think about coastal flooding from this thing, but we’ll see what happens tomorrow. The latest projection that I saw had Fay horizontal with the Tampa Bay Area tomorrow evening, but going more up the middle of the state (bad day to be at the Magic Kingdom!). Ain’t Florida fun?!
No DVDs != End of the World
So Netflix had a bit of an outage last week which stopped shipping for many customers for the majority of the week. Although apparently it did affect me, as I’d sent a DVD back on Monday and received its replacement a whopping one day late, I didn’t really think much of it until I saw an article in the paper that I thought was a bit harsh on the actual situation.
I then took a trip over to the Netflix Blog to see what the situation really was, and after spending entirely too much time reading comments, I finally just got pissed off and had to call it a day. It just blows my mind how a company could seemingly do just about everything that we could hope a company could do when they make a mistake – notify its customers (via e-mail, blog, and on the Netflix website itself!), keep those notifications coming daily until the issue is resolved, and then even proactively issue credits to anyone who was affected by the issue! I don’t know what I’d have done if Sprint had actually proactively issued me credits every time their service sucked on my phone…
I know that ultimately the people who commented on this thing were the hardcore users who didn’t have anything better to do, namely because several cited ruined nights and weekends because they didn’t get the next DVDs in their queue, which even if you were really looking forward to something is just a tad bit over-dramatic. Particularly scathing to me were those who cited that they were going to leave and go to Blockbuster Online, which only tells me how deluded they’ve gotten if they actually think that they’re going to get a better experience from the evil that is Blockbuster – I think if it were a toss-up between watching my grass grow and going to Blockbuster to rent a movie, I’d be in the market for a new lawn chair mighty quick. Oh well – their loss.
Am I letting Netflix off easy? Granted, Sara and I go through maybe a movie or two a week from them and lately we’ve actually been sitting on them for quite a while, so clearly we’re not of the caliber of customer who is watching and returning DVDs just as quickly as Netflix can ship ’em to them. Then again, I’m sure that many would argue that ultimately customers with such high rental volumes probably aren’t making them any real money, anyways, so losing a few dozen heavy users here and there could very well be deemed akin to when Sprint cut loose a bunch of their customers with high levels of complaints last year. I’m certainly not suggesting that’s the intent here – I really think that this was just a prime example of shit happening and people are just so used to horrible customer service at this point from everybody else that they don’t even recognize a good thing anymore…
Until we see a day when it’s commonplace to get one of these from Bright House when the cable goes out or even Progress Energy when the power dies, I think Netflix is still the company to model your customer service after. Ha – if Progress gave me a credit every night the power flickered, they’d be paying me each month!
