touchy about tipping

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I know I’m probably going to push a few buttons with this post, but I’ve just got to know … does anyone else think that holiday tipping is just a little bit excessive???

I ask because over the weekend, we’ve gotten solicitations from two people already that honestly would’ve never really came to mind – our garbage collector and the newspaper delivery person. The garbage collector probably rubbed me the wrong way the most, as I went out to collect our empty garbage can Saturday afternoon to also find in our driveway a little card in a plastic bag filled with rocks to hold it down, with the card saying happy holidays and thoughtfully listing our specific driver’s home address. Now that I think about it, I guess I have seen the newspaper one before, as today I picked up my Sunday paper in several pieces spread across the driveway because the bag had broken and amidst the papers was a similar card and return address.

Now I should note that I thought I was pretty good at tipping where I was supposed to – wait staff at restaurants, bartenders, valets, whoever cuts my hair at Supercuts, and even the bus driver at the airport – because I’ve always known these to be service industries where tipping is accustomed. Mind you, this makes sense to me because these people either A) make a lower than normal wage and tipping makes up the difference, such as in the food industry; or B) do something that they don’t have to do, like the bus driver at the airport welcoming us home and lifting our bags onto the shuttle bus for us. What I don’t get is the rest of the folks who also seem to expect tips, even though they already make a normal wage. People who work behind the counter at delis or convenience stores who then put out “tip jars” are a good example of this…

I don’t know, I guess I’ve always just considered how much I pay for garbage collection to cover all the bases, or likewise with the newspaper and the “delivery charge” that they automatically tack onto my bill as it is. I do reporting at my regular job and I certainly don’t get tipped for every single chart or spreadsheet that I e-mail out! Maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way … that it should be considered more of a Christmas bonus than just a tip, but it still just sits funny with me. According to the charts at the bottom of this article, we’d be looking at almost $100 just on the low end of holiday tipping if we opted to follow this trend. Does it make me a Scrouge to think that that sounds just a little crazy?

great timing…

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Also, apparently TextAmerica decided to pull the plug early and now my old domain (ssevener.textamerica.com) doesn’t even point to my MoBlog anymore, so I have no idea how I can even get my pictures from the last three years off. I tried logging in and downloading them from the admin page, but apparently they don’t have enough money for bandwidth anymore so after multiple attempts and lost connections, I finally gave up. I might e-mail them later asking for help, but they haven’t been very responsive lately so I won’t be holding my breath for any length of time.

I have no idea who else to turn to for a Moblog, either. I’ve looked into Flickr, but I’m not impressed with their 200 pic photostream limit (please correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m understanding this to mean that at 205 pics, the first 5 won’t show up anymore … I can still link to them, but no one can browse to them anymore). I wish it was something that I could just host myself or integrate into my galleries … anybody know of a moblog / upload via e-mail plugin for Gallery? 😉

Gallery grief

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I spent a good deal of time fighting with Gallery today, trying to get multi-site working properly so that I can start rebuilding my personal photo galleries that I’ve been neglecting for quite some time. I almost thought I had it working … twice … but now I’m about at the point where I’m ready to wipe the whole thing and do a clean install if things don’t start looking up soon! I’ve got my new gallery installed as a multi-site and now all of the included modules actually show up (they weren’t earlier today), but nothing happens when I click on them in the admin menus and they should show me a whole array of options. I’ve tried reinstalling portions, resetting database passwords, but now I haven’t the foggiest idea what else could be wrong…

Sadly, I think it’s just mucked up at this point. If I’m seeing things right, I might have as many as three different installations of Gallery on the server – the original one from way back in the day (which should’ve been on 1.0 but apparently is now running 2.0), the one I installed to replace the previously-mentioned version, but did because I was still tweaking (running 1.6, but now it won’t even launch), and the multi-site version that our wedding website and also today’s install are running from (wedding gallery is surprisingly working fine … until now … crap).

Oh yeah, and I think there are separate instances running for Just Laugh and L7 Comix, too, so that makes five copies running on one server! I think it’s time for some clean-up!

I was afraid to clean house until just now when I tried to login to the wedding version to verify if the modules were working there and that one is now dead, too (don’t tell Sara!), so that’s it – I’m going to make one final pass to make sure I have copies of all my photos, then I’m deleting everything in every Gallery directory out there and starting from scratch! If I do this right, one install should be able to support everything, with multi-site nodes for the wedding album, all of my personal stuff, and Lori’s sketchbooks over at L7 Comix. The Just Laugh one, whatever it even is, will likely fall to the wayside because I want to rebuild that whole site in 2008 anyways so it’s really not worth setting up Gallery for it at this point and half the content will likely end up getting replaced anyways.

Wow – I guess I know what I’m doing this weekend now, in addition to cleaning the house and finishing Christmas lights and putting up the tree! Regardless, at least now I know what needs to be done and it’ll probably go a whole lot more smoothly starting fresh, so it’ll be worth it. Whew…

GABF16

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Marge: What if we show Lisa we can sleep in her room without being frightened?
Homer: Ok, Marge, but don’t be surprised if a Snuggle Monster shows up!
Marge: Well, I hope he’s accompained by the How Was Your Day Monster and the Foot Rub Monster and the Let Me Just…
Homer: Don’t worry, he’s not showing up.

a little of this, a little of that…

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Bad
I hate Quiznos.

Well, at least I do as of 2:04pm today when I stopped by the location closed to my office and learned that they’re discontinuing my favorite sandwich, the Smokehouse Beef Brisket. Quiznos was one of the few sandwich places that still did a barbecue sub – Subway dropped their shredded barbecue chicken a few years ago and Firehouse doesn’t have anything even close on their menu. I was so bummed I actually walked out of the store without getting anything at all. What’s a guy got to do to get a decent barbecue around here?!

Good
The first of our Christmas lights are now officially up!

Mind you, it’s literally two strings of icicle lights spanning only half the front of the house, but it’s a start. It’s taking longer than I had anticipated because I’m being really picky on my design – I’ve literally spent the last three nights swapping bulbs between strings to get the proper color combinations. Crazy … but it’s gonna look sweet when I’m done, I promise! My goal is to have everything up by the end of the weekend, so we’ll see…

another ego-tripping cop…

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http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2007/11/pistol-packing-positivists-our-enemy-in.html

This kind of thing just gets more and more embarassing every time the evidence shows its face. It seems pretty reasonable to me to expect an explanation of what you did when you’re getting a ticket, but instead here we see just another fine example of the captain of the football team throwing a fit and resulting to violence when his victim wasn’t 110% subservient.

Yeah, that’s exactly the kind of person who I want serving and protecting me.

Bill Nye the Restraining Order Guy?!

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Bill Nye Seeks Restraining Order for Ex
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gSlWjRhFBKUoAdPLWI8jr_172VpAD8T2G8182

Sadly, even the coolest of the cool have woman problems. Hey, crazy lady – you mess with Bill Nye the Science Guy (Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill!), you mess with thousands of inspired science geeks from around the globe!

post-Thanksgiving bullet points…

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Shopping on Black Friday … Well, Sort Of
Yesterday evening, Sara and I went out to peruse some of the bigger stores to see if they still had anything worth picking up at low, low prices. You’d never catch me up at 4am sitting in line anywhere, but I don’t mind cruising around later to see what DVDs I can pick up for $5 each. It wasn’t nearly as good of a take as last year – I ended up with about 8 or 9 titles, and a couple that I had my eye out for were already sold out, but apparently the word on the street in general was that the sales just weren’t comparable to what we saw last year. Which is weird, seeing that even though you didn’t have any new consoles this year, the Wii is still impossible to get, plus there seems to be a lot of push for Guitar Hero 3 and Rock Band. Disney also had some good DVDs out recently, so I don’t understand why there weren’t better sales, but whatever. We ultimately ended up hitting K-Mart (although I don’t know why), Wal-Mart, Target, and Best Buy before heading home to watch a movie and enjoy some pie.

Wii … Needs to be Cheaper!
So I hadn’t really given it much thought until Sara put the idea in my head, but now it looks like we’re going to have to get a Wii eventually. I’ll admit that I was a bit reluctant because it looks an awful lot like exercise and I’m not exactly nostalgic for that, but after going through some of the games – Mario, Zelda, some of the carnival and olympic games – it looks like it could be kinda neat. Unfortunately, given our current financial status after moving and getting ready for the wedding and Sara starting school again next year, we just don’t have the $250+ it’d cost to pick up a system and a game or three for Christmas this year. At this point, though, we’re kinda hoping that if we can hold out until next Christmas, not only will it be cheaper and allow us to get more than just one game when we buy it, but maybe we’ll even have a little wedding gift money to pay for it!

Go, Go, Recycling!
I’m very happy to announce that today was our first official recycling pick-up day. Now it might not sound like a big deal to most, but I haven’t really been able to recycle since I moved down here because every apartment complex that I’ve lived did absolutely nothing to encourage or even allow residents to recycle. I did finally start bundling up my newspapers and driving them to a collection site myself, but it’s such a pain compared to having curbside pick-up like we had up north. But now that’s all behind us – this morning, our garbage man picked up two bags of trash and one bag of recyclables, which I think it a pretty good effort! Anything to help do my part…

Preparing to Light Up the Night
So I’m finally allowed to start putting up Christmas lights!!! I’ve spent some time conceptualizing what it is that I want to do, trying to figure out just how I can make the coolest presentation without bankrupting us at the same time. I’ve got something in mind now and I don’t think I’ll have to buy too many new sets for it, so I’m pretty much heading out to the store just as soon as this is posted!

Thanksgiving Disney?
And last but certainly not least, I’m pretty sure that we’re going over to one of the parks tomorrow, as long as I can at least get one or two more writing things done tonight so I don’t feel like I completely wasted my entire 4-day weekend! I’m kinda feeling Animal Kingdom this time, as we really don’t go there too much except when we’re staying overnight and can just pop in for Everest and then hop a bus over to another park, but I’m curious to see what they do for the holidays as far as decorating. There’s also a chance that we might get to eat at the new Yak & Yeti restaurant that opened recently over by Expedition: Everest before it starts taking reservations and the dining plan makes it impossible for us to get in on a whim.

Sometimes I think that the Animal Kingdom gets a bad rap because it’s an amazingly designed park – it’s just also very different from the Magic Kingdom or Epcot or MGM and I think when people have limited time, they’d rather do lots and lots of attractions. But you simply can’t argue that the attention to detail there is second to none – Joe Rohde and his team did an impeccible job when it came to recreating some of the great pride lands of the world on 500 acres of swampland in Central Florida! It’s too bad that Disney is probably done dumping money into that park for a while now – it’d been cool to see some of the other developments that could help turn it into a full-fledged 8am-9pm operating park like the others. Oh well, it’ll get there eventually…

Now off to Target!