Tag: yesterday

RSS and Advertising

Random Thoughts

Yesterday I decided to go through and make sure my RSS feeds in my reader were up to date.  I ended up dropping a couple where they haven’t posted anything in a while (a year), and decided that while I was doing it I’d try to see if feeds were available for some websites that I visit frequently.

Out of all the web comics that I added to the feed reader, only one (xkcd) actually had the comic in the feed.  The rest, at best, gave you a feed item letting you know that a new comic had been posted and you needed to visit the site to see it.

Now, I am not stupid.  I know exactly why they do this… advertising.  See, most of these sites, in order to offset the cost of hosting the comic (bandwidth and all that), have advertisements.  And as is the trend of ads on the web these days, most sites don’t manage their own advertising directly, they sign up with a banner providing site and then throw snippets of code on their site that will request an ad from the ad provider.  They do have some control over the ads, usually the ability to block ads they don’t wish to support, and overall I suppose they do a good job of keeping the ads “on message” with the rest of the site.

My problem is… well, why can’t the code snippets live in the RSS parser as well and tack on an ad at the bottom of a feed item.  Same banner image (though not the Flash “punch a monkey”/”you’ve just won two free ipod nano” ads), a line of text and a link/url to follow.  The capability exists.  WordPress has a plugin that does exactly that by putting a footer on RSS items.  Of course, not all web comics are using WordPress, but if it exists for one system it has to be possible for other systems.

Anyway, the result is, after adding a bunch of comics to my feed reader, I then removed all of them except xkcd.  For all the ones I removed, I’ll go back to visiting them when I remember to, which is usually once a month.  Just think, if they put the comic and an ad in their feed, they’d make me a daily reader of both their comics and their ads…

Prince Caspian

Reviews

9 out of 13 nots.
for being good and fun, but not spectacular

I actually saw The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian on Monday at a screening, but since it opened yesterday, I figured I’d go ahead and put up a review.  Keeping in mind that on my ratings scale a 7 means “average, not bad but also not good”, I’m giving this movie a 9.  It was better than average, but…

Okay, so, I’ve never read the Narnia books.  Even so, from the opening scene all the way to the end, this movie did not surprise me.  Not once.  Every turn of the story was, to me, telegraphed.  I saw everything coming.  It was… formulaic.  Now, while nothing surprised me in a plot sense, the special effects were fantastic, the fight scenes were great, but without a plot that really drew me in it felt like any other summer special effects laden blockbuster.

I enjoyed the film… really, I did… it just didn’t knock my socks off.  See it, but I would definitely say to catch this one at a matinée or early morning price.

Wii`ve made a full 360

Gaming

So, yesterday morning, after breakfast at IHOP, before getting gas for the car, the wife and I swung through Target to see what was what.

The new Xbox 360 Elite was due out, and they happened to have one. Just one. They also had eight Nintendo Wii’s (left from the 20 they’d had just an hour before). In full financial abandon, we bought both.

This should be fun…

Sometimes it is Worth the Splurge

Random Thoughts

The wife and I finished painting the kitchen yesterday, mostly because he had to. The cabinets are next, and they have to be done before Saturday. Why? Because Saturday is when the appliances get delivered.

We bought a fridge a few weeks ago. Found a good deal on one at Fry’s. Yesterday, we went to go check out hhgregg since they had some sort of super summer tent sale going on. Everything was still too expensive. But, Sears had a dishwasher that we liked for a good price so we decided to hit Town Center Mall and go ahead and buy it. While we were there, as usual in any store these days, we walked around looking at the ranges. Mainly, for anything that is stainless steel (the appliance scheme we have chosen) prices start around $500 for crappy basic gas ranges and go up to… well, if you so desire you can spend $8,000 or more on a new range. Anyway, we are looking around and see this really nice range. Basically, its just about everything we want. Gas, range with the flat cooktop, oven that is conventional and convection, etc… but it retails for $1,499, and that’s the price it was the last time we were at Sears. This time though, they have the floor model on sale for $1,099, four hundred dollars off. We talk it over, we discuss the budget and we decide to go ahead and buy it.

Wait, it gets better.

So we get the sales woman, Renee, to ring up our stuff, range and dishwasher. We are chatting with her about the house, it turns out she purchased a fixer-upper house a number of years ago and is still fixing it up. Then she rings up the range and it comes up $587. The wife blurts out, “Do we get it at that price? Like at Kroger?” “This isn’t Kroger,” Renee says. She voids it and scans it again. $587. She selects the item and pulls up the details to make sure it matches. It does. Then she goes to find a manager. When she comes back, Renee smiles and says, “Looks like you get it at that price.” Awesome!

We walked out of Sears with a $1,499 range for $587. That’s just more than 60% off. I still can’t believe it even though I have the receipt right here.

It is kinda funny with this house. We’ve got a major bad news/good news vibe going. My car breaks down, we get the house. I get flat tires, the inspection goes well. I burn the crap out of my foot on my father’s porch (I was barefoot, the sun had been shining on the wood for about 6 hours, I’m an idiot), and we get a new appliance for 60% off. Also this Saturday the cable is getting installed, and I’m trying to cheat… since I’m a new Comcast customer, they want me to pay $99 for internet installation, which I don’t need since I can do it myself, however if I were an existing cable TV customer self installation of internet is free. So, I’m getting cable TV done Saturday, then I’m going to call and add internet to my account with self installation to avoid the $99 charge. If my karmic balance holds, I wonder where the retribution will come…

The Home Stretch

Random Thoughts

Yesterday’s home inspection went well. Nothing is wrong with the house that we didn’t already know about and budget for. The lawyers for HUD finally got their act together and the closing is set for next Friday. So in a week I will officially be a homo… err… home owner.

It feels good to finally get through all the mess. The waiting, the preliminary paperwork, the ninja utility work… yeah, the HUD contractors are complete idiots, so we snuck into the house one night and capped all the open water pipes and gas hoses so that we could turn the utilities on for the inspection. If we hadn’t done that I suspect our inspection might have occurred some time in August with us moving in perhaps before 2007.

This whole experience gives me absolutely no confidence in government institutions. Its not just the triple paperwork, but the sincere lack of job pride that these overpaid overbenefitted slackasses possess. I would be hardpressed to find people outside of cushy government jobs who work so little and manage to make it sound like its hard work.

Anyway, one more week and I’m done with them for good.

Moving On Up

Pictures

This cube is actually to the East side of my old cube.Yesterday, not only did I get a new house, but I also got a new home at work. If you dig back through the Phone Photos you will find a dismal picture of my cramped old little cube, the one with a server on the desk. So now I have a new phone photo of my new cubicle. Just one cube over from my last home, but this one is much nicer. Its probably actually the same size, but with 3 less filing cabinets, no server and a better desk orientation, it is all around a much improved use of space. The only things it lacks is a window view of downtown Atlanta and a door.

So things of looking better from this side of Sunday (I’ll tell you what happened on Sunday later)… I’m moving on up! To the East side! (This cube is actually on the East side of my old cube.) To a deluxe apartment in the sky! (No! No more apartments!)

And with the job calls coming practically non-stop, I think I’m finally getting my piece of the pie.

Covered in a White Sheet

Random Thoughts

Yesterday, on my way to work, there was traffic. Lots of it. As usual, I guessed there was an accident, and there was. Normally when I get stuck in traffic, by the time I reach the area of the accident the most I ever see is the last of the tow trucks pulling away. Yesterday was different.

The bus crested the hill and we could see the cop cars, the ones that had been passing by us for the last twenty minutes. The road is five lanes, two each direction with a turn lane in the center, and the cops have three lanes, the two southbound and the turn lane, closed and are routing traffic through the two remaining lanes. As we approach, I notice that there aren’t any tow trucks, no fire engine, no wrecked cars. As we pass, I see trails of blood on the street, and human sized white lump with tennis shoes sticking out of it. The white sheet is stained with red in places, and the shoes are pointing in directions that two feet on the same person shouldn’t be pointing at the same time. There was a truck and a couple of cars pulled over, and there was a man, the truck driver from his dress, sitting on the curb crying. About a dozen cop cars were around, and everyone was waiting for the ambulance or the coroner to show up. And then we passed and continued down the road on our route.

I assumed that the truck had hit a pedestrian, since he was the one who was crying and being consoled by officers, but I wanted to know what happened. So I started to search the web… all the local news channel sites I could find… nothing. It seems that there was another accident earlier that morning in the Atlanta area, a 19 year old kid who was drunk or high was on the wrong side of the road and killed a woman in a head on collision. I found lots of stories on that, but none on the accident I can seen the aftermath of. Finally I did find something, on Scan Gwinnett, a website where they scan police and emergency freqencies and post stories and recordings. It turns out the truck had nothing to do with it… however, the pedestrian had been crossing the street and was hit by three cars. Police are still investigating, and so far no one has been charged, and they don’t know why the man was crossing the street there and not at one of the nearby lighted intersections.

I’d never actually seen a dead body not in a coffin before, technically I guess I still haven’t since I only saw shoes and a white sheet, and the whole thing kinda creeped me out. I felt sad even though I didn’t know the guy or any of the drivers, and I also felt angry because it was his own damn fault for not crossing at the light. And today I feel… differently sad, because this guy died and three people will live with having hit him, and lots of people saw the accident and the aftermath, but it wasn’t important enough to rate coverage by any of the local news stations. I mean, I can understand having to pick and choose what stories get airtime in the limited broadcast, but there is no limit on a website. Did none of their reporters even cover it? Was a story even written?

Life…

Random Thoughts

Yesterday was my first real day on the new job. No more training, just go in, log in to the phones and start taking calls.

At almost the exact instant that I sat down at my desk and logged in, on the other end of the call center, a man slumped over at his desk.

A few people from the call center performed CPR until the paramedics arrived. The EMS team rushed him off to the hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

Last I heard, there was still no known reason for his collapse. It has been attributed to a possible coronary arrest or aneurism, and in all likelihood probably something he was unaware he was in danger of having.

Life is short, Live it well.

12 September 2001

Random Thoughts

Yesterday
The World Trade Center was destroyed by terrorists. The Pentagon was also attacked. Four airplanes were hijacked to do this destruction.
Sounds like some hot new action flick starring Arnold or Sylvester or even Wesley. But it’s not. It’s real.
I told some friends yesterday that I kept blinking my eyes, like I was trying to wipe away the last remnants of a bad dream. And it was true. I spent the entire day in utter disbelief that this could be happening.
There have been other attacks on the U.S. by terrorists in the past. But each of those existed in a world of “isolated incidents”. Yesterday was a concerted, organized, deliberate effort to end lives. No kid with a truck of fertilizer parking next to a building, but hijacked airplanes diving down at the world below that no amount of security or protection could avoid, let alone stop.
Terrorism has existed for a long time. But to us in the United States, except for “isolated incidents”, it was a news story, a movie, a book, a television show. It was on the other side of the glass, over the fence, in the neighborhood down the street. It was second hand, rumor. Yesterday it became real.
For thousands of people yesterday, life came to a sudden and final halt. Minutes before they were probably looking, like most of us who exist in a corporate world, forward to the weekend, even though one had just ended. They joked. They gossipped. They smiled. They laughed. They stressed. They loved. They died.
For millions of people yesterday, life as they knew it came to a sudden and final halt. The world crashed down around their ears. Some of them ran. Some of them stayed. Some of them charged into the discord to see if perhaps they could calm the storm, or perhaps just drag one life from the jaws of death and into the world of tomorrow.
For billions of people yesterday, a dream came to a sudden and final halt. The United States has for 200 years been the beakon of freedom and hope for those both within and outside her borders. The dream of the perfect life in the land of plenty is something that people from all over the world think about. Even if they never work toward it themselves, they knew it existed and that people actually lived there in safety and peace.
There is a dream that is America. It still exists, but for most that dream now seems further away than ever. Where it used to be just out of reach, within our grasp, it is now a few paces away, easier to see than to touch. And in seeing the dream, we see that it is tarnished.
We will recover. America will be strong. Woe be to those who have for the second time in a century tempted fates and awoken the sleeping giant.
Life will go on. People will work. People will live, and love, and hate, and laugh, and cry, and die. People will fly in airplanes, although perhaps giving a second glance to all those passengers who made it through the new security checks. People will visit tall buildings to look out and the beautiful skylines of cities all over the world.
But these people are not the same people from last week. They are more like those of 1941. The people of the United States today have been touched by something that leaves no thing unchanged. Its a message. “Time is short. Life is precious. Live.”
Me? I’m off to get a job. Life goes on, there are bills to pay, and I’ve spent too much of my short precious time here on this Earth doing nothing waiting for life to take me along for the ride.
It’s well past time I put both hands on the wheel.
I’m driving from now on.

14 November 1999

Random Thoughts

Yesterday I spent most of the day going through papers that I have saved for various reasons. Bills, receipts, awards, warranties… everything. It’s odd looking through an accounting of your life on paper. Things go through your head like: “What was I thinking when I bought that? Do I even still have it?” “Wow, it never occurred to me how much that date really cost..” “I made HOW MUCH last year?? Where is it all??” “Now there is someone I’d like to talk to again…” It’s just odd.
And then to sort all of it into 2 piles: ‘Need to Keep’ and ‘Goes in the Trash’. When you are a packrat like me, it takes all day. Even longer when you watch DVDs while doing it.
Then, after deciding what to keep, I had to sort it all out… put my life in order, if you will…
But its all done now, put it behind me, close that door, move on. Until the next time the papers pile up.
It brings forth a thought though… when you die, you become only the fading memories of others and the things you leave behind. Neither one is really you. The things you leave behind are only keepsakes of what you have done (and there are tons of things I have done and don’t have keepsakes for), stuff you bought, and the paperwork of your life. The fading memories of others… inacurrate at best.
No one could ever really know me from what others remember and from my stuff… and I guess thats what life is: everything else.
Sometimes I ramble nonsense, don’t I?
One of the movies I watched yesterday was ‘Tombstone’ and there is a line in there I like.. okay, there are a bunch of lines I like, but one that pertains a little to what I’ve been rambling about here. Doc Holliday is dying and he ask Wyatt Earp what he’s always wanted. Wyatt says “A normal life.” Its what most people say to that question, alot of us anyway. But Doc’s response to that is “There is no normal life, just life.” And that’s really true.
If there was a normal life, who would decide what ‘normal’ is? Who would you compare to? Who would you strive to be? But there is just life.. compare to no one, strive to be you… and don’t worry about the papers you leave behind… in the end, no one will really care that you purchased the Sobakawa Pillow.