The big chill

I'm starting to see a pattern in my Blitzkriege* on Costco.

Regular readers (as opposed to those whose diets could use more fiber) may remember last month's encounter with the older gentleman wearing a viking helmet. This month, with another vacation day at my disposal, I once again girded my loins and ventured out for another unsupervised solo shopping run.

Thinking it might help me to avoid a few rafter gazers and hoping to minimise contact with the iPods and HD televisions, I decided to follow my usual path in reverse. I had loaded up on soft drinks, facial and toilet tissue, frozen meat, and a crate of lunch-size apple sauce cups by the time I arrived at the refrigerator room. I expected to find the packaged slabs of fresh and oh-so-sweet pineapple that Turtle and I loved. Instead, I nearly crashed into an elderly, white-haired wisp of a thing whose wheelchair was parked right in the middle of the cold room's narrow aisle. I apologised for nearly running her over, and as she turned to look at me I could see she was in some distress—just sort of shivering, like a Chihuahua on espresso.

Shivering, I say. In the refrigerator room at Costco.

"Ma'am, are you okay?" I asked.

"She said she'd be right back, but I'm cold," she said feebly. "Could you push me out of the freezer?"

I told her I'd be happy to, and asked if she needed me to get someone for her. She said no, that she'd be fine out where it was warmer; but as I headed on toward the beer and wine I kept looking around and wondering which of the hyper-active cell phone chattering women I saw was so self absorbed that she just left her mother (or grandmother) in the refrigerator and forgot about her. Very uncool.


* Technically, I suppose my sprints down the toilet paper and frozen chicken breast aisles are more angriffe than kriege, but who would recognize what I meant by Blitzangriffe?

[Cue crickets chirping. A lone tumbleweed blows aimlessly across the screen.]

Yeah, that's what I thought.

Meeped: Day 25

When last we visited the topic of my Comcast-to-Road Runner forced march, we had established that speeds were roughly comparable to what we had before, but Road Runner's SMTP servers were unusable except from a Road Runner-assigned IP address. By itself, this was enough to send me shopping for alternatives, but when our next Time-Warner bill arrived with a $17 price increase to our phone service The Brothers' fate was sealed.

Last Wednesday, we switched to Grande Communications, a small-ish company serving 48 francise areas in Texas (including [ahem] Midland and Odessa). In a rare stroke of luck, it turns out that they've just started providing cable internet (as opposed to DSL) in our neighborhood in the last six weeks.

Their technician came out when we were told he would and efficiently installed yet another box on the side of our house ("Collect them all!"). When asked if Grande was getting a lot of business that Time-Warner apparently doesn't want, he grinned shyly and said, "Yessir, that's a fact."

Within an hour, our cable TV and internet were switched over and working, but the phone won't be switched over until Time-Warner turns loose of our phone number. That's scheduled to happen tomorrow, and the cables should be buried sometime before Turtle and I head off to parts uncharted for Christmas.

The bottom line

• Not counting Time-Warner's $17 price hike for the phone service, we're paying about $50/month less for the same service tiers as we had with Comcast and Time-Warner.
  
• Grande's speeds are a bit faster in both directions than Road Runner's were.
  
  
• Grande's SMTP servers can be used from outside their IP range. All you have to do is pull your mail from the POP server first.* I can live with that.
  
• Our cable TV lineup is essentially the same as with Time-Warner with one notable and unfortunate exception: Outdoor Life Network (a.k.a. Versus). That means that I'll just have to make do with such Tour de France coverage as I can find on the internet—unless Turtle hits it big and we can afford to move up to the digital cable package.
  

* A side note: a day after the switch, I finally got a follow-up e-mail from Road Runner tech support, in which the author confidently assured me that most ISPs required their subscribers to be within their IP range to use their SMTP servers. "Most" meaning "only Road Runner", I guess. It was also explained to me that my best solution would be to just use another SMTP server to send my tx.rr.com e-mails, when I was away from the house.

I'm so glad I no longer own Time-Warner stock.

A belated Thanksgiving joke

This just in from my mom...

An elderly man in Phoenix calls his son in New York and says, "I hate to ruin your day, but I have to tell you that your mother and I are divorcing. Forty-five years of misery is enough."

"Pop, what are you talking about?!" the son screams.

"We can't stand the sight of each other any longer," the old man says. "We're sick of each other, and I'm sick of talking about this, so you call your sister in Chicago and tell her."

Frantic, the son calls his sister, who explodes on the phone. "Like heck they're getting divorced!" she shouts. "I'll take care of this."

She calls Phoenix immediately, and screams at the old man, "You are not getting divorced! Don't do a single thing until I get there. I'm calling my brother back, and we'll both be there tomorrow. Until then, don't do a thing. Do you hear me??" and hangs up.

The old man hangs up his phone and turns to his wife.

"Okay," he says, "They're coming for Thanksgiving and paying their own fares."

Windows to the past

I occasionally hear someone remark about a tree, the front steps of the county courthouse, or a piece of antique furniture, "Oh, if it could only talk." I feel the past too, but it's usually modern ruins that trigger those feelings in me. Maybe it's a derelict filling station or a weathered farm house with a tree growing through its roof.

The other day, I was digging through a CD full of images I'd scanned from photographs taken back in the early '80s, when I walked a lot and nearly always had my trusty Olympus OM-1N slung around my neck. This is one of them, perspective-corrected, color-tweaked, and with a bit of noise added. The "Main Street" sign is also my addition and sort of sums up my motivation for taking the shot of this abandoned warehouse that actually was on Main Street.

Meanwhile...

...back in the present, Turtle and I had a very enjoyable Thanksgiving with our adoptive grandparents, their family, and a few more strays like Turtle and me. The wine flowed, the dining room table groaned under the weight of a spread of such quantity and variety that it was overhwhelming.

We may not have spend the holiday with the ones that birthed us, but we were with family.

Where angels fear to tread.

Well, not fear precisely. More like "expect no good to come from the treading"—but in the end, It Is Done.

Here's what I've learned from my Blogger-to-Beta-Test-Blogger migration experience:

1. The actual migration process went smoothly. It took several minutes, but when I logged on to my new [low growl] Google account and checked out the results, I was relieved to find that my modified "classic" template had made the trip. Even better, my blog still displayed. The only obvious difference was the appearance of Blogger's navigation bar ("Click 'Next' to visit a porn site, or enter a search term to not find a term you know appears multiple times in your blog!").
2. In my sidebar, I've included a Blogger image linked to the Blogger dashboard for my convenience. I only had to update the URL to point to the beta test Blogger site and viola! Sorted.
3. As I type this post, I see the new "Labels for this post" field just begging to have some descriptive categories entered. Someone more organised, like Eric could probably explain why this sort of thing is useful, but my "classic" template doesn't support labels, and I'm unlikely to go to the bother of converting it to use the new JSP tags that beta test Blogger touts as being the second coming of Bill Gates. Putting aside the additional overhead of having to download a Gordian knot of JavaScript poo with every page, how random would I be if I started slapping categories on everything I post? (Hint: methinks "not very")
4. Google is considerate in not requiring your life and credit histories or even a blood sample in exchange for the required Google account. That's good news. It's not even that big a deal creating a new e-mail address for each profile I need prefer to create in order to keep my more-or-less anonymous blogs separate from the ones on which my Secret Identity is obvious. What gets up my neck is that it's reasonably obvious from Blogger's FAQ that the whole point is to force us into Google's system. There, they hope to entice us to use the various Me Too services they've added to compete with Yahoo! Going public and having a board of directors can't be a lot of fun.
5. Ah well... it's still FREE.

Foo and Turtle conversation #1

Foo: Ow! Why are you pulling my arm hairs?
Turtle: I didn't think it was attached.
Foo: It's an arm hair. Why wouldn't you think it was attached?
Turtle: It's white. I thought it was one of Bitsy's.
Foo: I suppose you think this one's Bitsy's too. [plucks at white hair on arm] Oh.
Turtle: See, old man?
Foo: Silence, impudent strumpet.

Foo and Turtle conversation #2

Foo: I'm kind of weirded out today.
Turtle: Weirded out? Why?
Foo: I don't know if it's because this temporary crown was killing me or what, but I was having some really bad dreams last night.
Turtle: Like what?
Foo: Well, in one you started levitating... floating about five feet off the floor. I told you to stop, and for once you listened right away. You fell on the floor, caught your leg funny, and broke your ankle so badly that some of the small bones fell out through a tear in the skin. I was freaking out, running around trying to find a zip-loc baggie to put the bones in before rushing you to the hospital.
Turtle: My leg's fine. See?
Foo: Yeah, well... no levitating, okay?
Turtle: I'll try to restrain myself.

A palm tree, DVDs, and thee

I wasn't going to do this. I really wasn't. I'm far too indecisive about such things, which is really my way of saying that I have a hard time thinking of what movies I've actually seen. On the other hand, that should make things easier since the ones I do remember must've made an impression.

Here's my list of the movies I'd choose to take along if I knew I were going to be exiled stranded on a desert island:

• Western - Tombstone
• Horror - Saving Private Ryan (hey... I was horrified)
  
• Sci-Fi - Serenity
• Musical - Rocky Horror Picture Show (I loathe musicals, generally)
• Comedy - Monty Python's Holy Grail
  
• War - Red Dawn
• Action - Hellboy
• Foreign - The Triplets of Bellville
• Classic (before 1960) - The Magnificent Seven
• Documentary - Ride With The Devil (not technically a documentary, but praised as being historically accurate)
• Bonus Pick (any genre) - Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels

Lost in translation

Some of your comments regarding my awkward years reminded me of an anecdote that ties together my 6th grade year and our parallel discussion about dialects:

It was the start of the first school year after we had moved to Kentucky, which meant that on the first day of 6th grade I had had only about a month to get used to the Southern twang. As I sat at my desk with my purse-sized pencil case, filling out the usual first-day-of-school forms (did any of us really know our dad's work phone number or that of our family doctor?), the little girl at the next desk spoke.

"Could ah borry a pin?" she politely asked.

"I'm sorry," I said. "A what?"

"A pin," she repeated, as though to a piece of wood. "Kin ah borry a pin?"

"A pin?"

"Yeah, a pin."

We traveled a couple thousand miles around the earth's axis* while my brain feverishly tried to make some sense of what this cute little blonde girl was asking me. Ultimately, it failed.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I don't have any pins."

"Yes you do," she said, now infuriated. "You've got a whole bunch of 'em, ah reckon."

"What... pins? Why would I have pins in my pencil case? All I have are pencils and pe--"

I blushed.

"Oh. You mean a pen, right?"

"Yeah," she muttered, certain I was mocking her. "An aynk pin, so ah kin fill out this here paper."

I sheepishly handed her a brand new Bic ballpoint. What in God's name kind of place had I landed in, where Es were Is and Is were As? Most perturbatory.

I did terribly on my spelling tests, that first year.


* In fact, it was probably more like 2 or 3 miles, but sometimes applying science to something just sucks all the fun right out of it. Or pops it with a pen.

Whur y'all fruhm?

Gwynne got me again with her posting of a quiz about American English dialects. My result:

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop." [Not any more. I compromised on "soda". -Foo]
The Northeast
The Midland
Philadelphia
The South
Boston
The West
North Central
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

Long weekend wrap-up

Which is long? The weekend, or the wrap-up? The weekend, definitely; the posting, probably.

Apart from the cruise that Turtle and I took back in May, I went into October not having used as much of my vacation time as I thought I had. As a consequence, I found myself needing to burn (or lose) 13 days by the end of the year. I've elected to take a handful of Mondays and Fridays off, which makes for some nice long weekends, and never mind that my days off are mostly booked with last-minute medical and dental appointments. Gotta use up that flex spending account, you know.

Friday

Sat at my computer until 10am or so, and then went out for a bike ride. It was windy, I'd been fighting some kind of bug, and I hadn't been on the bike for a couple weeks. After 11 miles, I decided I wasn't feeling it and threw in the towel.

After lunch, I headed down to Plano, where I had an appointment to have an echocardiogram. This, because of something my internist's PA thought she heard during my routine physical. There we were, talking about cycling and whether or not it was strictly necessary for me to have a prostate exam this year, and she dropped the bomb:

"So... what are we doing about this murmur?"

I chuckled. "Go on, pull the other one."

"No, really," she said. "You have a heart murmur."

"I've never had one before, and I didn't have one when I came in earlier this year," I said. "And that was to make sure some tightness in my chest wasn't heart-related."

"Well, you have one now," she said, apologetically.

So I had the echocardiogram, courtesy of Pam, the pleasant young technician who turned the monitor so that I could watch the valves of my heart flapping open and shut. I was struck by how much an echocardiogram resembled a sonogram.

"So, can you tell whether it's a boy, or a girl?" I asked innocently.

Pam blinked. "Excuse me?"

"You know, can you tell its gender from the picture?"

She searched my eyes for a long moment and correctly concluded that I was full of crap.

"Behave or I'll take away your pillow," she said.

"Yes'm."

Saturday/Sunday (core weekend)

Lots of the usual. Goofing off in my PJ bottoms, unraveling the mysteries of CSS-oriented design. Watching The Libertine on DVD (an unexpectedly grim experience). Going to church. Eating too much pizza (both days). Re-watching X-men III: The Last Stand and catching some interesting details I'd missed the first time around. Reconciling several months' worth of bank statements.

Scintillating, no?

Monday

Got up, showered, and headed to the dentist's office for a crown replacement. There was nothing really wrong with the existing one, aside from the fact that my previous dentist did a botch job on it. After more than five years, I still couldn't chew anything more resistant than a banana on that side, and the blasted thing was oversized enough that I frequently found myself masticating my own tongue. Why do it now, after so long? Gotta use up that flex money.

Got on the bike again, felt good, and managed to finish up before the construction workers awoke from their siestas to mess with me. When I returned from riding, there was a message from my internist's office on the voicemail, the gist of which is that my heart is perfectly normal. Either it's perfectly normal to have a certain amount of murmur, or the murmur has mysteriously disappeared.

The human body is so weird (and so is mine).

Awkward years

Over at Hubbadoo, Anne has thrown down the gauntlet with her Awkward Days post, in which she challenges those most likely to wear a pocket protector to publicly out themselves. The prize? The dubious honor of the King Dork crown.

Okay, I threw in that last bit on my own—primarily because, putting aside the fact that mine were awkward decades, I'm about the closest thing you'll ever see to a shoo in.

In her picture, Anne was in 5th grade. I was in 6th grade at the time this was taken and looked two years younger. Contrary to any impression you might have based on the highwaters, I would not hit my underachieving growth spurt for another three years.

And when I did, I was still a dork. At least the girl I had a crush on tipped me off to the fact that the mere existence of a top button didn't mandate its use. I can still remember her mocking laughter, but the lesson was helpful never the less.

C'est la vie. We can't all be tall or cool or pretty, and yet... there are still surprises.

Many years too late for it to have helped my self esteem, I gained an interesting insight during a phone conversation with my next-youngest sibling. She still lives in the town where I suffered through adolescence, and she works with some of the people with whom I attended high school. She'd been talking with Vince (not his real name), a football letterman who was a class or two ahead of me, and he said to pass along his regards.

"That Foo... he was pretty cool," Vince told her. "I remember he always seemed like he really had it all together."

I couldn't recall ever having had a single conversation with the guy. He was tall, athletic, had a blinding smile, and usually had a couple cheerleaders swooning along beside him. If anyone had asked, I would been positive this was a guy who had no idea we walked the same halls every day. And I would have been wrong.

We're all Losers; we're all Cool. You just have to ask the right person.

I passed!

I'm sure I will, at least. After more years with my employer than I care to remember, I finally had to take my very first drug screening test. Thanks, Messrs. Graham, Leach, and Bliley.

This morning was when The Examiners came around and, heaven help them, I was prepared. You might ask how one prepares for such a test. Or not... but I'll tell you anyway.

• Onions
• Asparagus
• Lots of strong, black coffee

There's nothing in my body that wasn't prescribed by a doctor or purchased at a fast food drive-through, so I'm confident I'll pass with flying colors. However, it may not be a perfect score.

I expect there could be deductions for going outside the lines.

Cool tool

I stumbled across a very handy Firefox extension this morning and wanted to share. Those of you who don't poke around in the innards of your blog templates and wouldn't know a <div> if it crawled up your leg and nipped you on the bum will not be interested.

When deconstructing an existing page layout on the way to putting it all back together using CSS, the biggest challenge often is figuring out how the existing document is organized. Sure, you can run the code through Tidy and hope the indents are right so that you can match closing tags with their mates, but it's an imperfect solution, especially for pages with a lot of content and multiple sub-sections.

That's where the View Source Chart extension for Firefox comes in. After downloading and installing this extension (written by Jennifer Madden), you'll be able to right click on a page and have View Source Chart display a hierarchical view of the entire document, complete with handy little boxes that give you visual cues as to what goes where. Even better, you can click on individual sections to collapse them and get them out of the way to make finding the higher level sections easier.

And, oh yes... it's free.

Zoom zoom

After a week of working at it, I've finally got a new car. The process was relatively painless, the one fly in the ointment being that the first salesman who ran out the door and grabbed on to my leg when I paid my first visit to the dealership was green as a tomato worm. He had only been selling cars for a few weeks, didn't really have a lot of answers to my lengthy list of questions, and ultimately cost me a couple wasted trips to the dealership. Things went more smoothly once The Hoary Veteran (a very pleasant fellow whose real name was Bruce) took me in tow when I visited during one of The New Guy's days off. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

My New World

Part of the challenge, as it was explained to me, is that Mazda has decreased the dealers' allocations of 5-doors (or compact wagon, as I've also seen it) for the 2007 model year. There I was, standing in the showroom with my checkbook in tow (I even brought my own pen!), and the sales staff were having trouble coming up with more than one to show me.

"Well, we have this black one," The New Guy told me. "It's pretty sharp, huh?"

"It's good enough for a test drive, and it does look sharp," I agreed. "But the only black car I've ever owned as a Texas resident is the one I owned when I moved here from out of state. Never again."

The New Guy gave me a look utterly devoid of comprehension.

"You know, because black is so hot," I said, attempting to bring him along.

"Definitely," he said, nodding and flashing a grin that went just beyond conspiratorial but didn't quite reach lascivious. "Black is very hot."

I suspected we weren't on the same wavelength, so I cut to the chase.

"I will not be buying a black car."

With that settled, we set about checking inventory to see what was available, only to discover that all the other Mazda 3 hatchbacks had manual transmissions. After 10 years of daily commutes in the beep-and-creepy Dallas traffic, one of my primary reasons for buying a new car was to get my left foot off the clutch. Those lovely creatures with their 5-speed manual transmissions and sporting a variety of lovely paint schemes were dead to me.

To shorten the story a bit, I ended up working with Bruce and Eric The Acquirer to find me a car. They were expecting delivery of a gray one (along with Phantom Blue and Aurora Blue, one of my three preferred colors) in a couple weeks but would also do a search to see if they could get one sooner from another dealer. The next day, I got a phone call from Turtle saying that The New Guy had called to say that they'd found one, that it would be driven in the next day, and what time would I like to come in to take delivery. I called back and asked if 10am would be good, and he said it would be just great.

At 10am yesterday, I showed up at the dealership to find that not only would the car not arrive for another three hours, but it was The New Guy's day off. Bruce and Eric were as mystified as they were apologetic. Since I was already there, I sat down with Bruce and worked out a few details regarding my trade in before heading home to wait and fall asleep in front of some really lame horror movie starring the post-car accident Mark Hamill.

Cutting further to the chase, at 6pm I drove off the lot. Still fumbling to figure out where all the light switches were and how to work them, I pulled on to the highway and immediately found myself in the midst of a traffic jam.

Ahhh, I thought. The blessed relief of an automatic transmission.

It figures that the day after I buy a new car, Texas can't spare me a little sunshine for pictures. But it's gray, after all, so call it a theme.

Meeped: Day 3

The bad news:

I can only send e-mail from my Road Runner e-mail accounts using SMTP from my home computers. When I'm at work (which is about 80% of my computer time), I'll have to either use RR's webmail, or another account—like, say, from one of my personal domains. Someone representing himself as a tier two support person for Road Runner posted on the forum at dslreports.com and confirmed the way their SMTP authentication works:

our smtp server authentication is IP driven no other authentication is supported... so if you are on a foreign connection its not going to work which is a pain i know !!!!!!!

Not a huge hardship, now that I've migrated my domains from Yahoo! Domains to GoDaddy so that my e-mail forwards actually work dependably. However, there are places where I'd like to provide an e-mail address that I can POP (that lets out my standby Yahoo! e-mail) and that isn't associated with my unique and very recognizable domain names (see my previous comments about online paranoia).

The good news:

It looks like the dust is starting to settle a bit, and speeds at the Foo household are comparable to what we had with Comcast. According to Speakeasy's speed test:



I can't remember what we're supposed to be getting, but it's a point of reference. Certainly, it's better than what I get at work:



In fairness, I should point out that the connection at work has to deal with a whole office of bandwidth hogs like the guy who sits for hours and watches old episodes of Whose Line Is It Anyway? on his computer.

Another bit of good news is that I did some checking into Grande Communications, which may or may not be the one cable alternative to Time-Warner/Road Runner in our neighborhood. I'll be looking at their pricing for comparable speeds, of course, but I did some initial research into their phone/internet/cable TV bundles, and it looks like going with Grande would be about $60 cheaper for comparable features. Of course, there are still all the tariffs and taxes to factor in, but I would argue that a savings of $20/month and ditching Time-Warner could still be considered improvement.

Meanwhile...

I'm having a vacation day so that I can go get my annual physical out of the way and then mosey—'cause that's how I do things when I'm on vacation—up to the Mazda dealership to see if I can make a deal for a new car. I even ran the old one through the car wash last night, and then came home and vacuumed up all the mulch and breakfast biscuit crumbs that had taken up residence in the carpet and upholstery over the past [mumble] years.

October searches

• gravity pulls in allen,texas Allen does not suck.
  
• misfire peristalsis Yeah, well... you make me puke too, so it evens out.
• meaning of bad penny You ain't from around here, are ya?
• list of abbreations I see you've started without me.
• sweeturtle I couldn't agree more!

Deep thought

Parents of conjoined twins: if you have girls, please don't name them Sybil and Phyllis. Kids are cruel. [I shouldn't have to explain this one to you, but I will if I have to. -Foo]

Meeped: Day 2

After receiving absolutely no response to my questions about procedures for doing the migration manually, without installing RR's ActiveX poo, I finally succumbed to social engineering and did exactly what I was expected to do. I gave in and just ran their bloody wizard.

I now have a stupid, grinning roadrunner cartoon permanently embedded in my Outlook Express e-mail client, an ActiveX program I can't find to remove, and a mostly-working internet connection. Browsing doesn't seem to be appreciably slower, as long as I'm viewing a page that's already in cache, and I'm able to receive e-mails from the POP3 server.

Unfortunately, attempting to send an e-mail to an address in some other domain besides Road Runner gets me something like this:

An unknown error has occurred. Account: 'FooRider @ RR', Server: 'smtp-server.tx.rr.com', Protocol: SMTP, Server Response: '421 Service not available', Port: 25, Secure(SSL): No, Server Error: 421, Error Number: 0x800CCC67

or this

The message could not be sent because one of the recipients was rejected by the server. The rejected e-mail address was 'xxxxx@yahoo.com'. Subject 'Re: grrrrrrrrrrr', Account: 'FooRider @ RR', Server: 'smtp-server.tx.rr.com', Protocol: SMTP, Server Response: '550 relaying mail to yahoo.com is not allowed', Port: 25, Secure(SSL): No, Server Error: 550, Error Number: 0x800CCC79

The first is no surprise, given what I've read on forums regarding Comcast-to-Road Runner migrations suffered out on the left coast. But does Road Runner honestly expect me to give up being able to send e-mails from my work machine by SMTP?

That's exactly the question I asked in my second missive to Road Runner's tech support. I don't actually expect to hear back from them this time either, but those folks are not without a sense of humor. From their tech support page:

Road Runner is proud to offer industry leading tech support through a variety of channels. All of our online tech support channels are available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Outlined below are your technical support channels:

Technical E-mail Support

Try our Technical E-mail Support where you can get answers in hours not days.

"Hours not days"? Good one, guys. I just can't stop chuckling.