Becky and I made some big strides in the new design for the World Wide Wood site this weekend. I’m pretty excited about it… it’s a very different look and feel We have a few bits and pieces to finish up, but the overall design is complete, including a new color scheme and layout. We think you’ll like it.

Saturday night we hung out with my cousin Mark ( of ***Izotope|http://www.izotope.com/*** ). His car gave us detailed computer-navigated directions to ***Taco Bell|http://www.tacobell.com/***, where we had dinner. Speaking of TB, they have this great new feature on their hot sauce packets: little hot-sauce-related quotes. For example: “The road to mediocrity is paved with ketchup packets.” or “Why order hot sauce when you can ask it nicely?” or “Mild: It’s the new ketchup.” (P.S. For anyone who cares, “ketchup” is the preferred spelling, while “catsup” and “catchup” are variants) Becky made a chocolate-cherry cake for dessert, which was beyond excellent. It had a devil’s food cake mix at its core, but did not use the recipe on the box. Becky can post the actual recipe she used, but suffice to say, it rocked. There was a lot left over, so I brought it in to work today. It was quickly devoured. One choice quote from the office crowd: “It’s like cake on crack.” Many thanks to my wonderful wife and her drug lab… err, I mean, kitchen. 🙂

After dinner we partook in ***quality entertainment|http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0098546/*** on DVD.

On the Mac front, the update to Mac OS X 10.3.3 was ***recently released|http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/macosxupdate_10_3_3.html***, and I’ve got that installed on the Pismo and Sawtooth at home. It just keeps getting better.

I have a pet peeve when it comes to fast food resturaunts and thier pricing schematics. Here’s the deal. Yesterday, I drove through McDonalds wanting some McNuggets and a small Diet Coke. I had a moment to look over the menu-board and was faced with a frustrating decision. The two items that I wanted were the same exact price as a ‘combo meal’ containing the McNuggets, a Large Coke and a Large Fries. More food for the same money. hmmm.

My good sense of Value tells me that I should order the combo meal. For the same price I get much more lunch. I would be the first to jump on such an offer in many other settings; ie, buy 3 tires get one free, or buy-one-get-one-free boxes of cereal. However, this time I was trying to be healthy and not eat all those french fries!

Yesterday’s experience reminded me of one I had a while back. I wanted a bagel and a small hot chocolate at Dunkin Donuts. I went in and ordered. The kid at the counter, being nice-doing his job, let me know that it was actually cheaper if I bought the large cocoa with the bagel (again a combo meal deal). I didn’t want the larger drink and ended up paying MORE for less! How aggrivating!

I wish that I could say that I didn’t understand why places do this, but I do. People respond well to marketing that offers them more for less. And the combo meals are easier and quicker to order. It would just be nice to spend money in correct proportion to the amount of food actually purchased. How frustrating to be penalized for wanting less!

Ok, this is a game almost EVERYBODY can play!

I thought up this little survey whilst driving around the North Shore tonight. All you need in order to participate is a radio with good FM reception and a scan button. Traveling in a car is a perfect place to take the survey, but you could also do it on a stereo at home if you get good reception in there (I only say this because the radios inside our house don’t get as much FM reception as the one in the car). If you don’t have a scan button, you can still participate, but you will need to scan through the stations manually. For the rest of the instructions, I’ll assume you’re using scan.

By the way, if you don’t usually listen to the radio in the car, you can still play. Just tune in to the radio for the purposes of this survey, then you can go back to whatever you normally listen to, or silence, or whatever.

To begin, tune your radio to the FM band, and set it to the lowest station. On my car stereo that’s 87.9. Next, hit the scan button to begin scanning through stations. Each time the radio stops on a station which has an audible, understandable broadcast, count it. If it’s too staticky to understand, don’t count it. At the same time, see if the broadcast is something you wouldn’t mind listening to – a song you like, perhaps, or a favorite talk radio show. If it is likable, keep track of it in a separate count, and try to remember which station, and who/what was being broadcast. But don’t stop the scan to listen, just let the radio keep scanning. When your radio has scanned to the end of the spectrum (107.9 or so), you should have a count of the number of stations which came in audibly, and a count of the programs that you might have actually wanted to listen to.

When you’ve got that, post it in the comments here, along with the name of any programs or songs you would have liked to listen to. Also, please make a note as to what time of day you were listening to the radio, and where you were (going?) at the time.

Oh, and feel free to go back and listen to the good programs, if any.