Every One A Capone

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The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has made available its complete list of tax delinquents. You can ***see the top ten business and individual delinquents|http://dorapps.dor.state.ma.us/disclosure/home.asp***, or ***search for delinquencies by delinquent type and/or the city|http://dorapps.dor.state.ma.us/disclosure/home.asp***.

See if your favorite restaurant is on the list, then boycott them until they pay up! Or, see if your friends and neighbors are on the list, and refuse to return that hammer you borrowed until they cough up the dough!

Hours of fun!

Camera Back!

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I got my camera back today! Hooray!

I kept copious notes of the whole process, for the benefit of other Canon users who may run into the “E18” error that ***I experienced|http://prwdot.org/?p=archives/001725***:

The Timeline

April 19: I contacted Canon customer service, and spoke to a representative named Donna. After discussing the E18 error on my camera, she entered my personal information into their system, and told me to send the camera in to the Powershot service center, using a traceable, insured shipment method, along with a letter explaining the problem and a copy of the original receipt. As my camera was still under its original 1-year warranty, she said that the problem would most likely be fixed at no charge to me.

April 20: Sent camera via FedEx 2 Day from Mail Boxes, Etc. I included a detailed letter which noted the name of the representative I spoke to, all of my contact information, and the serial number of the camera which I was sending.

April 22: Camera delivered to service center in Elk Grove Village, IL

April 26: Canon performs initial inspection and evaluation of camera.

April 28: Canon completes their repairs to my camera.

April 29: I receive an acknowledgement from Canon that they will be performing the repairs to my camera at no charge to me, under the terms of the 1-year warranty.

also on April 29: Canon sends my repaired camera via FedEx 2-Day.

May 3: FedEx attempts to deliver package to our apartment, but nobody is home, so they leave a Door Tag.

May 4: We sign the Door Tag and FedEx leaves the package later in the day.

The Results!!

I must say, Canon was very meticulous in repairing and returning my camera. Not only did they return the camera, but they also returned the letter and receipt I had originally sent. In addition, they removed the mailing label from the package I had sent, and returned it in their package.

They included a letter with their package, with details of the service they performed. A couple of excerpts:

“The service on your equipment has been completed. As part of Canon’s commitment to its customers, you can be assured that your eequipment has been returned to Factory Specifications.”

“Replaced the optical unit.adjusted,updated,cleaned and ck all functions.”

Canon seems to have done an excellent job bringing the camera back to factory specifications. In fact, it is performing even better than before. When the lens retracts, extends, and zooms, it’s much quieter and smoother than it was when I originally purchased it.

Now that I have had the camera repaired through the warranty, it has a new “repair warranty” which lasts for the next three months. So hopefully, if anything else happens to the camera, it will be soon. I expect that it will be fine, as long as I don’t drop it or bump it or anything like that.

Let the [digital] photography resume! 🙂

The Story Of Us

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Many of you may not know the story of how Becky and I met. I realized that, as far as I can tell, we’ve never mentioned it on the blog. So I thought it might be fun to write it out for all to read.

The first time we met, technically, was during orientation at ***Gordon|http://www.gordon.edu/***. We think, as best we can remember, that it was Monday, August 25, 1997. But that exact day isn’t terribly important, since we didn’t even realize we had met each other until well after we started dating. In any case, we had both taken the opportunity to go on a bicycling tour of the Wenham and Manchester areas, so we bicycled to the Manchester Yacht Club along with a group of other freshmen and some orientation leaders. After that day, however, we really didn’t run in to each other.

Until our junior year at Gordon. We ran into each other frequently towards the end of that year, through mutual friends. Sometimes I would eat with a friend who was eating with a friend who was eating with their friend, who was Becky. 🙂 There was one dance where we met up, and I had wanted to dance with her… but having just hurt my leg (at the dance), I really wasn’t feeling up to it. The pivotal moment, however, came one night in Ferrin Hall.

Becky was in the habit of coming over to Ferrin to watch ***ER|http://www.nbc.com/ER/index.html*** with her friends who lived on the first floor. The second floor had a lounge with satellite TV, and my room was just across the lobby from this lounge. Every so often, I would come over to the lounge to heckle them as they got all weepy over their favorite weekly show. One night, when I was sitting in the lounge, and Becky was watching ER, a commercial for ***Taco Bell|http://www.tacobell.com/*** came on. Becky exclaimed “Man, I would kill for some Taco Bell!” (or something of that nature – Becky) I replied, “Whoah, you like Taco Bell? I don’t know anyone up here [at Gordon] who likes it!” A connection was made. Some trips to Taco Bell ensued. It was a great time for Becky and I not only to enjoy our favorite fast food, but to chat, listen to music, and hang out.

After junior year, Becky and I corresponded over email. She was living on Martha’s Vineyard working at ***the bank|http://www.edgartownnationalbank.com/***, and I was living on campus at ***Gordon|http://www.gordon.edu/***, doing my co-op at ***CBD|http://www.christianbook.com/***

Once we started our senior year, we started seeing each other more frequently. There were more trips to Taco Bell, and frequent inter-apartmental visits, as we lived just a few floors apart in Tavilla Hall. On one fateful day, September 16, 2000, we took a trip into Boston to seek some slightly more advanced Mexican food. We ended up walking around the whole city, as the first two restaurants we had hoped to visit were closed. We ended up eating at ***Burrito Max|http://www.greenlinemenus.com/Restaurant.asp?RestID=304***. Later that night, I visited Becky in her apartment, where I told her how I felt about her… luckily, she felt the same! Phew!

One year and eight months later, we were engaged… five months after that, we were married. And that’s our story so far! Hope you’ve enjoyed it… and remember to check our our ***timeline|http://prwdot.org/?p=timeline*** to help put everything into perspective.

Soda Roast

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I have just finished eating today’s lunch – leftovers from one of Becky’s Crock Pot creations. As usual, it was delicious. I think it’s called Soda Roast, or Coke Roast, or something like that. Here’s the recipe:

qqq|one 3-4 pound roast
one can of coke
one pack of onion soup mix
one can of cream of mushroom soup
cook in crock pot for six to eight hours|qqq

Yum.

In other news…

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***Just remember, when you see this gag in a movie three years from now, you read about it on Yahoo! News first.|http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/topstories/*http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/ap/20040503/ap_on_fe_st/party_barge_accident***

Ai-Ya!

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Have I ever mentioned to you how much I love Amy Tan? I do. Her novels based on Chinese-American immigrant families (especially mothers and daughters) always lure me in.

You may have met Amy the way I did, through her Book, The Joy Luck Club, or the movie of the same name. My latest read of hers was The Bonesetter’s Daughter.

Throughout the book we jump back and forth between life stories of a Chinese immigrant (LiuLang) and her Chinese-American Daughter, Ruth. Tan takes the reader on a journey that travels from present-day San Francisco to the early 20th century China and back again.

Although Amy Tan writes about a Chinese mother/daughter relationship, there are universal connections to every reader; dealing with Alzheimer’s, romantic relationships, and much more. I find Tan’s novels to be engaging to read and offer insight into the Chinese-American culture that I would not find elsewhere.

Timeline

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I’ve been working on a bit of a pet project – a timeline that sets out, side by side, events from Becky’s life and my life, our life together, and other random events from our lifetime.

It’s far from complete. You can expect to see more entries if you check back in the next week or so, but you can go ahead and take a look:

***Our Timeline|http://prwdot.org/?p=timeline***

For those of you who don’t know us so well, I hope this helps you to get to know us a bit better. And for the rest of you, I hope you’ll simply enjoy looking back at the events of the past 25 years. 🙂

News, courtesy of Magpie

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I’m toying with a new feature, which you’ll see if you look at the left hand side of our page. By using kellan’s Magpie RSS – PHP RSS Parser, I can have our main index script automatically pull in RSS newsfeeds directly from other sites, and display their latest items right on our website.

Right now I’ve got the last 10 “Top News” items from Yahoo! News, and Apple Computer’s latest 5 press releases. The possibilities are endless. Let me know what you think!

A Feed Fixup

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For those of you subscribed to our site via RSS feeds, you’ll want to update your links as follows:

RSS 2.0
RSS 2.0 Comments Only
RSS 1.0
Atom

I have created a simple php script that will pass our newsfeeds through the same routines that our regular blog entries go through. That way, the links you read within our newsfeeds will look like regular links, instead of the internally coded link style we use, with the asterisks on each side and the bar in the middle.

Hope this makes some people happy! 🙂

Movie Wrap-Up

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Friday night, Becky and I rented ***Johnny English|http://www.johnny-english.com/***, with Rowan Atkinson playing an inept British intelligence agent. The concept of the movie, like Atkinson himself, is a bit goofy… first, all of MI:6’s top agents are killed, leaving only Johnny English to carry out the most crucial of tasks. Then, a French prison-construction mogul (played by John Malkovich) attempts to seize the throne by killing off all of the other legitimate heirs and asserting his own dubious claim. He plans to use his new power to convert England into the world’s largest prison. J.E. suspects the Frenchman, and takes it upon himself to reveal this nefarious plot. In any case, the movie is filled with typical Mr. Bean-esque physical humor, so if you’re a Bean fan, you’ll probably like it well enough.

On Saturday, Becky and I went to ***Chunky’s|http://www.chunkys.com/*** to see Sony Pictures’ ***13 Going on 30|http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/13goingon30/***. It’s a sickeningly sweet comedy, kind of like “Big”. Only in this movie, Jennifer Garner’s character fast-forwards in time along with the rest of the world, where Tom Hanks’ character in Big simply gets older while the rest of the world remains the same. There are the usual “oh, wow, I’m older” gags, some “80’s revival” gags (like when the whole dance club does the dance from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”), and a healthy dose of romantic comedy thrown in. It certainly doesn’t rank as one of my favorite movies, but at Chunky’s price of $6 for an evening show, plus eating dinner in the theater, it was a worthwhile evening.

Lastly, on Sunday, since Becky had gone away for the night, I went out to see the type of movie that she has absolutely no interest in seeing: ***Hellboy|http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/hellboy/*** (another Sony Pictures film). Now, I didn’t know anything about Hellboy other than what I had seen in the trailers and read about on the website. I haven’t read the ***comic|http://www.darkhorse.com/zones/hellboy/index.php***. So I am probably not the best person to judge. But in my opinion it didn’t live up to the quality of some other comic book based movies I have seen recently such as Spider-Man or X-Men. There were some great special effects, some cool action sequences, a few good one-liners here and there. The plot was a sci-fi mainstay, of the “ancient-evil-returns-to-wreak-havoc-only-to-be-stopped-by-our-ultimately-undefeatable-heroes” variety. The characters were just a tad on the shallow end throughout, and the final conflict was resolved far too simply. While it is true that the Spider-Man and X-Men movies also used typical sci-fi plots, they at least gave you a little more to chew on in terms of character depth and quality performances. My advice – wait for it to come out on DVD or VHS, then just rent it. Or at least wait for it to come out at discount theaters. Certainly don’t pay the $9.25 I spent to see it. The best part of that evening was the ***Pepperblue Steak|http://www.panera.com/menu_sandwiches.aspx*** sandwich I had at ***Panera|http://www.panera.com/*** before the movie. Yum.

Going forward, I’m very excited about this summer’s ***I, Robot|http://www.irobotmovie.com/***. If you’re going to base a movie on something, you might as well base it on a concept by one of the world’s most respected science fiction authors. ***Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow|http://www.skycaptain.com/home.html*** looks fun, too. And of course, ***Spider-Man 2|http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/spider-man2/index.html*** (hmm, another Sony Pictures movie…).