Never mind the MSG, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, or the rest of the laundry list of ingredients… I think it’s the “spices” that make Chex Mix Stop and Shop Brand Original Squares Mix taste so great. Yum.
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I’ve been a customer of ***SprintPCS|http://www.sprintpcs.com/*** since May 12, 2000 – over four and a half years. Because of my loyalty, Sprint has offered me 10% off of all of my recurring monthly fees for the life of my contract if I renew for another two years. Considering that I’ve been happy with them for a while now, I think I’ll bite. Sweet!
I needed to send a package today, so I headed over to the Post Office. I was about to go in to the counter to conduct my business, when I passed a curious looking machine – an “Automated Postal Center”. Nobody was using it, so I checked it out and used it to send my package. It has an ATM-like kiosk, which is connected to a scale. You can use it to look up ZIP codes, print postage labels, even sign up for things like delivery confirmation. Within a few minutes I had weighed my package, selected the destination, printed labels with Priority Mail postage and delivery confirmation, paid with a debit card, and deposited into the adjacent collection bin. The machine was remarkably easy to use, though if you’re accustomed to working with an ATM, there will be a few differences. So if you’re in the US, look for an “APC” at a Post Office near you. It’s pretty cool! Here are a few photos from the adventure:
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A full view of the APC|ppp
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A closer view of the APC screen and keypad|ppp
I hope you’re all enjoying the banners here at World Wide Wood. We currently have 31 unique photographic banner images, and one of them is selected at random each time you load a page on our site. Collect ’em all!
Sure, lots of people claim to have pretty old computers in their homes. But many of those folks actually have a fairly late-model computer that they use for their main day-to-day tasks, and just keep those old computers around for kicks. Our main computers, on the other hand, really are old – relatively speaking. I really started thinking about this when I saw that RAM for our laptop had showed up on Apple’s ***clearance hot deals|http://hotdeals.apple.com/clearance/index.php*** page. So here’s a look at our old-but-still-kicking computers:
* ***PowerBook G3/400 Pismo|http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/powerbook_g3/stats/powerbook_g3_400_fw.html***. Manufactured in August 2000, purchased by me in January 2001.
The Pismo has had numerous upgrades and replacements over the years: a new power adapter, new LiIon batteries, new power/sound board, maxed out RAM, upgraded hard drive. I think the hard drive may be on its last legs, but I still have one month left in its three year warranty. I’d love to replace the Pismo with a newer PowerBook or iBook, but I’m not about to take on an additional $1000+ in debt right now. Not when we’re trying (successfully) to pay down our debt. Besides, we (Becky mostly) get a lot of use out of it. Becky uses it to play a mean game of Freecell at ***Pogo.com|http://www.pogo.com/***.
* ***PowerMac G4/450 Sawtooth|http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac_g4/stats/powermac_g4_450.html***. Manufactured in December 1999, purchased by me in September 2003.
It’s got a decent graphics card (nVidia GeForce4 MX) which helps out with Quartz rendering in Mac OS X. This is the machine I mainly use at home.
* ***HP Pavillion 6730|product=58757&lang=en&lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&docname=bph05747***. Purchased some time between 1998 and 1999.
The Pavillion, well… it is used when we need Microsoft Word for some reason, and occasionally I boot it up to make sure it still works, but other than that, it is left alone.
These days, people are trying to let statistics do the talking.
Before the election, this op-ed in the Boston Globe claimed that Massachusetts and the Northeast were leading the nation in family values, in this case because of Massachusetts’ lowest-in-the-nation divorce rate. This is thanks to the predominantly Catholic population and the higher-than-average level of education.
Then we have a newsbrief in the Globe that says New England is the wealthiest region in the United States, but ranks the lowest in terms of rate of charitable giving. Yep, we’re a bunch of filthy-rich scrooges. Would other states continue to give at the same rate if they were making as much money as New Englanders?
Finally, there is the infamous list of states ranked by average IQ, with the Presidential candidate they voted for. It “showed” overwhelmingly that the states with the highest IQs tended to vote for Kerry. That chart was based on data from this page which now notes that some people have debunked the chart, and that a journal that originally published the chart issued a retraction. This page claims to debunk the original chart by using more balanced data. The results are all so subject to error it’s not even funny. I blame both sides for trying to gauge the intelligence of a state’s voters by the results of standardized tests that not every voting-age citizen has taken.
Tonight, after we finished dinner at the Salem Taco Bell, we pulled out of the shopping plaza parking lot as usual, in the right hand turn lane. We merged onto Highland Avenue, which at that point is a four-lane divided highway, and traveled in the right-hand lane. Just a few hundred feet later, a black sedan pulled out of a driveway to the right, and swerved right into our path. Here are five scenarios as to what might have happened next:
What Really Happened
I hit the brakes, bringing our car to a stop and allowing the sedan to safely merge onto the road.
The Correct Boston Driver Scenario
I swerved quickly into the left-hand lane to avoid the sedan. I did not use my turn signal, and I did not check behind me to see if any traffic was coming up in the left-hand lane. I narrowly avoided disaster, missing the car coming behind me in the left lane by inches. He honked his horn. I honked my horn. The guy in the black sedan honked his horn too. Some guy a few blocks away heard it and started honking his horn.
The James Bond Scenario
I flipped a toggle switch on my dashboard, deploying both the port and starboard missles hidden underneath my car. I then pressed a button on my steering wheel to fire both of the missiles directly at the sedan. The sedan exploded in a ball of fire, and I hit the accelerator to zoom right through it. I then pulled a 180-degree turn, deployed the machine guns, and gunned down all of the cars behind me – just for good measure. Also, my car was a brand-new BMW roadster.
The Future World Scenario
I pulled up on the yoke of my flying car, skimming quickly over the other car, wishing that my car really could made that cool, zippy sound that The Jetsons had me hoping for.
The Absolutely Crazy, Never Going To Happen, Not In A Million Years, Fantasy Scenario
The situation was avoided entirely because the driver of the black sedan actually stopped, looked at the road, realized a car was coming, and decided not to pull out into traffic!
Outside it is cold
I ate hot meatloaf for lunch
It was made with love
Another Boston Globe ***article|http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2004/11/09/charlie_to_begin_new_ride_with_modern_fare_system/*** on the ***MBTA|http://www.mbta.com/***’s new CharlieCard notes:
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Some riders, particularly the young, had no clue about Charlie.
”I thought maybe it had something to do with the Charles River,” said Kara Kitner of Boston, emerging from a Green Line trolley. When the reference was explained, she predicted, ”People won’t know.”
Ted Holmes of Newton agreed. ”Ask anyone under 30: Charlie just isn’t going to mean anything,” he said. ”It was almost 60 years ago.”
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MBTA General Manager Michael Mulhern said the T’s marketing experts warned that Charlie might not be recognized.
”It did come up when we were weighing the pros and cons of the different names, but we wanted a card with a strong connection to Boston, Boston’s history, and at same time weave in some MBTA history, and the song does that,” Mulhern said. ”It transcends generations. And now we have a fictional character all our own, that is uniquely Boston’s, that other transit systems don’t have.”
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As for some younger T riders not getting the Charlie reference, [interviewee Coco] Delgado said, ”Get the Dropkick Murphys to record a version of it, and you’re golden.”
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Out of a brief survey of the two people available at the moment (my wife and me), both respondents were familiar with the song “Charlie on the MTA.” Both of us are under 30. Becky is familiar with the song because, she says, “I had probably heard it on the oldies station.” I, on the other hand, am familiar with the song because one of my computer science professors at ***Gordon|http://www.gordon.edu/*** told us about it to illustrate a point.
I guess this just means that other young folk will have to become more in touch with their cultural heritage. What a shame!
Allow me to direct your attention to a few new features I’ve added to the site. If you’re reading this via RSS, you won’t see any of these changes, so be sure to visit prwdot.org to see them.
* We have added some new names to the list of Friends on the left. Be sure to check them all out – they represent people whose blogs we regularly read, or at least people we keep in touch with on a regular basis (Corey, for example, doesn’t even have a blog).
* Also at the footer of each entry is an ‘Email This Entry’ link. This will bring up a form that allows you to send a link to that entry to the email address of your choice. Use this if you see an entry you would like to send to a friend, or if you would like to send yourself a note to read it when you get home. This isn’t all that new, but nonetheless it appears to be underutilized.
* There is now a ‘Contact Us’ page, that pulls together all of the information on how to get in touch with us. Find it on the left hand side of our page under ‘Our Site’. It includes a link to a fun, user-friendly email form. 🙂
* Finally, if you haven’t figured this out already, the photographic banner at the top of our site changes each time you load the page. There are over 20 different banners to be seen, and all you have to do to see them is click around on our site! (Simply clicking on the banner over and over will work fine, but we’d rather you click around on other pages too!)
Enjoy, and as always, feel free to share any comments or suggestions!
