Opportunity

You know those commercials by Honda where Mr. Opportunity knocks on your TV screen to tell you about a great new sale they are having at your local Honda dealer?  I realized today he knocks on the back of a CRT based on the glass sound it makes when he comes up and tells you, “I’m Mr. Opportunity and I’m knocking.”  I was trying to think of how they could update that to become more relevant as people start buying either LCD or Plasma TVs.  The problem is, these new technologies don’t make a distinctive sound when you knock on the screen.  A dull thunk would not be nearly as understandable.  That’s just one more thing technological innovation has made more difficult.

Some of you may know about the new OS X that came out; Snow Leopard was released just last week.  I had pre-ordered it from Amazon a while ago so I’m not just waiting for it to arrive in the mail.  Apple did something that I hope is going to become more of a trend.  They decided that the next version of their OS would be only $29 to purchase and install.  For those of you keeping track, that’s approximately 1/10 the cost of an upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate.  That and the fact there are 7 version of Windows 7 makes life a little more difficult.  I will admit I really like Windows 7 though, Microsoft did a good job updating their OS to make it a giant leap up from Windows Vista (which was a huge flop in its own right).

I have a friend’s laptop to look at over the weekend because it’s starting to get borderline unusable for them.  I realized just what I was getting into when it took about nineteen minutes and fifty seven seconds for this thing to boot up and get all the startup programs running.  I can’t even imagine living in a house where this was the main method for connecting to the Internet let alone trying to do anything on there that involved more than clicking a single icon.  After a lot of virus scans, a lot of program deletions and a lot of applying update, the system is running with some semblance of speed.  It’s not the newest laptop you’ve ever seen, but it’s in good condition and it doesn’t seem to be ready to die.

One of the guys at work and I are watching the show “The Colony” on The Discovery Channel.  Basically, they take ten volunteers and put them in a representation of a pandemic torn world.  They have to use their knowledge and each other to do everything from creating a fresh water source to finding a place where they are safe at night.  It’s very intriguing and it’s given me a lot of ideas about how I’ll have to survive when the zombie attacks come.

Phone

I got a new phone in the mail because my last one drowned.  It didn’t drop into a standing body of water either.  You know how they have pictures on buckets and other vessels saying that it only takes a small amount of standing water in the bottom of a container for someone to drown?  That’s apparently true with cell phones as well.  It was in the door of my car and my car only had a sun shade (that’s just a roof with no walls) when we got more rain in one afternoon than we had in the last six months combined.  I was in a room with no windows so I didn’t even realize it was raining.  By the time I walked out in the evening, my car already had a nice little lake on the floor and my phone, which was in the door, no longer worked.  It was hard to make it through those five days without a phone, but I managed without too many problems.  I now have around 25 voicemail that I will not ever listen to.

Two nights ago we got a big enough storm that my power went out.  I don’t think I would ever have noticed save the fact that the stupid microwave and my alarm clock are both flashing their time.  I wish they had small batteries in them to keep that from happening.  My alarm clock does, but I’m convinced it doesn’t accomplish anything because it always resets when I unplug it or the power goes out.  I could replace the batter to see if that’s part of the problem but I haven’t seen a 9V batter on sale for a pretty long while.  True, I haven’t really been looking for one but I feel I would have noticed those things if they were hanging at the checkout line of the grocery store.

The shelf of my entertainment center was sagging because it was from WalMart and I don’t think these things are made to the highest quality standards.  Basically, there is about a quarter inch of space between the shelf and the top of the drawer and in the very middle, the shelf was resting on the drawer.  I don’t really use that drawer so I was trying to figure out a way to make this whole drawer-shelf-contact thing go away.  Conveniently enough, I got a cardboard box in the mail a few days ago so I just tore a piece off, folded it in half and jammed it between the drawer and the shelf.  Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor I am not, but it addressed the problem; that’s all I was really looking for.

The Group

Our group of people here is getting bigger and bigger as more people start moving into the area.  It’s getting even harder to get the message out to everyone about any plans we have for the evenings or weekends; this is definitely a good problem to have!  We’ve kind of started a text tree where someone sends the message out to some of us and we all keep it going to everyone else.  It means some people may get the message twice, but it also means most everyone gets the message.  We’ve got to come up with a better method but this will work for now.

We saw two movies this past week.  The first was G.I. Joe which I didn’t think was going to be very good even though I was really excited about seeing it.  It turned out to be a really good movie if you ignored all the very convenient plot twists.  There were points where the characters figured something out well before a real person would have because it allowed the story to continue without stopping to explain what just happened.  It was G.I. Joe after all; it’s allowed to be a little fantastical.  After all, it’s a movie adapted from a show about GIs fighting outlandish numbers of enemies and always coming out on top.

I really need to get to the post office at some point this coming week.  I have a few packages to ship out but I don’t really have any good point during the week that I can do that.  I work during the hours that the post office is open and on Saturday, I always manage to forget that I have to send stuff out.  One of my goals this week is to go during lunch one day and get all this stuff out of here!

This little guy recently set a world record by operating for 24 hours on one battery.  Why can’t we get efficiency like that in cell phones?!  I left mine in the rain and it no longer works, but you can be sure that when I get my new one in the mail in a few days, it will not get anywhere near 24 hours of constant use.  Come on, cell phone companies!  Keep up with the latest trend and give me more talk time!

This coming Thursday is this blog’s fifth birthday!  It’s been a lot of fun and here’s hoping for five more years!

Nights

We had a group of people in a different time zone for this past week and I volunteered to move my work hours so those guys always had someone they could get on the phone.  I found out that I really like working evenings because when everyone at work leaves and I have the office to myself, I can get untold amounts of work finished!  It was eerily quiet, but that just meant there was no one trying to get something from me and I was able to devote all my time to the people I was supporting via computer and phone.  It was pretty awesome.  That and I arrived at work way later than usual which meant a little extra time in bed every morning.  Friday I switched back to the regular schedule and got to go to PT again.  The only thing I don’t miss about PT is having to shower and go to work right after we work out.

I finally got to hang out with some friends who just moved into town not too long ago.  These were some of the people who were in New York with me and it just so happens that we were all eventually located in the same town for work.  We’re going to have to put together some trips to the mountains (hills, really) around the area that we can go biking, hiking and camping some weekends.

I found a game online that is basically a repackaged version of the game MasterMind.  That was the game where someone put a random assortment of colored pegs in holes and the other person had to guess which pegs were where.  I was never very good at it when I played with my brother because I don’t think I grasped the concept of patterns and critical links in different colors and placements.  Now, it’s fairly simple and challenging at the same time.  I have to think to play, but it’s not enough to make my brain hurt.  Hopefully it has the same warding-off-Alzheimer’s properties and sudoku puzzles and crosswords do.