Archive for July, 2010
Monday, July 19th, 2010
Took the train down to Portland Saturday, for the Metafilter.com 11tth anniversary meetup. Saw some well done graffiti, memories of when I lived in PDX, saw some street art I am pretty sure is new since I left. Saw one person I’ve known for a long time, met several other new folk. Took the train back up Sunday. Saw quite a few of the Seattle to Portland bikers.
While in Portland, saw a guy making and giving away balloon animals/flowers/swords on the MAX. Said old-friend suggested it was just portland “keeping it weird”, but when I got back to Seattle, had a woman on the bus (who I’m pretty sure I’ve run into on the streets of downtown before) who asked me:
1. If you win at penny slots, do they pay you out in pennies?
I replied that these days, they give you a ticket to redeem for cash, but yes, in the old days, they did pay out in pennies.
2. She asked, how much is 10,000 pennies. She was quite disapointed when I said $100.
3. She then asked, how many pennies in $10,000. (1,000,000 said I)
Then it was my stop to get off. I think there are just a lot of crazy people in the world.
Tags: adventure, amtrak, kind, meetup, portland, rail, seattle, train, travel, weird
Posted in photography, seattle, stuff | Comments Off
Saturday, July 17th, 2010
Congrats to Hampton Inn for being the only people with any rooms left in Portland for a short notice journey. De-grats for the ultra-cheesey hard-sell after I made the reservation. Poor guy can’t possibly manage to keep too many people on the line with a terrible script like that. What kind of marketing moron thinks that sort of crap was their best use of a semi-captive audience?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still staying there for the reservation I made, but next time….
Tags: advertising, aggressive, incompetence
Posted in cranky, wonderments | Comments Off
Friday, July 16th, 2010
Karaoke at Claire’s last night was a little depressing. Annie was a no-show, again. The really cute waiter wasn’t working. It was just me and the 80 year old guy, except for when one song. Who woulda thunk that having zero advertising would pay off so well =\
Tags: advertising, business, claires, fail, karaoke, seattle
Posted in music, restaurant, seattle, wonderments | Comments Off
Thursday, July 15th, 2010
What kind of person who claims to care about children can be so selfish as to deliberately leach money out of the paychecks of teachers actually teaching? I’d like to think that poor incompetent loser Shirley is just being taken advantage of by a crooked lawyer and some greedy children, but it sounds like she’s just another selfish sleaze feeding at the public trough, right alongside her friend-in-evil Roque Burio.
You have to be a special kind of cold-hearted to be able to live with yourself, stealing from children.
Tags: california, education, greed, shame, workplace
Posted in cranky, politics, stuff | Comments Off
Monday, July 12th, 2010
In response to the RealID debacle, I canceled my pre-orders for Star Craft 2 and for World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. They sent me a response to an emailed question today, which of course ignored my question completely, while including this gem near the end, “Over time, we will continue to evolve Real ID on Battle.net to add new and exciting functionality within our games for players who decide to use the feature.”
Translated from PR speak, “we’ll be making it mandatory right after the christmas rush, so fuck off”.
Yeah, I’m not regretting my decision to make leaving permanent. Welcome to the post-activision-world we all knew was coming.
Tags: activision, consumerism, facebook, fail, greed, privacy, warcraft
Posted in cranky, tech stuff, World of Warcraft | Comments Off
Sunday, July 11th, 2010
Ebay sent me word that a CD I had on permanent search had finally been offered up for sale, and at a starting price of only one penny no less. I put in my bid and end up getting the disc for $5 when all is said and done, woo hoo. It arrives, in original shrinkwrap it looks like, and plays perfectly. Thing is, I have no idea why I had been searching for the disc now. The band is from St Louis, so could be associated with some band I knew of back then, but it’s all neo-bluegrass from 2003, not industrial/alt/techno from ’95. Strange. Sounds nice enough so far.
UPDATE2: Figured it out. This is the singer from my favorite free CD ever, “Which Dreamed It” by Three Merry Widows.
Tags: ebay, music, mystery
Posted in music, wonderments | Comments Off
Friday, July 9th, 2010
I recently won a sculpture/pet-urn in a charity auction. It was graciously donated by Alex at CustomPetUrns.com. It looks really nice, and even though the auction ended up being a significant bargain compared to her usual pricing, when one of the tea-light holders broke in transit, even though perfectly packaged, she sent not 1, but 2 replacements. That’s pretty spiffy customer service for a transaction that’s a complete loss to begin with. If you have lost a pet, and are looking for an artistic way to keep the memory close, you could be well served by visiting her site.
UPDATE: Fixed pronouns, Alex IS one of those names….
Tags: auction, charity, customerservice, outstanding
Posted in arts, stuff | Comments Off
Wednesday, July 7th, 2010
I’m driving the scooter to work this morning, around 5am, and I come to a stop at a red light. The little crosswalk countdown starts, so I know I have 14 seconds-ish before it’s my turn. A car in the green direction comes up to the intersection and comes to a complete stop. He sits there, scooting forward a few inches and then braking, several times. When the light turns yellow, he floors it across the intersection, triggering the red light camera on himself.
All-right-y then. I’m going in this direction, thank goodness…you keep going in that direction.
Tags: cars, crazy, drivers, scootering, seattle
Posted in cars, seattle, stuff, wonderments | Comments Off
Tuesday, July 6th, 2010
Started out my Saturday at the Wooden Boat Festival on Lake Union. On the way there, the Beetle got unhappy, so he ended up parked the whole weekend, which left me limited to activities within scooter range, so no vintage car races. That’s OK, the zombies were out in force in Fremont. Children zombies, bride zombies, lady zombies, dude zombies, and of course, zombie-fighters.
Sunday was 4th of July fireworks at Gasworks Park. The day started out nice enough, I went kayaking without incident, but shortly thereafter, it started to rain. But by the time it was time for fireworks, things had cleared up nicely, and I got lots of pics of the action. Afterwords, got some cool stretchy light photos of boats and cars trying to leave the area.
Monday, helped out with the Starbucks Clean Up project. Found the remains of a mugging, and some strange bunch of poles and chains, and a fake rock, that smelt fuel-y.
Tags: boats, busy, holiday, lakeunion, seattle, weekend, zombies
Posted in photography, seattle, stuff | Comments Off
Sunday, July 4th, 2010
When the “check engine” light came on just as I was getting the Beetle to work, I was a little annoyed, but figured, hey, I’ve got the scooter as backup.
Then it started raining.
Thankfully, it’s stopped raining in time for the fireworks (pics uploading), and once the traffic is gone, the streets are dry enough to scooter home. I don’t have my long-johns at work, will have to get out the scooter-skirt, lest my legs freeze.
Tags: car, failure, holiday, luck, scooter
Posted in seattle, stuff | Comments Off