Return of the once and future Bishop…
So. After a month of fighting with my hosting company and getting my accounts alternately locked and unlocked I’m finally able to post something. Yea!
However I’ve probably lost what little readership I once had. Thanks 1&1. If anyone knows of a reliable hosting company please let me know.
So here is a ‘by the numbers’ catchup of the last 40 or so days.
- Comcast is gone, long live FIOS. Yes, I *finally* after 2 years convinced the wife to ditch Comcast and get Verizon FIOS. The final selling point is the $50/month savings. A great after the fact selling point is that every time she sits down to watch TV I hear her mutter something like ‘it looks like a new TV! Are you sure he didn’t clean it with something?” Yes, I’m sure. I was in the room the entire time. Keep in mind this is the standard package from Verizion, not HD. They are currently out of HD tuners because of the ‘get a free HDTV’ promotion so I had to settle for SD for now. It looks amazing! No kidding. It really does look 100 times better that Comcast SD signal. I’m not in a hurry right now for HD, seeing as how football season is over and the Sox’s don’t play ‘real’ games for another few months.
- In addition to tossing Comcast we are tossing AT&T. Yes we are going to have to pay a huge termination fee, but it’s just not worth dealing with their crappy service, ridiculous customer support and phantom charges. I’m *still* getting a $10.95/month charge for a subscription service I never subscribed to, they can’t find in their system as ever being bought and have never heard of. The biggest drawback is I have to give up my iPhone. So far, after 3 days I don’t really miss the phone, I only miss a couple features. Most of which I will probably be able to replicate on the new phone (orange LG enV) given enough time. One thing I won’t miss is the $40/month we save with the switch. Who-Ah!
- On a somewhat lighter note, I’m looking into heading back into the contract/consulting world once again. Nothing at all wrong with Molecular, in fact it’s a great place, but with the direction Beck’s ailments are taking it makes less and less sense for me to be working 45 minutes to an hour away. So if anyone knows of a Flash/Flex consulting gig, let me know.
- Finally, for those that have been asking, yes I am actually going to manage to get my garden going this year. Beck and I have finally settled the locale debate and we have purchased the first round of seeds. For now just the basics such as corn, lettuce, beans, carrots and the like along with several herbs like basil, parsley and rosemary. I still need to sit down and plan out the physical layout of the site, but that is the easy part. It’s the first step in the ‘monkification’ process. Something I’ll go into detail later once I actually figure out what it means.
Wallpaper Wednesday
This week I’m doing something a bit different. Rather than give you a single image for a background, and rather than create and original I thought I’d give you all something that has been brighting my day for well over 2 years now.
I found the first of a series of wallpapers on deviantart.com long ago and immediately fell in love. I laughed so hard I cried. When my colleges saw my computer desktop they all wanted a copy.
So without further ado, I present…
Issues with current restaurant ‘trends’
So I was talking to a friend the other day about the crappy service we got when we went out to lunch, and the next day I came across an article on AOL about 11 ‘trends’ at restaurants that annoy the writers, so I figured it was a sign.
I’ll sum up the points below instead of making you weed through their little Flash-like gallery
- Â Reciting the specials
- “I’m Sorry, We Just Sold the Last One”
- Bottled Water Up-selling
- Up-selling In General
- Listing the Birthplace of Every Ingredient
- The ‘Tini Suffix
- “Would You Like Freshly Ground Black Pepper On That?”
- Trios & Duos
- Over-pouring
- Prix Fixe Only
How to really get started getting things done.
The gang over at the Cranking Widgets Blog (my new idols, BTW) have put the harsh light of reality on the GTD concept, and it’s not all bad.
The problem is not with the tools, they’re doing exactly what they’re supposed to do - the bidding of their master (that’s you). Seriously folks, this stuff can be done with a couple boxes of super-cheap folders, a pantload of blank paper and a low-tech calendar.
January 11th edition of ‘…you might be an idiot.”
For those that didn’t follow my old blog, I had a (seldom used) feature called ‘…you might be an idiot’. It was based on the old Jeff Foxworthy line of ‘…you might be a redneck.’ (which I am by the way, Southern born and breed *grin*) but bumps it up a bit and throws in a bit of the Darwin Awards vibe. So basically, if you do something stupid, and get caught on film or tape you might show up here. And you might be an idiot.
So for the 2008 inaugural edition of YMBAI (kind of pronounced ‘yam be’, and yes Americans like to make initials into words, deal) we have…