Category: Miscellaneous

I’m sitting here in the gate area of the Fort Lauderdale airport, waiting for a flight back to Nashville (via Atlanta). We returned yesterday from a 9 night cruise (which I’ll post about later). It only took about 5 or 10 minutes to get through the security check point, which was better than when we left Nashville a 11 days ago.

On the cruise ship, they had stations and crew members just about everywhere you looked dispensing hand sanitizer. I guess that’s to help prevent any illnesses. Sitting here in the airport, there’s a lady sitting to my right hacking her head off with a bad sounding cough. It strikes me that since it’s no longer practical to bring your own hand sanitizer to the airport, they should have those same stations here that the cruise ship has. At least that way you’d be able to sanitize your hands after going through security and whatever.

The flight we’re on is overbooked. In the next gate they’re asking for volunteers to take a later flight in exchange for a travel voucher. If we were taking a non-stop flight, that might be an option for us, but we’re connecting in Atlanta and that’s not an option for us. Now there’s a flight that’s overweight due to a large number of bags that have been checked, and they’re calling for one or two folks from that flight to take a later one in exchange for $400 in “Delta Dollars”.  Sorry, but if you want to inconvenience me that way, it’s gonna take cash, not credit towards a future flight.

We’ve been here at the gate now for an hour; our flight is scheduled to leave in another hour. It should start boarding in about 30 minutes. I’m surprised at how busy the airport is this early (7 am EDT). The Nashville Airport was busy early too.

The big bottleneck is, of course, going through security. For the 10 or so gates that were accessed through the checkpoing we went through, there were about 5 or 6 x-ray machines. The bottleneck getting off the ship was going through customs; for the 2500 passengers getting off the ship, customs had 5 customs agents.  The phrase “I’m from the government and I’m here to help” comes to mind.

Enough rambling; the laptop battery’s getting low and I need to secure it before boarding. Later this week I’ll be posting my thoughts on the cruise and traveling in Florida.

I hope everyone has a safe and happy Christmas today.

Merry Christmas!

Hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving. In addition to it being Thanksgiving, today is also the anniversary of this blog. It’s also the birthday of one of my granddaughters. She’s nine today and we all miss her very much.

Not much else to blog about. The racing season is over, and Hendrick won another championship. Champ Car wants Nashville to put up $2 million to have a grand prix here. Uh, yeah right.

I daresay that blogging (for all my readers, both of them) will be light the next few days. Got a lot of stuff to do around the house and I’m working on a programming project for a client, so the time off from my real job will hopefully let me get most of that done.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

We noticed we were being charged $20 for voice mail on our AT&T bill this month. The only problem is, we turned off voice mail at least a year ago. Turns out it was from a “third party billing company” called ILD Teleservices, AKA Members Edge.

I called the number AT&T gave me to get this “service” canceled (877-448-3232). A recording thanking me for calling Member’s Edge told me my call was important to them and that all of their agents were talking to other Member’s Edge customers. I waited on hold for about 10 minutes, then a beep and silence. I called Member’s Edge back about 30 minutes later, was told again that Member’s Edge considered my call important, and after about another 10 minutes on hold, “Sonya” answered. I explained to her that I’d never heard of Member’s Edge or IDS Teleservices. She explained to me that someone signed up for Member’s Edge. That person turns out to be a guest in my house.

I told her that our guest didn’t have the authority to sign up for anything that would add charges to my bill, but she insisted that didn’t matter; if they put in a birth date that shows they’re over 18 and a mother’s maiden name, that’s enough for them.

After a little back and forth, she offered to issue me two month’s credits. I told her that I had charges for three months and that wasn’t acceptable. She basically told me that was all she could do. So I told her that I’d just not pay the charge on the current bill and they could sue me.

The bottom line here is, if I know your address and phone number, I can go to the Member’s Edge web site and sign you up for stuff you don’t want or need. If I’m unscrupulous, and I work for one of these companies on commission, I could sign up a whole bunch of people and make a ton of money. There’s literally no confirmation done by your phone company that these charges are legitimate. Their system just takes the info from the third party, and if the info matches, they add it to your phone bill.

AT & T does have a free service that will block third party billing, but you first have to even know about it, and second you have to call them and opt in to it. This is backwards. If I want to allow third parties to put charges on my phone bill, then I should have to call the phone company to tell them to allow it. At the very least, I should have to speak to someone at the phone company to verify that I’m signing up for something to be billed to my phone bill.

I’d suggest that everyone call their phone company right now and sign up to block third party billing to prevent companies like IDS Teleservices/Member’s Edge from submitting charges to your phone company. Otherwise you’re leaving yourself open to having to pay for charges for a service you didn’t sign up for. And by all means, read the fine print on these web sites that try to entice you by giving you free things…free until you find out you have to “complete” the sponsors’ offers.

I don’t get tipping. I mean, I understand the concept of paying someone a percentage of your food bill, but I don’t get it.

You’re supposed to tip someone between 15% and 20% for waiting on you. That means if you have a $100 restaurant bill, you have to kick in at least another $15 to avoid being considered cheap.

If your bill was $20, then that’s supposed to be at least a $3 tip.

So I’m supposed to believe that the person serving me a $100 dinner worked 5 times harder than the one serving me a $20 dinner? Just because the price was five times more? Sorry, I don’t buy it. In both scenarios  the waiter comes out, asks what I want to drink, brings it, then takes my food order. Then either the waiter or someone else brings the food. If I’m lucky, the waiter will show up again to ask if everything is ok, and if he sees that we’re finishing up, will ask if we want desert. Desert will be brought, then we’ll get the check. The waiter will take the money, then I sign the credit card slip and leave.

That’s what, a total of maybe 10 minutes of time for the waiter? And I’m supposed to base that on  the amount of the check? Sorry, I don’t think so.

Here’s an idea: if you’re a waiter, tell me what you’re getting paid an hour. Then I’ll match that based on the actual amount  of  time you spend waiting on me. If you’re making $5 an hour, and you spend 10 minutes with me, then I’ll tip you 1/6th of your hourly wage, which would double your rate to $10 an hour. Seems more than fair to me.

It’s getting about that time when employers waste their employees’ time by having some of them hit up their fellow employees for donations to this charity and that charity.

My employer has a big deal every fall where they anoint someone in each area to do this. They give you this pre-printed form with your personal info already on it (that info used to include your social security number) and, even if you don’t want to give anything, you still have to fill it out.

Then there are the countless “walks” and “food drives” and I don’t know what all.

It’s annoying at best and a waste of time. I’m looking at my health insurance costs going up (again) in January, and they want me to pledge a monthly amount to United Way? Forget it.

And then you’re kind of made to feel guilty because you haven’t been “charitable”. Give me a break.

I’ve finally gotten to where I tell them that I give to the charity of my choice, and what that charity is is none of their business. It irks me that countless man hours are spent collecting this money and pledges, when those same man hours could be used for normal business operations. I wonder if the productivity that would be gained by having those folks actually do their job instead of beg for money would help the company enough so that they didn’t have to raise my health insurance costs every year?

Look, if people want to give money to the United Way or whatever their employer is hitting them up for, then that’s their choice. If it makes them feel good, great. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t give to charity; they should. But on their own terms. You shouldn’t need a third or even fourth party collecting the money to hand out to the charity.

As everyone knows, today’s the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Perhaps fittingly, I won’t be at work today; I’ll be helping our democratic process by working at my local precinct for the Nashville run-off election.

I’ll be a “machine operator”, which means that I take the application to vote, activate the voting machine, and instruct the voter on how to use it. Then I get out of their way.

I was supposed to work in the general election in early August, but that was the day we flew out of town to go west. The last election I worked (last November) was a busy one. It was the first election with the new machines, so no one was familiar with how they worked. To add to the confusion, there were about 13 or 14 screens that the voters had to go through in order to cast their ballot for all the races.

Even though our precinct had 6 or 7 machines, the wait time to vote was an average of 45 minutes. By law, anyone in line at the time the polls closed is still allowed to vote. So we didn’t finish voting until 8:00 pm or so. I think I finally got out of there around 9:45 pm, after having gotten there at 6:00 am. By the time I left, my voice was gone and I was wore out, since I didn’t have much of a chance to sit during the day.

Still, I’m looking forward to working the election again. And on this day, of all days, it’ll be more meaningful.

Quite a few major changes have been going on in NASCAR lately. Here’s my take on a few things:

• Toyota’s first year in the Cup Series hasn’t been much to write home about. The teams they signed up weren’t very good with their prior manufacturers, so I’m not sure why anyone figured they’d do any good. But this week they announced that they’ve signed Joe Gibbs Racing to run the Toyota next year. Gibb’s seems to change manufactures every few years (if memory serves, he started out with Ford, then with to Pontiac, then to Chevy). This should give Toyota a good benchmark for how good their cars really are.
• Little Earnhardt will be driving the number 25 next year. Teresa didn’t want to give up the 8, and Yates didn’t want to give up the 38. I wonder why they didn’t go to Team Red Bull and try to get the 83?
• Another former F1 driver is looking to make the move to “real” racing. Jacques Villeneuve will be driving for Bill Davis Racing next year. I have to say that Juan Montoya is doing better than I expected, and that bodes will for Villeneuve. I guess it’s now official: you can pretty much write off the local stock car tracks as breeding grounds for new NASCAR Cup drivers. Teams seem to want to go with what to me seem illogical choices for drivers. I’d think the learning curve for a driver with several years of oval track stock car experience would be less than for a driver with several years of road course open wheel experience. But what do I know?
• There’s an Edsel in NASCAR’s future. Edsel Ford II is set to become the newest director on the board of International Speedway Corp. I wonder if it’s wise that NASCAR’s sister corporation have a Vice President of one of the auto manufactures on its board?
• ESPN’s coverage of the NASCAR Cup races this year has not been up to the standards they set when they were in it before. Jerry Punch is good, and Rusty Wallace is OK. But Andy Petree should go back to being a car owner; he was better at that than announcing. Please, please, please, someone go get Buddy Baker.
• Speaking of ESPN, they really need to take a page out of Fox’s book when it comes to high definition. They’ve got so much wasted space in the crawl area at the top it’s ridiculous. The crawl should go all the way across the top, not stop about a third of the way from the left side. Plus it’d be nice if they brought back the old scoring pylon that showed the top 10 or 15. They could put that on the left side of the HD screen and not really take up any more screen real estate.

NASCAR returns to Saturday night racing again this weekend with the Cup race at Richmond. It’s on ABC, so it should be interesting to see what the ratings are. TV ratings for races have declined over the years after the “Earnhardt death bump” had inflated them to higher than normal ratings. NASCAR was smart to take advantage of that from a financial standpoint, but I think the racing coverage has suffered as a result of the TV deal. That combined with just the excruciatingly boring racing has caused a drop off in folks watching. Not sure if I’ll be among those watching this weekend. I usually don’t remember Saturday night races are going on until it’s too late. Wonder how many other folks have that problem?

What is it about death anniversaries that makes people want to “celebrate” them? Every August at Graceland Elvis fans flock there on the day of his death. And with the 10th anniversary of Princess Dianna’s death a few days ago, the media went crazy.

Fox News showed some kind of memorial service for Dianna during their morning show. MSNBC actually reran the whole funeral.

And of course, every December 8th John Lennon fans gather in New York and burn candles for some reason.

I don’t get it.  I mean, I guess I do in a way, but why not do all this stuff on their birthday instead? Why highlight the saddest day of their heroes’ life, that is, the day of their death?

Last Saturday night, our last night in Las Vegas, we went to see LOVE at the Mirage. Through an incredible coincidence, we were able to get $125 tickets to this show for only $50. We were on the first row of section 207, which was at stage level. It looked like the $150 seats were actually below stage level, albeit closer to the stage.

The show started promptly at 7:00 pm and for the next 90 minutes we were bombarded with everything from roller roller skaters, trampolinists, acrobats, and and dancers, all set to the music of the Beatles.

It’s hard to describe the show. If you go to the show’s web site, they have a miniature preview. Check that out for just a small idea of what goes on during the show.

What struck me during the show was the almost seamless stage changes. One minute there’d be two half-pipes with roller skaters on the stage, and the next minute they’d be gone.

Last year when I heard about this show, and the remix that George and Giles Martin had done on the music, I was somewhat taken aback. My feeling is that once a song is committed to the mastering process, that’s it. I didn’t like it when Alan Parsons messed with his first Project album, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, for the CD release. And Children of the Sun by Billy Thorpe sounded better with the vinyl version as well.

I’d heard the remix last year when the CD came out. It was ok, I thought, but not something I’d go out and buy. But after hearing the music in conjunction with the show, all I can say is, wow. They’ve done things that they couldn’t even think of when the music was recorded. For example, using the original master tapes, they’ve taken a demo of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and used it as the beginning of the song, later merging in the more familiar version.

Now I may end up getting the 5.1 surround sound DVD version of the music.

If you ever get to Las Vegas, by all means try to see this show. Especially if you’re a Beatles fan.