Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Good Management
July 31, 2006

Berta’s sister, Mary Ann, and Mary Ann’s husband, Ryan, came to visit over the weekend. On Saturday night we took them out to Buca di Beppo, a local chain restaruant that serves mainly Italian dishes, family-style.

To avoid the 35-minute wait for a table, we elected to eat outside. The outdoor tables were on the shady side of the building, and the temperature was dropping as the sun dipped below the horizon. It was still in the upper 70’s with decent humidity, but much better than it had been outside all day, and probably worth avoiding the wait.

We sat down and placed our order - a small plate of spaghetti, a baked pasta sampler, and a small plate of chicken marsala, along with some garlic bread and a small salad. We had our drinks pretty soon, and our salad and bread was delivered in short order.

We waited a while before a waiter made an appearance so that we could get more plates for the kids. Apparently, our two kids didn’t register when we said “six for outside” and were seated at a four-person table. We were also missing some silverware and napkins. When the waiter (not actually a waiter, but an expediter) brought some extra napkins, he dropped them on the table in the puddle he had left from spilling Ryan’s water, rendering them completely unusable. Oh, but it gets better.

I Want My HDTV Review Site
July 27, 2006

A HDTVI asked on Ask Metafilter where I can find a good review site for TVs. Nobody has come up with a great answer yet.

I think this is a real problem with review sites these days. I’m getting fed up with the choice of information they do or don’t provide, and the quality of the information that they offer. For example, nearly every site seems to value the consumer review. Why?

Consumers are a picky lot. I have been a technology advocate for may of my friends. They’ll ask me what hardware I like for a specific function, and I tell them. But I’ve learned to add that tag line on the end: “That’s what I would do, which is not necessarily the best for you.” Often I’ll tell them what would work for them, if I know, which I often don’t because I’m not shopping for them. Likewise, there are two problems with sites that provide only consumer-based reviews.

First, I have no idea of the technical knowledge of the reviewer. If the reviewer is a 70-year-old book author, she might really enjoy her TV, but when it comes down to actual performance, it might really stink.

Second, most consumer reviews are typically “I liked X, I didn’t like Y, you should [not] buy this.” They don’t detail the item itself so I can make my own determinations or search for answers in the review. So if I wanted to know how many HDMI inputs a particular HDTV provided, I’d usually be at a loss with consumer-only review sites. Finding specs for a class of electronics from differenct manufacturers is a pain.

So consumer-only review sites aren’t complete. What else?

Light My House on Fire
July 27, 2006

I should probably continue my last post about Disneyland, and perhaps I will do that later, but the whole house situation is on my mind currently, so I’ll spend entirely too much time writing about that now.

I’ve spend the past two weeks pestering Berta about the details of our mortgage on the new house. What will our monthly payments be? She doesn’t have any answers, mostly because the people who should have them aren’t giving them to her. Otherwise - and this seems a real possibility - I just don’t understand it.

There are time these days when I think that the lethargy setting into my mind is becoming more permanent the more reticent I become in doing anything about it. There’s antoher sentence deserving of about six posts. Returning from my digression now…

In tandem with receiving no information about the loan, I’ve been having nice dreams about many house disasters. In a recent dream, I found myself climbing out of the basement’s Bilco doors to find that the above-ground portion of the house had been swept away by some funnel of wind.

This really isn’t funny considering the recent crazy windstorms around here that have put 200,000 or more people out of power for several days. More disturbing about these storms is the actual physical destruction they’ve caused.

Our California Adventure
July 24, 2006

Last weekend, Berta and I went to Disneyland for our 8th anniversary.

It was just a weekend trip. We dropped the kids off with Mom on Friday night (after yet another late showing of the house), packed, then left for the airport around 6am on Saturday morning. We arrived in Los Angeles in the morning, and took an hour-long ride in a shuttle van to the Desert Palms hotel, which is on the same block as Disneyland.

Disneyland is weird. In our area, amusement parks are not inside cities. For example, Hersheypark is kind of out in the middle of farm country. Dorney Park is near Allentown, but not among the city buildings. Likewise with Busch Gardens in Williamsburg. King’s Dominion is nowhere near anything, and neither is Great Adventure. Disney World is it’s own gigantic place, but it’s away from everything. So it seems weird that Disneyland is tucked between some buildings in the middle of Anaheim. Anyway, that’s just an observation.

When we arrived, we were too early to check into our hotel. Thankfully, they were able to keep our bag for us, otherwise we’d have been lugging it around for the afternoon. They directed us toward Downtown Disney for someplace for lunch, so that’s where we headed.