Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Feedback on Your Service
January 07, 2009

It will probably seem hypocritical to most people to mention this, but I really dislike the way that some companies handle customer service. Not that they provide no customer service, or that they don’t do it well, but that they try way too hard. I’ll provide a couple of examples.

I was out with the family recently for a lunch trip to Red Robin. Red Robin has unusually tasty hamburgers (they’re a 3/3 on the Burger Scale) and the service is always pretty good. It’s generally a good trip if you can ignore the price tag. I don’t really worry about service there. You know that thing that waiters do after they serve your food; when they come back and ask you if everything’s ok only when your mouth is full? That happened to us, but it wasn’t the waitress.

Photos Anyone?
January 02, 2009

Berta got me a home portrait studio kit for Christmas, and now I’m being drawn into the world of “professional” photography. I don’t really aspire to taking photo portraits for money, but I have frequently talked about not blowing $200 on studio photos that I then have to pay them for reprints of because WalMart won’t let me make copies of their copyrighted work. I digress.

I set up the studio in the basement. There are a few lights and two nice backdrops with a frame to hold them. What I’m lacking though, is a tripod. And that’s where my adventure starts.

Kids Menu
December 22, 2008

As you might be aware, we have two kids. We also occasionally like to eat out at restaurants. Inevitably this ends up with an order of macaroni and cheese ordered from the kids menu. Abby is starting to order some more interesting things these days, but that’s really not the point of what I’m writing here. What I’m interested in are the menus themselves.

Depending on the restaurant, you get a varying quality of children’s menu. Some places simply have the menu as a box tucked into a corner of the adult menu, but the interesting ones are full-color activity booklets that come with a pack of crayons. I find these activity books interesting, and themselves widely varying.

Scheduling Holiday Stress-Reduction
December 21, 2008

While Abby is a typical early-riser, and those genes don’t come from Berta or me, neither of the kids have yet discovered the Christmas morning ritual of waking their parents at 5am with “Can we open our presents now?” Thankfully. No, I’m about to ruin my good fortune by saying we’ve been strangely lucky in our ability to sleep in until 9am or so before the kids stir. Still, there’s a lot to do on Christmas day, and sometimes it seems more like work than a Holiday should bring.

We’ll usually get up at say, 9am. I’m sure that as the kids get older, this will change and be earlier. We need to give a reasonable amount of time for Santa to place gifts under the tree, so we’ll have to enforce some limit on the time before we can go downstairs.

Life After Harry Potter
December 19, 2008

It’s actually been a while since the last Harry Potter film, and even longer since the 7-book series ended. While we middling Potter fans look forward to whatever The Half Blood Prince brings in July, there are a bevy of movies that are aimed to fill the space of kid-friendly fantasy.

There is, of course, the classic Chronicles of Narnia, also based on books, but dredged up from C.S.Lewis’ writings in the 1950’s. The two movies so far are nice to look at, and have the same characteristic qualities of the books. As an adult, the story doesn’t quite hold up in a few places. There are just a few too many strange moments where I’m left asking, “Why would that be?” And it’s hard to avoid the religious undertones.