18 Nov 08 Other People’s Pictures

I enjoy taking pictures. I even like to tag the pictures I take and have spent a good amount of time going back and tagging old pictures (forward from 1999 to about 2004 and backward from early 2007 to 2005, with much of the ones since 2007 done as well). What I don’t really like is culling my photos — I have a hard time deleting photos that aren’t simply bad.

But worse than that (or so I thought) is trying to go through other people’s pictures, which is what I’m having to do now. I listed my self as available for volunteer photography at my kids’ school, but I’ve never gotten around to taking the required ethics class to be able to actually volunteer on campus. Instead (or possibly unrelated), my wife apparently volunteered me to a bunch of project photos from all of the classes (PK-8, 2 classes per grade) and make a video/slideshow out of them. Step one is to weed cull the photos and, as I mentioned, this is not an activity that I relish.

What I have found, though, is it is actually much easier than when working with my own photos. I don’t have any problem deleting a good photo if it doesn’t fit what I need or if it is effectively a duplicate. I also don’t feel the need to touch-up the photos — which is really a separate issue. Now I just have to actually get all the work done by Friday — Thursday would be better — as the video is needed for an event on Saturday and we’re leaving for Disney World on Friday.

Not gonna happen tonight, though — I’m going to bed.

Tags: photography, volunteering

31 Oct 08 Outlaw Trail 100

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Travis and I did the 100K bike loop of the Outlaw Trail. It was a good ride with nice weather and “Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner!” afterward. The night before, my parents and my family went to the pre-ride pasta dinner. Little did we know that we would be the opening scene of the promo video. I also found an image of Travis and me at the starting line:

Next week, the Wurst Ride followed by Wurst Fest. Yum! They have a pretty cool interactive ride map, and they even let people embed it thusly:

Tags: biking, maps, Outlaw Trail, video, Wurst Fest, Wurst Ride

14 Oct 08 True Blood

I’ve been reading Charlaine Harris‘ Southern Vampire novels over the past year and found them reasonably entertaining. Since I got rid of cable, I cannot watch HBO’s new show, True Blood, based on these novels. The other night while I was at Blockbuster I found that they had the first episode of True Blood available as a free rental. Naturally I took it — that way I’d know whether it was really worth the bother of watching the series once it become available to me (in a legitimate way).

Well, I got around to watching it tonight and I loved it! Subsequently, I found that it is also available for free on iTunes — at least I didn’t pay for the rental. I’m pretty resistant to iTunes TV episode prices, but I’d probably pay for this show, along with Showtime’s Weeds and Californication, if they were made available as they aired or shortly thereafter, rather than once the DVD was released (at that point, I’ll just get it from Blockbuster Online or Netflix).

Am I unique in being unsatisfied by the pricing and delivery models currently being offered for TV shows? Paying as much as or more than a DVD set for iTunes downloads when the DVD is already out seems silly. Likewise, paying $2 or $3 (HD) for a show I can watch for free from one of the broadcast networks makes little sense to me. Admittedly, I do have to pay for my TiVo service, but that amortizes out to way less per show.

Perhaps the problem is that there’s no room in the pricing model for renting TV episodes. I haven’t bought into the idea of owning TV shows, so that portion of the value isn’t really a factor for me. I think I might be willing to pay $1 per episode to just rent it, but more than that just doesn’t seem worthwhile to me, at least not for broadcast shows — I’d probably be willing to pay more for shows from premium stations. As I already observed, I’d likely fork over the $2 (maybe even $3 for HD) for certain shows.

Something else that would make the whole situation more palatable would be if I could go ahead and pay the prices that are currently being charged but in doing so I would also received the DVD (or Blu-Ray for HD prices) version once it was released.

HBO and Showtime just need to let me subscribe via the Internet.

Tags: cable, HBO, iTunes, Showtime, Tivo, TV

05 Oct 08 Davestin

 

On Friday night I went to my very first blogging event, Davestin! I had a great time at Opal Divine’s. I even took the bus downtown from work, though I hitched a ride back with Wayne. I think there were thirteen people there, including myself, though I may have lost count of some of the later arrivals. I spent most of the evening talking with Dave, Karla, Mags and Badger (and, of course, Wayne and Christy).

 

In addition to the custom badge and cool button-flair pictured to the right, Dave also handed out decks of playing cards featuring his artwork. I had wanted to order a deck of these cards before, but figured Wayne had probably ordered eight — which he had. I was going to get one from him, but now I don’t have to — Yeah!

By the way, the shrimp tacos at Opal Divine’s were the best I’ve ever had.

It would be nice if I could take the bus more often and more places, but it just doesn’t work out that way. The nearest stop is five miles from my house and requires a transfer to get to work. There’s also the issue of picking up my kids and delivering them to whatever after-school activity they have that day. Oh, well.

Tags: blogoverse, dave2, wayne

18 Sep 08 Journal… Ramblings… Renagerie

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been trying (with help from whall and others) to come up with a new domain name for my website. At one point during this process I decided to go ahead and rename my blog from “Ren’s Journal” to “Ren’s Ramblings”. Because of this, rensramblings.com was a possibility, but my website hosts other things besides my blog (my photos and my needs-to-be-updated running and biking maps), so I wasn’t satisfied by this.

We went through all sorts of alternatives, some of the best of which were “renfinity” and “rentinuum”. Some of the goals I had were for it to be memorable, identifiable (though I’m not actually sure what I mean by that), easy to spell from its sound and with an implied meaning that was at least vaguely applicable to my (or a generic) website.

I finally came up with “renagerie” and I immediately liked it better than any of the other suggestions. In fact, I like it enough that I plan to rename my blog (again) after the domain is configured.

Tags: DNS

06 Sep 08 Sprinting Away

When I switched from my Treo 755p with Sprint to my iPhone with AT&T I knew I would be paying Sprint’s $150 early termination fee. I had not realized, though it did not come as a complete surprise, that I would not get a prorated credit for the portion of my billing period after the termination (which turned out to be 26 days - almost $37 by my calculations). The thing that did surprise me, however, was that the early termination fee was inflated by $12.71 in “Sprint Surcharges” (”rates we choose to collect from you”) and $10.16 in “Texas State-Sales Tax”.

I called Sprint to ask about the prorated credit and to complain about the surcharges — to no avail, naturally. Next, I sent the following email to the recently publicized dan@spint.com address:

I am writing this email after having just spoken to “Russell” from
Sprint customer service. On July 31st of this year I terminated my
Sprint service of over 10 years. I did so with the full expectation of
paying the $150 early termination fee even though I felt that this fee
should have been prorated based on being 14 months into my contract.

What I did not expect was that I would still be charged for the rest of
my current billing period (August 1 - August 24). Additionally, I was
quite surprised that the $150 termination fee was subject to $12.71 in
Sprint Surcharges and $10.16 in Texas State-Sales Tax. The sales tax may
be unavoidable, though I am surprised that a termination fee would be
subject to sales tax. However, the Sprint Surcharges are pretty clearly
described as relating to service and the termination fee is certainly
not for service.

My final bill only includes the termination fee + surcharges and taxes
because the billing period was pre-charged on the previous bill. Still,
I was fully expecting a credit for the pro-rated amount of $36.66.

 Before I pursue other avenues of grievance, I wanted to give this email
address an opportunity to resolve this issue to my satisfaction. As I
stated, I expected to pay the $150, so I am fine with that. But rather
than the $172.87 that that charge grew to with taxes, I would want my
final bill to be either $113.34 ($150 less the $36.66 pro-rated portion
of the billing period during which I no longer had service) or,
grudgingly, the same amount plus the sales tax — $123.50.

In other words, I would want a credit of $59.53, or at least $49.37.

Thank you for your attention,

After the initial canned response I received the following specific response:

I apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced. The charges
on your account are correct. Since you canceled your account during a
bill cycle then your are responsible for all charges as if you were
going to pay the bill if you didn’t cancel. If there is any other
questions or concerns please feel free to contact me.

Nice — not.

It’s pretty silly — it’s really not much money and I didn’t leave Sprint because of any intrinsic issues, just to get the iPhone. Prior to this billing issue, it’s entirely possible that a few years down the line I would switch back to Sprint. Now, however, I’m very unlikely to do so. For $50-$60, probably less than one month of future service, Sprint is all but guaranteeing that they will not have me as a customer again in the future. Of course, at the rate they’ve been going lately, perhaps they already figure that they have no future.

Tags: customer service, money, Sprint

19 Aug 08 Headaches

I used to get periodic headaches. Most of the time the headache would be present when I woke up in the morning — perhaps once or twice a week, though not every week. Spontaneous headaches during the day were quite rare. The morning headaches were almost always mild and I would often just want to ignore them. However, I found that if I did not take anything for these mild headaches they would just get worse throughout the day. Naturally, I started taking something earlier rather than wait until the headache was severe enough to really bother me. It didn’t really matter what I took, pretty much any pain medication did the trick.

Losing weight didn’t help. It also didn’t help with my hypertension, which certainly could have been a factor in the headaches.

One thing I noticed was that I often felt like a soft drink would help me feel better. It never actually cured the headache and I’m not even certain it *actually* made me feel better, but I certainly wanted a soft drink. Now, this isn’t necessarily specific to headaches as I find I really appreciate the feel of the carbonation in several other situations (e.g., sore throat). Still, it definitely was in my mind that there could be a caffeine connection, but it’s not something I really believed.

I had gone off of caffeine before, but I wasn’t thinking about the headaches at the time so I do not know if there was a correlation. I switched back from caffeine free Diet Coke to regular Diet Coke after being challenged to a taste test and being therefore directly reminded of the fact that regular Diet Coke tastes better. (I have since discovered that Coke Zero tastes better than Diet Coke, but there isn’t a caffeine-free version.) Since I hadn’t dropped caffeine for any particular reason, I switched back for taste.

About three years ago I decided to go off caffeine to see if it would lessen my headaches. After a pretty severe couple of headaches in the days that followed I proceeded to have no headaches for nearly three years. At least nothing severe enough where I needed to take any pain medication. (I would sometimes have something that felt almost like a headache after a strenuous game of racquetball or a long day of golf in the heat, but it never really fully developed). During this time I also started taking medication for my hypertension, but it was after my headaches had already ceased.

Some time during this three year period I started having caffeine a bit more often. In particular, I started drinking more soda at restaurants, where there is almost never a caffeine free cola. This was still quite a bit less caffeine than I had previously been consuming and it did not trigger any new headaches.

Last night after racquetball, and after having probably consumed even less caffeine over the previous several days than usual, I again had one of those “almost” headaches. But this one seemed to be getting stronger as the night progressed. I went to bed a bit after midnight (having finished watching the evening’s Olympic coverage) and then woke up at around 3:30am with an honest-to-goodness headache. Bleh. I took a couple of Ibuprofen and managed to get back to sleep. When I woke up again at 6:30am the headache was gone.

Caffeine withdrawal? Something else? I was pretty tired from racquetball — it was a fairly strenuous set and there were only two of us playing rather than the three we sometimes have.

Tags: caffeine, Coke Zero, Diet Coke, headache, racquetball

06 Aug 08 Holy Cactus!

On the 18th hole of this morning’s golf round I hit my tee shot into a hazard left of the fairway. I found my ball and the lie was not too bad. I decided to try and hit an 8 iron over some trees to the green.

Things didn’t quite work out as planned. I failed to get the ball very high, though the result was acceptable and I managed to bogey the hole despite my ball going through the cactus pictured here.

It was a fitting end to a round of golf where I had several things go my way. On the par 3 8th hole I also hit my tee shot left, but it hit the edge of the cart path and bounced onto the green near the hole. On the 9th hole my approach shot was heading right but hit a tree and kicked back toward the green. Along with the cactus shot those were the three big examples.

The end result was an 84 — my best round of the year so far and I think my best score since 2004.

Tags: golf

01 Aug 08 Got it!

My iPhone arrived yesterday and I went and picked it up at the AT&T store. I’ve ported my number over and started what I expect to be a long process of migrating my other apps and data from my Treo.
I’m writing this in the Wordpress app on my iPhone, so that’s all for now.

Tags: iPhone

18 Jul 08 Ordered my iPhone today…

… at the AT&T store as is required to get a corporate discount on the monthly plan (voice only, unfortunately). They tell me it should arrive in 7 to 10 days.

Tags: AT&T, iPhone