Year: 2012

Thanks to Mom, I have an unusual sensitivity to spelling and grammar errors. I can look at a page of text (or programming code!) and somehow my eye picks out a single mispelled word. As I read sentences or look at billboards, I cringe at the problems with sentence structure and grammar.

So here’s one that just caught my eye:

“92% percent” is redundant. It’s like saying “$20 dollars” or “UPC code”. Come on, guys, you’re an advertising agency… hire a good copy writer.

It’s 4pm on a Friday and I just hit Inbox Zero.

It’s been a while since I haven’t had any emails that needed answering… apparently this last happened in July.

Too bad my to-do list is still huge…

Every two weeks, on payday, I use my online Chase account to send money to several employees. I use their free “QuickPay” service to transfer expense reimbursements to them, and they connect their QuickPay account to their bank so the money gets transferred electronically. Each time, I also send a couple of employees a full paycheck. However, QuickPay has a $5,000 limit so I can’t do it for everyone. It’s annoying, but okay, I understand.

Lately, every time I do this, I get an automated phone call from Chase asking me to verify that the transaction is valid. In some cases we’re talking about $50 or $100 for expenses. So I have to answer a bunch of questions about the car I own, the street address of my house, yada yada. I understand that if I add a new employee and pay them, it makes sense for Chase to verify that it was intentional to prevent fraud. Once. But every time? It’s the same people every two weeks, and often the same amounts (since their paychecks don’t change).

I finally got fed up with it this morning and called the Chase web team to see if that verification could be disabled. After literally ten minutes of the guy talking to someone else about it, he told me it couldn’t be done. But hey, I could sign up for Chase’s payroll service! For $10 a month I can do exactly what I’m doing now but it wouldn’t ask me to verify the payments.

Me: “So it sounds like your system is just annoying me, and you’re saying I can pay $10 a month to stop being annoyed.”

Chase rep: “Yes sir, that’s how it works.”

Nice.

I’m looking for some new memory for a few of my servers, and I came across a really interesting product on Amazon. It says it’s 184-pin DDR PC3200 RAM, but I’ve never heard of memory chips formatted as audio CD’s…

Dolores Sandoval, whoever and wherever you are, I keep getting phone calls for you. I’ve had three today…

It seems these days that when you buy a bag of potato chips, you open the bag to find that it’s about 60% air. Thanks, Lays, for giving me an enormous bag that could hold two gallons of something but actually holds about fifty medium-sized chips! And everything from peanut butter to Carmex lip balm seems to have clever packaging where the bottom is indented, giving the impression of a good-sized jar which turns out to be missing 10% of the volume of the cylinder.

So it was refreshing to open a can of peanuts today and notice that they were actually filled to the top.

Thank you, generic Kroger brand peanut manufacturer, for not cheating me out of my goodies.

Laralee made something called “black lemonade”. I have no idea what that is, but I moved a milk jug in the fridge and saw it hiding in the back.

Yikes. I’m not sure if that’s the black lemonade or a science experiment gone bad.

I encouraged everyone at work to dress up for Halloween, and I wasn’t disappointed.

I wore my fancy four-dollar afro wig all day– scratchy, but awesome.

Brent also had some big hair, although he had a sweet leisure suit jacket that really added something.

Ben was some comic character named Princess Purple or something.

And Brian… well, Brian apparently dressed up as a long-haired PHP developer.

Happy Halloween!

Tonight we had our annual pumpkin-carving party. Laralee worked hard on hers:

Zack carved a really cool set of flames (?) but accidentally broke one of them. We assured him that super-glue probably wouldn’t fix it, so eventually he reworked the flames into a sort of creepy octopus (??).

I carved my usual “traditional” pumpkin:

I’m looking forward to the big day on Wednesday.

I just completed my mail-in ballot.

Johnson for President.
How many of the other presidential candidates have climbed Everest? Or compete in triathlons? Seriously. And on the topic of presidential candidates, I was surprised to find that Roseanne Barr– yes, that Roseanne– is on the ballot. Who knew?

Thumbs up for legalized marijuana.
Let’s face it: the War on Drugs is an abject failure, and the real reason marijuana is illegal is because the paper conglomerates back at the turn of the century were worried about hemp paper eating into their profit margins. Plus, this is Boulder County.

More money for schools.
I’ve seen the results of massive budget cuts in my kids’ schools, and hopefully a slight raise in the mill levy will get a few more computers and a few smaller classes.

I wonder how many of the things I support will win.