Donnie’s Blog

One of my favorite classical music stations is no more. Now it’s country-western, ugh!

Actually, the station technically moved to the AM band, but that bothers me just as much. Classical just won’t sound as good on AM as it will on FM.

Oh well. Time to buy more CDs…

Today I heard a piece by Jacques Offenbach that is allegedly about a parrot owned by a girl’s boarding school, that dies of constipation. The parrot’s death of course affects the young ladies badly. Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to listen to the music, but I’m sure it would have been interesting, to say the least.

If you can read German, or if you can operate Babelfish, here’s a URL to a description of the piece:

    www.jacques-offenbach.de/liste-vert.html

Update: It’s true!

I got my first traffic ticket today. But it’s not like you think. It’s a speeding ticket for going 86 in a 60 zone. But, that’s Kilometres per Houre, which works out to something like 53MPH in a 37MPH zone. That’s not so bad. Going 86 in a 60 sounds a lot more impressive.

Anyway, I was actually caught speeding back in October of last year, the 15th to be exact! I was in Australia at the time, and New South Wales has speed cameras all over the place. I guess that one of them nabbed me. I was a little surprised by that; I thought I had done a good job of obeying the speed limits last trip. (OK, I thought I had done a good job of spotting all the speed cameras in time… whatever.) But I was wrong!

It took them about five months to track me down. The letter showed up today from the Australian government, asking for their fine. Fortunately they take credit cards, so I don’t have to appear in person!

I finally got my mountain bike fixed last week. It’s been two years since I rode that thing; ever since the heavy rains a couple of years ago, which washed out some of my favorite trails. But I discovered some new favorites, so I got the bike all fixed up.

Of course, the first ride was painful… At first I thought I was going to die, and then after a while, I thought that maybe dying wouldn’t be so bad. But I made it as far as I intended to go, and the views were great! The only real hitch was that I got a flat tire on the way down the mountain, but I was close enough to the bottom that it wasn’t a big deal.

I can’t wait to get back out there…

Yay identity-theft!

All my life there has been a constant presence at home - the old green refrigerator that my parents got when they bought their new house. They bought the refrigerator in March of 1975. Now, in September 2006, it finally gave up the ghost. That’s a pretty good run!

So, call me stupid for being all sentimental about a refrigerator, but I had to get a picture with it:

It’s older than me!

Now the hunt begins for a new refrigerator.

One of the interesting things that sometines happens in life is that you are involved in a class-action lawsuit, often without even realizing that you were harmed. I think that I have been part of three different class-action lawsuits now, two of which involved Microsoft. I found this quite humorous at the time, having actually worked at Microsoft myself. (I guess that was self-inflicted harm…?) Those particular lawsuits involved pricing on some of Microsoft’s products, and the settlement papers required you to report how many units of various products you had purchased. I didn’t do anything for those lawsuits since I always get my Microsoft products through the Microsoft Alumni Network, so I never have to pay what is normally charged in stores. A perk of having put in my time…

I was recently informed that I had been wronged again, much to my surprise, this time by a credit card company. And a few days ago they finally sent me my settlement, a check for $4.92. I feel that this is a very appropriate amount; it completely covers all of the pain and hardship that has been imposed on me. I think I will get coffee and a scone with my settlement.

Honestly, these class-action lawsuits seem like a big joke. The lawyers are probably the only ones who make out like bandits. Different people in the class will have suffered in different amounts, and if everybody gets a check for five bucks, it makes a mockery of those that suffered greatly, and also pays people who don’t really deserve or need it, like me.

Nonetheless, I’m going to drop my check off at the bank. I could go for a scone.

I went to the ATM today, but something was a little funky:

Seems that some locale-specific resource was missing! I think this was the “Would you like a receipt?” screen.

Buying stuff online is fun. Even more fun is getting a UPS or FedEx tracking number, and checking up on your package’s progress as it wends its way to your doorstep.

But, I think this may be the best option yet: now you can go to www.packagemapping.com and see your package’s path plotted on a US map, thanks to the Google Maps API and the package-tracking APIs provided by the various shippers.

Of course, my package is taking forever to show up…

Here’s an interesting little thought about how to make LinkedIn’s endorsements a little more useful. Just like amazon.com’s review-feedback mechanism, each endorsement should also have a simple agree/disagree option. Of course, this feedback mechanism would have to be constrained to other registered LinkedIn users who also worked with the person being endorsed, to try to minimize the potential for abuse.

This would provide two interesting features:

1. Endorsements would have a rough quality-metric indicating whether they ought to be believed.
2. LinkedIn could also flag users that have a tendency to hand out worthless endorsements.

Would this be helpful for potential employers doing background research? I dunno! But it would at least relieve me of my annoyance with LinkedIn.