1:35 PM
So the eTrex Venture finally arrived yesterday and I've got it all ready to ship back to Amazon.
Amazon seriously has the best return policy ever. As long as an item is unopened, you can pretty much return anything for any reason. And the best part is that THEY PAY for the return shipping! I filled out the return form on their site, it generated a printable UPS label for the package, I taped it on the box, and now all I have to do is drop it off at a mail store and not have to spend a cent of my own money.
I also think that Amazon really sucks at shipping orders in a timely fashion. If you choose their crappy free 'super saver' shipping or the next level up, they take like a day or three to actually ship your order.
However, if you spend a little more for 'two day' or 'next day' shipping, your order almost always gets shipped on the day that you place it.
I played it safe with two day shipping on the eTrex Legend, and I should have it in hand next Wednesday! Finally!
A few days ago I ordered the eTrex Venture from Amazon.
Then today I realized that there's a $50 rebate on the more-powerful eTrex Legend which would bring it down to the exact same price I paid for the Venture!
Sooo I just ordered the Legend and I guess I'll be returning the Venture once it arrives. Doh.
3:39 PM
I've been listening to David Byrne's Look Into the Eyeball and I like it a lot! I had to listen to the album about 10 times before I really started to enjoy it though.
David Byrne was the lead singer of Talking Heads, so this isn't exactly music that you can jump right into. Give it a chance and you'll probably like it too!
3:47 PM
An old favorite of mine is still around. I think the whole point of the site is to sell t-shirts. Or something. Actually I didn't have the patience to sit through it again.
10:25 AM
I just realized that the new Zelda game is subtitled "The Wind Waker," not "The Wind Walker" that I somehow got into my head. That's funny.
The Wind Breaker would have been funnier.
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was my favorite game on the original PlayStation. Konami now confirms that the same team that worked on SOTN is now working on a PS2 Castlevania game. Here's a gay little rhyme that I came up with for the project team-
11:16 AM
I mentioned that Tammy got me a GPS receiver for Valentine's Day, right? Well I actually wanted a different model, so we're returning the one she got me and I just ordered a Garmin eTrex Venture from Amazon. I'm totally pumped. I can't wait for it to get here so that we can go Geocaching.
Look at how many caches there are in Los Angeles alone!
Our beloved Gallery storyteller, Beverly, has decided to retire from her post. Her last day will be March 3, 2003 (3-3-03, she engineered it that way). She was fighting off an illness of some kind. She will be missed, not just by the cast, but by the many annual passholders and day-trippers who make it a point in their trips to come up to see Bev. Some have known her for many years, and introduced their children to Bev. Like Rod Miller, she is a Disneyland legend in every sense of the word.
There is an effort going on, as far as I've heard, to give Bev a window in the Gallery, or on Main Street. Also, the cast members are hoping to give her a huge send-off. They want everybody to come, former cast members, APs, friends, etc. I'll let you know when I have a definitive date.
Beverly will be working the first few days of the Pirates of the Caribbean exhibit in March. So, if people can't make the celebration, they can still say "good-bye" when they say "hello" to the new exhibit.
Beverly is a really wonderful old lady and was extremely nice to Tammy and I in the only interaction we'd ever had with her. She took us backstage at the Gallery and showed us the room that was to one day be Walt's grandchildren's bedroom.
It wasn't much to look at, but she noticed us peeking at the door and then went out of her way to show us a room that we always wondered about. She loved her job and did it a lot better than some of the other cast members who've worked at the park in recent years.
Tammy and I will probably be stopping by to drop off a card before she leaves.
11:21 AM
Valentine's Day was fun. I took Tammy to dinner at Hook's Pointe. She had prime rib or something, and I had the ahi. At dinner I surprised her with a gift certifcate for a massage and facial at this new spa over in PV. It was the first Valentine's Day gift I've gotten her that wasn't a video game or a piece of electronic equipment. She was impressed!
Tammy got me a GPS receiver! Can you believe it? Now we can go geocaching! I'm so happy!
Oh yeah, I also picked up a dozen rozes on the way home from work that night. I actually got them at Ralph's, a supermarket of all places, and they had PLENTY. I was amazed. It was 7pm on Valentine's Day, and this grocery store had more than enough roses to go around, and they were all fresh and beautiful.
Sunday we spent almost the entire day watching Farscape episodes from the season one box set, and we've still got at least half of the first season to get through. It's amazing how much stuff you miss in a TV show like that the first time around.
Monday we went to my parents' house for dinner, and I did our taxes in about thirty minutes with TurboTax! Hooray!
8:41 PM
So I'm sitting here watching the first episode of this season of Survivor, and I can't believe the insane comments made by some of the guys.
This season they decided to mix it up by putting all the men in one tribe, and all the women on the other. So all of the guys just keep going off on how incompetent and helpless they think the women are. They're all, "Man, there's no way those women are as strong as us.
They're gonna be cryin' and they're so weak and we're gonna win it and blah blah blah." They're just so insanely sexist on national TV, I'm pretty sure they'll have trouble getting dates after the show airs.
Kathy Griffin won the game, which I sort of suspected, but I was SURE sure that Erik Von Detten was The Mole. I was totally convinced. Who would have thought that a model and not an actress could have pulled it off so well? Not I!
11:14 AM
I think LA weatherpeople use El Nino as a crutch.
We get one day of heavy rain in Los Angeles, and everybody's blaming El Nino. El Nino this, El Nino that. Whatever! If we weren't in an El Nino year, they would just be calling it a "rain storm" instead of an "El Nino storm."
11:07 AM
Driving to work today vs yesterday was insane. Yesterday it was raining. Today it was a hurricane. The drops were HUGE and constant. It never rains in LA, and when it does, it's a light shower. I'm not used to torrential downpours like what we've had today, but it's exciting! I like being in the protective shell of my warm dry car. I even drove to work with the moon roof open today as if to say "NICE TRY RAIN! YOU WILL NOT GET ME TODAY!"
Check out this awesome arcrylic computer case! It looks like an ATX case, but they don't specify.
9:53 AM
This weekend Tammy and I stopped at Best Buy to pick up a printer cartridge, and on a whim we also got The Complete Farscape Season 1. Impulse buys like this will be the death of us.
5:03 PM
Oh yeah, Disneyland.com is all-new as of a few days ago. I wouldn't call it 'easy to use,' mainly because they used Flash for EVERYTHING and backing up is nearly impossible, but it looks a lot nicer than it used to and its got loads more useful information than before, that's for sure.
5:01 PM
I had a busy day today looking at commercial office space with Michael and Nate. I think the costs of moving the office outweigh the benefits, but I've been wrong before.
10:53 AM
I've been watching Celebrity Mole Hawaii on ABC from the beginning, and it has been a blast. It's kind of nice to see a reality series that doesn't doesn't trash things up with a lot of bad feelings and angry people.
My pick for the mole this time around is Erik von Detten. I've had that guy pegged since day one, and he's lasted this long even though he has made some truly bonehead sabotage-like maneuvers throughout the game.
4:39 PM
Today I had lunch at a place called Il Treno. It was inside of an old train car in the middle of Huntington Park. They claimed to serve Italian food, but I'm still not sure if what I ate was actually the lasagna that I ordered.
4:04 PM
Just when I think that Tammy and I are building up our savings again, I realized that I need to make a 2003 contribution to my Roth IRA. Dang it.
3:29 PM
As a matter of personal policy I make it a point to never discuss politics with anyone.
Everybody's already got their minds made up about political issues, and discussing or arguing with someone else about your opinions or theirs isn't gonna change anything.
3:07 PM
Despite the evidence we saw today from Colin Powell, I still think weapons inspections should be allowed to run their course before we think of doing anything in Iraq.
We should definitely have the support of a majority of the UN member states before we consider launching a military assault on anybody. As the most powerful nation in the world and as the largest member of the UN, we have a responsibility to live up to our obligations as a member of the United Nations.
We have the support of nearly two hundred countries in resolving this diplomatically. Seriously, EVERYBODY in the world has their eyes on Iraq right now. They're not going to launch an attack of anyone while these inspections continue. Let's let them continue until the UN is satisfied that the process has reached its natural conclusion, and then we'll see where we're at.
2:45 PM
Why does Fox News insist on spelling it "Usama Bin Laden" when the rest of the English-speaking world has standardized on "Osama Bin Laden"? We may never know.
11:08 AM
I think every video card I've ever owned has had its GPU fan die at some point or another. You'd think they'd have the technology nailed down by now!
One day last week, just out of the blue, the fan on my video card started making this grinding noise. I dealt with it for a week before it just got to be too much. Last night I popped the fan off the card and managed to break off a piece that I deemed to be nonessential. That seemed to quiet things down a bit, and the fan still works!
The whole ordeal made me realize just how loud my power supply fan was. It seriously accounts for at least 90% of the fan noise in my PC. Maybe I should get a new one of those!
4:29 PM
Interesting listening on the police scanner today.
First a kid (11 years old) left for school but decided not to show up because he hadn't done his homework. Police scoured the city for a good hour or so before he turned up near a Blockbuster video.
Then just a few minutes later a meth lab blew up just a mile or so away from where I work. Hoo-ray!
9:49 AM
Saturday I was foolin' around over at Amazon and I found a Bela Fleck CD that looked good.
I had a couple of Borders gift cards burning a hole in my pocket from Christmas, so I cruised on over to Borders and picked up a copy.
Someone once said that "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." so I'll just say that I really really really like it, and Tammy really really really doesn't! Which is fine!
Sunday we went with Tammy's parents, brother, and brother's girlfriend to both California Adventure and Disneyland, thanks to the Southern California ticket promo. We hit all the major stuff in no time (the rides were all walk-ons at night) and ate at the Blue Bayou afterward.
That whole Columbia thing sorta sucked, but crying about it isn't gonna change anything. Let's move on and plan some more missions!
Everybody got all excited in 1997 when we landed the Pathfinder probe on Mars and got to see pictures of the Martian landscape. What a lot of people don't know is that we did basically the exact same thing way back in 1975 and 1976 with the Viking 1 & 2 lander missions. Now you know!