The Daily Diversion Archive For April, 2001

4/30/01

OK, I'm not proud of that last Daily, but I did it. So there.

I had a productive weekend. I rode my motorcycle all over town, I went to the golf driving range and beat a bucket of balls all over everywhere, I did a bunch of stuff around the house and I had other fun as well.

Our friends Bob and Karen had a lovely cocktail party last Saturday night and it was just swell. It was a fancy dress sort of thing and they do this yearly. It was a great time.

The Mississippi river hit its peak this weekend and boy is it high. I'll probably never see it this high again. They've opened the locks, the bridge piers all leave big wakes in the rushing river and there's water over West River Parkway in a place I would never have expected it. High water is cool, but not if it's in your basement.

Not much else to say, really. I got way too much sun this weekend and I'm not entirely sure I'm done being hung over from the party. It's hell getting old.

4/27/01

Uh, Houston, we have a problem...

It's Thursday night and everything sucks.

I'm cranky. It's true. I have fucking had it with stuff that doesn't work, loud-ass inconsiderate neighbors, and the general state of the neighborhood.

The neighbors two doors down were burglarized yesterday during the day. Some shithook took their stereo, boom box, VCR and a bunch of other stuff including hand lotion and hair spray. Hmm. They must have took their sweet time. I'm sure our lovely dog saved our possessions from becoming someone else's. How nice for us. It would have been better if had not happened. To Mr. or Ms. Burglar, may your shit rise up and kiss you full on the lips.

Our neighbors on the other side have never heard music at a reasonable level. When the thump is missing, they're not home. It amazes me at how loud their music is. We literally can hear the bass lines in our living room with the windows closed. What the fuck is the need to listen to music so damn loud? Does deafness sound like a good idea? I'm tired of going over there when I'm at the breaking point to tell them to turn it down. I'm very sorely tempted to just start calling the police. I'm FUCKING sick of it. I sincerely hope you all go stone deaf.

The following mercurial mood change has been brought to you by a large, stiff Gin and Tonic. Gin and Tonic: Imperialism never tasted so good...

My long time friend Katie has recently announced that she's engaged to be married. Sarah and I are very happy for you and we wish you both all the best. Take care.

And with that I'm going to put some earphones on and listen to some Led Zeppelin.

4/23/01

I'm home from work today. I somehow pulled a muscle or pinched a nerve in my neck and I can't really move my head. It's mightily annoying, and for that reason alone, I'm staying right here for the day to loosen it up.

This isn't saying I can't get anything done. I've had this interview ready to go for a while and so I think I'll post it.

Allow me to introduce my old pal Nick Ryberg. He and I met through our friend Barry back in high school and we really hit it off. Nick and I get together infrequently these days as we're both insanely busy, but we do swap emails from time to time. Here are his responses to the INANETERVIEW questions:

Who are you?
Nick Ryberg, once known as St. Nick, but now 5 bill-yun IRC users seem to have good taste and use that name.

What are you?
Largely water and a few dollars worth of minerals readily available at your local chemist supply house.  A thoroughly overwhelmed and happy husband and father.  

Where are you?  
Far down the chain of enlightenment.  

Why are you?
Without inadvertently quoting a few saints, philosophers, Buddha, Ghandi, and my local mailman, I'm simply a pivot point in the twisting of the universe.

How are you?  
Good at some things (Chocolate Chip cookies and hugging my kids and wife), terrible at others (keeping my temper or bank accounts proper).  

What's your favorite number?
4 - It's always been so, but now it seems to harmonize nicely with the current status.

What is the most meaningful event of the last year?  
Events fly past me, rather like a flurry of Kleenex escaping an exploding facial tissue (tm) box, so it's very hard to grab one out of mid-air, and say, "There - that was the most meaningful event."  Perhaps my perspective for meaningfulness has been so abused, that I'm incapable of making such a judgment?  Hey, I could get a handicapped parking spot now!

What computer operating system(s) do you use?
At work: WinNT 4.0, and a little Linux.   At home: Win98 and a little Linux. I love dabbling with O/S', but only to the point that it takes to actually get one running.  I've kind of gotten to the point that for all intents-and-purposes, it doesn't particularly matter what one runs.  Linux, WinXX, BSD, etc... unless you're a serious computer gear-head, there's no longer one true path.

Do you know why you have the middle name you do?
Yes, I was named after my father (which I'm quite proud of) and to promote identification with National Public Radio.

What is your favorite gadget?
Oooooh.... that's a hard one.  Right now?  Maybe my Microsoft Optical Intellimouse, or perhaps the microphone that drives speech recognition software.  But then, there's CD-Rippers, that Mr. Tim kindly turned me on too...

What's your drink?
Generally - Diet Coke in quantity.  Was: lots, and lots, and lots of coffee. This was a problem and led to major headaches and attitudes.  'Nuff of that.

What is your least favorite building?
Even ugly buildings have character.  Perhaps the generic suburban office building - because while they are functionally correct, they age very poorly and are boring.  Nothing is more depressing than entering building constructed in the '70's.  Yech..

What is your favorite euphemism for money?  
A piece of paper constructed in a certain way, with a certain printed marks that differentiate it from a post-it note.  (Seriously, I don't really have one)

Do you own any domain names?  
No (other than the one granted by Earthlink membership).  While I'm tempted, I don't have the time.

Finally, how do you get to work?
In the ultimate family truckster - the minivan.  Which, oddly, I love. Would I like to be riding a Yamaha Venture motorcycle?  Yes, but without that option (which I don't particularly regret), I like the comfort, good tunes, and visibility of our Chevy Venture.

BONUS QUESTION

What's your favorite search engine and your favorite website?
Mine's Google (or Copernic), and Slashdot.

There you have it. Thanks, Nick. I'll try to send out some more questionnaires later this week so I'll have another INANETERVIEW for next week.

I've noticed a fair few more Minneapolis-centric websites out there. Welcome online, everyone. If anyone wants to link or be linked, please let me know.

4/23/01

I spent most of this weekend hiding from the rain. The nice day we had on Friday was certainly not a taste of what the following weekend would be like. No, it rained here pretty much solidly from Saturday morning to Sunday evening. Wow, what a drag.

I wish I could say that I spent my time productively, but I can't. Other than doing some chores around the house, I pretty much wasted the whole weekend teaching a pig to sing. That pig was the new motherboard I got for the devbox, and the singing part was trying to get the mouse to work. I've come to the conclusion that the com ports on the motherboard are bad. More's the pity that I didn't have the right header for the PS/2 mouse port on the board.

I'm using Red Hat Linux 7, and that has USB support built-in so I thought I'd be smart and get a USB mouse and bypass the whole legacy serial fiasco. It worked in the setup, but upon rebooting, it no longer worked. NUTS.

Granted, I'm not working with everyday equipment here. However, it would be nice if the darn thing worked. I really don't care about getting X to work except for one thing: It's nice to have that World Wide Web browser open. When I recompile the kernel, I may not even do X on this machine, but for now, I want it. It's as simple as that. NOW WORK, DAMMIT!

Sorry, frustrated.

We took Brutus to the vet on Saturday for his heartworm checkup. I just about dropped on the floor when they told me how much the preventative medicine was. Is there anything such as an HMO for dogs? That stuff is NOT cheap. Worse, I know Brutus needs it, because we do go to off-lead dog runs, neighborhood walks and the like, and I know that most of the folks in our neighborhood can't afford these preventatives. It's kinda like being the only one with insurance in a demolition derby.

In the last Daily, I answered a question about what the last book I read was. Well, I'm currently reading Alfred Lansing's book Endurance. Yes, I have jumped on the Shackleton bandwagon. Well, not really. The company I work for has. They were kind enough to send me a free copy of it, and since everyone and their dog is raving about it, I'm reading it. I have read about him before. In fact, I'm not entirely sure I haven't read this book already. I went through an explorers and adventurers stage back in high school. I know I read something about Shackleton then. It seemed to me that even though he failed in his mission, this guy would have been the guy to be working for if you were going to be going to the ends of the earth. It seemed like he gave a crap about his guys. At the time his expedition happened, there were worse fates to be had. I can't imagine what the fields of Flanders must have been like with the gas and the trenches and the over the wall stuff. Marooned on an island in the South Atlantic starts to look pretty good when compared to rotting corpses in a gas-filled trench.

Still, the guy has to be admired for keeping it together for such a long time. Patience and endurance were something these guys had in abundance.

My question is, would something like this happen today? Would the people of today with our instant gratification culture, stand for waiting that long to be rescued? Has the overstimulation of modern life essentially killed any chance of ever having another masterwork created? Could something like War and Peace be written in an era like today? Even if it was, would people read it? Are the works being created today of an equal quality to the works of the past? Is the pace of today's life here in the modern world too fast for deep thoughts and great creations? I tend to think so. It's a rare person indeed who has the discipline to shut out the trappings and distractions of the times we live in, and sit and think powerfully about something.

4/20/01

A friend of mine emailed me a survey the other day. It's one of those spam mail surveys that I usually chuck in the trash, but I usually open stuff from this fella. He's a good egg, and he had actually filled out the survey. He had some interesting responses, so I thought I'd give it a whirl.

It seems April is the month of surveys and so here goes.

There, it's done. I hope I don't grow horns on my head because I didn't follow the directions. I have to be careful about email and I hardly ever forward anything unless it's following an email that says it's coming. Security, you know...

I'm sitting here installing Linux for the umpteenth time. This time around it's Red Hat 7 that's getting some action. It's being reinstalled on my project box. My project box will soon become a permanent member of the production family around here. I've found a motherboard that I can live with, and now all I need to do is come up with a shitload of SIMM ram. SIMMs are so darn expensive, it may be a while before this box becomes the production box I want it to be, but it will eventually be serving the website in the absence of northome. It's neato. It's a dual classic Pentium box. It'll do up to 200MHz MMX processors and up to 256Mb of RAM--all cached. Nice. I scored it for not that great a bargain on EBAY, but it came loaded with a pair of P200 classics and some RAM.

It got rattled around in shipping quite a bit. When I opened the box, the BIOS chip and battery were rattling around loose in the anti-static bag. Both of the processor fans were loose, and one of the sockets had the fan mount broken off of it. Sheesh, what did they do with this thing, play hackeysack?

I gingerly unbent the pins in the BIOS chip and battery and stuck them back in their slots. I had an S-clip heat sink at work, so I just swapped the buckle base for the S-clip base, and I made double darn sure all the jumper pins were in the right places before I put power to it. I was fully prepared to write a nastygram to the vendor when it didn't boot, but it booted right up. I'll be dipped if it didn't. I was able to flash the BIOS, and it's just about done installing right now. No hiccups, and life is good.

4/19/01

I don't know if I wrote about this before, but I was just rummaging through some old notes, and I stumbled upon something I overheard at the annual Design Show and Open House at the old Munsingwear Factory. I don't get much of a chance to hob-nob with the idle rich, but there we were, bumping elbows with severe women in clothes that cost more than my house, and overstuffed suburbanites and their awful children. Yes, this is the Open House.

If you've not been, tough. They only do this twice a year and we always go. It's nice to have a sneak peak at what the rich and powerful will pay designers to put in their formal dining rooms and parlors. It's like the top out of sighters come out to play, and we get to watch.

It's quite another thing to see and sit on a couch that costs a month's pay. I can see how these things cost as much as they do. There were fabrics that you just don't see showing up in a college dorm. Exotic woods, designs and various objects d'art fight for the time your eye dwells on them. Unfortunately for the likes of me, these ultra high-end furnishings will not be gracing my home. OK, that's not quite true. Our living room and dining room sets are mission, and that's good. There were lots of folks selling repop mission things and yes, we got all their business cards.

Nothing quite so clearly demonstrates the difference between "them" and "us" as this overheard quote. The woman who uttered it was obviously slumming it and was aghast at the comfortable looking cushion on what looked to be a chair shaped coat rack and umbrella stand. She said, "I don't like comfortable chairs in my entryway." I'm sure she didn't, that's not in question. My question is, how does someone get to the point in their life that they possess an opinion, and a strong one at that, about the appropriateness of comfortable seating near the entrance to their house? I have an entryway, I need a coat rack, but ruling out a piece of furniture simply because it's comfortable is an alien concept to me.

I'm kind of playing Dumbo here. I know that when you have to worry about simply having food, clothing and shelter, the color of the tile in the kitchen, and wearing a tie that matches your shirt are not such a big concern. Probably the same holds true for the quotess above. The various performance differences between a V6 and a turbo 4 engine are not only not significant to her, but she may not even know what these things are. You wouldn't either if you had a driver to drive you places and an accountant to pay your bills. When you're that well off, there are other things to worry about. Like entryway chairs.

4/18/01

Sarah's back in town, the dog's happy and I'm thankful that our lovely Norwest Airlines transported my wife in safety and comfort. Thank you.

My pal Louie and I went to a Twins game on Monday night. It was a spur of the moment thing and we just decided to go at 4:30. I went home to walk the dog, and then, in a flush of community spirit, I decided to try to take the bus to the game. I looked up Route 5 on the web, and found that they had converted their schedules to .pdf format. That's great. The problem is that the stop points can't be seen through the whole schedule. If you're looking at rides that start at about 5:00 PM, the headings for the columns are back up the chart at about noon. This makes it very hard to look up a schedule without actually marking your point of reference on the screen with your fingers. Bad. Just stinko. You have to zoom in quite a ways before the tables are visible, and when they are, the print is so big that you have to constantly slide the toolbar back and forth to find what you're looking for.

PDF files are great if you don't want anyone messing with your data, but they can be a real pain in the posterior if you don't have a theater grade monitor on your desktop.

I worked a bit on the Kawasaki this weekend and I think I may have a taker for the Titan.

Hmmmm. Tired. Squinty. Gosh, I need a bigger monitor.

4/16/01

Happy Tax Day. I hope you had an easy time of it with yours. We got ours done a long time ago and it's pretty odd observing all this hubbub over the deadline when it doesn't affect us one little bit.

I have a special Monday treat for you all. I'd like to introduce my old pal John Stockard. I met him a long time ago when we both worked as peons for the company I presently work for. He was game enough to submit to the grueling questionnaire that is the INANETEVIEW, and the responses to those questions follow immediately:

There you have it. Mr. John Stockard, I thank you for your gracious cooperation. Take it easy, fella.

This weekend I sunburned my bald head. We had a spactacular day on Saturday, and I sat outside and fiddled with my motorcycles for the better part of the day. My wife and I, sore from our great efforts in the garage and back yard, treated ourselves to dinner at The Modern that evening. For my money, there is no better place to go out for a fancy dinner in Northeast Minneapolis than the Modern. No, I've never been to Jax Cafe, but I have meant to go there for quite some time. Anyway, it was a busy weekend, and now I'm not ready at all for the upcoming busy week. Yuck.

I will be going to the driving range in the first good day, though.

4/13/01

It's Friday the 13th. Do I get to be cut up by a chainsaw wielding maniac today? I sure hope not. Still, that's not something you see every day.

Yep, you guessed it. I'm tired. I had a busy day today. I went to a Linux conference. I heard lots of smart people talk about stuff I knew about. It made me feel smart and put wind in my sails. I came home, walked the dog, and started twiddling with the project box in hopes that it can serve the website for a little while while the webserver goes in for a rebuild and a kernel upgrade. Yes, this is needlessly technical, but it does explain why I feel a bit burnt up tonight. I'm going to be very busy this next week doing a bunch of server stuff. I hope to keep the Daily Daily during the early part of next week, but if it isn't, you know why.

I've thought a lot about motorcycles this week and I must say I need to get out and ride a bit. Commuting to work just one day just didn't slake my thirst for biking. I have a bunch of stuff to do out in the garage as well, so I just better get to it.

4/10/01

I had a very busy day today at work, but it didn't matter. I rode my motorcycle to work. It's funny how much difference it made. The streets are still very sandy and full of junk, the pavement is coming apart in places and there are still a few wet spots from snow melting, but the ride is worth putting up with this crap. I wish I could tell you that I was Joe Good Rider today. I wish I could tell you that it wasn't me doing 85 down the freeway this morning. I could tell you all this, but it would probably be a lie.

I don't drive a motorcycle like I drive a school bus or a car. I'm pretty aggressive, assertive, and coldly calculating because I figure that just about everyone out on the roads is paying less attention to the critical task of driving than I am. Therefore, I take liberties, if only in the name of being seen and not being killed.

Am I just saying this stuff to rationalize driving my bike like a complete maniac? Perhaps.

I've promised this enough times, so here it is:
THE INANETERVIEW

This time around, I interview The Best Man, also known as Illya Haynes.

There you have it. I'm sending a few more requests out and we'll see if anyone is game enough to take me up on my offer. I think I'll be changing the questions a bit, but not too much. I think I'll start with the who, what, where, when, why and hows first.

In other notes, thanks once again to all of you who have sent me notes in the past week or so. I think I've fielded about 20 questions via email in that period of time. This is unprecedented and very much welcome. I've been answering a lot of motorcycle questions and that's been getting me back in the motorcycling mood. Thanks to you all.

For all you bikers out there, if you're looking for various motorcycling websites and such, there are two excellent sites for getting addresses to other bikers' sites. One is via webrings. Yahoo seems to be the clearing house for webrings. If you're interested in a particular kind of bike, search for a webring dedicated to it. Chances are, there is one, and it's full of sites made by people who are as dedicated or even more so than you are. Scary thought, huh?

Another excellent resource for information and locations for other enthusiasts' sites is the search engine, Google. This has got to be the best search engine out there. They aren't a stupid pay-for-placement site, they are a top notch search engine that I use for flippin' everything. I've found info on Hondas, Suzukis, Toshiba laptops, Minneapolis history, and all sorts of other, fairly obscure things in Google. I know I'm looking for something obscure when Google will only bring up a couple of listings for it. OK, end of shameless unpaid plug.

The aforementioned Best Man, his girlfriend Dana, my wife and I went to the Twins Home Opener Monday night. What excellent fun. We had decent seats in the upper deck, just about even with third base. It was pretty much a thumping over the hapless Tigers. They had a knuckleballer on the mound who held the Twins scoreless through the first trip through the order. This ended in the second trip when The Lumber Company lit him up for 6 in the third inning. The final score of 11-5 wasn't really indicative of how much of a one-sided game it really was. The Tigers touched Radke and Wells for a couple of 2-run dingers, but they were genuinely out played, and out pitched. Detroit actually had more hits than the Twins did, but they just weren't able to get their baserunners across the plate.

It was nice to see the Twins scoring runs, and it was very nice to see Fast Eddie Guardado K two of the three batters he faced. Welcome back, big guy. Here's hoping you have a good season.

4/9/01

Well, the little Toshiba Laptop has officially sold on EBAY. It didn't go for as much as I wanted, but at least I got a fair bit of dough for it. It was cool, it was useful, and now some other guy is going to use it. Good.

I said on Friday that I was going to hook all you folks up with the first real INANETERVIEW today, but due to circumstances beyond my control, it will roll tomorrow, instead. Sorry. The subject of that interview is taking my wife and I to the Minnesota Twins home opener tomorrow night. How nice. Despite my trying not to get too strung out over this coming baseball season, I'm getting sucked in all the same. I'm a sucker for this game. I love it, I hate it, I can't live without it. If I am away from this area for more than a week during the summer, I become a rabid, drooling fan even if they stink. I don't know why this is. It could be that sitting on my Grandma's knee in her living room and watching Harmon Killebrew jack those sky-high homeruns had some kind of effect. It could be that seeing Rod Carew steal home while at the old Met with my little league squad was really a defining moment for me. It could have been watching the Twins take it all in '91 with my dad really was one of the happiest moments of my life. All this and more add up to a bunch of disjointed sentences that try to convey that I really dig Baseball, and I have for a very long time.

I also got out and did some stuff in my garage this weekend. Yes, it's very cramped out there. I am going to have to prune at least one project from the garage, but which one? I'm still debating what I'm going to do. Those of you looking for what I hinted at on Friday, well, I'm sorry, but I didn't make the decision yet. I have a couple of people I need to talk to before making the decision as to which projects are going to be cut loose. I'd very much like to trade all my projects away for just one runner, but I doubt that'll fly. If anyone would like to offer me a nice Honda CB350 twin or an RD350 with intact crank seals, I'll talk. If someone out there would like to trade a couple of these bikes for a GL1000 parts bike, I'm listening. I also would trade some of my projects for a running dirt bike of not so recent vintage. A big 2 stroke or a big 4 stroke would be keen. I also have 3 old outboard motors that could easily find a new home. Do they run? I don't know. I don't have a barrel to test them in. I certainly would trade one of the old 5 horse outboards for a tune-up on my 22HP Mercury. I also need some woodwork done on my boat and I need throttle and gear control for the boat as well. It's a little 12' Starcraft runabout, and I would like to get it out on the river this year.

I make it sound like I'm willing to give away the whole shop. This isn't quite true. I'm willing to get rid of some stuff in exchange for stuff I can use or stuff that would forward my progress somewhere else. I'm open to trading computer equipment for bikes. I really need a bigger monitor than the 15" I'm using. I need some kind of Mac machine to fiddle with. I REALLY need a decent KVM switch. I need a better laptop. I need a bunch of things. I have a bunch of things I don't need. Let's make a deal.

I also make it sound like things went poorly out in the garage this weekend. Quite the opposite is true. The Gold Wing pretty much started right up. Adina's Suzuki started on the first kick without even charging the battery. The Yamaha XS400 also started right up on the first kick. I must say that it looks as if most of the runners in the garage stayed runners. Presently, I'm charging the Kawasaki LTD 440's battery in hopes it too will start. I need to get my tabs tomorrow, and I'll be commuting via bike on Tuesday. Life WILL be good.

4/5/01

I'm sitting up here in my treehouse thinking about what I'm going to write about tonight. Will I write about the inconsiderate assholes who honk their horns out front at 10:00PM? No. Will I write about the various travails of work and installing modems on Windows NT boxes. No. Will I ever have a chance to go out and work on my bikes in the garage? Maybe. I've made some decisions about the fleet, so you should check back on Monday either here or on the motorcycle page if you care to find out what I'm going to do with my garage full o' bikes.

I think what I will do is say that the INANETERVIEW will be back on Monday with an interview with The Best Man. That'd be my buddy, Louie.

Bringing the subject back to computers for a little bit, it's funny how hard it is to configure an ISA modem for Windows NT. It really is a comedy of errors. There doesn't seem to be any tried and true way to do it without doing it 15 times. I'm just sitting here, watching the Blue Screen Of Death do a RAM dump on Frankenputer. I started trying to configure its modem last night at about 8 PM. I knocked off due to sheer frustration at 10. Tonight I started at about 7:45 and I'm still rebooting. It's just a tick past 10 and I'm about ready to kill. Really, nothing gets my shorts in a bundle like NT and modems. They just don't mix very well.

4/4/01

Suddenly, I heard a "BOOM," the kind of boom you hear when a fat guy splits the crotch of his pants from fly to belt loop. Which is, oddly enough, exactly what happened. Dammit, dammit, DAMMIT!

So, I got to go home after lunch today. I got the mail, walked the dog, changed pants, and grabbed a can of pop for the way back to work. I got to go back to work in jeans, which was nice, but I don't care to repeat the performance.

I also got a very tempting offer in the mail today. The nice people at Cross Country Bank have pre-approved me for one of their fine credit products. I think over the past year, they have probably sent us 5 applications in the mail and I just happened to not shred this one on site. I opened it and I got the feeling that something was not quite right. The wording on the flier didn't appeal to me, but that wasn't the only thing that didn't appeal. I read the fine print and realized that all the negative things I've been hearing about credit cards and credit card companies are true.

If I took this company up on their generous offer, I could expect a 21.24% annual percentage rate for purchases and cash advantages. Wow. What a deal. If that isn't outrageous enough, wait until you're late on a payment. If you're late even a day with the minimum payment, you lose this unreasonable rate for a truly unreasonable 24.24%. Do you think that's bad? Just wait, there's more...

If you're unfortunate enough to be a whole month late with your minimum payment, you earn the wonderful and fair 27.24% interest rate. Fair for them, that is. You'd think that this would probably be the highest rate they could legally charge. Well, I have news for you. This is a variable rate. It could go up. Frightening, isn't it?

I thought this would be the end of the bad news, but it doesn't seem to be. Here's some of the other money they'll be making off me if I decide to take them up on their generous offer. A $50.00 annual fee--something I've never seen above $20.00 ever before. A $100.00 account origination fee--as if this is come kind of crazy home loan. I don't think my mortgage cost that much to take out. I wonder what expenses could possibly cost $100.00 in the process of starting up a credit card?. My late payment fee would be $30.00 plus losing the low interest rate. My overlimit fee would also be $30.00. That's the best part-- you're already over your credit limit and they're going to charge you $30.00 a month to make sure you stay there.

These vipers are just preying on the poor and the uneducated. I was always too cheap to pay any origination fees and when I had a reasonable amount of debt, I always threatened to cancel my cards if they ever applied their annual fees. Because of the high origination fee, I doubt I would have ever applied for this card. But what happens when this is the only credit card offer you're getting in the mail? Everyone tells you you need credit. Everyone tells you you have to build a good credit rating. Listen to everyone and it will get you in a place like this. Not good.

No, I won't be taking this company up on their offer, however I will point my readers to places that might have something to say about this company. You could also look here, or even here. I really couldn't believe the sheer amount of hits on Google. This company is really cheesing a bunch of people off, and all they had to do to get me mad was give mail me this insulting credit card offer.

4/3/01

For once I didn't have a busy weekend. I pretty much just sat around, ate ice cream, read magazines, and caught up on some stuff I needed to do. I must say that apart from Daylight Savings Time screwing me up, it was a very relaxing weekend.

I read something very cool in Harper's Magazine this month. The article is called Tense Present Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage, by David Foster Wallace. It's a book review, but it's unlike one I've ever read. It's partly a political statement, a commentary about anal grammarians, and a wholly good read. It has the best argument for Standard Written English in it that I've ever seen, but at the same time it isn't a complete put-down of other forms of English. It was a rattlingly good read and it featured a bit about everything I found intensely stifling about getting acquainted with the English language. I think every middle school student should read this. It's a key and quite possibly one of the most essential things I've read since Class by Paul Fussell.

I also took this weekend to finally get an auction started on EBAY. It's for the old Toshiba T2400CS Laptop. I can't justify having two old laptops around, so I'm selling this one off in hopes of bankrolling a newer, even faster machine. I've found that with this site being updated as frequently as it is, I need to be able to do the updating on the fly, whenever I get the time. I'm hoping the proceeds from this sale and the bike I'm planning on selling later this month will get me a decent machine for not too much money. I can only hope.

I'm sleepy and it's time to go to bed.