In Memory Of Memorial Day

I have spent the last handful of Memorial Days in Newnan, Georgia with hashers at an event known as Hedon. Hedon is a “camping” weekend on private property where the rules are “No dogs. No illegal drugs.” and there are two beer trucks on site dispensing beer the entire weekend. Sound fun?

In the I have had a lot of fun at Hedon and about a month ago I signed up for this year’s event. However, my recently-relentless schedule combined with last weekend’s campout convinced me that Hedon was not for me this year. Instead I plan to spend a mostly-restful weekend doing whatever the hell I please.

Not Too Tough An Act To Follow
This morning I followed the “You Have But One Chance To Make A First Impression Act Of 1978” by taking the Jackmobile in for some TLC at Catcus Carwash. She looks fucking hot, even with the smattering of lint still present on the windshield. Seriously, I like Cactus Carwash but for what they are charging to wash cars could they not afford lint-free towels?

In two weeks I will take the Jackmobile in for her 50,000 mile checkup as she turns the ripe-old age of four. She still looks a like this picture from a year or so ago, with the addition of a few gray hairs and a few more wrinkles

Speaking of the Jackmobile, the other day I received a phone call from a District Attorney asking me questions about my carjacking which occurred in August of 2003. Ah, the swift wheels of the criminal investigation process…

When WiFi Turns Into WoeFi
When I made the monumental leap from my ancient Palm Pilot III to an iPAQ last year one of the big perks was getting the ability to surf the net wirelessly when I was at a location with a WiFi hotspot. It was great, until last week, when my iPAQ decided that it didn’t want to do this any longer. It sees WiFi networks, but refuses to attempt to connect to them. Rats!

The timing this couldn’t be much better since I am seriously considering moving to a Treo 650 from Sprint (Sprint’s prices for data plans seem so much more reasonable than Cingular‘s and Verizon‘s). Cool kids like Susan and Mark carry them (although not necessarily of the Sprint variety), why should I? And let’s face it, I’ll never be as cool as Maigh so a Blackberry is out of the question…

Don’t Know Much About Geography
Yesterday I found out that I will be spending a day or two in El Paso, Texas in the middle of July for training. Don’t be that way, nobody likes it when you are so jealous of me. Do you think it will be hot then???

Not being a cartographer myself I pulled up Google Maps to locate El Paso. Holy Fucking Hell (almost literally) it’s almost due South of Albuquerque, New Mexico! And it being almost directly on the US / Mexico border I can get a look at the new fencing being put up in efforts to stop illegals from entering.

Customer Disservice, Part 1
In preparation for my trip I decided to sign up for Frontier Airlines EarlyReturns^(R) frequent-flier program. I consider doing this like getting immunization shots before travelling; I may not need them, but having them can’t hurt.

After providing all of the required information on their web site I was greeted with an error message. So I tried again, same error message. Naturally I then turned to calling customer service where I was promptly greeted with the standard message that

• their menus have changed recently, please listen to all options
• my call was important to them
• call volume was higher than “expected”
• all of their loyalty agents were currently helping other customers

Loyalty Agents? Oh Please, stop this fucking nonsense! They are (on average) underpaid call service representatives who’d give their left nut/teet to get the hell out of Dodge and we all know it.

Customer Disservice, Part 2
June marks the end of my Natural Gas Fixed Rate plan. To prepare myself for sigining another contract I surfed on over to websites of the major gas marketers to check their rates. One of the marketers had a rate plan called the Choice plan which was in between the non-fixed-rate plan and their “normal” fixed-rate plan. Want to know what this means? Me too! From their site I could never figure out what the hell made this plan “choice.” I am sure that you understand why I didn’t dare call them because I had no desire to sit on hold to wait to talk to one of their Loyalty Agents…

Well, that’s a lot to digest. I’ll probably be posting on Monday, so check you aggregators then. If not, I’ll have plenty of nonsense to discuss on Tuesday. Have a safe Memorial Day Weekend all!!!

And now for some ideas stolen from LiveJournal…
Current Mood – nervous
Current Music – Sirius Satellite Radio, Channel 26 playing Yeah Yeah Yeahs — “Phenomena”
Website Of The Day – Are you planning to travel to where the Internets may have not reached yet too? You may want to do like me and grab some of your favorite apps from Portable Apps and put them onto a USB thumb drive.

If you ever want a quick glance of the sites I’ve picked for my Websites Of The Day, you can check them out on del.icio.us, my user name is InsideThePerimeter (go figure), and they are all tagged as “blogged.”

Exercise (b)Log – nothing

Cheers!
Paulie [eatl/ga]