OK, that title is not really a concern of mine for this post. I received the Lego trains I ordered and the box said “Caution: 12 V” or something like that, but it said 12V. I ordered the train from lego.com where the site said that it included a 9V speed regulator and a 9V motor. The speed regulator I got says 9V-12V on the hole for the power supply. The power brick says output: 10.8V AC. So, what’s the deal? Did Lego mean to put a 10.8V transformer in there (seems to work fine)? Did the site and the packaging get mislabeled? I don’t think Lego really cares about this type of train anymore as they’re moving to radio controlled trains, which I think is an excellent move for kids as I spent a few hours laying out my track and getting it to work correctly (and I have a BS in engineering). The trick is that the track switches must be in the correct positions, you can’t short circuit the track, and you must have power applied. The layout I put together has 3 concentric loops that allows the train to get to each of the loops. The problems I discovered is that the power must be on the outer loop and the 2 switches for each loop must be in opposite directions; they must also be switched at the same time to keep the train moving when it is on an inner loop. 4 years of college and I can setup a kid’s toy!
Wrong numbers
It’s amazing to me how many calls I get that are wrong numbers; for having my cell phone number for 7 years and my home number for 2, you’d expect people to be able to give out the right number. I don’t think the calls are misdials as I get a number of different callers calling. One particularly interesting wrong number are calls I get from Children’s Hospital to both my cell phone and to my landline (different area codes). I happen to recognize the caller ID for it as my dad did some work for Children’s for awhile and called me all the time. I’d hope people in healthcare to have current phone numbers of people they’re trying to contact. OK, maybe someone had a wrong emergency contact number.
The other day I got a call twice from someone I knew had a wrong number because the caller ID said payphone and I don’t know anyone that has used a payphone in years. The second time the person called, she argued with me that she had the right number. OK, if you say so.
To top off wrong numbers, I got a voicemail on my cell phone from a teacher saying that Johnny’s (I can’t remember the kid’s name) behavior has gotten out of control. Hello, parents, you might want to put correct contact info in you kid’s file. And teacher, you might want to listen to the name of the person whose voicemail you’re calling to see if it matches a contact name for the kid.
One of the coolest features I had on my phone line when I lived in Portland was the ability to block up to 10 numbers; I had a few people keep calling me with the wrong number, so I entered their numbers and never heard from them again.
On the flip side, I made a call to the right number the other day, but the number had already been recycled. One of my friends dropped his home phone a few years back and I was a bit slow on the uptake (I guess I always called his cell phone). I knew I dialed the right number, apologized for getting the wrong person and then hung up. I checked the number I dialed and it was definitely what I intended to dial. Next step was removing the number from both my cell phone and my desktop address book.
Movies based on books aren’t as good as the real thing
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a movie based on a book until yesterday. I went with my wife to see The Da Vinci Code after having listened to the unabridged version of Dan Brown’s novel on my iPod during my running. I was extremely disappointed in the movie because of this. I really can’t judge the movie in isolation as I kept going back to the novel. The detail in the book allowed me to form my own views of the scenes and I got really engrossed in the detail.
I realize that this isn’t news to avid readers, but it really clouded my view of a movie that was probably decent for those that haven’t read the book or forgot the contents of the book.
I think I’ll stick to audiobooks for awhile; they keep me going while running, almost to the point that I don’t want to stop running.
Movies in bad taste
While my wife and I were at the movies yesterday, we saw a preview of a movie about September 11th. Playing on this major tragedy in recent US history is in extremely poor taste, in my opinion. I’m sure every adult remembers where he or she was on that fateful day and doesn’t want to relive the emotions. For me, I had gotten married 2 days prior and my wife and I were in a hotel room in San Luis Obispo; I was showering and she was watching TV. We couldn’t believe it and cut our mini-honeymoon (we took a few extra days off from work to drive back from our wedding down the California coast) short to head back home. It was a very eerie trip home as we heading down I-5 and passed LAX where it was completely empty and the exit was blocked, not to mention the light traffic for a Tuesday.
I don’t think movies about this tragedy are necessary and having people capitalize on it is shameful.
Lego pricing
In my quest to find Legos, I’ve come across a number of sites and eBay that have Lego sets. Some sets/pieces are available on Lego’s website and people selling the ones that are available are pricing them at more than the price Lego has them. However, the market for used and new older Lego sets seems quite large. I wish I had gotten interested in Legos 10 years ago as I would have been able to get sets at list price and would have had a large selection. Over the last few years (at least from what I can tell), the emphasis in Legos has been licensed sets such as Star Wars, Harry Potter, Batman, Spiderman, etc. as well as Bionicles. I’m not interested in any of them, so the selection is quite limited for me and I’m afraid that Lego won’t be producing much variety in the town/city and train lines.
Speaking of trains, just as I start getting interested in trains, Lego is moving away from the 9V trains where the tracks are powered to plastic tracks where the engine is powered and has a remote control. The 9V trains interest me more as they are more like model trains and less toy like. In order to cater to the Lego target audience (young kids), Lego decided that the remote controlled trains are better. I can understand this, but it’s too bad for folks like me. I can still buy some parts from Lego, but soon the price will go up and the secondary markets selling Legos will make everything much more expensive.
BTW, if anyone wants to sell me Legos, let me know. I’m looking for town/city related sets, train cars (9V), as well as bulk lots of random bricks to build stuff.
What’s up with baseline energy usage?
I received my gas and electric bill today and have always been curious what baseline energy usage means because I always exceed it by at least 2 times and usually more than that. For energy usage > 100% of baseline, the rate increases and then increases more as the usage goes up. Turns out, the baseline is based on a) location (there are 4 zones, coastal, inland, mountain, and desert), season (summer or winter), if all electric or gas and electric applications, and number of days in the month. For the summer, where I live (inland), the baseline is 11.8 kilowatt hours per day. The big problem with this is that the size of the house nor the number of family members is taken into account. So a person with a 1000 square foot house has the same baseline as someone with a 2500 square foot house or a house with 2 people and a house with 4 people have the same baseline. Unless I’m missing something, this is completely ridiculous. I do what I can to conserve energy (I still haven’t turned on the A/C despite the 90+ degree weather outside), but my bill doesn’t reflect it. Granted, I do have to run computers all the time for my business.
I guess if you can afford additional family members or a bigger house, you deserve to pay more for electricity.
New office floor
After living in our house for almost two years, I came to the realization that my office was one of the high traffic areas in the house. Most of our downstairs is tile, so high traffic doesn’t really show. The carpet in my office looked awful and I decided to get hardwood in it. I chose bamboo as I wanted a light color for the long run and it was priced better than some of the other woods. This morning, the floor was finished and I moved my office back in.
Government incompetence
I received a notice last week that I hadn’t paid the tax for my company and I owed $70 in penalties. This had me fuming mad because I had a copy of the check I sent in March and the check was included in my tax return; how did the state process the tax return to know how much I owed without seeing the check? I called the Franchise Tax Board on Friday and spoke to a representative that said he’d send a note for the returns people to look for it (the check hadn’t been cashed) and he’d give me a call back. Today is Tuesday and I never heard from him, so I called back. The problem with calling back is that the automated system wouldn’t let me wait on hold because the system was too bogged down. So, 10 or so calls later, I got put on hold and then transferred to someone. The lady said that I needed to stop payment on the check (she didn’t bother looking up my account), fax in a copy of the stop payment and send a new check. She didn’t bother giving me the fax number.
I started looking at stopping payment on the check and sending all the stuff to the state. My bank wants $20 to stop payment on the check. So now that the state lost my check (I did send it), I’ll be out $20 and hours of my time trying to resolve this issue. I’m going to call back tomorrow to find out if they found my check and what they’ll do about covering the $20 stop payment fee. How can the government be so incompetent?
Legos, Legos, Legos
My wife thinks I’m crazy being a 33 year old, married man wanting to play with Legos. Well, I have news for her…I AM crazy! In my effort to build up a Lego town, I’ve started looking for bulk Legos as the most cost effective way of getting random parts to build buildings and such. I’ve found some on eBay, but with shipping costs and having no idea what I’ll get, I went to Craig’s list and found some Legos yesterday. I bought a big box of them and have started sorting them to see what I got. Unfortunately, there is a lot of junk in there. Junk being non-block parts and non-Lego parts. The non-Lego parts (some Mega Blocks) are far inferior to Legos in terms of quality. The process of sorting is very slow as I have to examine every part; most Lego parts say “Lego” right on the “stud”. It is, however, in my nature to sort things like this. I figure another day or two and I’ll have this box sorted and it will be time to find more.
Awful service
My wife and I went to hear a jazz band at a local restaurant last night (the band lead is the head custodian at her school) with a few of her friends. Having been to this restaurant before to here this guy play before and having experienced awful server, not to mention mediocre, over-priced food, we made sure we ate dinner first (I even had a candy bar right before we left so I’d get my dessert in). So, we get there and a waitress didn’t even come over to us to take our drink order for 30 minutes. Then the food order wasn’t taken for another 20-30 minutes (I can’t recall exactly). If that wasn’t enough, the food arrived about 1.5 hours after we got there (I had dessert only which arrived about 30 minutes before everyone else’s food).
I’m not sure why the service was so awful, but one of the wait staff profusely apologized and said that in the 10 years that she had been there (on and off), it was never this bad. I kind of find that quite hard to believe as that was our second (and last experience) with that restaurant. One of our friends and my wife complained and the entire meal (6 people) and drinks was provided free of charge. The waitress that apologized said that next time we come back, we should ask for her and we’d have a great meal. Hmmm…fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me….fool me three times? I don’t think so.
Our community (an area of San Diego) has 3 Italian restaurants, with this being one of them. We enjoy another one, but experience sub par service (we got smart and remembered they have free delivery). I guess we might have to try the third one or maybe we shouldn’t push our luck.
I’ve never had to work in food service, so I don’t know what it is like, but it seems to me that if part of your job depends on tips, you’d do your best job so you are rewarded (monetarily).