Time Zoned

We have been all screwed up the last 36 hours from jumping ahead 2 hours.  When we left Denver International Airport the weather was overcast and cloudy.  Ascention into the clouds was highly turbulent.  We dropped probably [Randy pulls a number out of his head] 10-15 feet with one bump and experience zero gravity for a moment.  It was beautiful.  Abby and Jessica were really scared.  Evie continued to suck on her pacifier as normal and the stewardesses did a song-and-dance about the airline not paying for people to get new underwear no matter how soiled they were.  It was not a good time and fun was not had by all.
Upong getting above the clouds Jessica went to the restroom because apparently she was feeling risky.   In the restroom the captain turned on the fasten seatbelt sign and we hit more turbulence. More bumps.  More Jessica being concerned by herself in a small confined space.  Five starts for fun.

We finally arrived here in Indy about 11:50 PM.  20 minutes late, which isn’t bad for all of the detouring the pilot had to do to avoid other storms.  He had taken us to more than 40,000 feet [12.2 kilometers] to get above some of the funk and to move faster through the atmosphere.  That late we were able to haul tailfin to the terminal gate and debark de flyer.  John and Kelsey met us past the insecurity area and we collected all 5,000 pieces of luggage and packed into the Buick (pronounced like Quick, but with a b, like bwick).  Fortunately the Peers don’t live 2 hours away from the Indy airport so we got to bed by 1:00 AM.  The girls are adjusting to the time zone faster than we are.  Of course the biggest issue is that we play games until deep into the night so our sleep patterns are screwed up even more.  Last night Jessica spanked me at Risk and then beat John to become the victor of the first full game of Risk I’ve ever played.  Before that I had actually only played mission Risk, which has a different strategy.

That is all for now, but I’m hoping that later I can post some pictures or something that will entertain you, the reader.

The Best Kind of AOL is the Dead Kind of AOL

I am at my in-laws in IN [that is the kind of alliteration that I dream of using on a daily bases].  They have teenage girls which means that they have AOL.  This is part of standards compliance for teenager girls apparently.  I am logging in on my wireless laptop at least.  However, AOL totally barfed on my older version installed on this laptop.  All it did was log me into their network and give me internet access.  None of the AOL crap loaded up.  None of the crap was blinking, popping, fading in and out, or demanding my attention.  It is beautiful.  It is the first time AOL has brought a smile to my face in a long, long time.

A Major Don’t In Web Site Style

While white letters on black backgrounds is a high contrast color combination… it kills my eyes.  Please don’t use it.  I read several blogs that ‘offer’ this design and I’d like to request that if you’re doing this that you think of your readers.  The odds are that the editor that you input the blog entries with actually is black letters on white backgrounds because its easier on your eyes.

I know, this is an odd forum to be writing such things, but I just wanted to throw it out because I know blogs are easy to create now and that most people don’t have design experience with things like that.   Thanks for putting up with my eccentricity.

Google Your Way Into a New Car

Google has now added car searching to their normal search results!  If you search for a vehicle make and model (for example Honda CR-V) one of the first results (under the money-making paid advertising) will be a field for you to input your zip code, the make and model of the car (pre-filled for your convenience except for your zip code the first time) you can search for dealers selling that vehicle used or new within a radius of X miles.  On top of that you can further restrict things by price.  You get the google map as well.

The Last Post About Dodge Calibers

This morning at about 7:35 I turned in the keys to Enterprise Rent-a-Caliber and am finally rid of the Dodge Caliber.  I don’t want you to think that I hate the car, except that I do.  I have had 4 men (I notice that women dont’ do this) ask me how I like it when the family piles out of the vehicle.  Each one got a standard three word response, “I hate it.”  Yeah, that’s a pretty strong statement to make about a car.  Except that a car that big and heavy needs a very serious engine, 6 cylinders at least, or maybe an iVTEC 4 cylinder engine that pushes various Hondas around.  The 4 banger inside the Caliber is most at home at a red light.  It purs and hums there until the light turns green.  If you stomp on the gas the car gets even more fidgety because it doesn’t know how to accelerate.  I was at a left hand turn, the light was green and a car was more than a quarter mile down the road so I thought I had room to turn left.  I hit the gas.  The gas laughed (laughing gas?), the car jittered forward and finally started to move smoothly as I was narrowly into the left hand turn lane before the other vehicle was going through the same intersection.
The upsides of the low visibility windows that the Caliber has are many and varied.  For example, not being able to see means your body will be in a relaxed state when you get into the accident instead of being tensed up.  Another fine quality of low visibility is that bullets flying at you from outside of a car in a high speed chase will have a smaller target if they have to go through the glass.  Of course most bullets would whip through the steel doors make that less of an issue.  The last upside I’m going to mention is that not seeing where your hood is makes it more likely for you to stay back from other vehicles at a red light because you wouldn’t want to bump into them.  15 feet until the next car may or may not be how far back I was from them… I don’t know, it was hard to tell unless I got out of the car to look.

There are some nice features that I have mentioned before like lights in the cup holders at night.  A stereo that sounds so horrible that you actually drive with it off so that your focus is more on the road (that you can’t see so well, anyway) helps.  There is a drink cooler in the dashboard.  Nice.  I can have cold drinks while I drive, but do I want to be driving?  Last, but not least, I love the fact that the ‘large storage space’ in the back is not any larger than my Honda Civic’s was.  Who needs to put things in the back of a vehicle?  Not me for sure.  Our stroller barely fit  in the back with anything else.

If you see a Caliber on the road, steer clear of them, they’re a mobile accident waiting to happen.

Please, Please,Please use alternative Text in HTML Email

If you’re like me you have subscribed to various email lists or advertising newsletters from specific company. You want to know about specific airfares when they’re being offered that may allow you to travel to destination X for a low rate. You also want to know when your next credit card payment is due. You get the emails from the companies and your modern email client (mine is Thunderbird) blocks the external images because they’re sometimes used by spammers to track legit email addresses. The blocked images, if they don’t have alternative text, give you the broken image symbol in the email and the ‘buy now’ link is just a broken image and nothing indicates that you should be able to take advantage of the lower fares from within the email. In essence their whole plan to draw you in has failed miserably because they have failed to do something that is so simple that even spammers have figured it out.

Please use Alternative Text

What do the links above go to in the original email? I can’t tell. And if I was blind or visually impared and wanted a screen reader to tell me what they go to? Tough. SilverPOP, the service that sent this email out doesn’t care about its customers enough to actually put in descriptive words that would tell me what those links go to.
Now with images

Thunderbird adds a button to show the images in the email when it has blocked the images. However, it is possible that the images contain text that a screen reader will still not see. This is the kind of stuff that would be easy to do, and add value to the email for EVERY user who has images blocked, a restrictive proxy server, visual imparement and or the email composer forgot to link to an external image and the URL is broken.

Think twice and add alternative image text, it could be effecting your bottom line!

When Abby Plays Cars…

Abby is now playing ‘Cars’ due to the movie and when she pretends to be a car she is the one and only star of the movie “Lightning the Queen.”  The actual Cars charact name is Lightning McQueen but Abby’s cultural references are a bit limited 🙂

Stick Shift Silliness

My mother-in-law has inherited a stick shift Nissan truck from the early 90’s.  It has a mere 80,000 miles, which is just so few.  The truck has been well maintained and the body is in great shape.  Last night she asked me to get some gas for her in it and I got to drive a stick shift for the first time in years.  Such fun!  I stalled the thing out 3 times in the King Sooper parking lot, but hey, its like learning all over again without my grandpa in the car.  Did I ever tell you that story?

You see I asked my grandpa Peterman to teach me how to drive a stick shift.  So he took me to a nice flat, sandy, isolated place (which is hard to find in the hills where he lives, well, level is at least) and helped me learn about shifting the gears, finding the right shifting points in his Chevy Luv, and getting used to a stick.  Then he let me drive home from that point (on a non-public dirt road, I was 15, I think).  Except for one thing: at a point on the road to his house the road is just as wide as the cars (plus a few feet, I’m sure) but drops off into a small stream on both sides.  At that point the road is inclined.  At that point my grandpa had me stop the truck and stop the engine.  And then he asked me to start the truck and continue on my way up to his house.  Yikes!  I panicked and freaked out and probably was 10 times more dangerous.  I let the truck drift backwards and then slammed on the breaks in major fear.  My grandpa chuckled as I switched places with him (having set the parking break, put the truck in reverse and swore to God above that I would never drive a stick again).  He smoothly drove us back up the hill and to his house explaining to me the physics and mechanics of driving.

I’m glad there aren’t steep hills and muddy streams in the King Sooper parking lot.  It makes it a lot easier for me to get going again.  Oh, and just in case you think I don’t deal with stick shifts well I happen to have inherited that Luv later on when I was 16 and driven it for a few short months until I scraped it down the side of my parents Camry 🙂

This Last Weekend’s Car Hunting Experience

Saturday afternoon, having left the girls at my parents’ Jessica and I went out in our rental roach car to test drive two vehicles (we’ve narrowed our desired car down to a mid-sized SUV): The Honda CRV and the Saturn VUE. The similarities of the vehicles include having a similar classification, both run Honda engines, both have a V in their names, and both were at car dealers. From there, it went completely opposite of what I was expecting. I warned Jessica that if the Honda salesman wanted to get pushy I was out of there. The Saturn guy I wasn’t worried about because Saturn is supposed to be a no pressure, no haggle place. That’s their policy.

Honda First

We went to the Honda dealership and after parking walked over to the CRVs and started looking. Bam! We liked the exteriors and just needed to get into the car and do a bit of a test drive. No salesperson ran up to us and shook our hands and asked how much money we were intending to spend. Instead after he had finished helping another family that was looking at CRV’s he asked if we needed help. I told him that we wanted to look at the CRV’s and since he had the key for the SE model (SE stands for Price, deluxe, bells and whistles) he let us in. I told him that we weren’t looking to spend that much and asked that we be shown the LX (LX stands for Low End. This car has so many more bells and whistles than our Honda that it seems funny that it is considered low end). He walked into the dealership after asking me questions that I evasively answered. I indicated that we weren’t going to be buying today. He got the clue, went into the dealership and got the keys for the LX.

He got into the back seat and Jessica was in the passenger seat. He didn’t say too much other than to suggest some things for me to be able to experience how the CRV handled. I have to confess to having bubbled over several times while driving about how great the 4 cylinder engine performed compared to the Civic. The CRV was a little slow on the starts but once it got going was nicely responsive due to the iVTEC technology Honda uses to get extra power out of the otherwise tiny engine. The interior had little details all over it that were major improvements over the 2000 Civic we had before. The exterior had lines we liked and it comes in a cobalt blue that we love.

After driving it up some hills quite quickly (without noticable engine noise) and after taking some corners a little faster than I would normally and having it not roll over I was impressed. I parked back at the dealership and messed with the factory stereo. Music. Sounding good [note that for a factory stereo it sounds good, I know that its not a high end system]. Space in the backend of the Honda was nice for a smaller SUV and the back passenger seats slide forward a few inches, if that is all you need, as well as folding up if you need lots more space. In short we loved the car. The salesman showed us the blue model with black interior because we asked if they had a blue model (which only comes with a black interior. Ouch in the heat but we’ll see). He then told me that his manager required him to ask us if there was anything he could do to get us into the car (he asked with the conviction of a man who knew he wasn’t going to get an affirmative answer). I told him no but asked for his card. He gave me his card and indicated that due to dealer incentives he thought we could get a prime deal if we purchased towards the end of the month. We shook hands and Jessica and I walked out of the showroom floor happily discussing the experience.

Saturn – Like Uranus

The Saturn dealership was not like I was expecting. The guy who was scheduled to show us the vehicles pretty quickly took us to a used VUE at the back of the dealership. It wasn’t old, it only had 256 miles on it. It was a bright blue color. It was the deluxe package. It had everything, including a 6 cylinder Honda engine and drive train (iVTEC included). Except that the body had lines that Jessica and I didn’t like. The sales guy started singing the praises of the safety features to which Jessica replied, “Yes, we like that it has the LATCH system for the seatbelts.”

Salesman: “What?”

Jessica: “The car seat attachment system is called LATCH.”

Salesman: “Whatever. blah, blah, blah, we’re better, safer, stronger, blah, blah.”

So we went and drove for a while and the salesguy said to us as he got into the car, “I’ll just be back here ready to answer your questions.” And then the dialog began. He started asking us questions, telling us more and more things, and upping the annoyance factor. Note to any car salesperson who reads this: let the customers experience the car, if you’re going to point out things that they should notice (because the manufacturer hasn’t already made them obvious), do it before (or after) the customer starts driving. It will save you a lot of annoyance points because
they will get to experience the vehicle. Cars are about experience as well as monetary commitments and safety cages.
Upon arriving back at the dealership we sat in the car and talked about a few things. I loved the engine’s power, but not so much the rest of the car, so I just noted how nice the engine was. Upon debarking the VUE he asked if we were going to pass such a sweet deal up and the pressure began. At Saturn. The no pressure dealership. He said that they hadn’t sold any cars that day so he was sure we could get them to bump the price down. At Saturn. The no haggle dealership. Jessica and I declined and departed. About 7 minutes later my cell phone began playing the MP3 song that is my ringtone. It was him telling me about some financing options they had.

Unsold! We’re not going to buy a VUE this time around because we don’t like the features and design of the car with a few minor exceptions. We didn’t like the pressure and we didn’t like the idea that we could haggle after being told that they were a no haggle dealership.

When we get back from our family trip at the end of the month we’re going to buy a CRV and may even buy it from the salesman who was so polite, courteous and attentive to our buying approach.

Undercooked Meat Hex

The last couple times I’ve grilled non-Steak meats on the grill I have undercooked them the first time they were on the grill.  This was driving me crazy!  Then I realized that I have been cooking everything like its steak, and so I’m a complete moron and the problem is not my grill or the meat.  So, next time I grill non-steak meats on the grill I am going to do it right.  people will once again be able to eat when I say the food is done on the grill and not so much gagging, running for the bathroom and losing their appetite when they cut into mostly raw armadillo.