guapacha.com

Used to be a time when getting rid of used electronics was a breeze, there was always someone wanting to buy what I was replacing. But these days, not so much. I’ve quite a few things around the house that I’d love to get rid of:

• A Series 2 TiVo with a large hard drive in it – I put this on Craigslist at a steal price but all I got were people asking if I had a (transferable) lifetime subscription to go with it. I don’t. No one wanted it.
• A Sony 5-disc CD unit, looks nice on your hi-fi stack, sounds great. Of course it’s old, won’t play new-fangled SACD or MP3 CDs but it’s still a decent item
• Dell Axim X51v which I used to use as my aviation GPS. I tried selling this on the forums that support the aviation software but only two people were interested and they wanted to buy it, and my software, for about a quarter of the ‘as new’ cost.
• A Sony MiniDisc unit. So MiniDisc never caught on in the consumer market but it was a great platform for music. When I had my MiniDisc player stolen out of my Jeep (along with all my MDs) I gave up on the format. I doubt anyone wants this, either.

And I’m sure there are other things too. I suppose I could take them to some e-waste site for free and at least be rid of them, but it saddens me that no one wants any of it.

Last week, Teri, my Dad and I went to Applebee’s in El Centro and had without doubt our worst restaurant experience in a while.

• We ordered Samuel Adams drafts and they just tasted bad, quite sweet and the colour was all wrong. We sent them back and the manager bought new ones but they looked identical to me. Dad thought his tasted ok, I was still dubious but we kept them. By the end of the meal neither of us had drunk more than half the glass – they were not good at all.
• Dad ordered the Orange Salmon but when the meal came they gave him an Orange Chicken bowl instead. We sent it back and our waitress came and apologised, said she had written it down correctly but hit the wrong button on the computer. It took about 10 minutes for the new dish to come
• Meal over, our waitress came to give us the bill, more apologies. But the bill had a charge for both the Salmon and the unwanted Orange Chicken so we had to get her back to correct it. By this time I am sure she just wanted us gone so she could forget about the whole thing.

So we paid the bill and left. I was a little surprised that we didn’t get something comp’d but maybe this level of service is the norm?

db has been posting about some customer service issues recently (no link cos I know you already read it) and I thought this was too amusing not to post.

A guy I work with has Time Warner Cable for his internet and for the last couple of days he says that their mail server’s time is off by an hour and 27 minutes, so his mail has the wrong timestamp. TWC lets you chat to a customer representative online and he sent me his transcript. It’s a little long so you can see it after the break. Anyone want to bet that RadleyH isn’t a real person?
Read the rest of this entry »

The other night outside Von’s I was taken in by the feminine wiles of a young lady selling “Toys for Tots”, and ended up buying a puppet theatre kit (look for some vids soon!). Anyway, the item only cost $15 and it’s all for charity, right?

But hang on there! Reading the back of the receipt last night it says that 5% of the retail price goes to charity. The other 95% goes to the corporation selling the item and that “no portion of the 95% is used to benefit any non-profit organization”! So, I spent $16.16 and only 75c is going to charity? What a con!

That chick used me, man.

As you all know I’m into most of the social networking sites, you can find me at Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn on a regular basis. And it’s been great “reconnecting” with past colleagues.

But when I look at my list of contacts, I get a large amount of career envy. Just some of the titles my ex-peers hold:

• Director of IT
• CIO
• Vice President of IT
• Financial Controller
• CTO
• Owner of their own consulting business

And here am I, peasant worker bee for a big conglomerate. I know some people will say ‘but you moved across an ocean etc’ and that might be true, and might even be a ‘big deal’ but ultimately I’m about to turn 43 and I am just another programmer on the treadmill. How come all these guys did so much better than me?

This past weekend, my Dad, Teri, her parents and her Uncle John and Aunt Vaneta took a road trip out to the railway museum in Campo, CA, a small place in the high desert between where we live and San Diego. We had hoped to ride the train that they run on weekends but it turned out that it doesn’t run in December as they run a special train for kids instead.

So we made do with a stroll around their rolling stock museum, over 80 items ranging from old steam engines to covered wagons. Most everything is in need of a good sprucing up but it was a cool stroll around the yard and through some of the carriages.

Of course I had my Flip camera with me to capture it all:

So today I was giving my co-worker his daily deserved helping of crap and, for reasons that I absolutely cannot remember, told him he could twist in his sobriety. No, I don’t know what the hell I meant either though it’s safe to assume I wasn’t trying to be empathetic to whatever he was talking about.

Which brings us to this week’s video. Back to 1988, Germany’s Tanita Tikaram and Twist In My Sobriety, from the album Ancient Heart which, if I remember right, was pretty darned good.

Oh, I’m off to Sacramento tomorrow but don’t worry. As our Governor liked to say – I’ll be back!

As previously mentioned, last weekend was the annual Brawley Cattle Call weekend of which one part is a parade down Main Street. I took some video of it on the Flip and split it into two parts. First up is a montage of the school marching bands that took part:

Part two is a collection of some of the other participants:

See you here in 2009!

Guapacha.com was registered in March 1999 and I used it solely as an email host at that time. It wasn’t until later that I turned it into a web site as well, and them much later when it became the mega-force of web publishing that it is now lol

Whilst looking at some web traffic stats for this little ol’ site I came across the Internet Wayback Machine which states that it has 85 billion webpages archived all the way back from 1996… including this site from it’s beginning in 2001. Click on an image for full size.

		2001
		2002
		2004

Look how far we’ve come………. awww!

I heard somewhere there’s an election on today! Well, thanks to my recent citizenship, I received a mail-in ballot so I am pretty sure the rumours are correct. Odd that I haven’t seen anything on TV 🙂

I filled my card in a couple of weeks ago but Teri will take it to the polling station with her today. Not that I think my vote will count for much – don’t need to count the votes to know that my Presidential candidate certainly didn’t win. I did vote yes on a couple of state Propositions, be interesting to see if they pass. Locally, a friend of the family is standing for a position against an incompetent incumbent who has run a pretty negative campaign; hopefully he will win.

Not sure what channel to watch the events unfold on. Usually Keith Olberman is my choice for these things but I can’t take his over-the-top pro-Obama stance so will look elsewhere, maybe CNN is the best of a bad bunch? BBC America is covering it but I don’t have that here in the apartment.

Or you can watch it all unfold in this widget, handily supplied by Google.