Megan and I realized that her 2000 Pontiac Grand Am was falling apart and losing value fast. Their recent low-interest promotions were great sales promoters but also dampened the used market, where interest rates are more typical. We didn’t want to hold on to a car that was in need of increasingly frequent repairs, and we also didn’t want to sell it and take an unreasonable equity hit.
So she traded it in last night and got a great deal — on a Lexus IS300. Cool.
I did more social things Saturday than I normally do in months. I should probably never admit this in public.
I met Laura downtown at Innovox, as usual, because I’m lame and only know how to get to that one place. From there, we went to the High Museum of Art to see the exhibit of the “Later Works of Edvard Munch.” The museum was fairly nice, although I’m not sure what compelled the members to spend a few thousand dollars on random junk collected from Ebay and call it art. The Munch exhibit, which would be more appropriately entitled “Everything that Edvard Munch Did Except For The Scream Which We Couldn’t Find”, was fairly nice, although it did prove the concept that not every painting an artist does is worth hanging on the wall.
Ooh! Just in time for Halloween: take a look at this photo collection of spooky towers, spooky graveyards and other spooky places. It’s just spooky!
CompUSA Sucks.
Yesterday, Robert and I stopped by CompUSA. Once at the register, the cashier informed us that there would be a 5 minute wait before we could be helped, as someone had just made a very large cash purchase. Rather than waiting, my friend put his purchase back on the shelf. I told the cashier to inform his management that the arbitrary hold-time due to the large cash purchase just cost Compusa about $200. The cashier then stated that his management was much happier about the large cash purchase and wasn’t very concerned about the loss of $200. I then advised the cashier to inform his management that while the hold-time cost Compusa $200, the cashier’s poor attitude cost Compusa two customers.
A parable for our times: “The Crow and the Owl“, by Louise Szente.
Ding Dong Kingdom. Sounds like a vacation spot for fat people.
Today’s the second day in a row that I’ve forgotten to charge the battery on my poor little cell phone. I defend myself by saying I’m trying to wean it off of electricity. The downside of not having my phone handy is that since my phone stores my phone number list, I have no idea what anyone’s number is. I guess having these numbers stored in my phone is good, as it means there’s one less group of facts that I have to remember, but it does suck when I forget to charge the battery.
I heart Pine. Today I saved a coworker a lot of time by explaining Pine’s batch-apply commands.
Say you want to move all emails containing the string “monkeys” in the subject line to another mail folder. These are the commands to enter:
; to enter Selection Commands
B Broaden Selection
T select based on Text
S select text in the Subject line
type in the string of text you’re searching for, and hit Enter.
Zoiks! It’s only fifteen minutes into The Hour of the Squid.