Be The Pigeon

So you probably know by now that Kristen (my youngest) broke her arm yesterday in a fall down the stairs. A funny thing happened this morning. First, note that the doctor is not going to put on a cast until the swelling goes down (on Monday), so she just has a bandaged arm for now. I came into the office and the kids were playing (day off school). Kristen was in playing with the big kids and had decided that the splint was in her way of achieving a true coloring masterpiece. Afterall, it's hard to color with your left hand when you're a righty. So she took it off! There's a problem solver for ya. She must be feeling better because she was happy as could be. Of course, as a parent, that's not exactly what we wanted to see. We put the splint back on and explained as best we could that it had to stay. She wasn't very happy, but accepted it. It amazes me how resilient and adaptive little kids are. She's fine today and now accepts that this is life. In ...

There's some pretty cool material out there. Here's a funny one. This one plays off of Shane's post about songs with Windows XP sounds .

I love dirty jobs. Actually, I loathe dirty jobs but I love Dirty Jobs . The show is one of the funniest things on TV. I think Mike Rowe is just hilarious. The jobs he does aren't always that funny by themselves (filling jam jars was real exciting, believe me). However, the genius of sarcasm that man brings to the show makes it worth watching all by itself. I'm also a little more content in my own home-office job each time I watch an episode. I can't believe some of those people do some of those things each and every day. So, here's my solicitation for your help. Please share: If you're a regular viewer of the show, which episode has just had you laughing until your cheeks hurt? What are the worst dirty jobs you've ever had to do in your home? Personally, I think the episode where Mike was in Las Vegas feeding buffet leftovers to the pigs was absolutely hilarious. Funniest thing on TV in a very, very long time. I laughed and laughed and laughed, and th...

Those of you who know me well knew this one must be coming. I just filed my taxes. This year we used TurboTax instead of the TaxCut product we'd used in previous years. (In my opinion, the cheapest one is the best one.) Every year around this time I marvel at how oligopolies work so well. First, a not-so-fake analogy. Why, when you try to buy tickets online at places like Ticketmaster, do you have to pay a "convenience" fee that ultimately increases the price of your tickets up to 20%? This so-called convenience fee is presumably for the privilege of buying stuff online in my underwear and not having to go to the grocery store to wait in line and buy tickets (where you'd then pay a service fee instead). However, the real convenience, we all know, is for our good friends at Ticketmaster, since they can fire 25% of their people now that we all use the Internet. Therefore, I'm paying them extra to do something that's more efficient for them, and thus ...

Today I shall be the pigeon... I enjoy listening to tunes while I work. I have an ample collection of MP3's I've amassed over the years. I even pony up for the RealPlayer DRM songs once in a while when I like something. In the past I've really enjoyed the smarts of the LaunchCast service (now owned by Yahoo) which plays songs it thinks you'll like. You rate the tunes and it learns your tastes. It's even free with commercials (or you pay a few bucks a month to lose the commercials). The thing I didn't like was that you had to restart the stream hourly if you didn't pay, plus you had the commercials. But the worst part was that it was IE only, and didn't work in Firefox. A friend at work today turned me onto a new service you have to check out. It's called Pandora and does everything LaunchCast did, plus more, and so far I haven't even had any commercials (though I'm sure they're there; they also have a pay service that eliminates...

OK, warning. Another conspiracy theory is about ready to land... I'm preparing to wax political and mount my soapbox. I had a procedure done at the local hospital recently. No, it wasn't a lobotomy, though I'm sure they'd have charged even more. Without disclosing my entire health history for the entire Internet to ponder over, I figured this diagnostic procedure would cost a few hundred bucks and that my health insurance would cover the majority. Today I get the bill from my wife and find out that not only did it cost me $13.09 per minute, but the insurance covered none of it! So this leaves me wondering why my more-than-$300-per-month health-care premium is so worthless. I looked it up (I'm sure most of you are calling me stupid about now) and found that I get the pleasure of forking out many hundreds of dollars for deductibles with zero insurance before anything at all gets reimbursed. I'm thinking, "OK, so after paying thousands a year to carry ...