Don't Back Down

While we hadn't been looking for a new vacuum, we were at Lowe's one day (undoubtedly looking to spend money on something else) and noticed a Dyson out on a cart, as if it had been marked down or something. Knowing that they were expensive, albeit tres cool, we kept walking.

On our way back by, we noticed that the price had been marked down. For whatever reason, we didn't notice this the first time through. By nearly 20%. In checking the tag on the item, we flipped it over, to find out it had actually been marked down twice more - by 10% (of the new price), and then by a little more than that. The end result was a nearly 35% markdown on the Dyson DC14 Low Reach.

We bought it. We didn't have any particular affinity for the low reach model, it just happened to be the one on the clearance rack. Everything appeared to be in order, and it came with plenty of attachments, though we didn't get a box, manual, or anything else. After taking it home, we ran it over our bedroom carpet, which had been cleaned by our other vacuum only a little while before we left.

It picked up a solid handful of dog hair, human hair, lint and who knows what else. And this after just a quick once-over the floor, not getting under things and moving stuff around like we had earlier. As a bonus, we hit the trigger, and it dumped out into the trash, without us having to touch this newfound dirt. Sweet.

While (still) expensive, it does work very well, we allegedly won't have to purchase parts or bags or filters or anything, it does a better job, and as a bonus it's much lighter than our old vacuum, so the kids can use it. Win, win, win, win.

I do have a camera, of course, I just didn't have one with me.

As I pulled into the parking lot, I noticed that I was next door to a van labelled "Target Corporation". I don't remember the exact wording, but it was something like "Corporate Services". Anyway, the owner (operator) of the van was busily loading from a full cart, presumably for a busy day's work.

The only problem? We were in the Wal-Mart parking lot.

So it seems that another supreme court justice is on the way in the person of Harriet Miers. I find it interesting that she is very public about her Christianity (or at least, the news media is). This isn't a bad thing by any means, and it is certainliy refreshing, even if you don't happen to share her views. All too often it's more about the mud they can dig up than the positive things. In any case, one of the first results on Google (if not the first) talks about her acceptance of Jesus in 1979.

Now I don't know much about her other than this, but it strikes me as a bit odd that this appointee is in her 60s (this is based on the article saying that she was in her mid-30s in 1979, which was 26 years ago, I have done no other research). It would seem that appointing someone a bit younger might make for a more sensible choice - if indeed the idea is to keep the justices on the bench for their full life.

That said, I don't wish her a short life, and women do live longer than men, so we may see her for a while yet if she does get confirmed to this post.

And again, I was without mine. I'm going to have to start carrying that thing around with me. Ever since I switched phones and no longer have one with me almost constantly, I seem to be missing all the fun stuff.

In any case, this was on the way to pick up our car this morning at the shop. We noticed a car pulled into one of the bus lanes on Independence on the way into town. This itself isn't so much surprising, but this one was stopped. Next to a portalet.

No confirmation if there was anyone inside (either in the car or the portalet), but it struck me as very funny at the time.

Our newest gadget has arrived, an HP Officejet 7410 All-in-One. Now the printer is cool and all, but Amazon had it for a (relatively) massive $60 less than the local Office Depot, especially impressive when Amazon doesn't have sales tax and the price of the printer is well above their free shipping threshold, making for an easy savings of nearly $100.

Read "Amazing Amazon" »

While I now have an all-in-one printer that has fax capabilities, I doubt that I'll use them. I really don't use faxes much at all anymore. But every once in a while they are useful. Instead, I use MaxEmail, which, despite the name, offers fax services. For $15 per year, I get unlimited incoming faxes to a dedicated number (the number is in the 815 area code), and when they come in, I get the PDF file right at my desk.

They do have other programs where you can pay for a number in your area code, or buy more minutes or the like, but this does the trick for me. There are other services out there, but many are more expensive or try and nickel-and-dime you in the process or even make you use a proprietary fax viewer. MaxEmail hits the spot for me, at just a buck and a quarter per month.

The service also offers you an email box at the same number, which will send audio files to your email when a voice mail comes in - but I have enough voice mail boxes and didn't use it.

Apparently a draft version (via Jenn) of a law in Indiana will require you to file a petition for parentage if you can't become a parent, uh, the old-fashioned way and if the person helping you (we'll call them the donor) is not your spouse.

Interesting. Even though they may be well-intentioned by trying to make sure that only your standard husband-and-wife arrangements may have kids, I have to think that the government in Indiana has finally found that point where they just don't have anything else to do.

Come on. Maybe if you can't think of any other laws to create, you should just go home and not make any more. Or maybe you should clear some off the books. It's obvious that the government spends far too much time now trying to intrude on our lives. Let's head the other direction.

So I'm trying the new Google Reader, and I'll say that it seems to have promise. Unfortunately, that's about it, as it's really slow. What I can say is that the interface seems nice and simple, the reading speed is good, and there are some nice keyboard shortcuts too. The problem as of this writing is that it takes impossibly long to load anything, most items don't offer any response (Peter says that importing is running slowly and you don't have a status bar) and there are a large number of server errors - either the little message kind within a larger page or the big message kind that takes up the whole page.

What I do like: It looks like you can add "labels" to feeds, and then select by label what you want to read, similar to tagging at other services. That's cool. The actual feed-reading interface is pretty nice and clean looking. There are integrated actions with both your Gmail account and your Blogger account. The sort actions for both feeds and items within the feeds seems good too. I'm not sure about the whole read and unread concept, as I need to wait for the Reader to pick up some new feeds so I can see what it looks like. More later.

Version 1.6.0 of the Bloglines Toolkit is now available for download. The toolkit currently supports 8 languages out-of-the-box (contact me if you want to add more) and has been configured to be compatible with the 1.5 beta version of Firefox. Those of you with automatic update checking should be getting an update notice in the near future. Enjoy.

Site5 is offering a special MultiSite Express plan for a limited time (until next Saturday, the 15th of October). This is a smaller version of their awesome MultiSite plan, offered at a drastically reduced rate.

During this limited promotion, you can get a hosting plan that offers you five True MultiSite™ Websites (each with unlimited domain pointers), 6GB of storage and 75GB of bandwidth, for just $97 per year. That's only $8.08 per month (you do have to pay yearly). At the time of signup, you can add a second year for another $50, dropping the monthly price to just over $6!

As a bonus for me, if you use my affiliate link (up there at the top of this entry or in the footer of any page) to sign up for this account, and if I get 15 of these signups in the next week, I'll score a free 2GB iPod Nano. With Site5 offering this great plan at such a great price, and their unconditional 60-day money-back guarantee, how can you lose?

A note to other affiliates: There is a new format for your affiliate link. Change it by next Saturday or you could lose referral credits.

This humorously-titled article appeared in the local paper today, saying that the city is rethinking their stance on traffic. The humor, of course, comes from the fact that they never really thought about it before. How can they possibly re-think it?

In any case, it might be a good thing. The article tells us that the City Council will vote on the recommendations in the future. Frankly, I think with the way that the City Council panders to developers, this plan stands no chance of being enacted, since those developers will balk at nearly every provision, but especially those that they have to deal with directly.

For the second time in as many days, I find myself going around and around with a telephone menu that's run by voice recognition software, and unable to get anywhere. I'm all for making improvements, and the telephone menu is a great place to start - but those who set up these voice menus apparently think they can address every single problem, and for some strange reason I seem completely unable to find anything - even more so than the typical "press 1 for..." type of menu.

What's worse is that the actual recognition stinks. It can't even recognize "yes" and "no", much less more complex phrases. While most thinks show incremental improvements and become worthy over time (look at cell phones), this sort of thing has absolutely no promise at this point. I've had problems with Cingular, PayPal and Sprint PCS.

I understand they don't want to talk to people. I understand that some people get tired and hang up, so they don't have to deal with it. I understand that such a system could be used to funnel callers to the right department. But it doesn't work! Most of the time these menus either take you to a general mailbox, or they collect all sorts of information, which the operator then has to collect again. Is it any wonder that I don't like the telephone?