New Headphones

My yellow headphones for my iPod have started sounding scratchy sometimes. I don’t know if the ipod’s audio jack is getting worn, if the remote is causing the problem, the cell phone in the same pocket is interfering, or some combination. But I thought it might be time to get some new headphones. The best small headphones I ever had were the ones that came with my Sony CD Player that I bought in 1990 or 91 at the same time as Jeb. They kind of go in your ear, but just barely and they had three hinges so they would fold up. I found out later they are called vertical in-ear headphones. When I bought the yellow ones I was looking for something similar but they weren’t quite the same (didn’t fold). Then I found a review on the Macintosh newsletter, Tidbits, that mentioned Sony MDR-A44L’s as being pretty good. So I found those at Amazon for $19. Then I checked buy.com where they were only $16 plus they were giving 10% off that day. Shipping was $6, but on orders over $25 you could get free shipping. I had been thinking about getting one of Elton John’s older albums, so I started looking for those to put me over the minimum.

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Road Rage

Sometimes when people tailgate me I will slow down just so they stop, but in general I’m a pretty courteous driver. In this case I made a guy really mad even though I wasn’t trying to and he took the most aggressive retaliation of anyone I’ve ever come across. Once he was in front of me I wished I had gotten his license plate so I could report him and I sped up to catch up with him before realizing I was being pretty stupid. But as traffic got more congested closer to Atlanta, I actually caught up with him and passed him anyway and got his license. But then what do you do with it? I found a website called www.roadragers.com and reported him, but that doesn’t really do any good. So I sent a description of his car and his license plate to both the Georgia State Patrol and the Florida Highway Patrol. I doubt they will do anything, but I suggested they send a letter to the guy just to say he had been reported.

I’ve always thought it would be a good idea to have some kind of traffic posse where the police deputize private citizens to report bad driving. As I envision it you would have to attend a day-long class about rules of the road and rules of the program and then you could report one person a month (maybe more). While no one would receive tickets when they were reported, they would receive a letter describing the infraction and a note would be made to that person’s file so that if the police ever pulled the guy over they could see a list of citizen complaints about him and realize he deserves to have the book thrown at him.

Anyway, here’s the letter I wrote:

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Katrina

Since I only use 1 bedroom of my house and live very close to MARTA, it seems like my house would be perfect for any hurricane evacugees. At first I thought I would be able to just drive by a shelter and pick up a family, but to qualify for assistance people have to work through the system. So, today, after procrastinating a while, I posted an offer to keep people at my house on the website that the AJC has set up for this. The AJC says they will share the list with relief agencies. We’ll see what happens. While I want to help people, I don’t want to have just anybody in my house. Here’s what I wrote:

“Single male homeowner with 2 indoor dogs has 1 or 2 bedrooms of house to share with a small family, married couple, or two individuals for up to 3 months. On bus line; one mile to MARTA rail. One-story house, but there are a few stairs at every entrance. No smoking, drugs, profanity, or weapons. Would prefer someone placed through a relief agency.”

TypeKey Comments

With the new blog upgrade, the old password thing doesn’t work anymore. Jeb is experimenting with junk filters and not using a password at all. But I set up my blog to use TypeKey which is a free service from the blog makers (Movable Type) to allow people to register and comment on any blog. I kind of like that because it lets people outside the family add comments, but it should stop junk (I guess if someone posts blog spam their TypeKey account is revoked, but if they are just obnoxious then I can put a block on that person).

I don’t think there is a way to do both, so if you would like to be able to post comments on my blog you will need to sign up for a free TypeKey account and log on when you comment. Please try it out. It only takes a few minutes to sign up, then you have to respond an e-mail to activate your account. The only problem is you have to use the same name all the time instead of getting to make up a name depending on whose blog you are commenting on (like “Mom” or “Gramalie”), so now I will just be “brted” (my usual internet alias) instead of “UT”.

Anyway, the TypeKey thing is working already because a guy made a very good comment to my entry about Mom’s new notebook computer.