Good Potato Chips

At Kroger they have Cape Cod brand potato chips that are kettle fried. One of the varieties is a reduced fat version that has 40% less fat. It is kettle fried too, but also baked. I tried them. They seemed just like regular kettle fried potato chips to me except they use little potatoes that yield small (but almost always whole) chips. They don’t come in nearly the variety of flavors (just plain), but they are worth trying, especially if they are on sale. I think they are just as good as the Ettensohn favorite, Krunchers.

Slow Amazon

After my birthday even though I really liked all of my presents, I decided I still needed to get some headphones, a U2 CD, and a Palm stylus. So I ordered them that night. The headphones and CD were ordered from Amazon, the stylus (I ended up ordering one for each of my two Palms and one extra to defray the shipping cost) from Styluscentral. Monday I got an e-mail from Styluscentral saying my order had shipped. Amazon listed my order as preparing to ship and I was not allowed to change or cancel the order. Today the styluses arrived in the mail. However I checked several times over the last couple of days and Amazon still had my order preparing to ship. When I ordered my AirClick it took weeks for it to arrive and I wasn’t looking forward to that again. I checked out buy.com and nearly placed an order for both of these things for the same price except that buy.com’s free shipping icon disappeared once the headphones were actually in my cart and they wanted $7 for that. Just before writing this entry, Amazon sent an e-mail saying the items had shipped, but that’s still four days before the item shipped. Earlier this year an order of CD’s took 6 days to ship, a headset took 5 days, and it took an amazing 26 days for the AirClick though Amazon warned it wouldn’t ship for 1-2 weeks (still took almost four).

Here’s my solution: don’t let them combine items into one shipment. Even though you would think they have just about everything in a big warehouse somewhere, apparently they have millions of warehouses with one item in each one. So you always end up waiting longer. Also, don’t hesitate to use buy.com who ship faster (on three orders this year they always shipped the next day) and are usually about the same price.

XL Birthday

It is harder to get everyone together and we were still lacking Bob, but I certainly am thankful for everyone coming to my 40th birthday. It was great to see Michael running around and I was very surprised to see Danny come up from Spring Hill and glad Nicole could make it too. Susan really enjoyed seeing everyone too since she is usually out of town for the big holiday get-togethers and vacations. The food was delicious! Thanks too for all the great presents; when I got home I got really, really drunk, baked cookies, and watched movies.

Thanks for all the good food and the loud company. It was an XLent birthday!

(XL is 40 in Roman numerals – ed.)

That Google

Susan and I recently rented a newly released DVD starring Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn. Later on I was writing the review (B+) and I wanted to look up some information on the movie, so I went to Google. I entered “the translator” (not in quotes). It gave about 3 results and then under that said “Results for The Interpreter” with the first link going to imdb’s page about the movie I had watched and whose title I had not been able to remember correctly (getting only “the” correct). I’ve always liked that Google could detect misspellings and ask “Did you mean . . . “, but this is a new level of outhinking otherwise less intelligent human beings.

I don’t think this is good for our future. Evolution worked for centuries making people stronger, with better vision, hearing, etc. Then we came up with machines that could make up for our weaknesses, made glasses for the myopic and hearing aids for the hard of hearing. Now Google is taking away the penalties for being stupid.

By the way, I tried this on MSN and Yahoo just now and got a bunch of results for translator-related stuff.

When I started putting rotating quotes in the blog description I would go to Google and enter the name of a movie and then the word “quotes” (not in quotes) and the first link would be imdb’s page of quotes for that movie. Compare that with going to imdb, searching for the title of a movie, picking that movie from the results page, then scrolling down to some quotes and clicking “more”. It’s actually easier to navigate imdb’s website using Google than it is by going to imdb.

Halloween

I started this as a reply to Kelly’s blog entry about Halloween, but it got to be too long so I decided it should be it’s own entry. Oh well, that’s one less comment for Kelly and one more entry for me . . .

I ask people what they are as much as a I can. Sometimes the answers are pretty funny, even though I didn’t have any Zombie Pirate Clowns come by. I had a record number of people come by without costumes. Three of them showed up and I asked what they were dressed as. They said “Nuthin'”. And I said well, you don’t get any candy. They looked shocked as I shut the door.

I wound up giving out Sweetarts, Starburst, and Sugar Babies. I wanted to get the Sweetarts that come in the paper package with 3 pellets because they are so cheap. I figured they would be good for people who didn’t wear costumes. But this year the store didn’t have those so I had fun-size packages which had about 10 or so in each package. I had some left over packages of saltines from getting chili at Wendy’s the night before so I thought that would be good to give to people without costumes. I put them in the bowl with the candy and gave one of the packages to a girl without a costume. I don’t think she noticed. Then in the next group this guy (in a costume) says “Oh, man saltines! I love saltines!” so I gave him the other package of saltines.

The funniest group was a little girl in an Incredibles outfit. Her Dad was with her too and *he* was wearing an Incredibles outfit. But then behind them was the girl’s little brother who could hardly walk, also in an Incredibles outfit and then behind him, the mother Incredibles! So it was the whole family.

Avondale was a zoo as always. There are just tons and tons of people. I went through half of my candy in the first half hour and saw only one white kid, so I know most of the people weren’t local. Later on I got a better mix of people but ran out of candy after about an hour and a half. That’s okay because thirty minutes later (at 8:00) Halloween officially ends and the police drive around with their bullhorns telling people to go home. It turns out the Starbursts were pretty cheapo because each pack only had two squares, but I had a lot of them so the candy held out longer than in most years.