March 8, 2008

Can You Hear Me Now?

rmiles7721March 8, 2008Technology

Fall Back. Spring Forward.

Or maybe it’s spring back and fall forward.

Doh!

I get it. Spring forward and Fall back.

I’m sure I must be brain dead or something. I’m riding home from drawer change tonight and it struck me. Spring Forward. Fall back. As in the seasons. I’m sure I already knew that but for some reason the play on words hit me as if I had just learned something. Working where I work must be steadily retarding my brain or something. Just give me another decade and I’ll be a gibbering drooling fool.

Oh wait, I already am.

Can it get any worse?

So here it is about 10:30. Or 8:30. Shit, it’s 11:30 and I have to get up at 5 am. So does that mean I’m getting up at 6 or 4? Can’t I just call in and forget this shit.

Why can’t the government just let Mr. Sun and Mr Earth’s rotation take care of time. They seem to have done a pretty fucking good job of it prior to our meddling. Now you have 482 different time zones (unless you are smart and live in Arizona) and they change twice a year. What the fuck?

So I need to be in bed. It’s midnight now and I am not going to be worth a crap in the morning.

The girls are in South Carolina tonight. I suppose I’ll sleep on the couch as I usually do. If I happen to be off I will sleep in the bed but I am so afraid that I will oversleep when the wife isn’t here that I crash in the living room.

On an entirely different note (pun not intended but well used) I love music. I hate earphones though, thus the reason I don’t have an iPod. The earbuds are fucking irritating and headphones are almost as bad. That’s one of the reasons I gave the Marine my Jabra Bluetooth earpiece. I tried it for a couple of weeks two different times and I just hate it. I love the quality of the music with headphones but I always feel like I’m missing something with them on. I also can’t do like the wife does and only keep one in her ear while she’s pretending to pay attention with the other one (the deaf one). I am not easily fooled.

Wait a minute. Actually I guess I am, but I digress.

When I bought the Blackberry last month (did I tell you I’m selling my Samsung i760 on eBay?) it came with a set of earbuds. These are kind of nice. They are heavy. Damn, they actually have metal in them and aren’t some cheap ass piece of crap plastic junk that I’m going to tear up in two days. I set them aside. Since there’s no one in the house but me and I don’t want to hear the yipping of the dog as I kick him through the house I figured I would try them out tonight. Very nice. I also like the media player that comes with the Blackberry as well. The only problem I have is that it won’t let me hide shit from it, so along with every fucking song on my SD card I also get 2 seconds dings and pings and assorted whoops in between songs. I don’t want that shit going off when I’m listening to music. Can’t they fix this shit?

Speaking of eBay, the auction on my phone should have been complete several days ago but they killed the first one. AND charged me $27 bucks for it. “KEYWORD SPAMMING” Here’s a keyword for you. Two, actually. FUCK YOU.

I had it listed as a Samsung i760, almost new. Hell, I have used eBay for about seven years now, but I am not on there very often and I don’t know anything about keyword spamming. It IS almost new you bunch of shitheads. They fucking waited until six days into the auction when it was up to at least the amount I really want for the phone, THEN they cancel the fucking thing. Bullshit. So I have about three bids right now and it’s only going for $250 right now. If’n you are looking for a Windows Mobile 6 phone, head your happy ass on over and bid. Just because I hate the fucking thing doesn’t mean that you will. I understand it’s supposed to be a pretty good phone but after three months of usage I hate it.

Now the Blackberry Pearl this thing’s the shit. It had better be for $450. It’s not the perfect phone by any means but it’s pretty cool. I think someone needs to ship me their iPhone and let me use it for a couple of months so that I can see if I like it or not. You go into the Verizon place (or wherever the fuck you shop) and they have these stickers on the screens and very few working models around so you can’t really tell how much of a pain in the ass it is going to be to use or if you are going to like it or not. And these geeks that write the call phone reviews are all fucking retards anyway. What the fuck do they know and how many times have they had to try and cover two different shifts with people that have called in in three different stores while they are driving somewhere anyway. With a cup of coffee in one hand and a smoke in the other. Now THAT’s the test of a goddamned phone! If I can call out and answer while playing with myself at 80mph that’s the phone I need and don’t give me any of that hands free bullshit. The same thing applies to hands free devices that does to earbuds and head phones and retards that look like they are talking to themselves in the car need to be run off the road anyway.

Well, now that it really is late I have to hit the sack.

 

Label Makers

rmiles7721March 8, 2008Site News

I keep a filing cabinet worth of stuff in my car for work. Although I do have a corner of the living room as my home office, since I am in my restaurants 10-12 hours a day my office extends to my car. I have simple stuff such as pen and paper, printer paper, extra uniforms, to other stuff such as steam tables (moved it to my basement last night), silverware, batteries and a DYMO label maker for name tags. I bought it about a year and a half ago, when I was opening the new store in Temple and I have been using it since then. Coomes in pretty handy too for labeling other stuff as well.

When I first started running restaurants about all you could get without buying a huge professional setup was those hand-held clicking label makers. I used one for quite a long time but as technology improves so does the equipment that I get to use as well.

DYMO also has some pretty cool stuff besides the hand-held label makers. They have label makers that you can hook up via a USB connection for your label printing as well as several other products.

The DYMO LabelWriter 400 Turbo is pretty cool. It prints out at an average speed of 55 labels each minute including the online stamps. That’s what I really like about it. I have been using Stamps.Com for a few years now, but I generally have to print and purchase an entire sheet of stamps at a time. The software from the USPS allows you to print them one (or more) at a time, but with a deskjet and stickers it’s a bit unwieldy and they will curl and sometimes get stuck inside the printer. That’s one of the reasons I like the LabelWriter 400 Turbo so much. It just makes printing stamps, or any other label for that matter, easy and simple. You don’t need to buy any ink or toner either!

With the DYMO stamps there’s no monthly fee like there is using the USPS service. As I mentioned before, it’s a thermal printer so the expense of ink cartridges is gone as well. If you print a lot of postage and other labels this will cover the cost of the printer in months. It also has add-ins for Outlook, Word and Quickbooks not to mention several other popular Mac and PC programs. Yep, it’ll work with your Mac as well.

If you are in the market for a decent printer for postage and other labels you just might want to check out the quality of DYMO’s products.

Just a Quitter…

rmiles7721March 8, 200810Site News

Normally I’m the only one up on a Saturday morning this early. I have to start getting ready for work shortly myself, but the wife and girls are driving back to Hilton Head for the weekend to see our friend Niqui. This may be the last chance they have to go visit before she moves. Of course if there is time at the end of the school year I’m sure they will go visit then but I think she plans on moving as soon as the year is up.

It’s some pretty cruddy weather out to drive in, that’s for sure. I grilled out last night and it was in the mid to high sixties. Now it’s raining and in the mid thirties. I love the spring time but the part I don’t like is when you are still at that stage where it’s too cold out in the morning. I still haven’t put my plants outside. I pulled them out of the basement too early last year and almost killed several of them due to a late freeze and I don’t want that to happen this year.

Speaking of grilling out, we had a couple of dinner guests last night. Supergurl stopped in on her way to Atlanta and a friend of the wife’s from work came over. I managed to get out of working last night when my boss and all of the other district managers were working 5-9p. Unfortunately I will have to make up the time and work this evening.

I am still having a hard time not smoking. I’m down to anywhere from one to five cigarettes a day and just cannot seem to get over that hump. I need to call our friend Michelle up. She was taking Chantix and didn’t like it, so I need to buy hers. I only have five days left. Man, time flies when you’re having fun. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, this has got to be the hardest thing I have ever done. If I could only go through addiction treatment for it or something and get the initial few weeks over with without being exposed I am sure I could get past it. Unfortunately although my health insurance company frowns upon my smoking and jacks up my rates because of it, they wouldn’t dream of actually paying for any type of smoking cessation program even if it would save them millions of dollars a year. They aren’t in the market to save money, they are in the market to charge exorbitant rates to unhealthy people.

That’s about it for this morning. I’m just sitting here sipping my morning cup of coffee and balancing the checkbook before I go to work. That’s something that seems to have lessened as well. I don’t seem to be drinking quite as much coffee since I have cut my nicotine intake either.