More than you want to know about Dale

The new phone books are here!

2009-07-01T16:59:03Z

The new phone books are here!

Today’s mail contained the Downey edition of my local telephone directory. The Windstream version is smaller and covers fewer communities.

I found it interesting that the Downey book has a numerical cross-reference, so if I have a number I can look up the name! It’s also amusing that for a directory that covers most of two counties, that cross reference is only 13 pages.

Tower of Trivia

2009-06-27T21:42:18Z

For those who don’t know, I tend to acquire Trivial Pursuit sets, though I don’t get to play as often as I would like. Having just been given a new one, I now have:

Standard form factor sets:

Genus
Genus III
Genus IV
Genus 5
25th Anniversary
Best of Genus
All American
The 1960’s
The Vintage Years (1920’s – 1950’s)
Disney – Animated Picture

Full sets, other form factors:

20th Anniversary
90’s

Supplemental card sets:

Genus II
All-Star Sports
Baby Boomer
RPM
Know-It-All
Way and Victory
Welcome to America
1980’s
Family (Disney)

Deluxe playing piece set

Anyone want to come over for a game?

Success Vision

2009-06-27T14:55:30Z

Sometime last year I changed the prescription on my glasses. On the recommendation of my son, I stopped in at Success Vision on Financial Center Parkway to have new glasses made. I was quite pleased with both their service and their prices. About 3 months ago, I managed to crush my glasses, seriously bending the frames but not damaging the lenses. I carried in the pieces and they fixed them free of charge. On Thursday I carried them in again because one of the screws they had put in hadn’t held. I was told that the frames were not repairable, and the no longer carried that frame. I was then told to pick out another set of frames and the glasses would be replaced free of charge! I was flabbergasted. I have progressive lenses which aren’t cheap. If I hadn’t already been recommending their services to my friends, I certainly would now.

So, if you live in central Arkansas and wear glasses, you owe it to yourself to try Success Vision when you next need glasses.

Oh, and it’s also one-hour service.

Tommy

2009-06-18T04:42:46Z

I went to the Rep this evening to see Tommy. It was a thoroughly enjoyable performance. I had forgotten just how much I like some of the music in that show. I came home and headed for my albums to drop the soundtrack on the turntable. I was quite displeased to not be able to find it. That probably explains why I haven’t listened to it in years. I will be replacing it (sadly not on vinyl) very soon.

Back to the performance — I thought it was very nicely done. The staging was innovative and kept things moving along nicely. The costumes were fun, and the dance numbers were quite enjoyable. The closest I have to a complaint is that I would have preferred a bit more vocal on some of the numbers. I think that may be an oddity of my hearing, though. For some reason I tend to hear instruments better than voices, and it’s rather annoying.

The Cattle Exchange

2009-06-17T18:36:40Z

I just had an encounter with a profession I thought was extinct — door-to-door-salesmen. Two men in a truck with a freezer in the back just drove up to my house to try and sell me frozen meat. They had a nicely printed brochure for “The Cattle Exchange” listing meat prices and contact information. After telling them that I wasn’t going to buy any today, I was told I could order from their website or call. The man then asked me for the brochure back. As I came back into the house I wondered how he thought I was going to order if I didn’t have information. I *think* I remembered the URL correctly, but there is no site there. A bit of research seems to indicate that they are a rather shady business. There can’t be much legitimate profit doing door-to-door meat sales in rural Arkansas during the day.

Scanning, scanning

2009-06-13T20:58:08Z

If anyone is interested in the early life of Dale, there is now an amazing amount of trivia available on Flickr.

Certified mail

2009-06-13T14:48:50Z

It’s rare that good news comes via certified mail. It’s almost always something you don’t want to see. Yesterday, however, that was not the case. I received a letter from UALR that stated that I was able to maintain health coverage as a retiree. I was somewhat worried about the possibility of contract jobs, as they don’t have insurance, and COBRA only lasts 18 months. This gives me the ability to maintain insurance at reasonable rates indefinitely. Of course, it’s really only useful if I’m living in Arkansas, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Now I’m wondering if they will consider me a retiree for other functions…

Picturing myself

2009-06-11T14:30:08Z

I’ve taken on a new personal project — a self-portrait every day for a year. I’ve seen others do it, and it has the potential to be interesting. I’m sometimes bad at keeping up with projects requiring constant input, so we shall see what happens.

I thought about starting out with something interesting, arty, and provocative, but decided that if my first photo was excellent, I would be discouraged on those days I didn’t feel like producing a masterpiece. Thus, my first picture is rather bland and uninspired. I have nowhere to go but up.

Movies in the Park

2009-06-04T03:23:02Z

Yesterday evening and this morning I was excited about going to the opening night of Movies in the Park. Early this afternoon when the rain rolled in and I started getting a headache I pretty much decided I was going to stay home. Around 4:00 when the sun came out and my headace went away at almost exactly the same time I decided it was a sign. I took a shower, got dressed, and headed into downtown. I wasn’t sure exactly where it was, so I parked and started walking around. While I was looking for the amphitheatre, Mark called. He volunteered to look up a map for me and discovered that the opening night show had been canceled due to weather. Ah well, I stopped by Home Depot on the way back home to pick up a few items on my “next time I’m in town” list, so the trip wasn’t a total waste. That will teach me to not check my Facebook mail before leaving the house.

Watching television

2009-06-03T16:53:04Z

I wanted to do something simple. I wanted to easily watch shows from Hulu.com on my HDTV. I have three ways to get a signal to the set: a Roku player, my Playstation 3, and the laptop, all via HDMI. The Roku is, of course, not an option since it only supports Netflix and Amazon. The PS3 sort of works. I can start playing, but if I pause the program for more than a few seconds it locks up, requiring a reboot. The laptop plays video beautifully, but if I’m driving the television fullscreen, I can’t do anything else. Any attempt to switch to another program drops the video back into a window.

So, I thought I would try another alternative — install Linux on the PS3 and use that. I followed all the steps for installation last night, but then was sidetracked. I discovered that I could load a Super Nintendo emulator and convince the SixAxis controller to act like a Nintendo controller. It wasn’t long before I was merrily playing Super Mario World and Yoshi’s Cookie on my PS3. Life was good.

Finally this morning I got back around to loading up Hulu in the browser. I was then told that I needed to load a flash player and was directed to the Adobe site. There I learned that their player isn’t compiled for PPC, only X86. So, I now have another way to *not* watch videos on my television.

Dreaming

2009-06-02T10:53:04Z

I just awoke from an odd dream where I was fixing Honeywell JCL (technically control cards, since JCL is an IBM term). The scary part was that I actually remember some of that, and I haven’t touched it in about twenty years.

It’s almost time to party

2009-05-29T02:22:14Z

I made a plan early this year to have eight parties at my house that roughly coincided with the solar calendar. I wasn’t truly trying to track the sun, but the intervals worked out nicely. The next is scheduled for June 20th. If you are reading this and haven’t received an invitation, consider yourself invited. You can visit http://dale-miller.com/party to find out the details. If you are coming, please let me know so I can plan food/drink/etc.

The weekend so far

2009-05-25T03:40:19Z

I have spent most of today with a headache. Nothing I do seems to make it go away. Otherwise, my weekend has been okay. I volunteered to work a beverage tent at Riverfest last night. It was mainly an excuse to get myself out of the house, but it’s kind of fun. The crowds are a bit much, but I occasionally just like to sit on the sidelines and people-watch. As a result of getting out, I stayed up far too late, slept in this morning, and haven’t done anything worthwhile so far today except bemoan my aching head.

I really need to go to the grocery store because I’m just about out of things I want to eat. I’m not a big fan of driving in the rain when I don’t have to, so I’ll probably make do until tomorrow. Also, the thought of driving eighteen miles (each way) just to have variety doesn’t appeal to me right now. That is one disadvantage to living in the middle of nowhere.

Exercising

2009-05-23T02:38:36Z

I have been spending far too much time on the couch recently watching television. It used to be that I would have my television on less than an hour a week. Now I’m up to several hours a day — mostly Netflix “watch instantly”. Somewhere in between season 3 of “Red Dwarf” and “The Ant Bully”, it occurred to me that Netflix probably had some exercise videos. In fact, they do. Last night I worked my way through “Crunch: Pick Your Spot Pilates” and this evening “Crunch: Super SlimDown”. They aren’t terribly difficult workouts, but they were enough for me at the moment. I am going to try to do *something* every night to fight off the pounds. It’s not as fun as taking pilates at UALR, but it’s far better than nothing.

Sun? On a Friday?

2009-05-16T02:38:19Z

I was at least a bit productive today. I climbed under the house to fix the persistent water drip that I’ve known about for nearly two months but hadn’t successfully patched. This time I cut out the section of pipe and used a splice that I bought last week. I really don’t like the fact that this house is plumbed with polybutylene, because it’s hard to repair. Nonetheless, I fixed the leak and have one fewer thing to worry about. While I was in a productive mood, I got out the lawnmower and headed down to the street. I actually managed to get the yard near the house mowed earlier in the week, so this morning I tackled the right-of-way. I got part-way through and apparently killed another lawnmower. I’m not certain it’s dead, but I can’t keep it running. I’ll tear into it soon and see if I can make it last the rest of the summer, but I don’t have high hopes. I pulled out the string trimmer and finished the area I had started so things at least look better than they did.

In other news — I received another anonymous card this past week. If the author perhaps reads this, I just wanted to say that you are on my list of favorite people, and I hope to continue to hear from you for some time to come. The fun thing about anonymous cards is that I can pretend they are from anyone.

My day

2009-05-08T03:01:03Z

I realized that I should have applied for unemployment insurance benefits last week. Since I didn’t, that left this week. Because it wasn’t raining, and I wanted to see something different, I went to the office in Russellville rather than the one in Little Rock. The application went smoothly, and I should know the results soon. As I left the office there, I noticed this bright thing in the sky. I think I remember it from a couple of weeks ago. It was so nice to see the sun rather than rain, I went on a drive. I headed up US64 to Clarksville, and then decided to come back on the south side of the river. The only problem was, I was getting hungry for lunch. I thought I would find something along the way. From Clarksville to Midway (on Ark 22) there is nothing. From Midway to Dardenelle there is an equivalent nothing. Since 22 dropped me on the south side of Dardenelle and I was heading south on 7, there wasn’t much. I couldn’t bring myself to stop at McDonalds, and decided that a late lunch at the dairy bar in Ola sounded like a plan. I was thus disappointed to find that the Ola Dairy Bar is no more. I ended up coming all the way back home and ate Hot Pockets. Not quite what I had in mind.

Upon arriving home, I found a nice greeting card in the mailbox. It was anonymous, but offered words of encouragement and support. That made me happy.

Productivity

2009-05-04T20:37:43Z

I now have a resume. It’s not necessarily a *good* resume, but it’s better than what I had. I need a good way to simply say “I can do whatever you want me to do with computers. I’m just good that way”. I can’t figure out a reasonable way to get that point across to potential employers. In any case, I have now posted it to dice.com and applied for a couple of the jobs listed there. I also need to spend time learning to write good cover letters. I think I’m insufficiently diplomatic.

The party report

2009-05-03T02:27:00Z

I want to have people come to parties at my house — I really do. Last night’s had a better turnout than the previous one, but still nowhere near what I had hoped. I sent out email invitations to a large number of people. For this party I had 45 people respond with “no”, 10 with “yes”, and 6 with “maybe”. The rest never responded at all. So I was expecting a small turnout and planned accordingly. The final count of attendees was 6. We ended up spending much of the time playing Rock Band and just talking. That’s a far better way to spend an evening than sitting here alone, but I would have enjoyed a few more people. I like to think the ones who came enjoyed themselves.

I have the next one scheduled for June 20th. We shall see how that works. If I again have almost no one, I may have to just quit trying.

Procrastination

2009-04-24T16:31:49Z

I need to be seriously looking for a new job at the moment. In order to do that, I really need to update (actually rewrite) my resume. I have plenty of time to do that, but I keep putting it off. I must, must, must have a resume ready to send out very soon. So I need to quit typing things like this and go work on a resume. Am I going to do so? Maybe.

Ouch!

2009-04-12T22:55:32Z

I tend, on occasion, to just go open the front door and look out at the world. I did that a few minutes ago and in the process stepped on a wasp. The wasp, following her natural instincts, stung me. It took a couple of seconds for this to register and then I began dancing around. I managed to plant my other foot on top of the wasp and she again reacted predictably. I think this is the first time I have ever had wasp stings on both of my big toes. Fortunately the pain doesn’t last long, but it’s a strange and interesting feeling.

Climbing

2009-04-11T22:20:36Z

Today I did something both fun and good for me. I drove to Pinnacle Mountain State Park and climbed the mountain twice (once up the east trail and down the west, and then back over). At my peak, I could have done that in just about an hour. Today it took nearly two … but I did it. The total distance is only about three miles, but it’s a rather hard three miles. The weather was perfect, I didn’t hurt myself, and I even stopped by the Crossroads Convenience Store in Roland for a turkey sandwich on the way home. All-in-all, it was a quite enjoyable afternoon’s trip.

Oh, and I did see two people walking up the mountain talking on their cell phones. You can’t get away from it even there.

Progress?

2009-04-10T01:00:37Z

When I was a small child, my house, like most of my friend’s houses, had a telephone. That’s right, one telephone. In many cases it was a black Western Electric 500 set. They were, of course, rotary-dial, since touch-tone wasn’t available in our area yet. My parents opted to spend the extra money to have a beige telephone. Yes, that’s also right, if you wanted a telephone in a color other than black it cost extra. Our telephone was on a small table just inside the front door. If you wanted to make a call, that’s where you went. When I was seven, we moved into a 2-story house and actually spent the extra money (every month!) to have two telephones, one upstairs and one downstairs. Oh, did I mention that we had to rent these phones from Southwestern Bell? You could not legally connect a privately-owned telephone to their lines. When I was fourteen we moved one more time. This time we kept the two phones, but had one of them fitted with a plug and had jacks in two of the bedrooms. This was seriously cool because I could use the phone in my own bedroom with the door closed.

Family vacations were interesting. My family did a lot of traveling by car. We used AAA tour guides to find motels in the cities where we would be staying. Often we could simply show up and find a room, but in some places we felt it necessary to call ahead. That meant finding a pay phone and hoping that the motel we picked had a toll-free number. Otherwise we had to stick in quarters to pay the long-distance charges.

Deregulation of the telephone industry put an end to the Bell monopoly and allowed people to actually *buy* their phones rather than renting them forever, and things have never been the same since. Soon, houses had telephones in every room.

I bought my first cordless phone in 1983. That was quite a revolution. I was no longer constrained by cords and could walk almost anywhere in the house. The next year I discovered that my phone happened to share the frequency with several nearby baby monitors. That limited the range and had some interesting side effects.

My first cellular phone was a Motorola DynaTAC. It was referred to as a brick, because that almost described the size and weight. However, it was far more portable than the bag-phones that were its major competitor. As cell phones go, I was a fairly early adopter. I got odd looks if I was walking along and my phone rang or, Heaven forfend, I was actually out in public *talking* on it.

These days everyone I know has a cell phone (or sometimes two). It is assumed that everyone is reachable all the time. I know people on campus that pick up their cell phones to make a call the moment they are out of class. It’s hard to even say “hello” to anyone on the sidewalk, because they are often on the phone.

No one even considers long-distance charges any more (remember when television had ads for long-distance companies?) because they are included on all the major cellular plans.

The reason I wonder if this is progress is twofold. By making ourselves always available we have set unreasonable expectations. If someone doesn’t answer their phone for four hours we wonder if they are okay. Maybe they just wanted to be alone for a bit, to go on a walk in the woods or even spend quality time with a significant other. The second reason is that by spending more time talking remotely to people we know, we ignore those around us. This is true whether walking across campus or standing in a checkout line. People used to *talk* to each other.

I sometimes miss the one rotary-dial telephone in the living room.

Sick

2009-04-06T21:55:56Z

As if I didn’t already feel bad enough, I woke at around 2:00 A.M with a severe headache, muscle aches, and a 101° fever. This pretty much defined my day. I managed to move from the bed to the La-Z-Boy and then to the couch. That’s as much energy as I had, and my thought processes have been severely lacking. Just before 4:00 P.M. the fever broke. I still have a headache and feel lousy, but I’m at least coherent and able to move around a bit.

It was not a fun fourteen hours.

I’ve been better

2009-03-25T12:58:13Z

For anyone who does not know my current situation, I’m not going to share at this time. For those of you who do, any good karma sent my way is greatly appreciated.

Busy, busy

2009-03-16T04:35:43Z

I survived the second week of kickball. Today I had a 2:00 Novice League game that was played on grass, with a slope between the pitcher’s mound and the plate. That made throwing strikes interesting to say the least. Then I headed over to my 3:45 Laid-back League game and tried to pitch in some serious mud. The problem that time was actually getting the ball past the plate. It would hit and just stop. It was, nonetheless a fun game.

This upcoming week I have choir rehearsals on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday nights and a concert on Saturday. I have jury duty on Tuesday. Lindsey’s Pools is supposed to come on Wednesday afternoon for a site survey and bring over my spa on Thursday. Oh yeah, I’m supposed to go to work and class as usual. I think I’m going to be exhausted when the week is over.