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Drive in movies, yes they still exist!

September 5th, 2010
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Last night my wife and I decided out of the blue to go to a drive in movie. I’ve been to drive in’s a lot growing up. My family and I used to go to the Capital Drive in located in San Jose California. That place was not your typical small town drive in. It had around 20 screens in a huge circle. I remember the ticket booths to get in, must have been 20 of those as well. Cars lined up packed in all the lanes waiting to get in. The parking lot wasn’t grass, it was pavement in a stadium seating style with cement berms and the closer you got the the screen the lower the parking lot was so that cars could see over each other. When we went they still had that 10lb metal speaker you had to hang on your car window, giving you that old fashioned crackly mono-tone sound. I remember the bathrooms at that place were one of the worst I have ever seen and still remember the smell, and I’ve been in some pretty questionable places in my travels in the south. But this drive in mixed big city with classic charm.

Well it turns out my wife has never been to a drive in. I remembered her town used to have one a long time ago, I only knew this because I remembered passing by the old screen still standing. I instantly recognized it as a long lost cousin of the screens I saw at the Capitol drive in years prior. It was almost depressing seeing this one screen standing alone in a field behind a run down movie theater. I’m not sure when Pottsville quit showing movies on it, must have been a long time prior to my arrival. Seems like everyone opted for the hi-tech indoor theaters over the joy of sitting in a field in your car.

So last night the wife and I drove out to Watertown TN, it’s about 30 minutes from Antioch, another 15 from Downtown Nashville and is half interstate driving and half rural road driving at 55mph. The drive in was small, with only 2 screens. Of course to me that was small seeing how I was used to seeing 20 screens. But it was quaint. And the neat thing about the drive in is the atmosphere. These aren’t your typical city dwellers that get dressed up to go out for a night on the town. They aren’t the punk kids dressed in baggy pants, chains and death shirts. These are typically people with family values. Why do I say this? Well as you approach the drive in you can see cars parked in the fields. You aren’t sure what time the movie starts because it has to get dark so the time is stated to be dusk which can be as easily as 7pm or as late as 8:30pm. Lots’ of time to waste once you arrive. Many of the people had lawn chairs out and were just chatting it up. Others were playing football in the fields between cars. To get to the concession stands you had to walk through the grassy field parking lot. Not to mention this theater is 45 minutes from downtown Nashville. These are a different  types of people, these are good people.

So we arrived and paid the $7 per person to get in, the nice thing that fee we could watch all 3 movies playing that night. If we went to a sit down theater it would have easily been $68 for my wife and I to see 3 movies, at the drive in a mere $14.

We pulled into the field area and tried to find an area to park, in fact found one right away so I pulled into it. Me being a newbie to drive in theaters (I’ve been to them but never actually been the driver) I learned fairly quickly that the first spot does not always work. So I backed out and tried another spot. It was ok, but the van in front had their tailgate open so it covered the bottom part of the screen. We thought it was ok so we both got out and walked to the concession stands. As we are standing there I turned around to the field and saw a better spot to park. So I walked briskly to the car so no one else would claim my grass patch and backed up as everyone watched wondering what the heck I was doing. I drove down the aisle and parked in what I thought was the correct spot. Nope, like parking behind a brick wall. An even bigger van was there covering most of the screen. I looked around and saw people staring at me and it was that awkward thought of “do I just suck it up and stay here, commit to the spot or move for a 4th time?” Well I moved. I backed up again and started to drive around and finally settled on a spot on the very back row which worked out nicely. We saw the entire screen, it was near the concessions and bathrooms. It was the perfect drive in spot. You know what they say, “if at first you don’t succeed try, try, try again. Sooner or later you’ll get it right. And I am happy to report we watched many cars do this ballet of parking as they pulled in, backed out and went to the next one car after car.

I rejoined my wife back in line after finding the perfect parking spot, during this whole parking ordeal I had envisioned her moving to the front of the line but somehow the line hadn’t moved a bit. So we opted to ditch the idea of corndogs and funnel cakes and instead head to the trailer that had popcorn and drinks. Remember how I talked about how many years ago I went to the drive in? Well we bought popcorn that I think was popped during my initial trip. It was beyond stale, and I bought a bucket of it. My wife even joked that she thought it was made of glass. But we did what any normal people would do. We brought it back to the car, set it in the middle console and I tried not to eat it but popcorn while at a movie seems to be magnetic. No matter how gross it is if it’s near you your hand will just tend to reach into the bucket. I will add to this part that we did eventually get corn dogs and funnel cake. Talk about good. Nothing like sitting in a field watching a movie and eating fried dough under a star light sky.

Time for a brief “apple” joke. It was pitch black in the truck, and eating a funnel cake in the dark not the easiest thing so I had my iPhone on as bright as I could get it. My wife said “boy you have an app for everything.” My response was the tag line of a commercial. “Eating a funnel cake in the dark at a drive in theater? Well there’s an app for that!” If you know me you understand that I got a huge kick out of that… Anyways back to my main story.

The first movie that came on was Toy  Story 3, it was decent and I had turned the car off but left the radio on so that we could hear the sound. The one bad thing about drive ins, they have ditched the old fashioned speaker you hang on your car window and opted with FM transmitters to broadcast the sound to your radio. It’s a fantastic idea… Except when I tried to turn the car on after the movie went off because we thought about leaving the car wouldn’t start….Lights came on, the truck clicked but no turnover of the engine. Yes the charm of the drive in is still there, but the new technology is not exactly perfect. You either need to leave your engine running and waste gas and pollute the air, or leave your radio on and drain your battery. Apparently this happens a lot because when I went to the concession stand I asked if they had jump start service available (not sure as it wasn’t on the menu ;) ). Well she said yes this happens all the time and they would have someone over to my truck shortly to jump it. Great service, the guy came over within a few minutes and I was up and running. But by that time the second movie “The Sorcerers Apprentice” game on and my wife was digging it so we stayed. Of course during the duration of this movie I opted to leave the car on. I didn’t want to trek back to the concession stand a second time asking for another jump…. And I was hopeful my gas situation was good enough I wouldn’t have to go ask for a fill up either. Talk about embarrassing if that happened. Once the second movie ended the third movie was starting up but we left before it as it was already midnight and my wife had to work the next morning.

There is perfect weather for a drive in movie. Last night had to be it. The temp was around 60 degrees. The sky was clear and you could see the stars brightly in the sky. We were far enough away from any city lights that there wasn’t light pollution on the horizon. Overall it was the classic charm you would expect from a drive in movie.

There was a stat that they showed on the screen talking about economics of drive-ins. This peaked my interest. I like charts, graphs and statistics. It must be the business major in me. They said once upon a time in America there were approximately 40,000 something drive in theaters. Today only approx 400 have survived. They talked about how the movie theaters are taking most of the money from their ticket sales and how your paying for the concessions instead of bringing your own help out. I must say I don’t typically like the “buy our stuff” guilt trip ads, but I really liked this one. I think all night I only spent $23 and that included 2 tickets (we saw 2 movies), 2 cups of ice, candy, popcorn, 2 corndogs and a funnel cake. Try to do that at the movie theater and it’ll easily be $65. Because we can go see multiple movies and eat snacks at 1/3 the cost of a sit down theater we will definitely be going back. I think we learned this time many useful tips which I will share below for the other drive-in newbies.

1. Start your car at least every 15-20 minutes to let the battery charge back up. (And it doesn’t hurt to bring your own jump starter. :) I have already ordered one so that should this again next time we are covered without having to order a jump start from the concession stands.

2. Get there a little early and find a good spot. Don’t settle on the first available one you come to. Try multiple spots out. And don’t think you are the only one doing this. Once you find a good spot you can bet you’ll see another dozen people pull into each of the spots you previously rejected.

3. Order popcorn, and throw it away promptly. No good will come out of eating it.

4. Bring pillows and blankets. And if you are in a truck, perhaps a mattress to put in the back so you can lay in the truck and watch the movie comfortably.

5. Clean your windows! Bring windex with you to wipe off those large summer bugs that flew into your windshield as you were doing 55mph down the country road. Nothing like trying to watch a movie with gunk in your way.

6. Promptly throw away the wrappers and left over snacks, don’t let it sit in your car overnight.

I will mention my truck did stick pretty bad this morning. We had that big bucket of popcorn left over which we used as a trash can. We put corn dog wrappers in it, funnel cake plate, ketchup and mustard in it, etc. As I was turning onto the ramp to get on the interstate the stupid bucket tipped over on my side of the truck (drivers side) and I had ketchup and mustard mixed with popcorn all over my feet. It was around midnight so I left it there and said I would clean it in the morning. Well this morning I went out and man oh man did it smell like a carnival when I opened the door. Lesson learned, promptly remove trash from vehicle.

My wife is already planning her next trip out to the drive in. They are doing an 80′s flashback and showing ET and Princess Bride. Some of her friends from work plan on going out with her so that should be fun for her.

If your in the Nashville or surrounding area and are looking for a nice drive in, I will say that the Stardust Drive In is pretty nice. No real complaints other then the line to get in is pretty inefficient. But then again, it’s a different type of people out there in the country. The website to the Drive in is -> http://stardustdrivein.com/

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Posted in Family, Observations, Random, reviews

Valvoline Oil Change – Breaks parts on your car, then tells you they are missing

August 27th, 2010
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So today I went to Valvoline Instant Oil Change to get service on my truck.

Let me start by saying last time I went they told me 2 screws were missing from my air filter cover which is odd because I only take it to Valvoline for service… Well today they told me that ALL of my screws were missing… Say what??? I was NOT happy at all with this news.

Valvoline wouldn’t help me at all so I drove down to NAPA and went inside and asked the guy for help who told me he can’t do anything at all for me without a screw to look at… I wondered why the computer didn’t have that information, but whatever..

So I went outside and popped the hood and searched my truck and found the screws. It appears the screws were not actually missing but BROKEN! This picture shows 2 of the screws I was able to pull out of the engine compartment where the battery sits, which happens to be directly under the air filter… I went back into NAPA, found suitable replacements and installed them in the parking lot.

Anyways, I just fired off a lengthy complaint to Valvoline about this, but thought I’d share this to see if anyone else had this happen. I drive a Honda Ridgeline, not sure if that makes a difference or not. I’m just annoyed that Valvoine first lost 2 of the screws (broke) and didn’t tell me until the next time I was there. Then this last time broke (lost) the last 2 screws. Then told me they couldn’t do anything to help, no replacements, or anything.

The funny thing, they then tried to UPSELL services. Yeah, like I’m gonna have them do more work on my truck when they can’t even put the dang air filter cover on without breaking or losing the screws. What a joke. I sure hope Valvoline refunds my money for this oil change, although if they don’t I don’t care, I just won’t ever visit them again.

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Last night I met a __. He has no __.

August 27th, 2010
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I’ll fill in the blanks at the end of this post. In the meantime, what would you put?

I’ll be honest, I can get along with just about anyone. But there is a sub-culture in our society of people that drive me crazy. These are the people that

  1. Have no job (or job potential)
  2. Have no goals or aspiration
  3. Have no respect for themselves or anyone else
  4. Have no morals
  5. Have no direction
  6. Leech of others /Take what they didn’t earn.
  7. Are not open to the idea of being successful

I’ve posted before how I hate people that just suck off the teat of the government. And it really drives me crazy. I my entire life have worked hard. I didn’t get to the position I’m at by sitting back and letting others provide for me. I got to where I am because I got off my butt, went out into the world and decided I wanted to be someone.

But there are some people out there that have zero desire to achieve ANYTHING with their lives. I’m sure if you say the name “Zig Ziglar” to these people and they would look at you funny not knowing who or what you were talking about. But you mention Zig to any successful person and they know not only who he is, but can tell you there favorite story that he has told. Zig’s a great leader, I listen to and read his stuff on a regular basis and recommend you do to.

But the same goes for Tony Robbins, now not everyone will like the guy, but he’s famous for working with the top world leaders from all different countries. He helps people see the potential and goals they want to achieve, it’s not rocket science but it’s how he does it that is so effective.

If you want to be successful you have to do successful people things. Get up, work, achieve and have some goal in your life even if you don’t want to work on a particular day you still have enough discipline to make yourself. After all if you don’t chase your dreams  you will lose them. This world is full of handouts, but those handouts are enough to make you miserable as you never get enough to achieve “the American dream.”

The alternative to being disciplined (and ultimatly successful) is to do non-successful people things like deciding to sit at home instead of finding a job, watch trashy TV shows all afternoon, play computer video games, drink beer, complain that you don’t have the opportunities others had.  All day long…

I’m not saying I don’t play video games, when I have time I’ll turn one on but that’s AFTER my work is done, the house is cleaned, lawn is mowed,  I’ve got laundry going and nothing else is on my list to do. See there are priorities in life that I have decided are more important. (in fact I may write a post on games, I’ve got some great talking points forming in my head.)

I’ve met a lot of people I can get along with both in and outside of work, I dare say 98% of the people I meet are good people. But when I am near someone that is the complete opposite of my beliefs of working hard, achieving, etc its almost impossible that we are going to get along.

I’ have over the years gotten pretty good at sitting there and holding my thoughts in, but sometimes you see a person like this idiot it just makes you want to cringe.  And I try not to go into much detail in my posts so I won’t say everything this male (was no man, more like a boy) was doing, but it wasn’t grown up stuff. He was acting like an immature baby and if that’s how he acts when he meets people for the first time ever I hate to see what he’s like when you get to know him and hes comfortable around you.

It’s entirely possible this person can change, but after talking to him for the short period I did last night I find it hard that he would ever amount to anything. And sadly we all have the same opportunities in life, I just decided to go do something with mine, he a few years younger then me decided to not do anything.

What really scares me is this guy who doesn’t work probably fills out a tax return every year and gets some amount of money from the government (yep we paid him to do nothing), and he has power to vote (which I highly doubt he does) but the fact that he can vote for people that will allow him to get more of tax payer money is troublesome. I think EVERYONE should have a right to vote, but I think it should be like a carnival ride. Instead of being “this tall” to ride the ride, you must earn “X” amount of money to vote. Make it the standard minimum wage to be fair. But I don’t think people like this guy need to have any possibility of voting on how my money is spent as a taxpayer when he doesn’t contribute anything.

So, what would I put in those blanks from the title above? I’ve gone back and fourth between words as there are so many options, but I settled on:

Last night I met an ass. He has no future.

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Mystery Shopping… It’s a mystery if you’ll get paid.

August 27th, 2010
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Mystery Shopping, one of the greatest scams of all times. There are legitimate companies out in the world that you can sign up with to do Mystery Shopping, I know I’ve done many successful shop.  I shopped everyone from Arbys to Smoothie King. Most of the time I got paid, some of the time I didn’t.

I’m not saying no one should Mystery Shop, but I’ll tell you after coming back into the Mystery Shopping Arena for the first time in several years the value of it has gone down hill tremendously, at least for me. As they say in commercials “individual results may vary.”

Years ago when I became a Mystery Shopper I did everything right. I got a DBA name, I was certified by the MSPA (silver certificate, the free one), I signed up with legit companies and was able to actually live off of Mystery Shopping when it came to eating lunch. I remember one period I ate at Arbys for almost 2 months, visiting them weekly. It was great. But then again Arbys was next to where I worked so it was convenient.

In today’s Mystery Shopping land there are so many hoaxes, scams and well companies wanting you to sign up for the shops its crazy. There is on site called ShadowShopper which IS a pay site but when you sign up you get access to a wealth of mystery shop companies and jobs. Now my theory is once you sign up after a month you can probably cancel because at that point you’ve signed up with about a billion other companies through shadowshopper. But still, that site will actually allow you to easily find real mystery shopping jobs. Now the problem at least that I have is the shopping pays little to nothing. In the past the pay was decent, it was enough to entice a shopper to go a little out of the way. Heck remember my Arbys comment earlier? There was one day when the company I sub-contracted my services to asked me to go on an Arby’s tour and hit 5 Arby’s in Knoxville the same day! In that case they made it worth my while, I got my purchases reimbursed AND I got some income from it as well.

In today’s worlds the shops pay little to nothing. For example, I did a shop the other day for Smoothie King, and this may break my NDA but that’s cool because I effective today have cancelled all my mystery shopping accounts. Anyways, this particular Smoothie King shop  involved me purchasing a Smoothie, asking some questions. No big deal right? Well the Smoothie King was about 15 miles out of the way, I drive a vehicle that gets about 20mpg so round trip I used a little less then 2 gallons of fuel, or approx $5. Well the shop paid $8 plus they would reimburse me for the smoothie.  The shop also required about 45 minutes worth of my time to actually go do it, write up my report and submit it. So I spent about 45 minutes of my time for $3 and a smoothie. To me that SO isn’t worth it, heck the smoothie really wasn’t that good to me. I’m not sure what Smoothie King is doing but I won’t be going back any time soon.

Well the title of this post asks if you’ll ever get paid. In most cases payment does occur, it takes about 45 days for most companies after you shop to get the funds, which in this case would have meant I was waiting for about $12, once again not worth all the hassle. But apparently I did the shop wrong, see I was supposed to wait 3 minutes before asking a question after I ordered my smoothie, I only waited about 2 minutes and 40 seconds….. BECAUSE THEY CALLED MY NAME at the smoothie counter, what was I supposed to ignore them because that wasn’t in the directions, I figured since I was acknowledged which is what the point was that I could go ahead with the shop, boy was that wrong.  So when I filled in the timings on my report rather then lie about the timing I put the real timing. Overall the shop was good and there were no issues with my report which consisted of 2 written essays totaling over 900 words, around 20 other questions (fill in the blank) and then I had to upload my receipt. Everything was good, but I was 20 seconds off….. So I am not being reimbursed. Yep, I spent 45 minutes of my day for $3 and a smoothie and I didn’t even get that…. Well I got the smoothie, but instead of getting $3 I spent $5 on gas. And you know that the company I submitted the report to is STILL going to submit my report to Smoothie King and get paid, yet I won’t see a dime since I wasn’t 100% compliant. I wish there was a way I could submit a report but they couldn’t use it until I was paid, once payment hit the report would be released.

The gist of this post isn’t Mystery Shopping is bad. If you can do it and the places are convenient then do it. To me it would be worth it if I could hit 5 businesses all within the same block or at least on my way home. But how it’s laid out every company seems to use a one-off mystery shopping company so you literally need to spend hours upon hours finding shops that are near each other. My time is worth more to me then a free bite to eat. Even if I did get reimbursed from my example above I wouldn’t do it again…

And then I saw other shops in the Nashville area available which included washing fence displays…. It paid $14.00 per location, each location was about 5 miles apart. Now this could earn some money as you could rack up around $50 in one day doing these shops. But it wasn’t shopping, it was cleaning this companies fence displays with a bucket of water and soap out in the 100 degree weather. I figured it would probably take an hour to do each location minimum, plus the added time to do the paperwork, take the pictures and submit the reports.

Mystery Shopping really has potential…. If you can line your jobs up right ,that’s they key. But if you do one off shops around town between the wear and tear on your vehicle, the risk of not getting paid because you were a hair off, and the fact you are working for literally dollars an hour. But if you want to sign up, do the research I don’t think you could make a living at it, but you could certainly break even.

And yes I know this post will inspire some of you to tell me that it was my fault for not following the directions in my Smoothie King shop above, you people always seem to surface somehow and that’s alright. I’m still going to leave the comments on this post rather then disallow them, but do it tactfully, because I can (and will) modify your comments as I deem necessary. And yes, I get detailed logging every time you leave a comment so it’s not like I can’t identify you. Be nice, or I’ll make you say some really stupid things and link it to your email address. You’ve been warned.

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Posted in Rants, Scams / Hoaxes, reviews

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A joke so bad it’s funny

August 25th, 2010
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My laptop was driving me crazy.

“The A, E, and I keys always stick,” I complained to a friend.

She quickly diagnosed the problem. “Your computer is suffering from irritable vowel syndrome.”

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Old Faithful in Nashville? Nope, just some idiot

August 24th, 2010
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I was driving home from work the other day and I saw a geyser. Now I live in Antioch which is just east of Nashville and we just don’t have geysers. I mean this thing reminded me of the time I saw Old Faithful. Water was shooting up higher then the tree line and it was an interesting sight.

The funniest thing, and I wish I had a better picture of it but there was a guy with like a hand drill standing near that truck next to it. I can’t decide if that guy was responsible for this “accident” or if he was the one that showed up first. But then again I can’t imagine why he would have a small drill to fix this huge leak…

Anyways, not one of those things you see everyday. And you can click on the picture to see it larger if you are interested. Not the highest resolution possible, it was taken from my iphone 3G as I was driving about 50mph. Surprised the picture was this good!

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Posted in Picture-worthy

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I find myself growing tired of Social Media and Web 2.0

August 23rd, 2010
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I have had an epiphany due to this Buzz thing. Social media isn’t content. It’s narcissistic crap. No one cares. I’ve been wasting my life!

-Leo Laporte

If I throw out a Tweet who hears it? When I log into facebook I am overwhelmed with the vast quantity of invites, gifts and other fake interaction that floods my inbox. I in the past looked at sites like Blippy that shares your purchases, Yelp which shares your reviews and even Foursquare that shares where you are at and rewards you for being an addict of the system. I tried out the Google Buzz, I tried out the Twitter. But I now find myself really getting bored with the whole social media scene.

Back in the days when Social Media first came out it was a neat concept. It was a way for you to interact with one another in a way that was never before possible. It allowed people to easily follow others and stay in touch.I remember one of the first sites I joined was a social playground called Firefly which has been a defunct site for over 15 years since Microsoft bought them and shut them down. I should have known that with the death of what I believed to be one of the original social media sites that I should have just quit with it.

As I grow older I find myself just running out of time to even care that much. I’m on Facebook, I tried to make an effort to stay in communication with my family but like everything else in life Facebook has gone from a neat idea into a site that is nothing more then a personal information farm. So many people plug in so much personal information about themselves into that site without realizing the consequences. I can’t believe in the year 2010 people still are so naive and don’t realize once you publish ANYTHING it will never go away. It’s sad to think that if you tweet that you had a ham sandwich earlier today that your tweet will stand the test of time. And I’m not talking people posting stupid things, the sandwich was merely an example. I challenge you to look at the people on your friends lists and carefully scrutinize what they post and ask “would you hire them if they interviewed for a job?” I can tell you almost everyone on my list I wouldn’t. It’s true I’ve had a lot of interaction with my family since they all got on facebook, but most of it’s been via third party apps like Farmville, MafiaWars or other games where they send me requests for stuff. I haven’t said “hi” to these people in years but every week they need help leveling up in their current addiction.

Social media really used to mean something. I could get online and chat with my friends across the country in a great environment. No commercial ads, no viruses, nothing to worry about. But now these days everything is so commercialized. Yes even MY site now hosts commercials at the bottom of some posts. I’m as guilty as everyone else.

But we went from a world that had something to say to a world that will say anything, to anyone, at anytime. Heck have you seen some of my tweets? When I first joined Twitter I followed over a hundred different people because what they said was real, I’m now down to 30 something and most of those I don’t even read their tweets because I don’t trust them. So many people now tweet for money. They will “share their opinion” which is getting to be a paid for opinion.

What’s real these days? Can you trust anything you read?

Web 2.0 had promise, but it became so commercialized that it lost it’s true value. I would rather PAY for a service that’s good, then use a service for free that has it’s momentum change at the drop of a hat based upon who the highest bidder is at the time.  I’m talking to you Zuckerberg.

Let’s journey down memory lane real quick to the first time you got on Twitter. You could search for anything and it was easy to find tweets on a topic. Now you search and all you find are retweets where people are trying to enter a contest and you see the same post page after page. No real content, just the same crap page after page. Twitter has lost it’s appeal, its value.

I’m not ditching the web all together, I think I’m really just ditching social media. I just bought a new domain name, I plan on using it. But I think I may sever the ties to most if not all of the social media sites I’ve joined. I mean really, does anyone care what I am doing at any particular time? Hell I’m not even that interested in my own life, I can’t imagine that you are.

I think what I’ll do is stop with the twitter, the google buzz and focus on real content. After all, it’s hard to say what you want in 160 characters max. On my site, I can write what I want, when I want and it can be as long or as short as I want it. I think the quality and quantity of my posts will greatly increase with this move. Plus the content I publish will start to be owned by me. Yeah, when you post to facebook, twitter or buzz (or any other site for that matter) those sites own your content. It’s no good.

So I apologize for people that read my blog and find new posts by getting twitter alerts each time I write a new post. I think this will be the last alert you get, alerting you that this post is published. I still offer the RSS feeds that you can subscribe to and receive email notifications when I post something. But I don’t think I’m messing with twitter or Buzz anymore. In fact I think I will start to remove those feeds from my site. After all, no new content being put into those environments, no need to pull the latest feed.

We’ll see how this goes. And I encourage the rest of you out there in the world to analyze what you are doing. For me this came after reading a blog by one of the people I follow, Leo Laporte. I’ve also been reading a great book called “Hamlet’s Blackberry” which is a phenomenal book on living with technology and frankly there’s way to much content creation by myself and others, I think we all need to live a bit without technology. Not completely, I need my iPad. :) But we can take steps back every now and then and enjoy the non technical world of ours.

I challenge you to figure out how many hours a day you spend with your gadgets. It may just surprise you. Read a book, sit on the porch, play with your dog, go do something that has some value to it. When you die no one is going to care what level of a game you got to. I have yet to read one tombstone or obituary that said “jon was an avid gamer that reached level 52 in ________.” It’s not those people you read about, it’s the people that do something with themselves, they help others, invent new ideas or just better themselves. If you want to be  a successful person, it’s best to mimic them.

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GoDaddy Sucks, and look who the CFO is!

August 16th, 2010
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Many years ago before GoDaddy was using smut to sell domain names I tried them out… Their menus were just a fustercluck and hard to navigate. Everytime you did anything in the site they tried to sell you a new product. You couldn’t really do anything with the site, it was one of the most terrible websites I think I have ever used…

(Interesting side note I just learned while writing this post, the CFO of GoDaddy according to CampaignMoney is Michael Zimmerman, that may not mean much to any of you but that’s the same guy that financially bought Goody’s Family Clothing (with some other partners) and later shut the company down, filed bankruptcy and kicked 120 employees to the curb with no notice, benefits, severance or dignity. Yep 2 years later we are still fighting to get our vacation money, benefits and WARN act money owed to us. So it looks like GoDaddy has some top notch guys running the place. No wonder the company is so terrible.) – Assuming this is the same Zimmerman, but there are many references to NY which is where he often flew in from when he visited the Goody’s Home office.

Fast forward about 5-8 years and well, I wanted to buy a .me domain name and the number of sites that actually register them are slim, GoDaddy was one of them so I reluctantly purchased the domain name and hosting package through GoDaddy. I was very sad when I logged into the control panel and found out that NOTHING HAD CHANGED!! The system was still hard to navigate and very clunky/slow to do anything. The only difference between today and several years ago, they hired more bimbos, sponsor a race car, and who knows what else.

I have been using a particular host for the last 8 years, loved them. The system is easy, you login and it’s very pleasing to the eyes. The menus aren’t littered with “by this”. Want to add a sub-domain you can do it in a few clicks of a button. Want to add email, it’s on the main menu. It really was the best interface I have seen.

With GoDaddy I don’t know where the heck to tell you to go. It is not a user friendly site at all. And what really gets me is this… See I bought a domain name and added on webhosting… Which meant I wanted webhosting, right? Why was it when I logged into GoDaddy I had to click on the “Activate” button which was somewhere in the chaos of the menu’s and then wait over night for the hosting to be enabled? Why was my hosting not turned on automatically?

Then I use WordPress for my blog, it’s easy and I like it. So I tried to install WordPress on my GoDaddy account, after I found out where to go to install it I found that there wasn’t an easy way to install it in a subdomain or a different folder. I finally found if you go in and create a new folder before installing wordpress that works, but it’s not user friendly at all. So I clicked the “Install” button. Mind you I have done this about 6 times on my current host as I have managed several blogs for various events. Installing WordPress on BlueHost is a matter of seconds… With GoDaddy, it literally took over 20 minutes before WordPress was installed and I had access to log into the system.

But then again I guess when a company uses smut to sell a product it’s for one reason. They hope you’ll look at the girls rather then what your actually paying for. But once you actually take a look at the fustercluck of a menu they have after you already paid the money it’s terrible, and they say you aren’t eligible for a refund if you cancel your account, but I did email customer service (I presume the lady in the picture wasn’t the one emailing me back) and did actually receive a refund for the amount I paid just 12 hours earlier. We’ll see if it ever hits my account, but it was only like $15 that I paid so I could try it out, not a big loss if I don’t see it. But regardless, I don’t want a company to spend so much money on tasteless adds. I mean, come on, this add tells you NOTHING about the service, well… I guess it does… They’ll take your money, give you a crap product and then celebrate. Great business model isn’t it? I’d much rather see an add like the one I put below for Bluehost, it is professional in the domain webhost sort of way. I want a company that gives me confidence that when I call there will be professional people to help me. Does this picture of a GoDaddy commercial give you confidence that if your site goes down they can help you get it back up? Nope, if your site went down it’s probably because some bimbo spilled a bottle of wine in the Data Center.

I wish that BlueHost.com would register .me addresses, but they don’t so I had to use GoDaddy for the actual registration pieces. However, BlueHost support was able to help me in about 5 seconds get my DNS names changed so I can still use my Bluehost hosting and management of the domain. I really love Bluehost, they have been a terrific company to be a customer of. Anytime I have any questions I get answers almost immediately, and downtime, I think only twice in the eight years was my site down, and it was in both cases back up within a few minutes.

If you want a webhost that will not keep trying to sell you products everytime you log in then check out Bluehost. It’s a clean, professional, easy to use interface and yet still gives you all the advanced tools you would want if you wanted to dig into the code, change your databases, etc. And if you want basic easy hosting, they have that too. I’ll be staying a customer of bluehost for a long time to come, especially now that I have got a brief taste of the crap that other companies have.

If you want to check out bluehost I’ve put a banner ad below. Just click on it to go to their main site.

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Review – Otterbox Defender for iPad = I love it!

August 13th, 2010
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Ever since I got my iPad I’ve been on a journey to find the best iPad case I could to protect my investment. After all, the iPad isn’t a cheap netbook and it needs to be protected while making sure you don’t make the thing so inaccessible. As part of the Amazon Vine program I received many trial cases and wrote reviews on them and never really found one I liked. I finally bought the Marware Evo-Vue case and for a few weeks that was my favorite. I used it at work all the time but the problem was the corners of the iPad were not protected and I hate to say but the case started to fall apart.

so I needed something better. Well I had an Otterbox case for my iPhone that was built tough and when I heard the iPad was getting one I was excited. I found them for sale on Amazon.com ($69 at the time, down to $54 now) and ordered one. It arrived a few days later and I immediately stopped using the Marware case.

Initial impressions on the Otterbox Defender, it’s tough, it’s sleek, it’s really nice. That being said, it’s a pain in the a$$ to put on, and it’s not a case you will be putting on and taking off. Once it’s on you leave it on. But it looks good, and feels good.

The Defender comes in 3 main parts (actually more but we are talking main parts.) The main body with rubber lining, the hard shell cover and the dock cover. These are what you will see daily.

Overall the case is really well done. All exposed buttons and ports on the iPad are covered, there are holes for the speaker, mic and headphone jack. What I don’t like is the rubber like covering around the home button can pop off if your not careful, it is attached to the main case so you can just push it back down but It can happen where it pops back a little bit. Also, I have an issue with mine where the cover on the orientation screen lock keeps popping open.

You may ask, does this thing have a stand? Yep, the hard shell cover actually has a stand built into it, and the cool part. The cover actually has small rubber strips that make it stick to the surface so it doesn’t slide around. Very smart design.

But wait, if the ports are covered how do you charge it? Otterbox thought of that too! There is a cover that slides off the back that allows you to use the official OEM apple iPad dock with the otterbox case on! Yes, this is one thing no other case I have see is able to do, be used in the dock with out taking the case off.

Overall I really like this case. I have confidence now that if I drop the iPad on it’s corner the case will do it’s job and prevent the iPad from getting damaged. Also the case gives the iPad a little bit of water resistance by shielding the ports. One thing I didn’t mention is the Otterbox also ships with a cloth and screen protector as well so it’s protected all the way around. But it is still possible that if you drop it and it hits the screen you will break it. So what if you drop it with the case all the way on? You should feel very safe. The back of the iPad with the rubber coating gives it a little bounce. The firm structure spreads the impact around the iPad if you hit the corner and if you have the front on there is a little air pocket designed to keep the front of the screen from getting damaged.

I would recommend getting this case, and right now Amazon.com has it on sale for $54.47 which puts in in line with the marware and other popular cases. You can get directly to the amazon product page using this link http://tinyurl.com/iPadOtterBox

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iPad + Skype = Awesome!

August 12th, 2010
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So today I forked out the $2.99 to enable me to make unlimited calls from my iPad to landlines using Skype. And I must say it is awesome! In fact I just got off the phone with my dad and talked for about 15 minutes, call quality was near perfect. And no I didn’t hold it up to my head, I had the speaker phone on since the iPad has a great Mic and Speaker built into it.

I really think when my AT&T contract with my iPhone is up I’ll be cancelling it. After all, if I can make calls and do email, web browsing, etc with my iPad, what do I need an iPhone for? Sure you may say that Skype doesn’t work over 3G, but I think they fixed it… And if they didn’t we’ll there’s always the jailbreak option if you are into that.

Anyways, I just wanted to post that Skype and the iPad works great. It does cost $2.99 a month to make unlimited calls from the iPad, and if you want a real phone number so you can receive calls that’s an extra $6.00 a month, but for $8.99 you essentially are getting all the calls you need way cheaper then AT&T’s iPhone plans.

Anyone have any comments? Feedback on how skype has worked for you? Feel free to chime in!

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