Charlie Hoehn over at Hoehn’s Musings wrote a post that boiled down to “just do stuff”. Of course, “just do stuff”, while succinct, doesn’t really do justice to the underlying sentiment. When people stop doing stuff, in my opinion, they have stopped living and are just taking up space. The group that I rock climb with embodies the spirit of the sentiment with the catchphrase “climb to fail”. What that means is that you can’t climb to a difficult move and just quit – you have to try to get past it and fall. The strange thing is that sometimes you don’t fall. Life should be lived the same way… just do stuff and climb to fail. Trust me, here, I’m a recovering dead person.

At any rate, you can find Charlie’s excellent article over here. I suggest you give it a read.

[Hoehn's Musings via Life Hacker]

It’s probably just me but there are things that I find really irritating and will cause me to not spend my money in certain places. Here’s an example-This morning I had breakfast at the McDonald’s at 1805 N. Harrison in Cary, NC. I had a Big Breakfast with Hotcakes (which is the new name for something that had a different name last week…. but that’s another post entirely) which consists of Eggs, a sausage patty, 3 pancakes, a biscuit, and a hashbrown brick. So she brought me one of the maple syrup flavored corn syrup containers and I asked her for another one because the amount in one is just short of what I consider adequate for use on the pancakes. I’ll admit it bothers the environmentally conscience part of me to use part of a plastic container for no particularly good reason other than some efficiency expert somewhere decided that people use less syrup than I do on an order of McD’s hotcakes, but I do it anyway. At any rate, she said they charge 27 cents for an extra one.

At this point I’d like to point out that I just paid $6.07 for the above plus a cup of coffee so an extra 27 cents puts it within rounding distance of $6.50.  I have several Waffle Houses within 10 miles of me and they all have breakfast specials consisting of food cooked for you instead of food cooked sometime today and kept in a warmer for less than $6.50*. My point is that I spend a significant amount of money at this McDonald’s but won’t anymore because there are and almost limitless number of places to buy breakfast (including other McD’s that don’t charge for syrup) and they’ll be getting my money instead of this one.

I know it may seem petty but if we all voted with our dollars and made sure that the business in question knew why, we wouldn’t have to put up with surly service, bad food, or cheap products.

[image by M.F. Naaldenberg via Wikimedia Commons]

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*Disclaimer: I’m not 100% sure about this because I haven’t been to one lately and I’m too lazy to look it up but I have been to Huddle House where 2 eggs, 2 strips of bacon, hashbrowns and a waffle with all the syrup I cared to put on it plus coffee was $6.35.

I just got back from a weekend of camping and rock climbing at Pilot Mountain, NC with some of the most fantastic people I’ve ever known. Here are the things I learned:

1. Everybody’s definition of what is art is different. And their definition doesn’t affect me any more than whether or not they like the same kind of music as I do. What I carrying away from that is that all forms of creation are as personal as religion or politics and, while not as emotional, should probably not be discussed in polite company.
2. Things that you learned well when you were young come back to you pretty quickly. I hadn’t been climbing in probably 10 years; seriously & regularly for a lot longer than that. The first attempt I made some classic beginner mistakes and tried to arm my way through which didn’t work. After that, the climbing was pretty good. Overall, I think I did pretty well… not nearly as bad as I was afraid I was going to be but obviously not at the level I used to climb. I will be going again as often as possible and think I can get back to close to the ability of my youth.
3. My last climbing experience was at an indoor climbing wall and this weekend verified what I thought about it then… Indoor is probably fine for practicing and so forth but it’s a dry and antiseptic experience compared to climbing on living rock. There’s probably an analogy for modern American life and Wal-Mart there someplace but I’m too lazy to figure it out right now. Maybe later. Or You can think about it yourself.
4. There can be no understating that having good people around you is one of the most important things you can do for the quality of your life. The group I went camping with is strangely diverse but respectful of the diversity. IMO, that provides you with maximum exposure to ideas that you can examine and adopt if you like.

In closing, I had a great time. We created great shared stories. We got out and wallowed in nature for a weekend instead of sitting in front of a TV being told when and where to buy things while we were waiting for a place to permanently lay down. I highly recommend you do the same if you get the chance.

This is maybe the coolest thing ever (probably not more than the second coolest though). It’s a polar exploration exploration lab designed by Matthiew Tarrit. It’s currently only a concept which means, like all extra-cool things, that it’s unlikely to ever see production but he gets props anyway.

Core 77 via Gizmodo

I have a Blackberry. I know a lot of other people who have a Blackberry. I know more people with assorted phones with qwerty keyboards on them. What this means and apparently what advertising/marketing  monkeys have failed to grasp is that a lot of us aren’t looking at standard phone dials anymore.  That means that we don’t have ABC above the number 1 and it makes it hard to decipher alphabetic phone numbers. What that also means is that when somebody asks me to dial 800-CleverNumberThatSpellsTheirName I either have to go to a site like phonespell.org or, more often than not, not call them.

When I was taking marketing classes, the object of advertising was to make people want to use your product or service. This fails in the most astounding way if you make somebody want to use your product but then make it really difficult to get to.  I can’t possibly be the first person to notice this since Blackberrys  have been required equipment for every upper level management wonk for approximately the last 10 years.

I mean, seriously, I understand that numbers are tricky for people to remember but it’s nothing like trying to remember what letters appeared above what numbers on a phone dial and decoding that in your head. I could totally buy into phone “numbers” becoming alphabetic like domain names but since telephone companies have all the innovative capacity of Neanderthals I don’t see that happening any time soon. They still seem to think area code splits are a good idea. I’m hoping Google Voice (and services like it) will change this someday.

Why is it, in English, we say a store is either open or closed? Shouldn’t it be open/close or opened/closed? I’m sure it’s the French’s fault somehow. English was pretty straight forward until they started fucking with it.

Jalopnik has a story about a guy that did an 8 bit flame job on his Toyota Prius with colored magnet strips. The idea is so weird and geeky on so many different levels that you’ve got to love it.

Photo by saeru

[Jalopnik via Gizmodo]

Those of you who know me know I have an abiding hatred of all things Walmart. In fact, one of my favorite lines from Boston Legal was when Denny Crane and Alan were sitting on the balcony and Denny Crane asks Alan what he would do to make the world a better place. Alan response was something along the lines of ‘destroy all businesses with mart in the name’.

I haven’t spent any money in a Walmart in at least 4 years and try not to go into them at all so you know I love this website. I hope they post lots more.

(PeopleOfWalmart via Gizmodo)

So just to prove I can do it I’m posting this from the mall. I didn’t really need anything but there’s a good Greek place in the food court so I thought I’d stop and get some lunch and wallow in humanity for a little while.

While I was here I thought I’d thow out some random observations that aren’t really complete enough to deserve their own post.

Judgemental people suck. I think everybody is a little judgemental sometimes but people who go out of their way to categorize based on appearance aren’t worth the effort to dislike.

Downtown Raleigh has changed a lot in the last few years. I don’t know if opening back up Fayetteville Street had anything to do with it but there’s a lot going on down there now.

Joseph Carnevale, the traffic barrel monster creator who was arrested in June after Raleigh’s crack police force solved the case, had his day in court. The end result is 50 hours of community service and then the charges will go away. The president of Hamlett Associates plans on erecting the sculpture outside the corporate headquarters and taking Carnevale to lunch. Carnevale plans on doing his community service working with Habitat for Humanity. No word yet on what RPD plans on doing with all the time they’ve got to waste now. Hang out at Snoopy’s, perhaps?

There still hasn’t been any mention in the traditional press but it certainly seems that this whole thing came about  because of a joyless thug named K.L. Everett who wears a badge. As near as I can tell (since the traditional press won’t come right out and say it), he took it upon himself to decide a crime had been committed and set to work the huge bureaucratic machine that is Piggy Central. Hope you take a bullet and it kills you in a slow and painful way. I would say that I hope it paralyzes you but then you’d be paraded around as some sort of “hero”. If you’re dead you just go away and the earth is a slightly better place.

Here’s a link to a story in the N&O.

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