Paul English writes:

I was complaining to my brother yesterday that a stereo shop put six miles on my convertible even though there was no need to drive it. He said “that’s nothing!” and told me a body shop kept his Acura for one month, supposedly waiting and waiting for various parts, but when he finally got the car back, he looked in the GPS and saw addresses for several towns all over the place! I guess they had a fun time using his ride for the month. Sheesh! He then tells me his friend drives a tow truck and admitted to taking a couple quarters out of each car his tows— just enough to add up for coffee runs during the day but not enough to elicit complaints. My brother couldn’t believe this, so he has started leaving a dozen quarters in his car each time he leaves it at a shop or with a valet, and sure enough, people almost always take some of the money! Time for a major sting operation me thinks…

Ack. Makes me appreciate Billy and Freddy who own the A-Z repair shop we’ve been going to for 20 years. Their father brought ’em up right.

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USA Today’s front-page headline today:

So now a tipping point is any change. Thus has the term reached the pinnacle of success: It’s become utterly meaningless.

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My laptop keeps getting set to the wrong time. For example, today after I forced a re-synch using XP’s built in facility, I got this response:

If I set the date correctly and use Windows’ own time server instead of NIST’s, it gets the time and date right. Is the national timepiece off by six days???

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Some standard Windows dialogue boxes put a question mark button up next to the close box (the little one with the X in it). If you click on the question mark, you get a question mark cursor. Click on something in the dialogue box and it pops up an explanation. Except if you click on the question mark button up next to the close box, in which case you get nuthin’.

And — in a failure of meta-ness — if you click on the close box, it closes the window.

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Applehas turned the default download of Quicktime into a full download of iTunes. If you want to get Quicktime and only Quicktime, go here. (And when you install it, carefully check the default MIME types Quicktime takes over.)

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The Stark (or is it spelled “S+ark”? Hard to tell) mouse from Microsoft is lovely — a chromium version of some bicameral body part. But the entire left and right side serve as the buttons, which means that you have no place to rest your hand. As a result, I end up clicking three times by mistake for every time I intend to. As my father would have said: Designed by someone who never used it. Ack.

(I’m being rude to my hosts. I’m at the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium, and the mouse was part of the swag. So I should at least mention the two lovely books they gave us, including The Interventionists from a very cool exhibit at Mass MoCA. Also, dinner last night was lots of fun.) [Technorati tag: PhilippeStark]

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Carbonize some marshmallows and sell them as “Microwave Campfire Marshmallows.” It’s a surefire million dollar idea, assuming you figure out the marshmallows-explode-in-the-microwave part. But, you could probably just market your way around that: “Poppin’ Fresh Microwave Campire Marshmallows (Caution: Be sure microwave door is securely closed.)”

And while I’m not on the subject: Towards the bottom of the Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cup, on the outside, it says “Caution: Contents extremely hot.” I understand that lawyers made the company put that there, but why are coffee places serving us coffee that’s extremely hot? And am I now responsible for reading the fine print on a coffee cup before drinking? Breaking the seal on the lid of this coffee cup constitutes agreeing to the EULA…”

Have I mentioned I’m in a whiny, crappy mood because I’m sick as a dog (a cold) and am about to fly to Phoenix and back? Poppin’ fresh eardrums, away! [Technorati tag: eula]

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I’m at the Scottsdale Plaza Resort (trip #2 of my 3 trips to Phoenix over the course of 8 days). The hotel is lovely but their broadband offerings consist of two parts: You can get broadband via a wire in your bedroom for $10 for 24 hours, or you can take advantage of the wifi in the hotel lobby for $10 per use.

Yes, per use. Cheaper hotels offer wifi for free. More expensive hotels sometimes, in my experience, make you pay for a wired hookup in your bedroom but provide free wifi in the lobby. Leave it to the pace-setting Scottsdale Plaza Resort to move to the per-session wifi model made popular by pay phones and hookers.

I have left the hotel a strongly worded note. Of course, the fact that I just spent 5.5 hours in the middle seat on a packed, overheated plane where dinner consisted of 12 peanuts has had no effect on my mood. None whatsofucking ever.

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I used my Chanukah money from my in-laws (thanks Grandma and Grandpa!) to buy a watch on eBay that I’ve been admiring for a couple of years. It’s a Citizen Eco-Drive — the Eco means it runs on light, thus saving .0000000000000000005 kilowatts per year for the children of Mother Earth — and I like it, except for the instructions. Often watch instructions fail because they’re too brief. These fail because, although they are full, they are incomprehensible. Here’s an example, under the subhead “O-Position Correction of Function Hand and Date Wheel”:

The whole thing is like that. Page after page.

We need a Watch Setting Wiki where our civilization can pitch in and, using our combined brainpower, create understandable instructions for setting our watches. [Technorati tags: watches eco-drive]

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I wouldn’t bother you with this, but I’d like to get it off my chest:

I spent too much of yesterday trying to install Symantec WinFux WinFax Pro 10.03 which, upon looking to the Web for help, I discovered is the biggest piece of unstable dog crap software ever to reach a double digit rev number.

Thank you. I feel better. Now I only wish I could figure out how to use my scanner to prepare multi-page faxes.

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