I got hung up by a Telephone survey person!

I don't usually answer the phone anymore due to telemarketers (even though we're on the No Call list), or the usual idiot trying to sell me a credit card I didn't ask for, and lately about the only calls I'd get are political crap or a survey.

At about 3:19 pm, the phone rings and I answer it. Some guy who obviously speaks as though English isn't his native language introduces himself as some person representing some marketing research group, and he's conducting a survey about fast food. Well, it happens to be one of my favorite subjects, and I tell him that. Pretty much. Apparently, he's not prepared for that sort of answer and says something like "What?" and I say "let's do it." meaning Let's do this survey. I don't know if he understood my response, but I got summarily hung up on. Usually it's me doing that!!

Well, if you didn't want to do the survey, why did you call me?? I'm going to keep an eye on my phone bill in case this ends up being a scam.

Verb Noun Agreement

What is with people recently in that they can't get the verb-noun agreement correct anymore? What sort of thing am I talking about?

OK, the thing that annoys me is when people write the name of a company, or a plural but singular noun, and then use the wrong number verb with it.

For example, I saw in the paper the phrase "The media get blamed...." GET, not GETS, but the incorrect GET. The MEDIA GETS BLAMED. Blamed for what? That's not important here. MEDIA is a singular plural, therefore it gets the singular verb. If you can replace your noun with "IT" and then read the sentence, does it sound awkward? It does. and if you can't see that, then I need to boot you in the head.

Another example - using a company name with a plural verb. "Company XYZ have licensed..." Umm, how about wrong? The company is a singular entity. IT HAS LICENSED,  THEY HAVE LICENSED, but we're not talking about a bunch of people, we're talking about 1 singular company. And it HAS licensed. Company XYZ HAS licensed. Corporations are taxed as a singular entity, and are singular nouns. Just because there's a bunch of people working there doesn't mean the company name is a plural entity.

I have you have it has - Singular
We have you have they have. - Plural
 
Get it? A company has licensed, it has licensed. They have licensed. The people behind the company have licensed. "People" is a plural noun and plural in every way. "Person" is a singular noun. People have,  a Person has. Try the replacement, which sounds correct? It have, or it has? You see what I mean, Vern?

The media gets blamed, they get blamed, it gets blamed.

IN SHORT: STOP USING PLURAL VERBS FOR SINGULAR NOUNS SUCH AS COMPANY NAMES OR PLURAL NOUNS THAT ARE SINGULAR IN NATURE.

 

Sorta good news?

News on my car: My mechanic located a used Kia 98 Sephia transmission with 80K miles on it for about $600. Thing is the place he's getting it from won't be able to remove it until Monday and it won't get to him until Thursday.

So it's easier to deal with a used transmission rather than a rebuilt. And probably faster than getting an overhaul kit which I guess in my case wouldn't do enough. I don't know if he knows about transmission overhaul kits.

He found a used one with a better price and better mileage than anything I found online.

Well.... sh__.

It's 2 and half weeks into March 2012, and I've driven my car for only 3.5 days of it. Half a day today because it basically leaked transmission fluid all the way to where I ended up today. The first 2 weeks were spent at my mechanic, working on the starter that died the last Monday of February. Today wasn't great. The guy who towed it seems to think it might be a broken axle, because when he got it down off his hauler, it sat in Park. Well, it was sitting in park when he picked it up. Either way, the transmission could be toasted. I did find out that I have options - a used one, a rebuilt one, or an overhaul kit. As my options go, and I hope my mechanic knows about it, would be the overhaul kit.

However, if it's a broken axle, that's like a $150 part.

The starter work he did was beautiful. It didn't sound like my car. I did mention the extra loud exhaust sound that it has now.

As an interesting aside, the tow truck driver has his own Mater, aka Tomater, sitting in his yard, and lets people take pictures with it.


I worry how much _THIS_ repair will be. I wish for help paying for it... I hope nothing else happens because I can't take my car breaking down again.

Car

Might have seen evidence of the leak my mechanic mentioned. Thought smoke coming from car was steam but smell says possibly oil. So that's the leak? anxiety Over this car will be the death of me.

So the starter dies in the Kia...

Ok so the starter on the Kia hasn't been well lately. I think it started going bad on Saturday. It was a difficult start in the cold weather, because for some stupid reason, I just had to go out and get some things that day, even though Sunday I'd be right out again anyway getting the local paper. 

I had noticed there was some rough spots in the starter working on Sunday, and even today. In fact, I had problems getting it to do something in the first parking lot I was in, and some problems but not as much in the 2nd parking lot. It wasn't until I wanted to leave the Post Office and go home that the starter finally died. Well, not so much as died as it was still spinning, but nothing was happening with the engine.

So in some sort of panic, I located a phone. It was a good thing that I remembered the pay phone in front of the old GTE phone building, because my damn Motorola Tracfone wasn't getting a network signal.

I called family, then attempted to call a wrong number and left a message for my mechanic - which I kinda knew even though the annoyed guy called my number back at home and told me I got the wrong number. $1 in quarters on 2 calls. (They give your money back when you get the phone company's recording for a non-working number.) Thankfully, the toll free number for Triple-A (aka AAA) didn't require any money.

So I get the guy and he collects my particulars. Asks if I'll be riding along to the mechanic and I thought he also asked if I need dropped off at home. Which I do ask for. I have Gold+ membership after all, but even then I get only 1 call due to mechanical breakdown. But at least the towing up to 100 miles is free. I'm probably less than 2 miles away from my mechanic, and likely home as well.

So we get to the mechanic, and I tell him that he's probably sick of me being here so much. I explain the situation and all, and it might be 2 days or so (no problem actually) before he can get to it. I hope the estimate isn't too high. He explains hearing something spinning in there is possibly a good thing.

I go back to the truck and I tell the guy about dropping me off at home, and he tells me they're really not supposed to do that.... Um, what? That's not the impression I got from talking to the AAA guy earlier.

So I try my phone again - no network. But at least I leave it on and proceed to walk down the driveway, back out onto the road, and towards the next main road. Thankfully at some point, my phone makes a noise and that tells me it's got a network. It's a Tracfone spam. Well, they are useful for something after all. I call my younger sister's number and thankfully my brother in law was home by then and my 2nd niece who answered it - well, they heard me leaving the message - finally got someone to help me get home. Otherwise, I'd have walked all the way back (not that I didn't need the exercise - but I would have likely ended up collapsing due to the pain).

At any rate, I asked him to see if there's a way to check for shorts that would cause battery drains, asked him about the coughing the car would do going uphill at 40 mph with less than half a tank of gas, and an estimate on getting the emergency brake working.

So now I'm waiting on what it'll cost for the starter. I hope I don't have to go back into debt too deeply to fix this. It's not going to be a decent couple of days coming up...
 

Ran into my first bad Verbatim disk

Today while watching the video I put on a Verbatim DVD+R, the playback started messing up at one point late in the disk. At first, maybe the source was messed up, or maybe the DVD player was being marginal at the spot it was reading the disk. So I got the disk out and looked at it.

There was a surface scratch that affected media burning, so in the spot on the media behind the scratch are blank unburned spots. I had to search the rest of the stack (not much of a coincidence that I'm at the bottom of this media stack) and found several others with scratches near the edge, and a couple with a scratch in the middle which renders them unusable.

I found a couple others with no flaws, reburned the disk, and finished watching what I had on the other, now garbaged, disk.

I used to run into bad media at the bottom of some orange-backed HP media stacks. But this is the first time I ran into any with Verbatim. And they had the nerve to raise the price on their media last time I was at the store. I'll still buy Verbatim, but now I'll check the surface for scratches incurred during manufacturing.

What's interesting is I found a few more disks with scratches similar to the one I found today, in that if I didn't have content that ran into that area, the rest of the disk would be just fine. I might use them for small projects.
 

I finally identified that design

After all these years, I finally identified the dishes I remember my mom having when I was but a child. The dishes she had that through use got broken, destroyed, and eventually thrown out. I forget the last time I saw any of them. Then, after a chance visit to a store that's gone now, I found 2 pieces of the design, and the same dishes I remember Mom having.

The store was called Village Discount, but it's gone now. Finding these for 75 cents each was like the best coincidence or a small miracle. 

So that's all find and dandy, but what is it? As it turns out, it's made by the Indiana Glass Company and it came out during the 1950s to the 1960s. It's Milk Glass, and the design is called Colony Harvest. All this time I thought it was china and it wasn't. I thought mom had gotten it as a set of wedding china, because she had it ever since I could remember. This was mainly available through the S&H Green Stamp catalog. I don't remember how much she had of it, but I do remember some of these Snack Plates as pictured, and some tea cups (or whatever they were) that went with them. If there was more, I don't remember. Thankfully, there are places on the web that have this design and I could practically collect a set for a service for 4 if I wanted to. It's sad that these were lost through the years due to people not taking the greatest care of them.

A couple of things

I expect to finally be done with my business plan very soon. I courageously made a phone call for info, and when it turned up something more that I looked up (which seemed to be a hassle when I looked at it), I should be able to finally do what I need to finish it.

Also I finally GOT MY OWN DREMEL. Well, it's not that brand, but it does the same thing. On Sunday I was going through the ads in the Sunday paper and Harbor Freight Tools, home of the $3 digital voltmeter and the free LED flashlight, had an advertisement insert with a coupon for a $7 "Rotary Tool" set. Well, shoot, I know what that is, and $7 is a hell of a deal!! Even though the Superbowl was going to begin, I took some Ibuprofen so I could function, and then zipped up to grab one of those rotary tool sets.

Now, one thing about HFT is that the item you want usually isn't where you expect to find it. I had to ask an associate and found them up by the registers, hanging on a peg thing. There were 3 of these things left. They had 2 different brand names, but still it was the same tool.

The guy ahead of me for some reason was making a purchase but his credit card wasn't clearing. ARGH. I have only so many minutes of functionality. Let's move on.

I had one of those laughs when I got my purchase in the car. Oddly enough, the first useful thing I did with it was to use an actual Dremel attachment for cutting and opened up the AC Adaptor for our cordless drill's battery charger which stopped working one day last week. So I'll have to figure out if the transformer burned out or the rectifying bridge on it had a silicon diode burn out. WHICH IS ONE MORE REASON WHY I HATE CORDLESS DRILLS. If it was an electric drill, which is what I should have bought in the first place, I'd have no lousy rechargeable batteries to go bad. I have the worst time with rechargeable batteries.

I also noticed that a store in the same plaza with Harbor Freight Tools, something that called itself Village Discount which was a resale shop of almost anything, had gone out of business since the last time I was there almost 2 years ago. That was where I found 2 pieces of china that is exactly like dishes my mom had. I'll have to take a photo and see if Tineye can find something like it so I'll know what the name of the design is.

Geez, I didn't know Time Warner was THAT much higher...

So Time Warner finally included a list of services and prices with the latest bill. Let's see...

I pay about $10 LESS than their "Standard Service" because of DirecTV. If you consider their Digital Tier and then DVR, then I pay $30 less. I can't miss features I don't have. I can only wonder how much I'd be saving with Dish Network.

Digital Phone from them is $50 a month for unlimited nationwide. I pay HALF that with my land-line phone. I also don't pay for long distance I don't use because I'd probably use the Tracphone for that, but I rarely call long distance out of state. So far, my savings is about $50 according to the rates on this card. I can do without certain features in order to save $50 a month, $600 a year.

However, it might be worth paying an extra $13 for a faster Road Runner. That is until the Evil Cable Company decides to arbitrarily raise rates again because a yacht payment is coming up..

I had no idea Time Warner was that much more than DirecTV  + traditional landline phone. Geez. It doesn't make sense to get it to me. I also think that's why people get things like Vonage instread of Time Warner digital phone service. I'd want my services on separate bills, but I don't like having all my serviced dependent on a single wire. TV, Phone, and Road Runner right now are on separate wires, and that redundancy is preferable.