I’ve been sitting on several pieces of new music for a while, trying to find the time to edit, review, and post them. I finally made some time to finish a few of them. The first is a four part setting of “Blessed Be the Name of the Lord”.
It is free to download and use, and you can find it, along with all of my sheet music, here.
Our neighbor, like most everyone who lives in our area, has Verizon for his local phone service. Almost a week and a half ago, all of the phones in his house stopped working—no dial tone at any phone jack, completely dead. So, he called Verizon (using his mobile phone) to schedule a service call. Verizon said the earliest they could send a technician was 3 days ago (Friday, March 28).
So, right off the bat, Verizon left a customer without service for a week.
On Friday, Verizon called our neighbor on his mobile saying that they had to reschedule the service appointment for the next day, Saturday, March 29—a week and a day without any phone service.
On Saturday, they called again and told him they would not be able to send a technician until this Friday, April 4.
That will be two full weeks without service for a family with small children. Two full weeks without 911 service. What if they need to call an ambulance? What if they have a fire? What if someone else on the street has a fire and is unable to call 911?
But wait, they have a mobile phone, right? Sure, but does that really make it ok? Should everyone have to have a mobile phone to compensate for Verizon? What about folks who don’t have a mobile? I would bet that demographic includes many seniors, and other people for whom their landline is the only option in an emergency.
Aunt Mae has a monitoring services that relies on her phone line. She wears a button around her neck that she can press in case of an emergency, and it will automatically call the service so they can take action, such as call the police or an ambulance. What if her phone service is out for two weeks and she falls? What about her, Verizon?
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I had been using this for a while, and it only recently occurred to me that it might be useful to someone else. So, I finally motivated myself to create a Google Code project for my admittedly still very minimal Freemarker Bundle. I posted about it a few days ago on the mSpoke blog, but I figured I might as well give it a shameless plug here, too.
Here’s the first version. If you find it useful, drop me a comment here or there, and suggestions are most certainly welcome.
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Since we usually do our big weekly grocery shopping trip on Saturdays, it has been easy for us just to buy Aunt Mae’s groceries at the same time. She usually calls on Saturday morning to give us the list.
As you may have guessed from other things I’ve written, Aunt Mae is not only an incredible cook, but also downright hillarious. So, getting the list is, like most things we do with her, usually quite entertaining.
The list usually starts out small, with about five items (of course, as you’ll see, an “item” might be something like “twenty boxes of pudding”). After that, she’ll say “that should do it, honey … oh, except for…”, and then she’ll add a few more items. Then, “I think that’s it, except for…”, and add a few more. After shopping, we usually find that our grocery cart is two-thirds Aunt Mae.
Not only do we get the list of items she needs, but also a small story about each. For example, last weekend, she needed four packages of cream cheese. Three of them were for the cheesecake that she was going to make when so-and-so came over this week. And by the way, did you know that so-and-so’s daughter and her family are doing well? They live in this-place-or-that now, and she hasn’t really seen them since they were in visiting so-and-so. The other box is for bagels, of which she still has plenty. She didn’t eat many last week, because she wasn’t in the mood for bagels. She did eat quite a few Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, though, you know.
Oh, and did you know that so-and-so is other-so-and-so’s cousin?
“That should do it, honey … oh, except for…”
Do people even read the grocery store fliers anymore? You know, the ones that list all the stuff the store has on sale for which you don’t even need a coupon? Aunt Mae does.
When there are big specials, like twenty boxes of cook-and-serve pudding for $10, she gets twenty. Do people these days even know what to do with twenty boxes of cook-and-serve pudding? Or twenty boxes of anything, for that matter? Aunt Mae does.
Last week, she noticed that hams were on sale. Not ham, like coldcuts, or slices of ham, but hams. She wanted a fourteen pound ham. The smallest I could find was a fifteen pounder, which was fine with her. Do people these days even know what to do with a fifteen pound ham? Aunt Mae does.
God bless you, Aunt Mae.
Recently, I got an offer from Rain X to try their new Latitude wipers. I don’t know if I actually needed new wiper blades, but I hadn’t changed them since I got my car in 2004, so I convinced my frugal side to give the Latitudes a try. They came as part of a kit along with Rain X glass cleaner, glass treatment (their claim-to-fame product), and a microfiber cleaning cloth.
The glass cleaner came in an aerosol can, rather than a typical blue stuff spray bottle. When you spay it on, it foams. I used the cleaner and microfiber cleaning cloth to clean all the windows of my car. Beforehand, they were dirty. Afterward, they were clean. I’m not sure that it worked any better than the blue stuff. I’d probably only buy it again if it’s cheaper, or is more environmentally friendly. I have no idea about either yet.
The microfiber cloth is actually quite nice. It has little pockets in the corners for your fingers so you can easily get the cloth into the nearly unreachable inside corners of your windshield.
The Latitude wipers are the newer “beam” style assembly, with a single curved, springy beam that is supposed to evenly distribute the wiper pressure across the windshield, as opposed to standard wipers which have several “pressure” points, according to the Rain X marketing department. The wipers have some weight to them, and feel like a quality product. They were fairly easy to install, although I had some trouble when trying the different adapters.
When I placed my order, their web site guided me to the correct driver and passenger wipers sizes for your year, make, and model, which was great. After I installed the Latitudes, I sprayed water on the windshield to test them. They completely missed a four inch wide, six inch long swath right in my field of vision. My first instinct was that I installed them incorrectly. A quick look at the instructions revealed that it was reversed, left to right. I couldn’t imagine how this would make a difference, based on the design, and sure enough after I fixed it, the wiper still missed the same large swath.
I decided to try the other adapter in hopes that it was a bit larger and would cause more pressure on the blade. It was a pain to change, and involved using a screwdriver to pry things. I can understand that, since you don’t want your wiper assembly flying off at high speed, but still overly tough. Unfortunately, neither adapter allowed the blade to contact the windshield fully in this one area. Since that pretty much defeated the purpose, I gave up and put my old wipers back on.
The Rain X glass treatment works pretty well. I had used it, or something similar (I think it was Rain X brand, but can’t remember for sure), about 8 years ago, and remember it working well.
At low speeds (under 30 mph) with light rain, water beads instantly, but you still need to use your wipers intermittently to clear the water. Heavy rain runs down and off the windshield at low speed, and amazingly enough, you can still see clearly and only use your wipers as needed. At higher speeds (over 40 mph), light and heavy rain are blown up and off the windshield. This higher speed effect is quite nifty to see, and works surprisingly well at keeping the windshield clear even in fairly hard rain. Of course, you should still use your wipers as needed.
There is a gray area between “low” and “high” speeds where the airflow over the windshield holds even larger water beads in place. I’ve had to use my wipers more in that gray area than at either low or high speed.
So far, the only downside I’ve found is that under very light rain, the glass treatment can leave a light haze on the windshield after clearing it with the wipers. It doesn’t hamper visibility, but it is definitely noticeable. I don’t know how long a single application of the glass treatment will last. I’ve heard 2-3 months. It only takes a few minutes to apply, so that’s probably long enough not to be annoying.
I’ve read in several places that PPG Aquapel is at least as good, and may last a good bit longer. If the Rain X doesn’t last 2-3 months, I may give the Aquapel a try later in the spring.
Is it just me, or does perforated cardboard never seem to do what it’s supposed to? I always end up either mostly shredding the parts that aren’t perforated as the tear shoots off in some random direction, or tearing the perforation so slowly and carefully that it may as well not even be there in the first place.
At work, we have a Keurig single cup coffee maker. We get our coffee singles from Green Mountain Coffee (Keurig seems to be heavily marketed through Green Mountain, are they subsidiaries?). I’ll admit that although I like drip-brewed coffee better, the coffee singles are actually pretty good.
Anyway, the coffee singles come in boxes that are perforated on one corner, kind of like the 12 packs of soda that are meant for your fridge. They also have this nice cutout for your thumb or finger on one edge of the perforation. Apparently its purpose is to lure you into thinking that you can just insert your thumb or finger, pull, grab a single and brew. It never fails that I partially destroy these boxes while trying to use the obvious approach.
The perforations on those damn 12 packs never seem to work out either.
I don’t get it. Perforations really seem like they should work. If I had more free time, I’d invent a better way, but since I don’t, I guess I’ll just complain-blog about it.
Yet another Trac TextMate Bundle update. This one adds a hot key for formatting text as strikethrough, which was a pretty obvious oversight in my last update! It works just like the bold and italic hotkeys.
You can check out the (mostly uninteresting) Change Log, or just go grab version 1.1.3.