Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Manbags, snow, and subscriptions
I'm back from sunny Detroit. I was favoring staying tonight about 70/30, but my class got over with early. So I was presented with the opportunity to beat traffic and make it back to Indy at a reasonable time. It had begun to flurry a little bit and the temperature dropped. I listened to my cautious side and got the heck out of Dodge, errrerrr Detroit. The drive back wasn't too bad...only like 5 hours or so. I stopped right inside the Indiana line and grabbed drinks and snacks.This truck stop had briefcases for sale. They were a pretty good price...they were like $10 with a $5 mail in rebate. I didn't really stop to look at them too long, but I just couldn't help from thinking about briefcases at a truck stop. My grandfather drove a truck for the majority of his life, and I sure as hell couldn't imagine him with a briefcase. Heck, I can't imagine myself with a briefcase and I work in a damn office. So really, who is the truck stop people targeting with the briefcases? If you are a traveling ____________ (insert occupation here) and you job consisted of a need for briefcase...wouldn't you have one already? So lets go through the situation.
Let's take Joe. Joe is a traveling ______________ he stops at the truck stop to grab a red bull, a thing of beef jerky.
Perhaps they are just an ok manbag. Perhaps the truck drivers of the word are uniting in protest of having to stuff their pockets full of junk while ladies get to carry a purse with compacts, wallets, pens, kleenex, tampons, candy, gum, pictures, keys, spare keys, money, receipts, chapstick, lipstick, kleenex, lip gloss, lip liner, and carmex.eye liner, a pda, a cell phone, 15 different store cards, check book, candy bar, and $3.62 in change. They have had enough and are uniting in the manbag revolution. I know that I sure as hell get tired of:
Left front pocket: Keys (on a carabineer rated for 6800lbs...you never know when you have to rapel), and carmex.
Right front pocket: Cellpdaone and PDA
Left rear pocket: Wallet
If it wasn't such a cultural stereotype I would carry a manbag. It sure heck would be a heck of a lot better for my back, not sitting on a 1 1/2" wallet.
So, that was my drive home. Last night I slept on the hardest bed ever. I think that they just built a mattress out of plywood, threw a mattress pad and a sheet over it and called it a mattress. I sleep on my side and felt like I was beat up when I woke up at 5am. I almost slept in the recliner in the room....it was a lot softer. What is with hotels and hard beds? I think that by having a soft bed you give more options. You allow the guest to either sleep in a soft bed...the bed, or a hard bed....the floor. By providing a hard bed you have cut my sleep options in two.
My class thing wasn't too bad. Nothing spectacular. There is a more advanced course tomorrow and I would have liked to stay for that, but I have to be at work tomorrow to start the install of the program that I had the class on today. I'll see about scheduling the second part soon.
It looks like winter is finally here. That beautiful November weather that we were having is finally gone, and in it's place is a blustery (is that a word?) twenty some degrees and high winds. It was windy as hell on the way home, but that keeps it interesting. My little Mazda3 isn't too bad, it's the semi over correcting that makes it interesting.
Ok...now on to the subscription thing. Here is my process for deciding who I subscribe to:
Step 1: Browse my blogrings and click on numerous people all at once, opening up 30-50 windows at a time.
Step 2: Read the most recent entry or two from the opened sites. If there is something interesting I'll make a comment. I don't make comments like "Hi, eprop back".
Step 3: I start to recognize people that I open up frequently and comment on. If they seem intersting or have a neat blog I do a trial subscription if it is an option.
Step 4: I read my subscriptions every day. This is my real and trial subscriptions.
Step 5: At some point during the 21 days or whatever a trial subscription is I make the determination if the person is interesting or not. If they seem to update regularly and are interesting I'll activate the subscription to a full one. That way the person knows that I'm subscribed and not just some weird stalker that is commenting.
Well, for the past week or so I've been trying to activate some of my trial subscriptions to regular subscriptions. I wasn't sure if it was working or not because I keep seeing the people that I'd activated as trial subscriptions still. I didn't think much of it. Well, today I login and a few of my trials are missing. I'm like WTF!? Where did they go. I go back through my comment history and find the people that are missing, I then activate them as regular subscriptions. I'm then left with another 2 or 3 people still on trial subscriptions, a couple of them are coming close to expiring. I decide that I need to do something about that or I'm going to lose those too. Well, I just delete the trial subscription then go to the persons page and activate a real subscription. Whew, all fixed I think that I found the people that I disappeared, if not I'll stumble across them again.
I'm also at another point in time in my Xanga life. In about 1/2 of my blogrings I'm seeing the same core group of people update regularly. It's the regular updaters that make this fun...not the once a monthers. So, I'm subscribed to the people that I've found interesting on my blogrings...and I'm not seeing anyone new on the blogrings...oh, what to do? I think that I might try a little blogring shuffle and see what happens. I'll probably be dumping a couple of them to find more interesting people...since finding more interesting people is the game.
Well, now that my subscription rationale is updatershe open, I have nothing else. I'm going to go and wake Amanda up (she's taking a nap) and eat some pizza. Amanda will probably want to watch One Tree Hill and oogle over Chad Michael MuOHGODarry for an hour or so. Take it easy.
