Eat It

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Emily and I have found our new favorite food place - it's a Mexican-food restaurant chain called Chipotle. They actually have a fairly small menu - just burritos and tacos with salads available - but they do a excellent job providing variety within their menu. You can order your burrito or taco choosing from four different types of meats (or have it vegetarian) and all of their food is made fresh. They get you through the line quickly, or you can order online to have your food ready when you get there. Chipotle advertises that they use ingredients like organic beans and open-range pork and beef, and they offer fresh salsa and the best guacamole I have ever tasted. And even better, their prices are reasonable - Emily and I split a shredded beef burrito and have chips, guacamole and drinks, and can eat for less than $12. Fast food prices and quick service, but their food is of such good quality that I'm hesitant to label Chipotle as "fast food" - it certainly doesn't taste like it. We both work day jobs, so sometimes it's nice to be able to eat out, get great food, and not spend a lot of money. In fact, it feels so nice, and the food is so good, that sometimes we eat at Chipotle more than once a week - yeah, we really like Chipotle.

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And while I'm on the subject of food, I really like a good cup of hot chocolate. I don't drink coffee, so when I want a hot drink, it's hot chocolate for me. But I've found, at least in my town, that most coffee shops don't make good hot chocolate. Starbucks makes terrible hot chocolate, and even the locally-owned coffee shops, while usually doing better than Starbucks, still don't make really good hot chocolate. Most just squirt some Hersey's Chocolate Syrup into some warm milk, but so much of the time they don't use enough syrup, and I usually end up with a warm cup of milk that has a slight chocolate flavor. Until I visited Maui Wowi. A new Maui Wowi shop opened here a few months ago, and I stopped by to check out their hot chocolate. Now I admit that Maui Wowi is just another franchise that is capitalizing on the boutique coffee fad started by Starbucks. Maui Wowi serves Kona Coffee, and according to Emily it is very good coffee. But I discovered that Maui Wowi uses a special hot chocolate mix made by the Ghirardelli Chocolate Company. If you know anything about good chocolate, you know that Ghirardelli's is a world-class maker of fine chocolate. And the hot chocolate mix used by Maui Wowi tastes excellent - they easily have the best hot chocolate in town. I've already filled up two punch cards (for two free hot chocolates) and I've almost finished my third card. It's very good and highly recommended if you like good hot chocolate.

Hey There Delilah

My 8-year-old granddaughter Katie made her singing debut last week, singing Plain White T's song Hey There Delilah acapella at her school talent show. I am very proud of her - she can sometimes be shy, but she got up in front of a large group of parents and sang through the whole song, alone in front of the microphone. I had never heard her sing before - she definitely is able hear and sing a tune, and she sounds like an alto. So I'm thinking and a Grandpa/Granddaughter act may be in our future.

Way to go, Katie! Good Job!

Funny Girl



Boom Boom Girl

Ain't She Sweet

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Today we're discussing Internet domain names - the names you type into your browser, like microsoft.com or yahoo.com, to get to your favorite web sites. For those of you who glaze over whenever computer geeks begin talking about computers, you are forewarned that this posts contains some computer terms and references, but I will try and keep it simple. And if you are involved in managing an Internet web site or need information about domain names, you may find this post helpful.

I began my computer career in the mid-90s building web sites for local area businesses, and since that time have been involved in helping to set up every aspect of a web site, including the domain name. A domain name is simply the main address name - it's a user-friendly name that makes it easy to remember a web site's address. The Internet actually works on a numbering scheme - for example, Microsoft's address number is 207.46.232.182. If you paste that number into your Internet browser, you will see the Microsoft Corp. main web page. But "microsoft.com" is easier to remember and deal with than "207.46.232.182", so domain names are a big help and are pretty much required for promoting a web site, and because of that they have become important. And buying and selling domain names is a big business on the Internet. Now, you can make up your own domain name and register it as long as no one has used it before. But if the name you want is taken, your only choices are to think up a different name or offer to buy the name you want, which may not be an option at all because the person owning the name may not want to sell it. To register your name, you would use a Domain Registrar. Network Solutions was the first domain registrar, and for the first years of the Internet they had the monopoly on registering and selling domain names. But the monopoly was ended and now many companies are available for registering domain names, which has brought the prices down considerably - Network Solutions used to charge $70 per name/per year when they were the only game in town. Now you can register your domain name with many companies for less than $10/year.

One of the most popular and visible domain registrars is GoDaddy. They have registered a large percentage of domain names, they have low prices, and many people know of them from their "titillating" ads, especially their Super Bowl ads. I've been using GoDaddy for a while now - I started using them when they were new on the scene so I've been with them for several years and, up until now, have all of my domain names registered through them. Their tech support has been good for me - you can search the Internet and find customers who have issues with them, but by and large I think they do a good job, and I've always been able to get support when I need it. They tend to be heavy-handed with their sales promotions - when registering a domain name, the customer will have to click through a few pages of colorful ads designed to sell more products like GoDaddy web hosting or GoDaddy email services. And they send out similar full-color ads to customers, advertising GoDaddy products and sales promotions. But that's not the worst of it for me, and that's not why I'm leaving GoDaddy.

I'm leaving GoDaddy because of the GoDaddy girls. The female race car driver on the GoDaddy website who's also in all of my GoDaddy email ads. The buxom scantily clad models in those Super Bowl ads. The perfect-looking faces that smile at me while I'm using the GoDaddy site. These are the reasons that I'm leaving GoDaddy. Don't misunderstand - I'm not a misogynist, and I'm "hetro from the word go". But the sales philosophy of GoDaddy seems to be "put a pretty girl in front of guys and they'll buy anything". And that bothers me on several levels, starting with my pride. Because even though I've done some stupid things in my life, I'm not a stupid person. So when GoDaddy thinks they can get me to use their services because they show a large-breasted female in their Super Bowl ad, I am insulted. Instead of appealing to my intelligence or common sense or even my wallet, they appeal to my hormones and apparently think that that's all it takes to win me over. And the more I think about it, the more offended I feel - that's what GoDaddy thinks of customers like me, that all they need to do is put a female in our line of sight and we simply start salivating and pull out the credit card to order.

But besides my self-important pride, there is another issue here. I am opposed to the sexual objectification of women. Because I like women. I've met a lot of them, and they're some of my favorite people. Many of them have helped me during my life. Some of them have been very good friends. One of them is my best friend. And using their image as a sexual lure, appealing to a base instinct for the purpose of selling product and making money, is more than a bit disgusting to me. Yes, I know lots of businesses do it, and I know that "sex sells". I know I'm not going to change the world with my little Internet diatribe. But as I've watched this marketing campaign develop over the years at GoDaddy, I've become more and more uncomfortable with it, and now I no longer want to do business with them. So I am in the process of moving my domain name management to other registrars.

I did my online research and came up with two registrars who received consistently good reviews - NameCheap and Moniker. Both offer good prices and have good reputations, so I opened accounts with both of them to explore their services and support. The basic experience with both has been smooth - easy sign-up and domain transfer - but NameCheap offers free email and URL forwarding, and Moniker charges extra for these services. In fact, with their web interface and features, NameCheap seems the best candidate for GoDaddy's former customers. Over the next few months, as the yearly fees for my domains with GoDaddy come due, I will be moving my domain names to one or both of these registrars. If you need to register a domain name, either of these two domain registrars would serve you well - unless you're just looking for boobs.

Blister Soul

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Back at the beginning of 2008, I started listening to a musician who's been around since the early 1990s. Over the years I've seen reviews and articles about Bill Mallonee and his band the Vigilantes of Love but I had never heard any of his music until a few months ago. Following a link from a blog, I listened to a couple of VoL songs and was immediately drawn to Bill's style, both band-wise and songwriting. Bill's music has been categorized as everything from roots-folk-Americana to Brit-pop, and while the strong influence of artists like Bob Dylan and Neil Young is evident, VoL sometimes sounds like Tom Petty, R.E.M, the Gin Blossoms or even an alt-country band. Put all of that together and you get a hint of Bill's music, which I am enjoying as I try to catch up on 15 or more VoL albums as well as Bill's 10+ solo recordings.

As a songwriter, Bill is both prolific and quite interesting - deep, thoughtful, even spiritual, his songs reflect brokenness and struggles that relate in a real-life way, yet are not so depressing that the listener loses hope. In fact, I think many of his songs inspire hope because of their realism and sensitivity. I'm very impressed with his ability to be revealing and honest, and to put the honesty of his thoughts and feeling into his songs. I find music like this refreshing - because it's not the sugar-coated, false love, hyped sexuality that many "hit" records are made of. Bill is a song-crafter with years of good work behind him. And yet his story is not what many would call a success story. The Vigilantes of Love broke up in the early 2000s, mainly because they couldn't afford to stay together. They had been dropped by their record company, which, in spite of several very good albums, hadn't been able to "sell" them well enough. For a while the band did very well on AAA (Adult Album Alternative) radio, but exposure through AAA does not always translate into high sales. So Bill found himself without a label and without a band, and began a solo career that hasn't even always paid the bills. In an interview from October 2007 Bill talked about the 2006 Christmas season when he had to sell a guitar to pay the rent and couldn't get part-time Christmas work from a temp agency because the only experience he had for the past 10 years was "... I was a songwriter, I managed a band and made records". And I find it interestingly sad that a talented songwriter like Bill, someone who is obviously successful at writing good songs and with a catalog of good music to be enjoyed, is getting such a seemingly poor response to his work. It certainly deserves a lot more.

So I've been searching eBay and Amazon.Com for Bill's older albums, and many of them are also available for purchase and download at volsounds.com - if you've never heard Bill's music, this is a good way to get to know him and his songs for low cost. I fully recommend his music - I believe that you will enjoy it. I am, and this is what I've collected so far:

Blister Soul (1995)
V.O.L (1996 - compilation)
To The Roof Of The Sky (1998)
Audible Sigh (2000)
Summershine (2001)
Perfumed Letter (2003)

Take a listen - to pique your interest here are a couple of MP3s from the Vigilantes of Love albums Blister Soul and Summershine - just click to listen:

You Know That (Is Nothing New) from Summershine
Offer from Blister Soul

A sweep of a feather....

I've Gotta Get a Message to You

Today I received another of what I call "guilt email" messages. You've probably received these before... they start off with a story - it could be a cute, religious, patriotic, medical or philosophical story, or sometimes it is all of the above. The story is meant to encourage, inspire or just entertain, and at the end of the story the receiver is bidden to forward the message to others, usually with a directive like "if you care about (whatever) forward this email to 10 friends...". And it's that "if" that bothers me the most. Because the message will state something like "if you really care/believe/whatever" with the implication that if you don't forward the message, you are uncaring, insensitive or don't really love God/Jesus/Mom/your country/your friends/cute little animals. Now I believe in Jesus, I like my country and I care about my friends, but my faith in Jesus, my feelings for my cat, and my concerns for my friends have nothing to do with whether or not I forward an email. In fact, I generally don't forward email messages. Working in the computer industry I'm aware that the volume of email on the Internet is tremendous, and that's primarily because of spam, but I don't think I need to add to it by forwarding every cute joke I receive from friends. And emails with attachments are even worse, using more Internet bandwidth and taking up more space on your hard drive. So usually don't forward email stories/jokes, but in spite of what these messages imply, that doesn't make me a bad or insensitive person for not wanting to clutter the Internet with forwarded email. I also don't like being someone who fills up my friends' mailboxes with alot of email - if my friends are anything like me, they already get alot of email, and don't always have time to read what they've already received. But I've noticed that sometimes, when someone realizes I didn't forward their email, their reaction indicates some degree of surprise and/or disappointment. Surprise that I didn't just forward the message along (like they did) and disappointment in me for not forwarding something they sent to me. Hey, it's nothing personal... I still like you, your kids and and your dog - I'm just trying to do my part to reduce email.

Use the "delete" button

Call Any Vegetable

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Many people like vegetables. Emily really enjoys her vegetables. Our daughter Rachel has decided to stop eating most meat and just eat vegetables. There is even a Beach Boys song about vegetables:

I'm gonna be round my vegetables
I'm gonna chow down my vegetables
I love you most of all
My favorite vege-table

If you brought a big brown bag of them home
I'd jump up and down and hope you'd toss me a carrot

I'm gonna eat my, my vegetables
i'm gonna love my, my vegetables
I love you most of all
My favorite vege-table

Most people like vegetables, and some people really like them - my friend Suzanne makes elaborate dinners just out of vegetables. A few years ago she made me a breakfast omelet out of eggs and vegetables. It was very good - it tasted like it had sausage in it, but she did it with only vegetables. And every time I visited my friends Cy and Jane, I always knew that our meals would include vegetables. Cy once told me "We aren't vegetarians - we just love vegetables".

I don't love vegetables. I don't even like most vegetables. I do like tomatoes (which are technically fruits) and cucumbers, and lettuce and celery. And Emily has been feeding me spinach in my salads, which tastes alright when covered with tomatoes, cucumbers and celery. But I avoid most other vegetables. When they are served with a meal in a restaurant, I leave them to grow cold on the side of my plate, eventually carried away to their final rest by the server clearing our dishes. Sometimes Emily will have mercy on them and move them to her plate where they will be appreciated and enjoyed. Which is fine with me - more room on my plate for the meat. And now that I am well into my 5th decade, I really don't see this changing - I guess I'll be a veggie-hater for the remainder of my years.

Within the vegetable family, the worst for me is peas and carrots (Spanish Rice is just about as bad, but since this is a Vegetable post, I'll hold off on the rice until another day). When I was a young lad, my mom served peas and carrots at dinners. She had grown up in western Kentucky and had been eating vegetables all her life, and apparently my dad didn't mind (and he would always let us know when there was something that he did mind) so there was at least one meal each week that included peas and carrots. I still remember the disappointment I felt when I sat down for dinner and saw those nasty little green globes and orange squares on my dinner plate. It shouldn't have been so bad that I didn't like them - lots of kids don't. But my dad was one of those parents that wouldn't let his children leave the table until we had finished everything on our plates. So I spent some of my best young years sitting at the kitchen table, staring for hours at a dinner plate that, while stripped of every other morsel of edible food, contained now near-frozen organic remains. Sometimes, to get rid of them, I would scoop up a mouthful and quickly shovel it in, followed by about a quart of milk to wash it all down, swallowing as fast as I could so that none of the vile flavor would touch my sensitive taste buds. But my parents were insidious - they always made sure that the amount of peas and carrots on my plate was greater than the amount of milk in my glass (I think the usual serving of P&Cs weighted about 7.5 pounds). So I would sit there, not allowed to leave the table until my plate was clean, hour after hour, listening to the TV in the next room but denied the pleasure of seeing which amphibian Endora would turn Darrin into, or how Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin were going to handle THRUSH that evening.

Until finally, I discovered a solution. I started hiding the peas and carrots. After the rest of my family finished their meal and left the table, leaving me alone again with my herbaceous nemesis (a semi-nightly event in our family) I would gather up the veggies and hide them on the kitchen window sill behind the curtains. I tried to remember to clean off the sill the next day, and that worked OK for a while, but I wasn't always able to get to it before school... eventually my mom discovered piles of dried-up peas and carrots on the window sill and she was pretty sure who to blame. So I had to re-adjust my strategy and find another hiding place. A few months later, my mom found it - while cleaning behind the refrigerator. Of course, I found other ways to dispose of unwanted food items - pushing the food through a window screen out into the dog pen worked for awhile - but eventually I got old enough to refuse to eat peas and carrots, or even to show up for dinner at all. Once I got my paper route and started making my own money, it was McDonald's most every night for me. After all, you don't have to worry about finding any asparagus or zucchini in a Big Mac.

You deserve a break today...

Like An Island

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Here is another favorite movie of mine that, for a change, is not some obscure sci-fi or eclectic comedy flick. Cast Away starring Tom Hanks, with Helen Hunt as the love interest, was a successful box office hit movie in 2000. It's about a modern day, Type-A personality FedEx manager named Chuck who survives a plane crash and is marooned alone on a deserted South Pacific island for 4 years. Well, not quite alone... he has a soccer ball named "Wilson" for company, and interestingly enough the conversation is not entirely one-sided. But he spends four years isolated from the busy society that was his life, although eventually he is rescued. He returns to pick up his life, but his time on the island has changed him forever. I enjoy this film and watch it several times a year, but I know that many people didn't like it. "Nothing happens" is one of the main complaints I have heard, and certainly Chuck's time on the island is not very satisfying if you are the type of movie-goer who needs to see a car wreak or a gun shoot-out every few minutes. But for me, it is in that time where "nothing" is happening that I see the changes happening to Chuck, and that part of the story, as well as the bittersweet events following his rescue, are quite engaging for me, and why I continue to revisit this movie.

While I do think this is a great movie, I have an issue with one of the scenes, and since this is my blog and I get to write whatever I want, I'm going to comment on that scene. It is a part of the movie, before Chuck is marooned, where he and a co-worker are sitting on a FedEx plane, waiting to leave Moscow. They are talking about some of the delivery trucks did not make it to the airport in time, and the co-worker asks Chuck why he didn't just wait for the trucks and make up the time in air speed. Chuck's response is about keeping to the schedule - that if they let it slip a little today, they might slip even more that next time, and even more the time after that until, as Chuck puts it, "next thing you know, we're the U.S. Mail". Having been very familiar with the U.S. Postal Service, I take exception to this line in the name of the 500,000 postal workers around the country, and would just like to point this out as the cheap shot that it is. After all, a FedEx guy will deliver, what, a few dozen packages a day, while a U.S. Letter Carrier will deliver over 1000 items every day visiting every address on his route, which by the way is far more addresses daily than any FedEx or UPS driver. But I understand the frustration that those poor FedEx drivers feel, always wanting to be in the big leagues with Mail Carriers, but always being looked upon as "wannabes". Oh well, c'est la vie, or as I say to my friends who are FedEx workers, we can't all be professionals (can you tell I enjoy this?).

Anyway, back to the movie - I like it... I like the part where "nothing happens"... I like Wilson, and I like the ending. Well done. Mr. Zemeckis... I just wish I could lose as much weight as Chuck did on that island.

Movie Trivia: What is notable about the music soundtrack to Cast Away?

Answer: There is no music played during the time Chuck in on the island.