Brandon Notices

This is probably the most frustrating electronic device I've ever tried to use: the Totes Shower Clock Radio.

I removed it from the package and couldn't even get the battery compartment open. I hurt my thumbs trying to turn the knob and pull on the door. I'm not sure if I wasn't turning the knob hard enough, or if I wasn't pulling on the door hard enough, because I had to ask my dad to open it for me. It's very easy to remove after the first time, but I have never had so much trouble just to get batteries into something. And the trouble didn't stop there.

Setting the clock was more difficult than opening the battery compartment. The clock's buttons didn't even seem to depress when I pushed them. Maybe this has something to do with waterproofing the device, but it didn't even feel like the buttons were designed to be pressed. I had to put all my body weight into pressing them. I physically exhausted myself and hurt my thumbs trying to press them. When I finally thought I had set the time, I was disappointed to realize that I had set the date instead.

The radio has nice volume, but it doesn't seem to tune anything in very well. The tuning dial is very touchy, but I haven't been able to get anything that wasn't very noisy and staticky. I couldn't get anything at all in the AM band except for a loud buzzing tone.

The mirror seems like a clumsy addition. The manufacturers intend for you to hang the device on the showerhead, but unless your showerhead is at eye-level, you won't be able to see anything in the mirror except for the ceiling's reflection. If you're able to hook the shower radio onto anything lower than the showerhead, then you could use the mirror.

I received this from my parents as a Christmas present. I've asked them to return it. I don't recommend that anyone try to put up with this shower radio. I've posted a similar review on Amazon.

Yesterday, I was at the Meridian Cost Cutter in Bellingham. I was a bit surprised to see that within the grocery store was a small dollar-store section. They had shelves of merchandise including cheap toys, housewares, pet stuff, and food—all for just one dollar! They also had a few shopping carts filled with junk. Inside them, my cousin found some water balloons in horrible shape.



The balloons were disintegrating! They were dried out, and parts of them were flaking apart! I suspect these balloons were cheaply made; do normal balloons ever get to this point? I wouldn't buy these to use as water balloons, not even for a dollar! They'd probably break apart instantly... or possibly melt into a colorful slime. Also, the label has "balloons" misspelled.

Who is responsible putting sand on the roads after it snows? I suppose that would be the Department of Transportation. The weather's been getting colder, and I've recently been hearing on the news about de-icers and sand being used on the roads.

Last winter, they dumped heaps of sand on the steep hill outside my cul-de-sac. For some reason, I suppose this makes it safer to drive on. It was pointless, though, because nobody in their right mind would want to drive on that hill anyway, especially when they could just go around the block instead.

It made for some very disgusting brown, gritty snow. After the snow was melted and gone, there was still the slippery sand on the hill for months. Cars or people walking on the hill would skid on the sand. After the snow was gone early this year, we called them to ask if they'd be cleaning the sand off the road, since it now seemed to make it more dangerous. But they said they'd be keeping the sand on the road in case it snowed again.

It wasn't until late spring or even summer when a street cleaner went up and down the hill and finally removed the stuff. I don't want them to sand the hill. I bet I couldn't stop them, though...

Before I watched Monk last night, I caught the end credits at the end of Elf on USA Network.



They seemed to rush by pretty quickly. By my observations, any given line of text is on-screen for about 13 frames, which means you have 0.43 seconds to read it. One line is scrolled onto the screen per frame, so you must read 30 lines per second.

Also, the credits are shrunken down so much that they're practically unreadable. Does USA expect people to kneel down in front of their TVs, squinting and speed reading these credits? I bet that most people don't usually read the credits after movies, but even those who wanted to would be unable to under these conditions. Why does USA even bother showing them?

I was at Safeway this evening, looking at the huge variety of toothpaste products, trying to choose which one to buy. I was looking at the price tags, and noticed something very irritating.


This Crest Whitening Plus Scope Toothpaste has a red sale tag, and it says that the box of toothpaste costs $2.99. It also displays the toothpaste's unit price: 37.4¢ per ounce.


This Colgate Total Advanced Whitening Toothpaste also has a red sale tag, and it is the same price, at $2.99. The unit price is displayed on this price tag too: $8.26 per pound.

Wait! Why does Safeway give the unit price for the Crest in cents per ounce, but gives it for Colgate in dollars per pound? These are not compatible!

It should be that I could look at the price tags for both the Crest and the Colgate and be able to compare them very easily. But I can't do that, because the units are incompatible! I would have to pull out my calculator and multiply the per-ounce price by 16 to compare them. (Incidentally, the Crest toothpaste contains 8 ounces of toothpaste, whereas the Colgate has 5.8 ounces, so you get more toothpaste per dollar with the Crest.)

AUGH! I shouldn't have to do this! I thought the point was to give customers the opportunity to quickly compare the price per amount of something without having to whip out the calculators!


This last example makes the whole situation even worse. This 6-ounce Colgate Max Fresh Toothpaste has a red tag price of $2.49. Unit price: $41.50 per 100. Per hundred of what? From what I can tell by shaking the box, there seems to be only one tube of toothpaste in it. If I bought 100 of these boxes, that would cost $249.00, not $41.50. I thought about this a moment and did some calculations to check: Safeway means that this toothpaste costs $41.50 per 100 ounces! Why??

Safeway, you're driving me crazy!

I handed out candy at my dad's work today. Every year, on the Saturday before Halloween, the businesses in the Greenwood area around his store participate in a trick-or-treating thing, and my dad hires me to give out candy for his store.

Most kids are too young to know to say thank you. Most of them I'm sure don't even know what's going on. (That doesn't mean they have to stare at you after you give them candy, though.) I was surprised by how many kids were saying thank you today. Several of them really seemed to be excited to be trick-or-treating, and I think this was a great thing. There was one group of girls, slightly older than the rest, each dressed up to give her a pallid look, and they weren't smiling at all, and they hardly said thank you. Were they in this just for the candy? It didn't even look like they enjoyed being together.

The worst part is when you give a kid candy, he turns around, and the mom or dad says, "What do you say?" The expected answer, from the kid to me, is "Thank you," but it doesn't always come to that. Often, the kid will just stand there, staring awkwardly, until the parent thanks me. Actually, what's worse than that is when the kid does say thank you, but the parent says, as they're leaving, "DID YOU SAY THANK YOU?" It's too bad that the parents don't trust their children. Did they harass them like this at every store?

There was one little girl who came in the store right as the event was ending at three. I gave her a Rocky Road candy and wished her a happy Halloween. Then, her mom asked her, "What do you say?" Instead of giving thanks, though, the girl said, "I'm allergic to nuts." So I had to take the Rocky Road out of her hand (it has cashews!) and replaced it with a Laffy Taffy.

I had little doubt that Michael Phelps would be able to score his record-setting tenth Olympic gold medal tonight. I was expecting to sit down tonight and see an exciting and dramatic race. Instead, I got this:



I saw this horrible spoiler at the top of MSN.com (Internet Explorer's default home page). I live on the West Coast; footage recorded live is actually delayed three hours before being broadcasted here. So the 200m butterfly race has already happened, even though the Olympics footage hasn't even started on TV here. It makes me upset that I can't even open Internet Explorer without ruining my evening.

I was looking forward to watching the Olympics tonight. I've watched them every night so far. I even told my family that I wasn't going to go out with them to dinner tonight so that I could watch the games. But it's been spoiled for me. There would be no suspense in viewing the races tonight.

I'm going out to dinner now.

My mom, sister, and I went to Food Emporium to order a cake. Something I know I'm not the first to notice about the express checkout lines is that the signs are ungrammatical.

You aren't supposed to use the word "less" when you're talking about things that can be counted. Since the number of goods being purchased can be counted, the sign really ought to say "12 items or fewer." Actually, I think this akin to saying "eight minutes and a half"—I would prefer the sign to say "12 or fewer items."

We also went to Safeway. It seems like they try to avoid the entire "less"/"fewer" issue.

Unfortunately, this sign brings up another issue. The limit of groceries a customer can purchase is more generous, but when "15 item" is used to modify "limit", because it is more than one word, it becomes a compound modifier, and needs to be hyphenated. The sign really ought to read "15-item limit."

I suspect that sign makers who know these rules may still prefer to break them, arguing that the signs may somehow be more readable. I also suspect that most customers don't care or are far too excited about finding a 15-item-limit express lane to even notice.

In case you don't know, by February 17, 2009, TV broadcasts here in the US will be digital only, which, if I understand correctly, means that televisions with analog receivers won't work anymore without some kind of digital upgrade box or something. I'm not too concerned about it because we have digital cable already, but the television stations want to make sure that everyone is ready for the digital switchover:

  

Tonight, during both Wheel of Fortune on KOMO and Quantum Leap on ION, I got warnings about how some people's TVs will eventually stop working.

The irritating thing is that KOMO has been putting this irritating scrolling banner on the bottom of the screen during Wheel every day for the last month, if not longer! Today, it repeated during the entire third round! Okay, KOMO, I get it! A lot of people probably don't understand the digital switchover, and their TVs will suddenly quit receiving a signal, and KOMO wants to make sure that they are prepared, but come on! Enough is enough! I've had it with these stupid messages!

KOMO wants us all to be ready for the future, but it still isn't providing Wheel of Fortune in HD! Come on, KOMO! How can you be concerned about the future of TV when you don't even care that your present programming isn't the highest quality possible?

Oh, jeez, I just saw another one of these banners on KSTW/CW, right now! I'm watching Frasier in the background, and a little lower third popped up. Fortunately, their banner was so brief that I didn't even have time to take a picture of it (I couldn't get the SD card in my camera fast enough).

The digital switchover isn't for about 270 days, so I suppose we'll have to get used to seeing these messages every day until February 17, 2009.

By the way, I never post a puzzle without giving the solution. The solved puzzle above is A WALK DOWN MEMORY LANE.

I just finished reading a version of Jane Eyre, which is a good story, if not drawn out. I was reading an illustrated version published by Penguin, and it is divided into three volumes. It was when I was on Chapter 11 of Volume II that I noticed something odd:



If I didn't know any better, I might think that I was reading Chapter 11 of Volume 11. Or maybe Chapter II of Volume II! The problem is that the text figure 1 and the small caps I look the same in this typeface! I can't tell them apart!

Now, keep in mind that this isn't a rant against Roman numerals. In fact, I love Roman numerals! This is a rant against ambiguity. The Arabic numerals in Chapter 11 look the same as the Roman numerals in Volume II, and that is absolutely not acceptable.

Check out these eight Garfield comics:










AUUUUGH!
Jim Davis! What are you doing??

The first six comics are all from the same week in November of 2006. The seventh is from last September, and the eighth is from today. There is something in common between all eight comics:

"We're bachelors, baby."

Running gag, or creative genius running out of jokes? I have been of the opinion that Garfield reached the peak of funniness in the mid-'90s or so, and hasn't really been as funny since. Recently, it seems to have been picking up a little, but it's repetitive stuff like this that I'm afraid will tire me out.

I'm wondering why Liz thinks their house is messy. I hardly ever notice any clutter. Indeed, all we ever see in nearly every Garfield comic these days is a basic horizontal line representing the edge of the table or floor, and usually nothing else. Garfield will occasionally scratch the chair or the drapes, but Jon usually has them replaced by the next day.

And why is Garfield only now pointing out that they're bachelors? The word "bachelor" was hardly ever tossed about before Jon and Liz started dating. Why start now? Once they get married, you're going to have to stop using your new catchphrase, Garfield.

Sigh... and Garfield didn't even do his cute head tilt today.

In honor of all these comics, I have designed one of my own:

Safeway got some new shopping carts recently. They are small and metal. They're fun, but they are incompatible with their older, plastic carts--they won't stack together! They cannot be collapsed into each other! The cart return recepticals in the parking lot are overflowing with carts! Whoever designed these new carts should be fired.

You know how for the past nine years, the government has been running a program to mint special commemorative quarters that feature each of the fifty states? It's been a huge success. This year was supposed to be the tenth and final year of the program, ending with the quarter for Hawaii, but the government passed a bill that will extend the program one more year. In 2009, six new special coins will be minted that feature Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and American Samoa. (source)

I'm not a coin collector (I lost interested after the Delaware quarter), but it is obvious to me that this is both wonderful and horrible news.

It's good news because, yay, more quarters. More quarters means more money! And people like to collect quarters. Especially coin collectors.

It's bad news because of those coin cases that everyone bought to display their quarters. Some of them are expensive, and some of them are cardboard, but all of them were built to house exactly 50 quarters. Now those cases are all totally worthless. They won't be able to hold all the commemorative coins! I predict that when 2009 rolls around, every coin collector in the U.S. will become enraged. We will see riots, murder, looting, suicide, rape, and everything else we associate with angry coin collectors.

I'm at Cost Plus, where they have many signs boasting their furniture sale. They all say, "All furniture up to 50% off." However, most of the furniture isn't fully half off. The sofa I'm sitting on is only 20% off. Since "up to 50%" means that the discounts can be less than half off, why don't they just take the extra step and make the signs read, "up to 100% off"? It sounds much more impressive, and isn't any more misleading.

I got a Blockbuster gift card for Christmas, but the little paper folder it was inserted into didn't have the value of the card written in the appropriate spot—only a few question marks instead. I looked at the back of the card, and found a number I could call to inquire about my balance. When I called that number, however, I got a recording mentioning that the offices were closed and that I would have to call back some other time.

I assumed that the telephone card balance inquiry system had mistakingly been taken offline during the Christmas holiday, so I went to the Blockbuster website to see if there was a form online, but all the website had was the same phone number.

I finally got around to calling the phone number again a few minutes ago. After pushing through a few menu choices, I finally got to the gift card balance inquiry line, where a recording told me that all the agents were helping other customers, and that I should expect a hold time of at least 25 minutes. What?! I'm not going to wait that long! Why isn't this system automated? This is crazy!

Update (Jan. 15, 2008 at 7:32 p.m.): I just tried again, but their offices closed an hour and a half ago.

Update (Jan. 18, 2008 at 10:30 p.m.): I almost forgot! In case you're curious, I e-mailed Blockbuster with my card number, and someone replied yesterday to tell me that the card is worth $10.

I'm at my aunt's house in Bellingham; I'm staying here for almost a week for New Year's. Everyone here is either asleep or watching CSI reruns, so I decided to make myself a sandwich and read the comics in the newspaper. None of today's were particularly funny, but something about Mother Goose & Grimm caught my attention.


The main joke isn't really all that funny, nor is it very timely (the incident at the University of Florida was more than three months ago).

It seems in panel one that Grimmy has walked up to Ralph's front door to ask why he is holding the imprisoned fly high up in the air at arm's length. In panel two, Ralph is for some reason now to the left of Grimmy. And in panel three, he has returned to standing on his doorstep.

At first, I was a little confused about why the characters had swapped places. Then I thought that the author, whose name I can't make out from the illegible scribble he left, must have done this in order to get the dialogue to flow in the correct order without having to cross the speech bubbles. The picture we see in the second panel must have been drawn as seen from the other side of the characters. It's confusing to have the characters flipping back and forth like this, though. Personally, I would have left the characters in their original positions, and simply put the cat's speech bubble above the dog's; the reader would read the bubbles correctly this way. Switching their dialogue doesn't seem to upset the comic too much, either:


Also, why didn't Ralph rescue any of those other flies in the background? There's about twenty flies hovering around the bug zapper, seconds away from flying into instant death. He rescued only one.

The family is going to my aunt's house in Bellingham for Christmas, so we opened most of our presents early this year. Something I got for my sister was a pair of Magnetic Poetry Kits. I got her the Clichés and Pick Up Lines sets, which I thought would be fun to mix up. Part of my gift was to separate the words from each other and place them on the fridge. That's when I noticed an error on one of the magnets:


Wrong! You wouldn't say, "Don't judge a book by it is cover." The only time you're allowed to use "it's" is in the "it is" contraction—this magnet should have had "its" instead. It's insane how I found such a clichéd spelling error in the Clichés set.

I think I can fix this, though. All I have to do is get scissors and cut up the magnet such that each word belongs to its own magnet. Then I can use a correct "its" magnet instead of the "it's" one. Oh, it looks like there aren't any "its" magnets in these sets. That's okay—I'll use an "it" magnet with an "s" magnet. This is starting to sound complicated.

It's a little after 11 o'clock in the morning, and I'm here to post something slightly disturbing I just saw on the Game Show Network. (I've also noticed this on QVC.)


Password Plus is next, but note what time it's scheduled for: 2:00 PM. Obviously, they mean Eastern Time. They also mention that it airs at 1:00 Central Time. Notice, however, that Pacific Time is not mentioned at all. What gives?! Why aren't they listing the airtime for our time zone? Since when is Central Time given more priority than Pacific Time (and Mountain too, I guess)?

My cousin must have thought that I would like the episode of Monk that aired on Friday. He sent me an e-mail with a link to the USA Network's website where I could watch the entire show online.

Overall, I enjoyed the episode (it was about everyone hating Monk for shooting Santa Claus), and the best part was that I was able to watch it for free! Except I had to sit through an occasional, uninterruptable advertisement. This would be fine, because it's something I should normally have to do while watching TV anyway, but the problem with watching it online was that I was presented the same commercial repeatedly. I saw the same ad for Pledge lemon-scented cleaning spray at least six times.

We have a problem when it comes to viewing content online. Advertisers lose out on lots of impressions when viewers go online to watch shows instead of watching them on TV, but the "beauty" of advertising online means that you can present certain ads to different groups of people—something that can't easily be done when you're broadcasting one feed to televisions everywhere. With the Internet, specific ads can be targeted to relevant people. The problem here is that this just isn't happening. I saw six ads for Lemon Pledge—don't tell me that I'm the kind of person who is most likely to buy Pledge. I don't see it happening. Why aren't they designing these sites to present relevant ads to me?

Actually, now that I think about it, I guess cleaning supplies might not be too far off topic if you're a fan of Monk. The character is afflicted by obsessive-compulsive disorder and a phobia of germs, among many others.

I'm not a huge fan of advertising, and I know that right now, it's basically the only big thing anyone in the entertainment business gets any money from, and therefore the only reason we don't have to subscribe and pay money to watch anything on TV. But when will be the day when I don't see the same ad twice?

Donkey Kong Country 2 is one of my favorite video games. It was originally released for the Super Nintendo back in 1995, and improved on the original Donkey Kong Country game in almost every respect. It's about Diddy and Dixie Kong, a pair of love-monkeys. The controls for this game, like the last, were very simple. Press B to jump, and hold Y to run. It was very easy to do a running jump: While moving in one direction, hold the Y button with the tip of the thumb to run, and press the middle of the thumb into the B button to jump. It was very natural and comfortable to play this way, which is a good thing, because the running jump is perhaps the most frequent action you'll perform in this game.

DKC 2 was released on Wii's Virtual Console back in May; I'm surprised that I didn't buy it until yesterday, but I have a good reason for waiting. It's because I didn't have the right controller. On the Wii, Virtual Console games can be played with two controllers: the GameCube controller (which I happen to have plenty of) and the Classic Controller, a new controller Nintendo has developed, which has a very typical button layout (unlike the Wii Remote's).

Until yesterday, I did not have a Classic Controller, but that's okay, because I can use my GameCube controllers to play Virtual Console games, right? Not really.

Since Nintendo gives no option for remapping the controls for Virtual Console games, it would be very uncomfortable to do a running jump with the GameCube controller. The A button is situated between the B and Y buttons, which means that in trying to perform a running jump, you are more likely to press A and have Diddy jump on Dixie's shoulders (that's what the A button does).

It's unfortunate that Nintendo gives no option to remap the controls. I would assign jump to the A button and run to the Y button, but I can't. So I decided yesterday to buy a Classic Controller, which practically has the same layout as the Super Nintendo controller. Now I can do running jumps! The controller cost $20, but it doesn't feel like a rip-off. It will be useful for future games, like the upcoming Smash Bros. game. But for now, back to Donkey Kong.