Brandon Notices

When I've used Windows Live Messenger, I never expected for any of the text ads on the bottom of the window to insult me, but I guess I was wrong!



Calling me an ass is no way to get me to click you!

Okay, okay, what's actually happened is that the rest just got cut off. The rest of the ad reads, "Associates, Master's, Bachelor's."

In other news, an Elebits sequel is apparently coming to the DS.

A year or two ago, Alderwood Mall turned off the water in their fountain pools. I'm surprised that people still throw coins in.

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 dad, cousins, and I sucked at the crossword puzzle we attempted on Saturday.

Speakers' platforms: ROSTUM
Right-triangle ratios: TIEEM
Cacklers: CHKN
Unfreeze: DTHAW

Our biggest mistake was doing it in pen, but I don't even know what we were thinking on some of these. We kinda gave up after a while, though, and were goofing off before we quit entirely. Keep in mind that this was the Saturday puzzle, the hardest of the week.

I was bothered by all the apps sending me notifications here on Facebook. But just a moment ago, I got a wonderful notification that totally changed my mind. It said that one of my friends compared me with one of her friends and thinks I am a better potential father. I'm so glad I got this! I don't know with whom she compared me, nor do I even know the name of the app that sent the presumably automated notification, but I now know that this is what they mean by "social networking."

I just feel sorry for the poor sap who got the notification that said that somebody "has just compared you with one of her friends and thinks you are a worse potential father."

Last night, I tried to call my aunt Karen, and I got her voicemail. I didn't want to listen to her recorded voicemail greeting, so I pressed star to skip it. Instead of hearing the beep, however, I was instructed to enter a password. I had pressed the button used for Karen to log in to her voicemail account.

It turns out that the keys you press to skip the greeting depend on who the recipient's cell phone carrier is. Mine is Verizon, so when you call me, press star to skip the message and get right to the beep. It turns out that Karen's carrier is Cingular; I was supposed to press pound to immediately leave a message. T-Mobile also uses pound; for Sprint, press 1.

The annoying thing is that even if you could remember what button to press for each carrier, you probably won't know what carrier the recipient has. If you were to call me, reach my voicemail recording, and press pound instead of star, you would instead be prompted to enter a password. This is why one of the first things I say in my voicemail recording is, "You can press star to leave a message now." Not only does it assist people in knowing which button to press, but also teaches people that don't know already that it's possible to skip the message.

My advice is that you should include a line like mine near the beginning of your voicemail recording. You could save your callers from having to listen to some thirty seconds of redundant recordings.

I'm out on the annual family camping trip. An idea I had this year, since our site has electrical hookup, was to string up lights to illuminate the tables at night. One string my aunt brought is a bunch of picnic items: watermelon, cheeseburgers, hot dogs, ketchup bottles, and mustard bottles. It's all very whimsical. It's the mustard bottles, however, that got my attention. Why does it say "Premium Mustard"? Why not just "Mustard"? Why did they deem it important to make such a distinction? My cousin and I had a good laugh about this when we were putting them up.

It bothers me when people remove food from the microwave early without resetting the countdown timer. The microwave blinks the time remaining and the message "PRESS START" repeatedly as it waits idly. I'm the one who has to reset it, even if I wasn't the one using the microwave. Someone needs to manufacture self-resetting microwaves.