Stray Hawkeye

Remember when Chrysler / Jeep / Dodge did their “Let’s Refuel America” guarantee of $2.99 gas for 3 years for anyone buying one of their new vehicles, in order to offset their cars being gas guzzlers?  Given that gas has been cheaper than $2.99 since October of last year (so they haven’t had to pay a dime to this program since then) how are they not swimming in cash?  How terrible of financial shape would they have been in if gas prices had actually kept going up?  How much more of your tax money would they be holding on to for you then?  Remind me again why we have any faith at all in them to not blow through every dime we give them?

Why we don’t let them fail, and let other car manufacturers buy up their facilities and equipment at bankruptcy sale prices and actually build decent cars with it that will sell under a realistic business model?  Honda and Toyota already have plants in the US.  Yes, that Japanese Honda Accord is made in Ohio, and that Japanese Toyota Tundra is made in Texas, in fact, most of their line up is built here.

Or, break Chrysler up under anti-trust laws into the three brands they’ve already made themselves, so parts of them can fail without taking out a huge sector of the economy.  (Same for GM.  Ford I’ll be gentle on for the moment since they actually show signs of being in tune with the market, have a reasonably sized line up, and didn’t take government funds.)  Anti-trust laws exist so the words “too big to fail” should never be uttered.  Too bad the government hasn’t really enforced them since the early to mid ’90’s.

I recently flew to Ohio and got my ticket by the usual methods- go to a flight search engine and find the cheapest ticket that gets me there roughly when I need to go.  It so happened that the airline I got was Midwest Airlines, a somewhat small regional carrier based out of Milwaukee.  And, I must say, I was pleasantly surprised.  The staff at the counter were pleasant, upbeat, and friendly.  The lines were short.  We didn’t always leave the exact minute we were supposed to, but we always got where we were going right on time (with a connection in Milwaukee, going there and back, I had 4 legs of flights with them).

The planes were small, but every one of them (again, 4 flights = 4 planes) had enough leg room for me.  That’s saying something.  I’m 6′4″ and lanky.  There are a large number of cars on the market that I can not physically drive because my knees get stuck against the steering wheel and I can’t turn.  Leg room is always an issue for me.  For this reason (and motion sickness, and the hassles of security, and the weird layouts of most airports, and stress, and …, well, see previous post) I generally really dislike air travel and much prefer to drive wherever possible.  But, I will say, Midwest Airlines was about as painless as possible.

And, now we get to the real secret of this post.  The important part.  Are you ready?

Midwest Airlines serves fresh baked chocolate chip cookies (for free) on every single flight.  This is awesomeness.   They actually cook them on the plane while you’re climbing.  They’re not hugely out of the ordinary cookies, but they are pretty tasty, and the chocolate is still melty and gooey, for free on an airline.  On every single flight, no matter how short.  And then the plane smells like warm chocolate chip cookies.  Where other airlines are cutting every thing in sight (charging for peanuts), this is a great little touch.

Even better, our flight attendant (I actually had the same one on two separate flights, one going and one coming back), Stacie, from Kona by way of Denver, was quite nice to start with, but then, on the second flight I had with her, when we got off the plane, she gave me 3 extra cookies that were left over!!!  Mahalo!  They seem to generally hand out the extras to kids, but apparently I qualified.  Awesome.

As everyone I’ve talked to about it since, even frequent travelers, seem to be unaware of these free cookies, I thought I would do what I can to spread the word.  So, if you happen to be searching airline tickets and Midwest and somebody else come up around the same price, I’d suggest going with the free cookies.

XKCD again.  This made me laugh really, really hard.

The title is ill-fitting to my sentiment, but I still like the content of this XKCD.

Globular Cluster is an official scientific term.

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That one made me laugh really hard, especially being a band geek and all.

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Breakfast of Champions.

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Ahhh, those scribbley times, I’ll never forget you, or at least I wouldn’t if I could remember you, but I’ve heard stories.

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So, High Times magazine is sort of amusing on it’s own for being a magazine solely and blatantly about pot.  Their website is even funnier for the fact that it take your normal website with flashing banner ads full of half naked women and replaces them with flashing banner ads for pot and naked women half covered with buds.  What’s even funnier (at least to me) is that not only do they have podcasts, but that they refer to them as potcasts.

My rss feed for Cute Overload was broken for a while.  I have now caught up.  Thus, blast of cuteness:

• Up
• My deerest
• Punk kitties
• Reminds me of Fox and the Hound, before the sad part.  And the follow up.
• Alarm clock
• Cool coffee (more on the click through article)
• Pile of sleepy kitties
• Runt
• Surrogate (this one’s not only cute, but the accompanying article is also a warm fuzzy and totally worth the brief read.)

While we’re on the subject of great songs by Jonathan Coulton, I also really like re: Your Brains.

Again, because of the realistic take on music, you can listen to it online for free before you buy it, and because of the Creative Commons license, there’s a huge number of remixed videos of it on YouTube.  It’s almost like taking a more copy-left view gives you all sorts of free advertising for your content that would be otherwise nearly impossible, while at the same time producing good will towards you on the internet and causing other artists to engage with your work.  You know, if you’re in to that kind of thing.  (Hint hint dinosaur record labels.)

I can’t believe I haven’t posted this yet.  Like back in the days of Nrrrd Grrrl.  Though better late than never I suppose.

I love this song, by Jonathan Coulton, who is not only awesome for writing great, funny music, but also for licensing his work under a Creative Commons licence, and having a realistic take on how the music industry should actually work.  When I talk about how much I hate record labels that make it hard to share their content, and are ultra-unfriendly to the internet, this is what I want them to be like.  Dear Jonathan Coulton, please take over a major record label and make them not dumb.  In fact, please take over all major record labels and make them all not dumb.  Thank you.

I also like the wonderfully dorky class project style video take on the song.

Birthday Combo

I’ve now been blogging here for a year.  I had intended to come up with something cool for an anniversary post, like picking out my top 10 favorite posts, or coming up with a bunch of statistics about hits and how many words are on here, and that sort of thing.  However, I did some traveling this weekend (to the tune of 1,500 miles or so over the weekend and today), so I’m a bit pooped, and I’m going to keep it short.

The above is my attempt at a birthday cake for my blog.  I was going to take the usual route and use whatever came up first on a free image search for birthday cake, but I didn’t like any of them.  As I’ve been out of town, haven’t gone grocery shopping for a while, and, really people, it’s a blog, I wasn’t going to make a real cake.  Looking though the cupboards, I did pick up some Combos on the trip.  I like Combo’s, great traveling food.  So, I made my blog a Birthday Combo.  Which I’m pretty sure it will be okay with, as, from what I can tell at least, it don’t have a mouth.

Perhaps it’s good I don’t have children yet.

Also good it’s only one year old, because I’m not sure how I’d add another candle without lighting the piece of paper it was sitting on ablaze.  Guess I’ll have to plan ahead a little more next year.

So, in leu of a more lengthy post, let’s get you people in here.  I know at least a few of you read semi-regularly.  What do you like?  What are you sick of?  What’s your favorite post?  Help me help you.  (Dear lord I need out of consulting.)  Thoughts?  Suggestions?  Things you’d like to see less of here?  More?  A little to the left and faster?

Damn Interesting is a great site, which is unfortunately undergoing a bit of an extended period of inactivity.  It has great articles (even the old ones are still good, I know, amazing in this new ever 5 minutes internet) which combine reporting on obscure events and locations with a wonderfully dry sense of humor and an engaging narrative style.

This one came to mind because they’re not only interesting articles, but they stick with you.  A few days ago I was discussing websites with a friend from work, and we both remembered a particularly line from a particular article.  This article.  To not spoil the particular line, it comes immediately before “When airline mechanics finally arrived…” very near the end of the article.

There’s plenty of other great stories on the site, that one just happened to stick out in my mind.  A great site to spend some time reading.  I believe they also have a book out as well.

Radio Locator is a kind of handy site.  It’s basically a search-able list of radio stations everywhere in the US, and some foreign countries as well.  I know it’s way cooler to listen to your iPod and download songs for a dollar a piece, but I still love the radio and listen to it pretty much all the time.  You can also search for stations that stream online, in case you want to listen at work, or want to listen to radio stations from other places (like if you found one you love while on vacation.)  Not life changing or anything, but a handy site none the less.

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Stressed out?

• Solution 1 – Snap Bubbles
• Solution 2 – Perpetual Bubblewrap (for the really, really, really stressed out)

Warning – both have sound when you pop the bubbles, in case your speakers are turned way up.