New Blog

I've created a new blog and don't intend to update this one any more. My new blog is The Wallace Report.

A Day At The Beach

Today, we spent the majority of the day lounging on the beach at
Virginia Beach. Last night we watched Jaws 2 on television. I didn't
get in the water much. Not because of sharks, but mainly because I
don't like sand in places it doesn't belong. I feel relaxed for the
long drive home tomorrow now.

Busch Gardens

Yesterday, we went to Busch Gardens Europe and stayed until we could
barely walk. I hate getting older--I could have closed the place when
I was younger. It was one of the most scenic parks I've ever been to,
except for maybe Disney. The last major ride we rode was Griffon.
I'd been avoiding/dreading it all day, but I knew I'd regret not
riding it. For the uninitiated, Griffon is 200+ feet tall with two
ninety-degree drops. And on the first drop, you hang there looking
straight down for a few seconds before they let you go. It was
probably the scariest ride I've ever been on. It was great.

Captain George's World Famous Seafood Buffet

My latest buffet trip involved going to Captain George's. The line is
themed to look like a clipper ship. The food was excellent. I
noticed they also had a room in the back reserved for a haunted dinner
theatre. Sounded like fun, but we didn't do it. By the time we
finally got out, I'd eaten so much I thought I was going to need a
stomach pump.

Kids!

I'm so glad I'm not a parent, although I think I'd be a better one
than the majority of parents I see. Tonight, I nearly got run down by
a kid in the same restaurant twice (different kid each time). One
almost sent my fully loaded plate flying across the room. Plus there
was the kid eating the ice cream from the machine in my last post.
I'm convinced that manners are a thing of the past, and most parents
are just lazy.

Colonial Restroom

I love the restroom signs at Colonial Wiiliamsburg.

My Gross Out Moment

So we ate at a buffet the other night. I got a piece of apple pie and
was gonna put ice cream on it, when I discovered a waitress cleaning
the machine. She was also scolding a little boy, telling him what he
did was unsanitary. I think he licked the ice cream nozzle. Needless
to say, I decided to forgo the ice cream.

AT&T & TiVo

Oddly enough, AT&T has surprisingly bad coverage in Williamsburg. I
alternate between no service and 1 bar of signal at the condo we're
staying. The web on my phone is already painfully slow on Edge, but
at 1 bar it's almost unusable.

Switching subjects, here is one of the reasons I love my TiVo: the
ability to program it over the Internet. We saw a show advertised on
TV last night that comes on tonight. So I hopped on the web and told
TiVo to record it. It would have been painless if my signal was
stronger, but as it was it took me a while to get the recording
scheduled. I'm hoping someone will make an iPhone application to make
it even easier.

Dangerous ATM

Money flies outta this machine. Kinda like it does from my wallet.
I'll have to take their word for it. While I stood there, no money
came out.

Virginians Love Their Pets

They even gave them their own rest stop.

West Virginia Is F'd Up

West Virginia is an odd place. First of all, there is not a straight
section of road anywhere. The curves are sharp, and when the signs
say you can take one at 60mph, West Virginians know it really means to
go 80mph. Finally--no joke--we saw a sign for a highway called
"9/9". I wondered why they didn't just call it highway "1". Maybe
they don't teach fraction simplification here.

Corn Fields

In Indiana now. If I never see another cornfield, it'll be too soon.

What's Wrong With This Picture?

I'm in Albers, Illinois and I'm thinking these people are all high school drop outs. As you can see in the picture, gasoline prices are somewhat unusual.

Hurricane Bertha, Part II

Well, Hurricane Bertha appears to be turning away from the U.S. Virginia Beach, here I come!

Digital Signatures

I'm all about technology. But one thing that irks me are those digital signature pads stores want you to use when you use a credit card. First of all, they are rarely calibrated correctly. You push down in one area and your digital "ink" shows up halfway across the screen. It makes it very hard to write your name. And then the second thing that bothers me is that you cannot even read the signature after you are done. I'm gonna start putting a big "X" on the signature line and see if anyone notices.

Hurricane Bertha

Okay, so I'm getting ready to go on vacation to Virginia, and there appears to be a hurricane heading toward the east coast on the United States: Bertha. What are the chances that a hurricane would occur on the one week I could get a reservation? This trip could turn out more interesting than originally thought!

I just finished reading the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. In the trilogy, most of the characters have a companion daemon/spirit which sorta acts like a conscience. The first book in the series is The Golden Compass. The movie will be in theater's in December. Go out to The Golden Compass movie site to see what your daemon would be if you could see it. Here's mine:

Zombie Nation

Why don't Americans stand up for themselves anymore? I look around, and I see our civil liberties being eroded left and right, and relatively few people are complaining.

The U.S. government can hold you indefinitely without legal representation. All it takes is a supposed threat to national security (real, imagined, or fabricated), and you can be locked away for a very long time. Most people I've spoken to about this think it only happens to bad people, such as terrorists. Our government has become so secretive, who knows?

Orlando has an ordinance making it unlawful to feed homeless people. An activist group has intentionally violated the ordinance, and now at least one man is facing a judge and jury. Activists rarely achieve hero status, however. They're usually demonized.

It's not just government bodies behaving badly. I saw an article yesterday where schools are banning any kind of physical contact between students, whether it be holding hands or giving someone a "high five". This is ridiculous. I guess we are all supposed to exist in these little bubbles of isolation. It's stupid, not to mention unrealistic. The students should band together and all hold hands one day to show school officials they are not going to stand for it.

I doubt that will happen, though. No one wants to make waves and stand out. We've all turned into a bunch of consumer zombies. We're all too busy talking on our cellular phones, playing Playstation 3, watching HDTV, listening to our iPods, and surfing the Internet to care what goes on around us.

My Take on Tulsa's Plan to Develop the Arkansas

With a vote quickly approaching to determine if people in Tulsa county want to tax themselves to develop the Arkansas River, I thought I'd better educate myself on just exactly what Tulsa county is planning to build. If you are interested, the master plan can be found here. Now, I think developing the river is a great idea, whether it comes from private funding or from taxes (although I think Tulsan's money could be better spent on things like street improvements). So you can imagine, I was leaning toward voting for it. But after looking at the master plan, I will be voting no.

From what I saw, there are seven major areas of improvement. Each of these is spread out really far. There are areas in Sand Springs, Tulsa, Jenks, Broken Arrow, and Bixby. In my opinion, it's too spread out. Take Oklahoma City, for instance. When they renovated Bricktown and built the canal, all of the improvements were essentially concentrated in one area. It has wow factor. The improvements Tulsa county want to make are all too small to have a similar impact. I think the proposed Channels project had more wow to it--it was focused in one area and could have turned out really cool.

A Dirty Secret

After cell phone companies, credit card companies are probably my least favorite corporate entities to deal with. I think they all need to be sent back to ethics school.

Almost all credit card companies allow you to post a payment on their website. It's fast and it's extremely convenient. Or at least it was--that is, until some greedy sonofabitch in accounting decided they could make a few extra bucks by tricking their customers. Allow me to explain. A lot of people are procrastinators, especially when it comes to money issues. If you don't believe me, go to the post office on the night of April 15th, and see how many people waited until the last minute to send in their tax returns. Recently, I've noticed the credit card companies are taking advantage of this behavior.

Here's how the scam works. Take the day that your payment is due and subtract a day. This will be the last day you can make an online payment without incurring a late fee. So if your payment is due on the 31st, you cannot log in on the 31st and make your online payment anymore. That day will now be blacked out, and the soonest you can make your payment will be the following day, or the 1st, at which point you payment is considered late and you will likely incur a late fee. To avoid the fee, you must now log in the day before your payment is actually due. Otherwise, your payment will not officially post in time. This is total bullshit, of course. It has not always been this way. Just a few months ago, I was able to log in on the day the payment was due and make a payment with no problems. But this way makes the credit card companies more money.

So if your credit card company is not doing it yet, keep an eye on them. They will eventually.