My eagle-eyed readers will notice several new buttons at the bottom of each post. What the hell are they? I’ll tell ya.
The post’s permalink.
A printer-friendly version of the post, suitable for framing.
A form allowing you to email the post.
The post’s comments.
The RSS 2.0 feed for the post’s comments.
Possibly coming soon: buttons for converting a post to PDF and sending a link via AOL Instant Messenger.
This is just plain funny.
I was sending something via FedEx today, and I noticed something interesting about the carrier’s rate schedules. Thanks to the Rate Finder, I was able to find rates and transit times to send an envelope from Houston to South Bend, Ind. For the sake of discussion, I’ll make the following assumptions:
Here’s the data:
Graph the points, and here’s what you get:
Look at the marginal values, and here’s what you get:
This is really the meat of it. Upgrading from the cheapo service to 2Day, Standard Overnight or even Priority Overnight costs a few cents for every hour of improved speed. After all, if you’re torn between 2-day and 3-day service, the package isn’t all that time-sensitive.But First Overnight costs more than $16 per hour of improvement over its cheaper brother, Priority Overnight. I wouldn’t think there are too many situations where 10:30 a.m. isn’t fast enough, but 8:30 a.m. is.
That said, if you’re in one of those situations, it really “absolutely, positively has to get there” first thing in the morning. FedEx knows that in that kind of right-down-to-the-wire, pressure-cooker situation, people will pay. A lot.
I’ve said this before, but I love Southwest Airlines. It’s an amazingly successful company in an industry loaded with money-losing, flight-cancelling, bankruptcy-declaring, customer-pissing-off dinosaurs. I don’t fly a whole lot — maybe four roundtrips a year — but I always try to fly Southwest. It’s faster, cheaper and safer than pretty much any airline out there. Hotter stewardesses, too.
That’s why I was happy to download Southwest’s “Ding” application. It’s a small app that sits in the system tray, displaying the familiar striped 737 tail. Whenever Southwest has a sale or other promotion, it plays a “Ding” sound effect, and I hurriedly click on the icon to see where I can go. Everytime, memories of Caesars flash through my mind.
Here’s what makes it even better. Southwest recently changed its Rapid Rewards program so that credits are good for two years instead of one. What’s more, the company retroactively applied the change, so I’m just two flights away from a freebie. I’m heading to South Bend in a few weeks for The Observer‘s 40th anniversary reunion/drinking binge. This summer, I’ll be heading to Medina, Ohio (rhymes with vagina) for Tommy’s wedding. After that, I’ll get a flight (and booze!) for free. Hell yeah.
Lately I’ve been hearing more and more about Bill’s Khakis. I don’t know what could be so special — they’re just khaki pants, after all — but people love these things. Here’s the top review on Amazon:
Yep, these babies are like no other khakis you will ever own. I have two pair, one that I just got. They are the best fitting pants you can get…just make sure you order them a little bigger than your usual size. Take them to a tailor and get them properly hemmed and you will never regret it. I took my first pair to the cleaners often but I’m not going to do that with this new pair…just wash and hang to dry. They look great and will last forever. Bitchin pants!
Wow. Glenn Beck is a fan, too. The folks at Bill’s say their pants are inspired by the pants issued to GIs in World War II. I know for a fact that other designs from that era have withstood the test of time, like the brilliantly simple P-38 can opener.
Here’s the thing, though: they’re $97.50. I’ve never spent that much on a pair of pants in my 24 years on this earth. But if they’re worth it, I’ll go for it. Anyone out there have a pair of these?
I replaced my busted water heater over the weekend. That’s got to be one of the easiest home improvement projects around. From start to finish, it was about two hours, and that includes the trips to Lowe’s and the time it took for the new heater to fill up. And the whole thing cost me about a quarter of what the jackals at Blackmon Mooring wanted for the job. Here’s how it went:
Shut the water off.
Shut the power off.
Drained the old heater and moved it off to the side.
Marshalled my forces.
Removed the old leaky hoses.
Moved the new heater into place.
Teflon-taped the hot and cold water connections.
Connected the hot and cold water hoses.
Connected a drain line to the pressure-relief valve.
Turned the water back on and waited for the heater to fill up.
Turned the power back on.
Voila! Plenty of hot water for cleaning up my filthy hovel.
Piece of cake.
I just got done upgrading to WordPress 2.0.2, which has some security fixes. Kinda nerve-wracking, since I had to delete the whole blog and upload it again, but it seems to be working just fine.
Leave a comment if you notice anything screwy.
UPDATE (5:45 p.m.): Spoke too soon. The following features are broken:
I’ll get crackin’ on those tomorrow morning.
I need an excuse to try out the apparently-excellent Flickr Photo Album plugin, so here goes. When I finally get around to publishing my autobiography, I think I’ll put this photo on the cover:
St. Patrick’s Day was fun.
My water heater crapped out yesterday, and leaked water all over the floor of my garage. Apparently, the thing was 12 years old, and was therefore living on borrowed time.
This was confirmed by the friendly people at Blackmon Mooring, who charged me $99 to tell me, “You need a new water heater,” which they would be glad to install for the low, low price of ELEVEN HUNDRED SON-OF-A-BITCHING DOLLARS. When I delicately asked “Why so much, you thieving vulture scumbags?” the guy said, “Because it’s a weekend.” The weekday price is only $800 and change.
Screw that.
I can roll down to Lowe’s and pick up a brand-new 50-gallon Whirlpool electric water heater for $239 and install that bad boy myself. It looks like a pretty easy job. As best I can figure out, it goes like this:
So that’s today’s project. I will take pictures and post them tomorrow.
I bought a 1GB Memorex USB drive today, and now I have to figure out what to put on it. So far, I’ve got a few applications:
Plus a smattering of music, work-related files, etc. Any other suggestions? Leave ‘em in the comments.
Lou had a post about Joe Bastardi today, and it got me thinking about Johnny Dangerously, one of my favorite movies. There are a few great lines by Roman Moronie:
You fargin sneaky bastige! I gonna take-a your dwork, I gonna nail it to the wall! I gonna crush your boils in a meat grinder! I gonna cut off-a your arms, I’m gonna shove ‘em up your icehole! Dirty sum-o-num-batches! My own club!
Here’s the audio for that one. And of course, Moronie’s statement:
I would like to direct this to the distinguished members of the panel: “You lousy corksuckers. You have violated my fargin rights. This sum-o-num-batching country was founded so that the liberties of common patriotic citizens like me could not be taken away by a bunch of fargin iceholes like yourselves. Thank you very much.“
Great movie.
Wait until Laurence hears about this one:
For Rodney and Scottie Colvin, it was been a nerve-racking eight days. Their cat, “Piper,” scampered up a tree in the yard of their Summerville, South Carolina home last Monday, March 13.
Efforts to coax the animal down failed. A week later, on Monday, March 20, would-be rescuers came to Piper’s aid. Then, something went terribly wrong, but this time all was okay in the end.
The cat fell nearly 80 feet, clipped a branch on the way down and then landed on its feet and ran away. Piper, no doubt, used up at least a couple of his feline nine lives, but otherwise appeared to have survived the ordeal without serious injuries.
Here’s the video.
In the tradtion of my Gaelic forbears, I have been celebrating the Saint’s life since yesterday afternoon. Video clips — brought to you by the good people at Google Video — will be posted soon.
Until then, happy St. Patrick’s Day, lads!
Time for another grocery store bitch. Wes and I were at Kroger tonight, buying essential supplies for tomorrow’s St. Patrick’s Day party. It was late (11:00 p.m.) or so, and no checkout lanes were open. None. Instead, we had to use the U-Scan self-checkout machines.
I can’t stand those damn things.
I should qualify that. They’re actually pretty convenient when I’m in a hurry, and I just want a Coke or a dozen eggs or something. But when I’ve got a cart full of stuff, I don’t want to check out my own groceries. I don’t want to search for barcodes, I don’t want to weigh fruit, and I don’t want to feed currency into a slot one bill at a time.
One of the problems is usability. After you scan each item, you’re instructed by the maddening feminine voice to “please place the item into the bag.” The bags — flimsy plastic only — are on racks mounted on a big scale. Apparently the weight of each item is programmed into the system as a theft-prevention measure, so some scumbag doesn’t pay for a candy bar and walk off with two cases of Pabst. The problem is that when you have a whole lot of groceries, you run out of room. You try to take one of the full bags off to make more room, and the maddening voice tells you to “place the item back in the bag.”
But my main beef with the damn things is much broader: It’s not my freakin’ job. I already have a job. I get up in the morning and I work very hard at my job. When I go to spend the money I made at my job, I don’t want to do someone else’s job. There’s a reason the good Lord made pizza-faced 16-year-olds, and that reason is so that I don’t have to run a six-pack over a laser grid 17 times.
Some of you might find my anti-U-Scan position at odds with my nature as a free marketeer. After all, Kroger is just trying to make a buck, so what’s wrong with that? Not a thing. The company is certainly free to conduct its business however it wants. But so am I, and that’s why I usually shop at Randalls, where they have real live people to ring up my groceries. Imagine that!
I also have a problem with it on a larger level. Society-wide, the notion of customer service has been slipping because we, the consuming public, have allowed it to slip. Sixty years ago, I bet the notion of routinely pumping your own gas was pretty foreign. Nowadays, it’s pretty rare to even find a full-service pump. In fact, the assholes responsible for the U-Scan monstrosity admit their inspiration, in part, came from the decline in gas station service:
Based on their acceptance of ATMs and pay-at-the-pump fueling, “customers show they are willing to use self-service technology,” says Jim Mueller, director of information technology for Shnuck Markets. “The technology is now more secure and reliable and customers feel comfortable guiding themselves through the checkout process.”
Bullshit.
I was just in the drive-through lane at the absurdly-named Amegy Bank of Texas, when an HPD cruiser rolled up, blocking the exit of the truck in the next lane. Within about a minute, all three occupants of that truck were handcuffed and frisked. I finished my business and was driving away when I saw a bank employee leaving for the day. I asked her if those guys were trying to rob the bank. She told me, “No, they were trying to pass a fraudulent check.” I guess the teller got wise and called the police.
This means one of two things:
I’m not sure which one it is, but either development is most welcome.
The word of the day, courtesy of the good people at Dictionary.com, is crapulous:
1 : marked by intemperance especially in eating or drinking
2 : sick from excessive indulgence in liquor
Yeah, that sounds about right.
Most of y’all know that I’ve been losing some weight lately. Thanks to the excellent Weight Watchers program, I’ve gone from an all-time high of 271.6 to my current weight, as of this morning, of 197.5. That’s a loss of 74.1 pounds.
Clearly, there are lots of figures involved, I thought I’d break down the numbers of losing weight.
No weight-loss program causes the subject to lose fat exclusively. Unfortunately, there’s some loss of lean muscle mass as well. Based on my body fat figures, I estimate that about 60% of the weight I’ve lost has been fat, with the balance being muscle. So here’s the first breakdown:
Total weight loss: 71.4 lbs.
Fat loss: 42.8 lbs.
Muscle loss: 28.6 lbs.
I started on June 20, 2005. Thanks to this nifty little calculator, I can see that I have been on this program for 267 days. That brings us to the next breakdown — weight loss over time. Numbers under a pound are expressed in ounces, and there’s a small margin of error due to rounding.
Total weight loss: 4.3 oz/day, 1.9 lbs/week, 8 lbs/month
Fat loss: 2.6 oz/day, 1.1 lbs/week, 4.8 lbs/month
Muscle loss: 1.7 oz/day, 12 oz/week, 3.2 lbs/month
As common sense will tell you, the only way to lose weight is to expend more calories than you take in. A net calorie deficit means you’ll lose weight. So let’s figure out my deficit. First, we have to convert the above figures to Metric, using yet another nifty little calculator.
Total weight loss:Â 32,386 grams
Fat loss: 19,432 grams
Muscle loss: 12,954 grams
Fat, as we all learned in high school health class, packs about nine calories per gram. Muscle is four calories/gram. So now let’s look at the losses in calorie terms:
Fat loss: 174,888 calories
Muscle loss: 51,816 calories
Total loss: 226,704
That’s a lot of calories. Such a high number that it’s pretty much meaningless, unless you break it down over time, as we did before.
Total loss/month: 25,472 calories
Total loss/week: 5,944 calories
Total loss/day: 849 calories
So I must be burning, on average, 849 calories/day more than I’m eating. How can that be? Well, let’s figure out my metabolic rate, or the total number of calories I burn in a day. The basal metabolic rate is the energy the body expends just keeping itself alive: breathing lungs, a beating heart, and bajillions of synapses firing takes energy. The commonly used formula is the Harris-Benedict equation:
BMR = 66 + (13.7 X weight in kg) + (5 X height in cm) – (6.8 X age in years)
Fortunately, I am blessed with both height and youth, which help keep the metabolic engine chugging along nicely. Thanks to yet another nifty little calculator we can see my basal metabolic rate is as follows:
BMR: 2,095.3 calories/day.
However, I like to think that my life is a bit more than just breathing. In order to find true daily energy expenditure, you have to take activity into account. In order to do that, you multiply BMR by an activity multiplier. They range from 1.2 for a sedentary lifestyle to 1.9 for someone in intense training. Mine is 1.55, defined as “moderate exercise or sports 3-5 days a week.) So, my total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) is something like:
TDEE: 3,248 calories/day.
Earlier, we established my calorie deficit to be 849 calories/day. To figure out how much I’m eating, we apply this formula:
Intake – TDEE = deficit
And we learn that my average calorie intake has been something like 2,399 calories/day, assuming the above formulas are accurate. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration bases federally-mandated nutrition labels on a 2,000 calorie diet, so it’s possible to eat significantly more than that (in my case, 20% more) and lose a whole lot of weight.
Of course, weight loss is a lot more complicated than that. You don’t just eat a raw lump of calories. You eat food, and different kinds of foods are metabolized differently. That’ll be the subject of my next post.
In July of 2005, I hired Rachel Doyle of Web-Divas to redesign my blog, which at that time was being hosted on Blogger. She came highly recommended by Ree-C, of Rightmom and Lone Star Times fame. Stupidly, I paid about $160 bucks, all in advance. You can guess what happened next: weeks and then months rolled by with little apparent progress. More than a dozen polite, but increasingly frustrated, emails and telephone calls went unreturned.
She ripped me off.
Today, I happened across this little gem on the Web-Divas site:
Web-Divas is closing its doors after almost 3 years. We are thankful for each and every Client who made us what we became. At this time the health and well-being of our families needs to come first. We just want to say thank you for everything!
Love Rachel & Cherry
Good riddance, scumbag.
We now have 160 of 171 precincts in (94%), Dan has pulled ahead slightly:
Dan Patrick: 69%
Peggy Hamric: 18%
Joe Nixon: 9%
Mark Ellis: 6%
One more victory Scotch just might be in order.
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