Apple Conquers World

So I'm shopping at Kroger last night (in Bartlett no less) and over the intercom I hear the following announcement in between TRL-styled songs:

"Attention shoppers. Today we're running a special on iTunes music cards. Buy one, get one free. They make great gifts and you can use them to download songs to your PC, Mac or iPod. Get yours today!"

I'm sort of paraphrasing but the point is that now we're hearing ads for iTunes cards over a Bartlett Kroger intercom. My interpretation is that Apple has really permeated all aspects of our culture with the iPod and it better be sure it doesn't squander that brand loyalty by prostituting itself out.

I know Steve Jobs would never let that happen but money has a way of doing things to the leadership of a company. Or, more importantly, money has a way of influencing the stockholders and board of directors.

Anyway, it was just this surreal moment for me last night when I heard this promo. I mean, has any Apple product ever been sold in the Bartlett Kroger?

What Is That Noise?

Want to know what I'm listening to at work? Didn't think so. But here it is anyway. Keep in mind, I'm at a new Mac and haven't had a chance to bring all 5 gigs of tunes down from my previous Mac so pickings is thin.

Boycott Locked Door Businesses

I'm not a big believer in boycotts because I think they make the boycotter feel good about himself more than they whip up awareness or effect change. However, I believe we (and I mean you and me) should start boycotting businesses that lock their doors.

Wha?
Stay with me here. Most businesses have two doors which are side-by-side. You either pull or push these doors to open them and they are usually glass. Yet almost every business keeps one of these two doors LOCKED! Sometimes it's the right door and sometimes the left door. Of course it's the other way around if I'm leaving the place but almost every business with two doors locks one.

Why does this happen? Frankly I don't care. If there's a "good" reason, I don't want to hear it. I just want the damn doors unlocked. Why have TWO doors if you're going to keep one of them locked? Why not have ONE DOOR and a wall? It works for Dino's restaurant on McLean. They have one door and it's always unlocked, except when it's closed. Which makes sense. But when it's open, the door is unlocked. Which also makes sense. But what doesn't make sense is having a business with two doors, being open and then locking one door.

And yes, I'm the dumbass who tries to go in or out the locked door. How the hell am I supposed to know which door is locked? Is there some locked door memo that I missed? Yes, sometimes they have signs on them like "This Door Locked" or "Please use unlocked door." Those signs help but are still stupid.

So I've decided to boycott businesses with locked doors. If I go to a business with a locked door I'll walk in and ask for the manager, owner or person of importance. I'll lodge my complaint and explain that I won't be back until both doors are unlocked. Then I'll leave.

You with me? Can we grow this thing? Just needs a catchy slogan. Any suggesstions?

Weird Time To Blog

Ok. I'm crazy. I know this. Now you are about to know this as well.

Right now I'm in Magnolia, Arkansas. This is not too far from Texarkana, near the Texas border. I'm staying at my wife's grandmother's house. She does not have any computer or Internet access. She has phone lines but I don't really want to do the whole dial-up thing. Too much trouble.

However, my wife's aunt lives in the house next door to her grandmother. She has a Cable Modem (high speed broadband) and a Wireless Network. It's very nice, almost like my setup at home. But they're all asleep and I don't want to bother them by coming into their house at ten minutes to midnight (nobody locks their homes here). So, I decided to sit out here on the back patio to check email and post a couple of blog posts. Did I mention that it's around 30 degress? Yeah. So I'm insane.

It's actually kinda nice. I just watched The Last Samurai and while it wasn't the greatest movie ever, it wasn't bad. And now I guess I'm in a flick-induced Zen-state where I think it's cool to sit outside in my coat and slippers to blog. And I can smell wood smoke from somebody's fireplace. Such a nice smell. And it's peaceful here in Magnolia. So I guess it's all kind of cool.

Anyway, what's the weirdest thing you've done to get your blog on?

High School Ball

Watching USC stomp OU in the Orange Bowl. Memo to Oklahoma; when you play a game it helps if you actually show up at the stadium. Just something for Stoops and the boys to think about. Switzer's boys always showed up. Ahh, those were the good old days.

So I missed the first half of the Orange Bowl because I took my son to watch White Station come back and beat Overton. We rooted for the Spartans because my friend is the head coach. I'd probably root for them anyway since I'd send my kids there if I had any high school aged kids.

Folks, if you haven't been to a high school basketball game in a while, do yourself a favor and go. It was fantastic. The energy in that tiny gym was electric, genuine and raw. There wasn't some guy pumping t-shirts into the crowd. No furry-suited mascot leading cheers. No light show, except for that one light in the corner that kept blinking out. Not much loud music except at the end of each period. It was just good, solid basketball. People cheered for the game, not the hype. Maybe it's no coincidence that I saw Coach Calipari limping out of the gym while I was walking in. He said, "Hey man" and I returned the greeting with a head-nod and a "Howzit Going?"

Anyway, get your rear to see some high school basketball. The best $5 you'll ever spend.

"Unstiffed" and other stuff

A lot has happened since I last updated this humble blog. I guess I should try to hit some of the highlights with an ever popular blogging device: the list.

• One of my forums got hacked. That's right, hacked. A real-deal H@x0r hit my phpBB forum and exploited some php security hole to generally do what malicious hackers do, wreak havoc. The infiltrator left witty messages like "we own you" and "never forget that we were here." Clever. So I then spent nearly a week trying to restore everything and with some help, I was able to get it all back to where it was pre-hack. Lesson learned: BACKUP EVERYTHING!
• I upgraded this blog, and all my other blogs, to Movable Type version 3.14. I actually bought the personal use unlimited blogs/authors version but I didn't pay the $99 price tag. Because I had donated to MT previously I got a price-break and then since I volunteered to help beta-test MT 3 (back in the day) I got another price-break, even though I never actually did a bit of testing. Then my friend Matt Wood, who has ditched MT in favor of WordPress, gave me two of his MT rebate keys and the end result is I paid a whopping $17.95 for the full personal version of MT. The install went pretty smoothly but I was horrified to discover that the MT admin pages don't properly display in Safari. So now I do all my blog posts from Firefox, which is probably for the best because Safari has some sort of problem with getting really, really slow. Apple, please fix that.
• My pre-MT 3.14 install of MT-Blacklist was horribly out of date and basically quit working. That's part of why I upgraded to MT 3.14, I needed a way to manage my comments. In about 48 hours I received roughly 800 comment spams. So I upgraded to MT-Blacklist 2.04 beta and it works very, very well except that in the background I'm getting these plugin errors (Byte order is not compatible) in my activity logs. Bummer. I'm not sure how to fix this but since it seems to be only in the background it's not a top priority to fix right now.
• I received a wonderful note in the mail from the Davis-Kidd blog cashier girl last week. Turns out she's the PR manager (or something, I don't have the card with me now... I'm at Otherlands, a local coffee shop, playing hooky from church) for Davis-Kidd and read my blog entry about the unsatisfactory service at their restaurant and sent me a very nice note. The card also included a gift certificate which was an extremely nice gesture but I think I'm going to use it to buy a children's book to donate to the public library. And I did return to the Davis-Kidd restaurant over the holidays and the service was better (though not perfect but service rarely is perfect) and I will continue to go back... for now. The point is that Davis-Kidd is a classy bookstore. Because of the blog cashier girl's gesture, I've vowed to never shop at B&N or Borders again. Can you imagine the B&N manager doing anything like reading a blog and sending a personal note? Me neither. This little gesture shows me that Davis-Kidd "gets it" and is plugged-in to its community in ways the big, national chains would never be. It also says something about the way blogs empower individuals and businesses to connect and communicate but I'm still trying to figure out all the details of that, and I think it will make a nice post sometime in the future.

So, that's what's been going on. I really have been thinking about this blog lately and I'm leaning towards changing it's "mission" to giving it a more Memphis-theme. I know I've already done that in some ways but I think I want to officially make this a commentary on things around town, and less about technology and blogging. I don't know, still considering everything but just telling you what I'm thinking.

UPDATE
Firefox on the Mac has some trouble running JavaScript. That's why there were two, identical posts here for a bit. There's always gotta be a problem.