Detroit transplants living in Dallas
I was cruising around the internets today looking at Lost promos & trailers out of boredom at work, and stumbled across a gem.
Apparently if you play the brainwashing scene backwards it reveals a subliminal message. This could possibly be a big overall plot clue. Or not. Either way, it’s freekin’ creepy!
The weekend is over and we’re both back in the US. The cottage was a fantabulous success for me, as was Brantford for Christa. Monty was happy to be back home after spending the weekend with Christa’s parents, and Bailey was just happy to see people back in the house again after hanging out on his own all weekend.
So it sounds like we may have our first real “snow event” this winter here in Detroit as they are calling for 5″-8″ between this afternoon and tomorrow morning. Sadly, I’m actually excited for a real snowstorm. It’s been pretty sparse in the snow department and I haven’t even had the need to break out the shovel once this year.
Christa and I are both having a great white north weekend, albeit in separate parts of Ontario.
Christa will be back in the old ‘hood of Brantford catching up with all those folk.
I’ll be hamming it up further down the 401 with some friends from Ottawa & Toronto who all get together a few times a year. For the 2nd February running we will be staying at a cabin on Big Bald Lake in Buckhorn Ontario – where the population is only large enough for 1 Tim Hortons and a Beer Store/LCBO.
Have a great weekend!
After starting the new year off with a bang of blogging, I kind of fell apart towards the end of January and got lazy again. Nothing overly exciting happened the past few days so I just didn’t feel like writing anything.
So sue me.
Friday night went over to a friend’s house in Royal Oak & made some beats for a few hours, talked about music, and had a few beers while Monty played with Justin’s dog Jersey & Christa watched tv on a 42″ plasma.
Other than the Discount Tire fiasco (read it here), Saturday we went to a 40th birthday party for Brian Bourlier (Bourlier’s Barbecue and Fireplace) and enjoyed some good times, then around midnight hopped on over to IPMradio.com‘s Studio 6 in Ferndale for more good times, tunes, & beer for the rest of the evening.
Sunday was home project day for me! I went to Home Depot and bought a staple gun and some of that expanding foam insulation stuff to try and plug some of the insulation gaps where cold air was streaming into the basement. That seemed the do the trick, so the rest of the day was spent tinkering on small projects here and there downstairs. I didn’t bother watching the super bowl at all last night, so I’ll probably spend the day today checking out the commercials on YouTube since the boss is away.
After spending the past week or so dealing with a car that a) even in 2nd gear has issues getting moving when there is even a hint of moisture on the road, and b) generally has the handling characteristics of a brick, I decided to pull out the ‘ol credit card to replace the bald tires on the Accent.
After repeatedly being dicked around or otherwise screwed with at the Troy Discount Tire location over the past few years, I decided to check out the Discount Tire in Center Line after Christa got tires there 2 weeks ago and was generally pleased with her experience.
I had done the research up front on what tires I wanted. I was all prepared with a backup set of tires on the off chance the ones I wanted were out of stock. I had also perused some of the cheap tires that got horrible reviews just so I could know to avoid them if they tried to sell me a set of those instead. Well as you can probably imagine, the 2 different sets of tires I was prepared to buy were not in stock. Super. So what do they have _IN_ stock that would be a decent all-season? Something I’ve never heard of and don’t remember seeing on the review website. Instead of walking out and trying another store for the tires I wanted I made the mistake of falling for their bait and switch.
What a sucker I am.
So almost 2 hours later (after a 40-45 minute estimated wait time) I was out with the new tires. Not just tires that got a few poor reviews online, but tires that got HORRIBLE reviews across the board online. All-season? They don’t even say that on the tire description. As a matter of fact, many of the reviews said not to purchase these tires if you are in a rainy/wintery climate as they have very poor handling in these conditions.
Awsome, and the Discount Tire return policy?
If you are not pleased with the merchandise that you receive, or you have simply changed your mind, we will provide you with a refund within 30 days of the date of purchase.
…
Tires must not be driven on (used).
Well that works out well, since, well you know, I had to drive off the lot of Discount Tire to get home to read the reviews to get all worked up and pissed off.
The only lining to this story is that I don’t think I want to own this car for more than a year, so maybe the 15-20,000 miles most people were able to get out of these tires will get me through until the time I dump this car.
So the moral of the story? NEVER BUY ANYTHING FROM DISCOUNT TIRE AGAIN. This time I’m going to stick with that.
I wish I could do this with their tires right now:
Myself, Christa & Jacqui went ice skating at Campus Martius in downtown Detroit Saturday night, and it was another of those experiences that makes me feel like Detroit is not dead.
We decided to check it out later in the evening around 8:30pm thinking that it wouldn’t be busy and would arrive to have the rink to ourselves.
Wrong!
The place was PACKED! Despite the cold, despite it being later in the evening, there were kids, families, young, old, all crowded into the park. People were actually excited about coming to downtown Detroit for a change!
It’s exciting to be witnessing Detroit turn around!
I had my laptop out in my lap this morning sitting in my chair with my feet up. Bailey decided that he should be in my lap instead, so I shutdown and closed the laptop to give him the personal time he requested, and he bolted not 2 seconds later.
Christa summed it up best: “He’s laughing at you on the inside.”
AT&T just bought Cingular? Wasn’t Cingular was already owned by AT&T? Bellsouth owns who now?! Let Stephen Colbert help you sort this out!
Isn’t capitalism fun?? 😉
Occasionally I come across something tech related that I’m working on which is hard to find documented, so I document it here for myself & for google to index to possibly help others…
I wrote a simple web page hit counter for my website years ago using php & mysql. This worked fine until last year when I had to move my site from a machine I managed to a hosting provider. One issue surfaced where randomly, a string with ?PHPSESSID= would appear in the URLs while users were browsing my site, like http://defunkt.net/?PHPSESSID=1ba1f201361fa4ae2fef8122bec3.
Having the PHPSESSID in the URL is not only ugly, but it’s a security risk as well. If you visit a page that has PHPSESSID in the URL, a malicious admin on the site you click to could gain your privileges on the site you came from.
If you are using a hosting provider like I am now, you probably don’t have root level access to the machine serving your pages. The solution in this case is rather simple; if your provider is running Apache (most do) use a .htaccess file.
.htaccess is the default filename of Apache’s directory-level configuration file. It provides the ability to customize configurations defined in the main configuration file.
In this case, all you need to do is create a .htaccess file in your www root, and include the following 2 lines:
php_value session.use_only_cookies 1
php_value session.use_trans_sid 0
That’s it! Apache will apply your configuration change even though is defined differently by your hosting company.
I went to my first Red Wings game last night at Joe Louis Arena, and it was a blast. Had a few beers & watched them cruise to a 5-3 win over the Nashville Predators.
Between the 2nd and 3rd periods they tried to bring out a Toyota Tundra pickup for an advertising stunt. The truck made it about 3 feet onto the ice before it was greeted with a deafening boo from the entire arena, followed by a chear as it was rushed off out of sight. Der! Someone over at Toyota didn’t do their homework. I can only imagine the number of out of work autoworkers from Ford, GM, and Dodge that were in attendance last night. I wonder what the Toyota execs would think, watching their truck booed off the ice, and only to be cheered as it was quickly escorted away to safety.
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