Monday, July 21, 2008

A Eulogy For A Phone

All good things must come to an end. I've been using a Samsung T629 cell phone for about a year now, when all of a sudden this happened:

Through the looking glass.

A power cycle solved the problem for about an hour, then it reinverted. I just worked with the weird phone until I shut it off for the movie theater. Now it will not power up at all.

It is truly a sad day for all phone-kind.

What really sucks is that both Targets I've been to have been sold out of T-Mobile prepaid phones. What the crap man!

Friday, July 11, 2008

Wheel Her Out There!

Dan Wheeler has had saves in every season since 2004. Just saying.

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Public Servivce Annoucement

This is random, but important. When moving into an apartment, TAKE PICTURES OF EVERYTHING and upload them to Flickr/Snapfish/MySpace or whatever. Document the state of the room/apartment before you move in, and then upload those to some 3rd party site so you can prove the photos came from before you moved in. Trust me, even if you move into your best friend's attic, take the damn pictures.

Monday, July 7, 2008

Yahoo, Give the Minor Leaguers Love Too!

In Yahoo fantasy baseball, managers (people playing the game) get to choose MLB players from the player pool for their teams. The player pool normally consists of everyone who is on an active MLB roster or was on a roster last year and has not formally declared retirement. The Yahoo team also has several minor league players added, usually the interesting ones (e.g. Evan Longoria). However, they do leave some notable minor leaguers out (e.g. Jay Bruce). This leads to interesting situations when those left-out players are called up to the bigs.

Having the #1 waiver priority is a huge advantage. It means that you get first dibs on the hot new rookies recently promoted to the bigs who were excluded from the player pool. You can snag that essentially free player, be it Clayton Kershaw or Jay Bruce, hitting or pitching, whatever you need. These excluded players really make the #1 waiver pick much more valuable than it should be.

In one of my leagues, Evan Longoria was drafted with the 180th pick (out of 400 players taken). But Jay Bruce, Johnny Cueto, Edison Volquez, Matt LaPorta, and other excluded players were undraftable, leading managers to draft such waiver trash as Jacque Jones, Luis Gonzalez, Lee Gardner, and Ronnie Belliard. 

Players who want to take a risk and hold on to MiLB stars can only hope those stars are in the select few added by Yahoo's sports staff to the player pool. Waiver priority is designed to decide who to allow to pick up dropped players. Instead, it can be used as a tool to drastically improve a manager's team midseason. 

Yahoo really needs to add all MiLB players in any team's 40-man roster to the player pool. There, that'smy piece. I'm done.

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Wedding: The Only Bad Part

I plan to post a thorough review of everything that happened on my wedding day, because A) it was mostly awesome and B) I don't like having to tell the story 8000 times. But there was one part that totally sucked: the limo. 

During our booking process, we discussed various Excursion/SUV limos with the limo company and the owner, Brendan. When we visited Brendan to sign the deal, he showed us two Excursion limos, and pointed out one of them that likely would be the one we'd get if we booked that day. We booked the Excursion limo that night with Brendan and handed him a hard copy of our itinerary.

First of all, the limo driver showed up in a 14-passenger Town Car limo instead of the 18-passenger Excursion limo we had ordered. We spoke with the owner on the phone and he insisted we ordered the smaller limo. He asked me to check my receipt, which I could not find, and that the receipt clearly said 14 passengers. While I haven't been able to find my copy of the receipt, we spoke exclusively with Brendan about the Excursion limo. Brendan only ever showed us Excursion limos. The only place 14 passengers was mentioned was when we asked him if 14 people would fit in the Excursion limo. Brendan even admitted on the phone on June 14th that the limo he sent us would not fit 14 people. We had to make immediate plans for groomsmen to drive their own cars instead of being in the limo. 

Then, the driver was unable to turn on the electricity in the cabin for the first 15 minutes of the trip. This meant no radio and no air conditioning, a big deal on a hot June day. She did not have a copy of the itinerary that we sent in via email and by hard copy when we signed. We gave her the addresses and told her the time and schedule. After she dropped off the men at the church, she left the church to get lunch for herself without telling anyone. By the time she returned and we sent her to the hotel to pick up the bride, the wedding was delayed by 30 minutes. Our guests had to wait 30 minutes for us in the church, and we lost 30 minutes of the 5 hours we had booked for the reception. 

On top of it all, Brendan and the driver were rude through the whole process. The driver acted like she was doing us a favor driving us around, and Brendan didn't make any attempt to apologize or even be nice to myself and my best man. 

I am in the process of discussing this with the limo company, so I don't want to mention their name yet. We'll see how they respond to my query.

All rights reserved. Take that!