Author Archives: bluedepth

Barnes & Nobles Surprising New Look

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Earlier tonight Scott, Craig, and I took a trip down to Scott’s Barnes & Nobles so he could get something he put on hold. While we were there he showed off all the hubbub regarding the changeover and the new stock and layout for his store. I have to admit that I was very pleasantly surprised by what I saw!

The new changeover made room for many new rows of games, as well as a really impressive new section devoted to education. There were many really awesome and very affordable surprises laying in wait for me amongst these aisles. Chemistry sets, Lego, and even working mechanical learning sets were arranged in a very smart way. As you progress through the aisles you see how it goes from items for teenagers down to grade school age kids and then all the way to toddlers and infants. There is literally an educational game, toy, or kit for every age and many pursuits. I found myself loving being there, looking at all the things arrayed on the walls, thinking “If FAO Shwartz was purely for education, this would be it.” The arrangement of the aisles and all the new things that B&N is carrying now is absolutely stunning.

If you have kids, or know someone who has kids, you owe it to yourself to pay the B&N in Portage, MI a visit. The most expensive kits are $20-$30 and look awesome and quite fun to try out. I myself saw a cute Triops Kit for $14! B&N is planning a special unveiling to the local educators this coming Saturday but I think that all the parents and all the people who care about education in my friends circle and who may read this post really should swallow your irritation and drive down Westnedge Ave and get to the B&N in Portage and see for yourselves all the new things that B&N is carrying. If I had a spare $100 there are many kits I would love to play with, and I’m an old fuddy-duddy! I have to really congratulate Scott as he’s responsible for a lot of the design and organization of the sections and he did a truly masterful job of it, everything is ordered with care and it’s such a wonderful feeling thing. The most charming things that B&N now carries is this series of stuffed animals that serve as security objects / sleep facilitators for very young children. A soft little sheep that has a smooth plastic insert that plays ocean sounds or running water sounds, just like Scott’s noisemaker that helps him sleep at night, seeing them in their clear plastic boxes kind of makes you go “Awwwww” and smile softly. If you are facing a young child’s birthday without anything, you have to go to B&N, you will find something there.

The only thing I was surprised they didn’t have were Radiometers and Gyroscopes, but compared to the depth and breadth of what they do offer, their absence is easily overlooked. If I can put aside a little bit of money I have my eyes on a few games that I’d love to get for entertainment around here, as well as the “Hydrogen-Powered Car” kit and the Triops Kit, a cheap way to give something like the delightful ecosphere another shot without the huge expense.

SmashBurger – Kalamazoo, MI

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Today, on August 11th, 2010 a new burger joint called SmashBurger opened on West Main Road in Kalamazoo, MI. Scott, Craig, and I decided to try them out for dinner, along with a fair amount of the rest of Kalamazoo, they were very very busy.

I had a Classic SmashBurger, Scott put together one of his own featuring sauteed mushrooms and onions and Craig had a Michigan Olive Burger. For sides, Scott had the classic french fries, and I had deep-fried Dill pickles.

We walked into a clean and orderly restaurant with a very compact and on-first-glance well designed approach and order area, we ordered our food, the total for Scott and my meal came to just under $20. Craig’s came out to just about $10. After we ordered we were given a number flag that went with our order and wandered away. The first failure hit then, we weren’t given cups that went along with our order and had to ask for them, this isn’t anything out of the ordinary as we have to do that for a few restaurants in the area. Once we had our cups, that’s when we ran into our first problem. The fountain service is to the far left and it is not at all obvious where the lids are kept. I walked up to the fountain depot and already the Low Ice alarm light was blinking. I put my 16oz cup under the Coke Zero spigot and tried it, the Coke Zero sprayed horizontally and covered my hand with mix and a big carbonated squeal. Only when I looked much closer did I discover that there was an “Out Of Order” label that was printed using black ink on a clear plastic label and attached to a dark piece of plastic just under the Coke Zero display. I got slightly vexed and switched to Diet Coke instead, which was just as well. With my hands covered in Coke Zero mix and what amounted to fizzy club soda I walked back to the bathrooms. What I expected was a standard restaurant bathroom setup, Men/Women, big enough for multiple users at once. SmashBurger’s bathrooms were single use rooms and there was a line of 4 men doing the pee-pee dance, I didn’t need to wash my hands THAT badly. As I walked to the bathrooms I was amazed at how much space was wasted in the long hallways to the bathroom area, whoever designed the layout to that restaurant did them a disservice.

Once I returned to the table we waited for our meals to be walked out to us. It quickly struck us that nobody was really paying any attention to the number-flag system for the orders and they were wandering around asking people what they ordered and seeing if it matched what they were carrying. Scott and I got our food first, then after a few minutes Craig got his order. I immediately had a problem with what I saw in my order, The Burger I ordered was delivered open-faced and the patty/cheese combo was wedged underneath the tureen that held my side-dish. When I moved the tureen I saw that some of the cheese was stuck to it and came away from the burger. So right from the start my food was smushed up against the outside of another serving dish and I had to fight down a little bit of irritation, it didn’t *have* to be that way. On to the burger itself, it had it’s own problems. The SmashBurger Burger that I received was assembled hastily and the burger began to immediately fragment as I started to manipulate it on the serving dish it came on, trying to pick it up. As I started to eat I noticed not a dripping of meat juices but a veritable raining / deluge of juices running out. SmashBurger cheats. They sear and sling, the meat doesn’t have time to dry out since it’s delivered in a heartbeat right off the grill. As I ate, I had to lean very far forward so the gushing juices could land in the serving dish and not against my shirt or in my lap. As I ate, the meat slid to one side and the vegetation slid to the other side. This was because the burger was sent out of the kitchen open-faced. The meat didn’t have time to melt the cheese and help the vegetation stay in place. As I ate it was mostly the hamburger first, and then at the end a bread-covered salad. Once I was done speed-eating the burger (since it was gushing juices so very much) I reorganized my dishes and tried the fried pickles.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a salt hound. I love salt, I can’t get enough of salt and I always season everything to my liking and it’s always proper. Even I, as a salt hound, found the fried pickles to be shockingly salty. The taste was SSSAAALLLTTT pickle dill.

After I finished my meal and my drink I got to thinking about how everything was organized in this restaurant. There are no “Meals” or “Baskets”, everything is a-la-carte, you get a dollar discount on the sides if you order a sandwich, but that’s it. I started polling the table for opinions and Scott was very displeased and Craig was shrugging along with the rest of us. What we got wasn’t $20 worth of food, at most it was $12 worth of food. SmashBurger is in direct competition with Culvers, and from what we saw tonight SmashBurger will not be able to compete with Culvers. I posed a question to the table, “If you had a half-tank of gas, as we do now, and you were driving from downtown, would you stop here and have dinner or would you drive on another 5 minutes and go down 9th Street to the Culvers by the I-94 interchange?” Everyone was in agreement that Culvers would be the preferred destination by far.

Earlier today we stopped at Culvers for lunch and I had a vastly superior burger and fries, Scott got a burger and chili-cheese fries and the total was $15.03 for the entire meal, with fountain drinks. Culvers superiority coupled with it’s relative inexpensiveness in comparison with SmashBurger is really damning.

On our way out of the restaurant we were effectively trapped and prevented in our leaving by a SmashBurger employee who took it upon themselves to begin spraying the glass door with Windex and wiping it down. There is only one door, and there we stood for about 30 seconds while we waited for the SmashBurger employee to conclude their needless glass cleaning task. It stunned me, that they elect to have someone wiping down the glass doors during the massively busy dinner crowd, just getting in the way, preventing people from entering or leaving. Since this was the ONLY DOOR in or out I did feel a slight shine of irritation that I couldn’t exit until they were done doing a needless task.

The manager of the establishment was wandering around like a lost puppy bumping into customers and tables, during the mad dinner press he was bounding from table to table, getting in the way. He asked how everything was and Scott and Craig were fine, I was busy chewing. By the time I was done he had bounded off to another table. What I had to say wouldn’t have made him feel very good anyways, so I kept my peace.

SmashBurger enjoyed an insanely busy opening day, the honeymoon period in it’s prime. After our experience we decided that we would give SmashBurger one more shot, and we’ll do so on September 11th, 2010 – one calendar month from now. Scott mentioned “If they are still open by then…”

Then once we were in the car, I asked everyone for their ranking scale and the score they gave SmashBurger Kalamazoo. Scott gave them 2/5. Craig gave them 2.5/5. My score is 1/5.

One thing that struck me was, SmashBurger’s grand opening could have been far more successful if they had tried a soft open a week earlier with invited guests. “Please come to our new Restaurant and have a meal on us, critical feedback is greatly appreciated” and that would have caught the lid problem, the label problem, and most likely the salt problem.

I don’t see SmashBurger being very successful, I see the competition walking away with their money. There are so many other better places to eat lunch or dinner with similar themes. Culvers, Red Robin, and even Sonic are better than SmashBurger. I can agree with Scott, if they are around in a month, I’ll be surprised.

Camcorder Bullshit

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Trying to get rid of old stuff from my house I hopped on Craigslist to get rid of a SONY HandyCam Camcorder. At most all I want is to get $60 for it. I had this odd fellow contact me, wanted to buy it and have someone pick it up. That’s fine. I got the check today. It was written from a 3rd Party company, sent from Clyde, NY and the check was for $1360.00! The email from the yoyo buyer was this:

Hello
How are you doing this morning,I just call Ups to confirm the
package and they told me that the payment would be deliver to you this morning.

Once you have the check,I will like you to go ahead and cash it
instantly in your bank or you may deposit the check into your account or you can take it to any cashing store place to cash it instantly. As soon as you have the cash in hand i will instruct you to deduct money for the item,Plus $100 for your runing around,$20 for the Gas fees to transfer the balance,The remaining Balance should be transfer to the shipper via Western Union Money Transfer today so that they can be able to come for the pick up f the item immediatly he did pick the money up at Western Union office. Here is the shipper information to have the balance send too………

Name————-Mary Seales
Address———1717 Paradise Road
City—————Modesto
State————–CA
Zip code———95350

Email   c.moving@yahoo.com

Please do take care of everything this morning before 12.pm today cos i am moving to other state tomorow and they will be coming for the pick up today immediately you have transfer the money, i will be glad if we can complete the transaction today.Please i have apologies for this transaction to make everything done today.As soon as the money has been wired to the shipper i will reuqest for the transfer details
and also your map quest to easy for Mary Seales to arrive there.

Here is the confirmation for the tracking #(1ZV970180190139348) from
UPS courrier service.

So I took the check, got a witness and a video recording of me shredding the check, and that’s that. All I wanted was $60 and to meet in a Meijer parking lot and hand over a box. Jeesh!

Life as a Spring, or Housecleaning.

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It’s not so much a post about the vagaries of housecleaning, which are rather dull, but instead the nature of the beast, which I envision as a shell-within-a-shell sisyphisian trudge. I have a plan, this plan goes hand-in-hand with my personal will towards simplification and forcing my house to bend to my designs. It is made of steps that have to be dealt with in a certain order for everything to make sense. You have to start somewhere and you need to cut out before you can reorganize.

Step 1: The Grace of Goodwill and/or the Salvation Army – This step is one of the biggest, but not the absolute biggest hurdles to my year-long plan for home order. The plan is to separate Fall/Winter wardrobes from Spring/Summer wardrobes and while selecting for that, also pitching clothes that no longer fit or are so surplus that I haven’t even thought of them in a year or more. This involves the purgation of all of our closets, which for a pair of gay men is as legendary as you imagine. There are 4 closet areas, the Walkin, Hobbiton, Hallway and Guest. All four have to be emptied and sorted, a pile heading to the charities and then the sorting of their seasonal appropriateness. The not-seasonal-now clothes will all eventually be stored in Hobbiton, as it is the largest closet I have ever seen in my life. Once the clothing is ordered properly we’ll have a clear bead on how much of Hobbiton was consumed and how much remains for secondary storage. Hobbiton is THAT BIG, and frankly speaking, I’ve never really looked very closely inside Hobbiton, so I imagine there are surprises lurking within, mayhap, even Hobbits.

Step 2: Organizing the Man Cave – Two gay men, a fully finished basement, and more electronics and gadgets than you can shake a stick at. This zone must be organized. DVD’s have to be sorted into alphabetical order and music has to be sorted into alphabetical order. The only variance to the sorting is the special thematic category of Horror/Thriller/Halloween movies, they will be on their own, sorted but segregated since they are the gory delight of every Samhain/Halloween celebration. The splatter must stand alone. 🙂 The music really ought to be digitized and the physical media obliterated, but that would be more trouble than it’s worth in the end.

Step 3: Organizing THE LIBRARY – I use all caps because the old master bedroom became THE LIBRARY. It’s where all our books are stored. Anyone who even is partially aware of Scott knows that his affection for books is beyond epic, beyond legend, it’s incredible. We don’t honor our Library nearly enough as we ought to and for this plan I can address some of it by alpha-sorting the entire structure. I need to dig deep into that room and purge off very old castaway technology and pitch much of what is my personal storage in that room. I haven’t seen it in a year, almost all of it, so keeping it is doing nothing for me, it has to go. The only thing that stays are the books, but for me personally, there are some books that will be landfill bound. Before we can address the Library we have to get our current lodger up and flying, so he can get his independence. Once that is done, the work on this room can commence.

In the end, of all these steps, our house will be more orderly and pleasant and I won’t have to feel awkward and bent about all these little nipping irritants, not being able to find the right clothes, the right movies, the right music or the right books to suit me. Also it would be nice to have a home again where I can sit where I please and do what I wish without having to contend with piles of drift-stuff that ended up malingering in corners. UP AND OUT. That’s the theme.

When will this grand plan be achieved? Maybe a year from now, maybe two. This simplification is vital and I can’t resist it any longer. All of this STUFF is stifling. When people mention this stuff, they sometimes use the word ‘trappings’ and that’s exactly what it is, stuff-based traps. I’m done with traps. Time to be simple.

Simplification

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I have taken it upon myself to engage in a spate of mid-year resolutions. Amongst these is a will towards simplification. I have unpacked a lot of old CD’s, objects, boxes, and sorted what I want from what is trash. As I progress in this task it struck me that engaging in simplification is a lot like honoring the dead and releasing it from within. I have looked into many DVD’s and CD’s full of data that was pertinent to a previous me, but no longer really relevant. I’m sorting the wheat from the chaff and I’m shredding a lot of these discs in my CD/DVD shredder. There is a unique liberating feeling that comes with doing all of this winnowing.

I have also been temporarily overwhelmed with nostalgia as I unpack things I haven’t thought about for years as I dig into the piles I have hidden throughout my home. I am a self-confessed packrat and that time is over. I give myself a little moment to consider what I’m getting rid of and then I purge it from my life. So far I’ve been able to sell a few things which will definitely help the budgetary process down the road.

Out with the old feels a lot like therapy. I can symbolically achieve little bright shots of closure each time I make a decision to keep something or purge it. By the end I should have an orderly, simplified, and much leaner household.

Comic Con Day 3 – iPad is Disabled

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Just exited the Family Guy panel on Day 3 of San Diego Comic Con and after it was done I opened up my Apple iPad and to my chagrin it said “This iPad is Disabled, please try again in 4 minutes” and my Bluetooth was active. I immediately thought that someone was being hacky and clever with my open Bluetooth stack being a security risk. I left Ballroom 20 with concern that somehow my iPad had been broken into and was now for some reason vulnerable. As I walked along, trying to reset the iPad and turn it on and off to no effect I waited and eventually the device was unlocked. I opened up Google on my POS Blackberry and looked up the phrase, “iPad is Disabled”.

This is where my chagrin was firmly planted. I also brought with me my Apple Wireless Keyboard today, and didn’t think anything about it. While I’m traveling I have my iPad in secure mode with a passcode. Apparently somehow my Apple Wireless Keyboard turned on (probably a nudge) and then it started to feed my iPad guesses to the unlock code. With enough wrong guesses the iPad started to limit access. I’m thankful that I caught it when I did, after 10 wrong guesses my iPad deletes all the content within it.

Apparently my handy Apple Wireless Keyboard has a very touchy power button so now when I travel I’m just going to pull it’s batteries out. A part of me wishes it wasn’t that hard to screw everything up, and another part of me is embarrassed that I even let it happen.

If you are traveling with an iPad and an Apple Wireless Keyboard, check your batteries!

Comic Con Day 2 -San Diego

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I’m sitting in the Sails Pavilion after enjoying a spot of lunch, which was a few oatmeal cookies and two bananas washed down with some bottled water. So far ComicCon has been like it has been in years past, very very busy and lots of great reveals and sneak-peek screenings. My iPad gets recognized and doubly-so when people see me reading comic books on it. I’ve attended a very digital comic heavy convention so far and the industry has caught a whiff that they may be behind the herd when it comes to releasing digital comics. I laugh at this, because they are very behind the curve. They are trying to approach the situation as a kind of transmedia experience, that people want a rich experience with audio, animation, video, and links. It is my opinion that they are right on for 2001. As for 2010, this should have all been old hat and the next wave they should be preparing for is the collision of digital comics and social networking. How do you mix comic books, digg, Twitter, and facebook all together? That’s where the future lies, until the herd moves on into post-social networking.

Seeing people getting all ooh and ash over digital comics when I’ve been enjoying then since April gives me a strong feeling of chagrin, i’ve been there, done that. What is new for me? I suppose I have to make it up for myself to really get any kicks anymore.

ComicCon 2010 has several oddities worth noting:
– more energy spent arranging shuttle services has made the con much easier to get to
– housing botch was annoying and demonstrates the inanity of the housing system
– line management in the exhibit hall needs more work
– out of control spontaneous photography in the exhibit hall clogs flow, they need photo zones
– DC’s snarky and immature preparations for releasing their signing schedules demonstrates that they don’t take their fans as seriously as Marvel does. The schedule needs to be online, in iCal format, and published two weeks before the start of the con.
– Artists are a capricious lot. Artists Alley needs a cork board for contacting free-range artists. We want to shower you with cash, but we need to see you first!

Next up are a batch more panels and perhaps some irrelevant wandering in the exhibit hall. 🙂

ComicCon – Day 0 – Chicago

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Today is Day 0 of our ComicCon adventure. The trip from Kalamazoo to Chicago was exceptionally easy. The traffic was practically non-existent and even the Kennedy expressway in Chicago was flowing incredibly quickly. We left the cats in good hands, a house full of food, and everyone who needed to have keys has them.

Tonight we went to Joy’s Noodle Company in Boystown and had some exceptional Tom Yum soup and my usual Rama Special.

Tomorrow we’re going to take care of some banking needs and then around 1pm head to Midway Airport. I’ll park my car at MDW and we’ll fly off to San Diego, California.

We got to laughing about how many people will be checking in using #4sq and we figure we might have a super mega holy-cow swarm with just the people checking in at San Diego Comic Con tomorrow.

I forgot to print my badge registration form, but thankfully I saved it in my Evernote, got it from there to my Google Mail account and was able to print it out. So now I have everything I need.

Now it’s time to hit the hay before I slump over. 🙂

Mild Irritation of Obsidian Butterflies

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Unlike the Death of Obsidian Butterflies, which is a neat little construct in the Exalted RPG, I am the unpleasant recipient of the Mild Irritation of Obsidian Butterflies. First while making Guacamole for friends that are house-sitting for us while we are off to San Diego Comic Con I regularly, and in this last instance accidentally missed scraping the lime zest with my handy-dandy microplane grater and accidentally grated a bit of my ring-finger knuckle. Nothing to bleed over, but enough to make the rest of the Guacamole a trip through pain-town and dinner, which was Greek Lemon Chicken Orzo soup to be exquisitely painful as raw lemon juice soaked into my boo-boo. It is only aggravated today by TotalTech. I ordered a data cable that will allow me to move data from machine to machine without savaging the local ethernet network. The adapter came in a box and wouldn’t you know it, I accidentally scrape the same boo-boo against the staples that they use to secure the shipping manifests to the cardboard boxes. Just a little glint of sharp staple point, not enough to make me bleed, but lucky enough to hit me in the EXACT SAME SPOT.

They weren’t trying to get me, so I’m not, and can’t be angry about any of this, but ouch, the mild irritation of obsidian butterflies. 😉

Reading List

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These are the books currently in my reading list:

1. Fool Moon by Jim Butcher
2. The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Tielhard DeChardin
3. On Love & Happiness by Pierre Tielhard DeChardin
4. The Art of Happiness by The Dalai Lama
5. Grave Peril by Jim Butcher

The most current list reflects my pursuit to get off the black spiral and find some other way to be. So far Fool Moon is a re-read as I’ve listened to the audiobook a few years ago. I’ll be getting back I to the swing of things with that series once I finish off the three other books.