Fun and Games Dept

So I have been in San Clemente, California since Sunday night. I am here for a training class for work and I am learning lots of nifty things. The class is a mix of in-person and online students. Luckily the teacher is also here in San Clemente. I am looking forward to using these learned skills in the next big project at work.

San Clemente is a beautiful city. I’ve driven through here on Interstate 5, the last time was way back in 1998, but I’ve never spent anytime in San Clemente. I have enjoyed walking the downtown area streets and I have also enjoyed the Pier and the Beach.

Last night I ate at the Fisherman’s Restaurant and Bar on the Pier. Alex was a very friendly waiter and the food was delicious.

Tonight I ate at a downtown restaurant at Nick’s San Clemente. My server was Nicki. She was very sweet.

At both dining experiences, neither Alex nor Nicki made me feel uncomfortable in any way because I was dining alone. I opted not to sit at the bar at either restaurant and just went with my own table. I enjoyed the people watching.

After dinner I walked off the slight beer buzz I had going on and ended up walking about five miles as I made my way around the downtown area. I feel very comfortable here with the mix of different people here. I am looking forward to coming back here on vacation. We have put it on the bucket list.

This very large seagull asked me to tell the seagulls that fly around the Jeep back home at lunch time, “we don’t need handouts from Burger King”. He then flew off in search of fish.

All in all it’s been a lovely trip. Tomorrow I head to San Diego for the night so I can catch an early plane on Thursday.

Dinner at sunset. There are two things that would make this better: a bear and a cub.

*Siri*

I’ve been trying really hard to use Siri on my iPhone more often, especially with all of the improvements that came along with the new iOS 7. For those unfamiliar with a Siri, it is the voice controlled “personal assistant” that is suppose to do some nifty things like play music, read your tweets and launch apps, all with voice commands.

I just asked Siri to read me my appointments tomorrow. She started out good, reading my calendar up until lunch time. However, at lunch she paused and asked, “shall I continue?” I responded in the affirmative. And she started up again, but from the beginning of the day, reading me the appointments she had just told me about.

I went through this fun loop four times before I realized she just couldn’t get beyond lunch.

Earlier this evening, when using her voice to call out directions from Apple Maps, she developed a new trick: on two separate occasions on the NJ 17 freeway near Mahwah she had us exit the roadway, go to the end of the exit ramp, do a U-turn around the median and then head back up the ramp to resume right where we left off on NJ 17. The frustration level in the Jeep leaped exponentially and when I pulled over to see what she was drinking and to make sure we were headed the right way (we,were), she then had us weave across the NJ-NY state line a few times and go northeast when we should have been going southeast before she was dismissed and replaced by Google Maps, who took us the 1.7 miles to Earl’s hotel for the evening.

This prompted an outburst of my frustration on Twitter where I declared that Apple sucks, the whole “it just works” mantra is a fallacy and any sort of quality control from Apple died with Steve Jobs. Angry Apple fanboys bombarded me with messages and I gave them the finger.

Apple just ain’t cutting it anymore. I have to beg and plead with Siri every morning to give me the weather. She only takes requests about 40% of the time. I think it’s something to do with the networking, but our home is pure Apple and if Apple can’t get their devices to do what they’re suppose to do on their own hardware and under their own software, then all the gold Kardashian phones out there polluting up good sensibilities is nothing more than lipstick on a pig.

Right now I want to jump ship to something else but I can’t because Android is more schizophrenic than Congress with the varying devices and versions and the like. God knows what Microsoft is doing these days but I suspect they’re trying to affix a mouse to the side of a phone because that’s the opposite of what everyone else is doing.

The fact of the matter is that quality control in the tech world is dropping like a guy with cement shoes in the Hudson and I don’t see it coming up for air anytime soon.

I want something that works reliably. I want something that is production ready. I want something that is easy to use, uses technology in a smart way and is available to me without pleading, cajoling or having to give the damn thing a biscuit.

Maybe I’m too much of a perfectionist. I won’t apologize for that, though. I refuse to subscribe to mediocrity.

Someone tell me about their perfect mobile computing experience. Quick.

So Earl and I are sitting at TPA awaiting our return flight from our weekend in the greater Tampa area. We are flying to LaGuardia today; I will then be leaving Earl in Jersey for work meetings he has tomorrow and I’ll be making the drive home solo. Luckily he’ll be home tomorrow night.

While our long weekend in Tampa has been quite enjoyable, Earl and I have decided that it wasn’t quite long enough for our tastes. Oh well, our next adventure is just around the corner. We were in town for my cousin’s wedding. It was great to see family we haven’t seen in a long while.

I brought the “real camera” along for this weekend and I had a good time taking photos, other than when the camera decided to fog up on the inside for a bit. I need to bring my camera along more often.

We decided to rent a Dodge Challenger because we were in the mood for some muscle. My camera was being foggy.

Here are some shots from the resort where the festivities took place, the Magnuson Hotel in St. Petersburg, Florida.

So Earl and I are at LaGuardia Airport terminal D awaiting our flight to Tampa. We are headed to Florida for my cousin’s wedding.

I’m feeling good this morning and I’m excited to see family that we haven’t seen in a long while.

I was going to write that life is good, because life is good, but the cynicism of the internet showed its ugly head last week when someone sent me a message letting me know that people who say “life is good” are delusional.

I guess I’m delusional.

So I’ve been listening to Sirius/XM’s POTUS channel quite a bit again. My Twitter stream is populated with lots of folks with a political interest. I like to think that I’m somewhat in tune with what’s happening our country and I like to think that many would be interested in being as informed as I strive to be.

Please note that I haven’t been blogging about politics lately. To write about it endlessly would lead me to some depressed state, so I’ve been concentrating on happier things like travel and flowers and autumn winds.

To put it mildly, I am really disappointed with the current state of the U.S. Government. While I believe that the majority of the mechanics of our government is sound, I think that we’ve populated our ranks with a bunch of idiotic, crazy, stupid people from the top of the mountain right down to the bottom of the river.

I’m probably going to bullet point this because I’m feeling my blood pressure rise as I formulate this blog entry.

* While I think that everyone is entitled to affordable health care and I agree with much of the Affordable Care Act, I am PISSED that the new healthcare.gov site was designed and coded by a Canadian contractor. I am INSULTED by this.

* Per reports that I heard this morning on unconnected media outlets, the United States spends $1.00 for every 70 cents it takes in in taxes. I don’t know how the budget works in your household, but when Earl and I have acted in a similar behavior we have found ourselves in debt and have ended up working really hard to get out of that debt. The country can not go on spending more than it brings in. We could reign in some of these stupid, idiotic congressional squabbles if the freakin’ budget was balanced.

* Through no fault of their own, thousands of government workers have been off-the-job since the beginning of the month. This is how a government shutdown works. It’s horrible that the government was shutdown in the first place, but to add salt to this gaping wound, the workers will be paid for sitting at home during the shutdown and then will be paid again for doing the work they should have been doing in the first place. Again, this is nothing against the workers that were affected by this, but what the bloody hell? The purpose of the shutdown was what again?

* I really wish that a certain group of individuals would just admit the racism card and get it over with.

* I am really starting to become interested in the way other democratic governments work. People keep telling me that if the congressional body of Australia pulled something like our Congress did, the whole group of them would be declared null and void and there would be an election within three weeks to fill all the seats. I really like the idea of a quick election process. A lot. Hearing people talk about Hillary in 2016 is making me want to scream at anyone or anything. It’s 2013. Presidential elections are over three years away. We shouldn’t even be talking about such a thing until August 2016. Simmer down people.

* Congress needs an overhaul. They keep changing the rules so that they can do whatever the heck they want. Congressional districts are being redefined, rules of voting procedures are being made more convenient and they keep paying themselves for doing nothing. If there was any part of our government that needed a complete reboot, it’s those idiots in Congress. To think that there’s 5% of the American population that thinks they’re doing a good job is insulting and sadly indicative of what’s wrong with our country: the celebration of idiocy and mediocrity.

* I like Australia’s law of “If you don’t vote you have to pay a fine.” I really like that. Get the lazy American population off its ass and into the voting booths.

* Any congressional member that is using words like “historic” and the like to describe today’s steps towards diverting the country from a huge fiscal calamity should be smacked right across the face on live television. I don’t care who does the smacking, but the only reason this is historic is because we’ve never been in such a horrid state of affairs before. Just awful. Any sense of pride is insulting to each and every American citizen.

As we approached the interchange, Earl asked me to get out the toll money. He handed me a stack of bills and a slightly crumpled turnpike ticket.

I sighed.

He knew why I was sighing and said, “My money is a mess but I’m not used to carrying cash.”

After giving him the exact change required at the rapidly approaching toll booth, I sorted through the wad of remaining bills and organized the cash in his wallet a bit. I’ll tackle the plastic on another day.

I consider myself fortunate that I grew up in a fairly organized retail environment. Aside from a dog that would occasionally knock prosthetic limbs off a customer or a cat that hissed from atop the cash register, my paternal side of the family ran a pretty tight operation with the family business. One of the hard fast rules was that all bills went into the cash drawer with the heads facing up and to the right. This is something that I expect from anyone at deals with money. At all times.

95% of the time I am disappointed.

My money clip is organized. All bills a facing in the same direction and stacked neatly in denominational order. I will not leave a sales counter until I have adjusted my change to meet my order guidelines. I don’t consider this a symptom of being anal retentive but rather I just consider it a symptom of being organized: I always know how much cash I have in my money clip and I always know where the big and small bills are.

I am now pleasantly surprised when my change in counted back to me after a retail transaction. Forget counting up to the amount tendered, nobody does that anymore, but anything is better than being handed a wad of cash with an accompanying glare. However, when I get money from an ATM or from a bank teller, I have the expectation that the money will be given to me in an orderly fashion. If a bank teller or the person responsible for loading an ATM with bills doesn’t have the time to handle my money in an orderly fashion, why would is make any sort of assumption that they’re know what they’re doing with my money behind the scenes? A symptom of sloppiness could be indicative of greater problem.

And I don’t want a bank that apparently has a problem to deal with our fortunes.

I have written many emails and even a couple of old fashioned letters to banks to express my displeasure with the way they handle cash. Most probably find this absurd.

It’s probably been crumpled up and tossed aside anyway.

Tomorrow Earl and I will be celebrating one of our anniversaries. I can’t believe the time has gone by so fast, but it was two years ago tomorrow that we were legally married in New York State.

Life is nifty when you marry your best friend.

As part of our celebration, while in Chicago, the two of us went to Navy Pier for the evening. Earl quickly remembered that it was around 10 years ago when we were last at Navy Pier. Actually, it was 10 years, 1 month and 9 days ago, as confirmed by this blog entry. To celebrate, we rode the Ferris Wheel again and reenacted a photo from our first visit.

2003

2013.

We were in a different gondola this time around, but Earl accurately remembered that we were in gondola 13 the first time.

We went to Harry Carey’s twice during the evening; the first time was for a beer and appetizer, the second time was for a beer and supper. In between our visits to Harry Carey’s we decided to go for a speedboat ride on Lake Michigan. There were actually two rides we could choose from: a 60 minute slow-moving haunted ride that was sold out (we would have been the last two on the boat) or a 30 minute speed high-speed boat ride making waves, jumping waves and making crazy turns in a speedboat.

We felt the need for speed.

The boat ride stopped twice to show off the skyline of Chicago, where the Sears Tower is still called the Sears Tower and Macy’s is still called Marshall Fields.

After the speedboat ride we went back to Harry Carey’s for the second half of our meal, where we posed with a potted plant. We figured it was a good way to start a new tradition on Navy Pier.

At the very least we plan on coming back in 2023 to sneak another kiss on the Ferris Wheel.