Wayne D's Blog

I'm on the search committee, was supposed to run an ad in the local paper and forgot. Now a month has passed and our interim organist is only around until the end of December. Details athttp://www.stpaulslutheranchurch.com/organist.php. If you know anyone who would be interested please pass this on to them. The paper charged us $217 for a small ad that will run in three editions over a week, I thought that was a bit excessive. Does anyone have any suggestions on where else would be a good place to advertise?

On a completely different note, we updated the sitemap on our company website almost a month ago and Google has stubbornly refused to get it and replace the cached version it has from mid-September. Maybe if I throw a reference to it in here the inscrutable Google robot will be spurred to action.

Yikes, I was hoping to write something earlier today but between updating the Argonotes website and driving my youngest back and forth to Timberwolves I just ran out of time. I decided I dash off a quick entry before I headed off to bed.


I love CBC radio but they can be so infuriating sometimes. This summer they ran a show called Socket that showcased young, inovative Canadian artists. I didn't bother to bookmark any of the links on the website because I never dreamed that when the series ended the CBC would remove the webpage. Guess what, they did. I guess they decided the 100k or so of disk space it took up would be better utilized by a video clip. The three artists that were most memorable were the ones who:

1. Asked women about their panties.
2. Took pictures of herself sitting on discarded furniture.
3. Took pictures of the grafitti in bathroom stalls and juxtaposed the graffiti with pictures of women feet and shoes taken under the partition.

Of those three I could only find on the web again the last one, her name is Jessica Bushey and you can see samples of her work here.

I must be getting old, I can't remember what I was planning to make my next rant. I was goign to rant on Yahoo video because they had decided to use a player that required Flash version 8. This was going to be tied into a rant against Adobe for not supporting Flash 8 on Linux but then I found out that Adobe was releasing a Linux version of their next Flash version and were working hard to get it to beta test at the same time as the Windows version. They almost had them released simultaneously, I've got the beta running and it is working great so far.

I could rant about the driver who can't wait for traffic to clear and turn left onto the single lane that I have to turn right onto when I come home from work but I think I already complained about them before. Impatient buggers! A pox on them all.

Internet Explorer 7 is out. Yawn. Firefox has supported tabbed browsing for over two years. I hear that the next version of Firefox will do spellchecking in browser text entry boxes like the one I am using to write this posting. Finally I'll be able to spell check these things along with the email I write using Yahoo's new email client. I can't understand why Yahoo hasn't bothered to implement spell checking, their web based email client did it so the technology isn't new to them. I know I've mentioned it before but the lack of spell checking still bothers me.

I'd really like to be able to save this thing in draft mode so I can enter something more before I post it but Yahoo hasn't added support for that either so it goes it the way it is. I promise, no rants next time.

A word of advice, I went camping at Warsaw Caves two weekends ago and we found a broken, discarded hardwood chair in the dumpster that burned with a nice hot flame. No matter how cold it is you should keep your rubber soled shoes a safe distance from the fire. My feet were toasty warm even though my shoes were damp from tramping through the woods in the rain but when one shoe started smoking I realized that it might be a little too close to the fire. It's only slightly melted on the bottom. Good thing it was my old shoes and not the new ones. One of the hiking trails at Warsaw Caves crosses what they call  a limestone plain. It was amazing how the trees managed to take root in the cracks on what is really just a really, really big flat rock.

I generally don't watch a new TV show during it's first season. I have been disappointed in the past when I really got to like a new show only to have it cancelled. I warned my wife but she decided to show caution to the wind and watch Smith, it was cancelled after three episodes. This year I decided to break my rule decided to start watching Studio Sixty on the Sunset Strip. I really liked The West Wing and Studio Sixty if from Aaron Sorkin who also created The West Wing. I wasn't disappointed, it's a great show but I have been reading that the rating have dropped in each of the three weeks it's been on the air. Evidently NBC has ordered a firm thirteen episodes.


I watched CSI:Miami for a little while when it first started but soon tired of  David Caruso's  constant intensity. Kim Delany couldn't stand it either and bailed after 10 episodes. The final straw was when Emily Procter left the show at the end of the second season. I was a fan of hers when she was on The West Wing but even she couldn't moderate the glowering Caruso enough to make the show watchable for me.


I would like to urge you to give Studio Sixty a test watch. Try watching two episodes, it may take you a while to warm up to the characters. If you are Canada and have access to a U.S. proxy server you can download the previous episode and watch it at your leisure on your PC. If not learning how to use a peer to peer program might be worth your while. If you have no other reason to watch at least tune in to see how they hide Amanda Peets rapdily expanding midriff. The wardrobe gyrations remind me of Shelley Long and Rhea Perlman on Cheers hiding behind trays and the bar during their pregnancies.


On a side note, Sting was on this week's show performing music from his new album "Songs from the Labyrinth". Very nice, give it a listen if you get a chance. The NPR website has a interview and some song samples here.

Or it takes them a while. A few weeks ago my wife forgot to watch Survivor and went to the U.S. network website to watch the show she missed. Unfortunately when someone from outside the U.S. ties to access the U.S. network site they get a message saying that only residents of the U.S. can watch. Peer to peer networks have been full of TV shows for quite some time and the U.S. TV networks have responded by either making there shows available for purchase from itunes or for free on their websites. For most shows Canadian's have the option of either finding out how to set up a U.S. proxy or learning how to use peer to peer to get the content. The Canadian rights holders are encouraging people to take the effort to learn how to bypas the legal content distribution channels by not providing one. In the process they are missing the opportunity to market to these viewers. If people get used to downloading their content from the Internet they won't bother to video tape the shows they want to watch  and viewer numbers will decrease. Less viewers means less money from advertisers.


SunTV in Toronto was showing season two of Veronica Mars over the summer. They decided to skip the last four episodes of the season to allow them to start showing the season three episodes in sync with the U.S. network. What do you fans of the show thought of that? On their website they say they will show the remaining episodes at some undetermined time in the future. The funny thing is that they doubled up on shows, showing two episodes on consecutive nights when they first started broadcasting season two but decided not to do that at the end of the season leaving the story arc for the season unresolved. How many people do you think ended up downloading those episodes?


It should be easier to buy what you want to watch than to steal it.

Bugger, I wrote half of this thing and Seamonkey crashed before I saved it. Let's see if I can remember what I wrote.


Last Sunday my brothers and sisters and their respective families went to Lonestar for lunch to celebrate my two oldest sons confirmation. The woman who led us to our table told us that our server's name was Corona. When Corona came to take our drink order I couldn't resist asking her whether her mother had called her Corona. She replied, not surprisingly,  that Corona was her server name. I didn't ask but I wondered if the wait staff in the restaurant adopted server names to protect their privacy, whether the company wanted them to use a name that reflected the Tex-Mex theme of the restaurant, whether the company recycled their uniform jerseys when staff turned over or whether it was just easier to not reprogram the restaurant's food and beverage system with new names. I guess I'll never know, irregardless, Corona treated us very well and we had a great time.


For the past ten years or so I have been playing NTN trivia on Tuesday nights with a bunch have guys that has remained pretty much constant over the years. Since I started we have had to change bars once due to an ownership and them change, before I arrived I think they changed bars a couple of times. One of the side effects of going to the same place every week is that you get to know the bar staff by name. The Tuesday after my visit to Lonestar I was late because I had a meeting at the church. In our rush to get everyone organized and off to lunch on the Sunday we had neglected to take the flowers from the alter that had been given to us to commemorate the boy's confirmation. I put the flowers in the car and headed straight to the bar.


When I arrived I decided to bring the flowers in with me and distribute them. On my way in I gave one to the security guy and the manager on duty whose names I will omit to protect their privacy. The security guy gave the flower he picked, which was a daisy, to one of the wait staff who was also our server for the evening. She took my beer order and when she came to the table to deliver it she was wearing the daisy in her hair. I asked her whether the name she gave us when we asked was her real name or her server name. Over the years we have found that when you treat the people who bring your food and drink like human beings they really appreciate it. I was surprised to find one night that another group who had been coming to the bar for at least three years didn't bother to For a second she looked at me as if I was from the moon before saying "of course it's my real name". I quickly explained the story of Corona and she decided that she was going to take Daisy as her server name. The other female server who was working that night took her flower into the kitchen to give to one of the cooks. She then came back and asked if she could have another one because the other guy in the kitchen was jealous because he didn't get one.


The moral of the story, if you aren't going to bring the wait staff flowers at least take the time to call them by name, and if they treat you well, tip them appropriately. To compliment the daisy theme of this posting I have included a couple of daisy pictures. If you are reading this on www.wdawe.com you have to go here to see the other daisy picture. To ensure there is no misunderstanding, the picture of Daisy to the right is Daisy Fuentes not Daisy the server.