Al's Blog-o-Sphere

I love my new cell phone. It’s finally a fairly modern phone. I mentioned it here recently, the LG VX-9100 aka. ENV2.

But I have one problem with it. I keep dialing random numbers with it when it is in my pocket. Sometimes, it even treats them as a redial or gets into the directory. That’s the worst, because it calls real numbers and real people!

If I’ve called you and you heard nothing but background, or worse, heard whatever I was doing at the time, please accept my apologies for anything I said! One friend called me back to let me know it was happening and we laughed about it, because her son did the same thing all the time. Continue Reading…

It was the worst of times, it was the best of times…

The starting line of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities sure fits here.

Yesterday, after we got done with Al’s business at the hospital, we went out to see if we could get some shopping done. I was looking for a certain type of specialty store that Santa has sworn me to secrecy over, so I won’t mention it, other than that.

We did a little research on Google and found two shopping malls in or near Pittsburgh that we thought were worth a try. The first was across the river on the south shore and the other one was a few miles further away, but still not that far. Continue Reading…

The television industry is once again, treating you as nothing but a consumer cash-cow, an open wallet for them to reach into.

I was indulging in one of my guilty pleasures, watching My Name Is Earl. I can’t help it, it’s such a stupid comedy, yet the characters are so endearing and when you come down to brass tacks, it’s really about someone doing the right thing, even if how it gets done is pretty ridiculous at times.

But tonight’s episode crossed a line, selling out bigtime to advertising and product placement. In the show, Joy, Earls’ ditzy Ex, sees a commercial on TV with Jane Seymour pushing some diamond necklace. Later she has a dream about it and sees Jane in her medicine cabinet. Seymour tells her that she has to disprove the theory of evolution so that she can have her own diamond necklace.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t about creationism to me. I think it’s hilarious that Joy sets out to disprove Darwin’s theory by putting a fish into an aquarium and putting food up on a rock. She says that if the fish grows legs and climbs up on the rock, then Darwin was right. The only problem is, she’s so stupid, she doesn’t know a pollywog from a fish and it does grow legs!

Continue Reading…

A conversation on the Reason talk show on WECK this morning about the trouble someone had getting Verizon to honor an offer they mailed to potential FIOS customers reminded me of a recent phone adventure with DirecTV.

I had DirecTV installed a year ago and they threw in all kinds of extras for the first year. But the year is now up and I’m paying full price for everything now, so I’ve been watching the bill a little closer than usual. I opened my last bill and was shocked. Continue Reading…