Dale Miller

The new phone books are here!


Today’s mail contained the Downey edition of my local telephone directory. The Windstream version is smaller and covers fewer communities.

I found it interesting that the Downey book has a numerical cross-reference, so if I have a number I can look up the name! It’s also amusing that for a directory that covers most of two counties, that cross reference is only 13 pages.

For those who don’t know, I tend to acquire Trivial Pursuit sets, though I don’t get to play as often as I would like. Having just been given a new one, I now have:

Standard form factor sets:

Genus
Genus III
Genus IV
Genus 5
25th Anniversary
Best of Genus
All American
The 1960’s
The Vintage Years (1920’s – 1950’s)
Disney – Animated Picture

Full sets, other form factors:

20th Anniversary
90’s

Supplemental card sets:

Genus II
All-Star Sports
Baby Boomer
RPM
Know-It-All
Way and Victory
Welcome to America
1980’s
Family (Disney)

Deluxe playing piece set

Anyone want to come over for a game?

Sometime last year I changed the prescription on my glasses. On the recommendation of my son, I stopped in at Success Vision on Financial Center Parkway to have new glasses made. I was quite pleased with both their service and their prices. About 3 months ago, I managed to crush my glasses, seriously bending the frames but not damaging the lenses. I carried in the pieces and they fixed them free of charge. On Thursday I carried them in again because one of the screws they had put in hadn’t held. I was told that the frames were not repairable, and the no longer carried that frame. I was then told to pick out another set of frames and the glasses would be replaced free of charge! I was flabbergasted. I have progressive lenses which aren’t cheap. If I hadn’t already been recommending their services to my friends, I certainly would now.

So, if you live in central Arkansas and wear glasses, you owe it to yourself to try Success Vision when you next need glasses.

Oh, and it’s also one-hour service.

I went to the Rep this evening to see Tommy. It was a thoroughly enjoyable performance. I had forgotten just how much I like some of the music in that show. I came home and headed for my albums to drop the soundtrack on the turntable. I was quite displeased to not be able to find it. That probably explains why I haven’t listened to it in years. I will be replacing it (sadly not on vinyl) very soon.

Back to the performance — I thought it was very nicely done. The staging was innovative and kept things moving along nicely. The costumes were fun, and the dance numbers were quite enjoyable. The closest I have to a complaint is that I would have preferred a bit more vocal on some of the numbers. I think that may be an oddity of my hearing, though. For some reason I tend to hear instruments better than voices, and it’s rather annoying.

I just had an encounter with a profession I thought was extinct — door-to-door-salesmen. Two men in a truck with a freezer in the back just drove up to my house to try and sell me frozen meat. They had a nicely printed brochure for “The Cattle Exchange” listing meat prices and contact information. After telling them that I wasn’t going to buy any today, I was told I could order from their website or call. The man then asked me for the brochure back. As I came back into the house I wondered how he thought I was going to order if I didn’t have information. I *think* I remembered the URL correctly, but there is no site there. A bit of research seems to indicate that they are a rather shady business. There can’t be much legitimate profit doing door-to-door meat sales in rural Arkansas during the day.

If anyone is interested in the early life of Dale, there is now an amazing amount of trivia available on Flickr.

It’s rare that good news comes via certified mail. It’s almost always something you don’t want to see. Yesterday, however, that was not the case. I received a letter from UALR that stated that I was able to maintain health coverage as a retiree. I was somewhat worried about the possibility of contract jobs, as they don’t have insurance, and COBRA only lasts 18 months. This gives me the ability to maintain insurance at reasonable rates indefinitely. Of course, it’s really only useful if I’m living in Arkansas, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Now I’m wondering if they will consider me a retiree for other functions…

I’ve taken on a new personal project — a self-portrait every day for a year. I’ve seen others do it, and it has the potential to be interesting. I’m sometimes bad at keeping up with projects requiring constant input, so we shall see what happens.

I thought about starting out with something interesting, arty, and provocative, but decided that if my first photo was excellent, I would be discouraged on those days I didn’t feel like producing a masterpiece. Thus, my first picture is rather bland and uninspired. I have nowhere to go but up.

Yesterday evening and this morning I was excited about going to the opening night of Movies in the Park. Early this afternoon when the rain rolled in and I started getting a headache I pretty much decided I was going to stay home. Around 4:00 when the sun came out and my headace went away at almost exactly the same time I decided it was a sign. I took a shower, got dressed, and headed into downtown. I wasn’t sure exactly where it was, so I parked and started walking around. While I was looking for the amphitheatre, Mark called. He volunteered to look up a map for me and discovered that the opening night show had been canceled due to weather. Ah well, I stopped by Home Depot on the way back home to pick up a few items on my “next time I’m in town” list, so the trip wasn’t a total waste. That will teach me to not check my Facebook mail before leaving the house.

I wanted to do something simple. I wanted to easily watch shows from Hulu.com on my HDTV. I have three ways to get a signal to the set: a Roku player, my Playstation 3, and the laptop, all via HDMI. The Roku is, of course, not an option since it only supports Netflix and Amazon. The PS3 sort of works. I can start playing, but if I pause the program for more than a few seconds it locks up, requiring a reboot. The laptop plays video beautifully, but if I’m driving the television fullscreen, I can’t do anything else. Any attempt to switch to another program drops the video back into a window.

So, I thought I would try another alternative — install Linux on the PS3 and use that. I followed all the steps for installation last night, but then was sidetracked. I discovered that I could load a Super Nintendo emulator and convince the SixAxis controller to act like a Nintendo controller. It wasn’t long before I was merrily playing Super Mario World and Yoshi’s Cookie on my PS3. Life was good.

Finally this morning I got back around to loading up Hulu in the browser. I was then told that I needed to load a flash player and was directed to the Adobe site. There I learned that their player isn’t compiled for PPC, only X86. So, I now have another way to *not* watch videos on my television.