Filed under: Life — at 1:25 am by jim

Last night I went to a sports bar with one of my friends to watch the Yankees-Red Sox game.  I’m a Yankees fan, and he’s a Red Sox fan… so one of us was going to leave happy.

Although the Yankees were 13 games behind Boston in the AL East before the game, this game was still very important on a psychological level.  If the Red Sox won, it would be yet another reminder of their dominance this season… and if the Yankees won, it showed that they still have what it takes to beat the Red Sox… something of a momentum shift.

So me and my buddy showed up at the sports bar, each of us wearing our respective team’s hat.  The moment I walked in the door, people were groaning.  One guy said, “Man, how could you actually cheer for the damn Yankees?”  Hey, it’s my team.

Throughout the game, it became clear that EVERYONE sitting at the bar with us was cheering for the Red Sox.  It’s not because they’re Red Sox fans.  A few people disclosed who they actually cheer for… there was one Mets fan, an Astros fan, and a couple of Braves fans… but that doesn’t stop them from hating the Yankees.  That’s just how it is… you either love the Yankees, or you hate the Yankees.  And if you hate them, then it’s your duty to swear and get pissed off every time they score a run or get a hit or pitch a strikeout.

So the whole game, I had to listen to a half-dozen guys get pissed off every time one of the Yankees did anything good.  And whenever the Yankees did something bad, people cheered louder than if we had just discovered the cure for halitosis or something.

However, things worked out in the end… the Yankees won.  w00t.

Filed under: Life, Cars — at 1:36 pm by jim

I installed the new radio last night… unfortunately, I didn’t get any pictures of the installation process.  It’s for the best though, because I ended up breaking the wiring harness while removing it from the old head unit.  It was actually only a little plastic retention clip that I broke, but I would have preferred if it stayed in one piece.

So far, I’m loving the new radio… it’s the best repair I’ve made on my car in a LONG time.  Not only is it nice to listen to music, but it’s also nice to NOT listen to the car’s various rattles.

Also, I think I somehow put it in European mode… AM stations increment in 8kHz intervals or something, rather than the usual 10kHz.  Fortunately, I never listen to AM radio.

Update: Here are the photos.

 

and without a flash… sorry it’s so blurry:

Filed under: Life, Cars — at 10:47 am by jim

After leaving Keasbey, NJ at 6:37am yesterday, my car’s CD player arrived in Kennesaw, GA at 11:49pm last night.  For those that are unfamiliar, Kennesaw is one of Atlanta’s suburbs.

I’m left wondering whether the FedEx package is travelling via air or ground transportation.  In 17 hours, the package travelled 880 miles (according to Google Maps).  That’s entirely possible, since the estimated trip time is just under 14 hours.

Additionally, FedEx packages that go through the airport will generally show a location south of Atlanta (by the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport).  Kennesaw is north of the city.  Hmmmm… not that it’s significant which way my package is delivered, but I’d be impressed if FedEx drove packages all the way from NJ to GA.  I’d also be impressed if FedEx bothered to drive the package almost 900 miles in one day.  I would have thought it would stop overnight at some other processing facility somewhere along the way.

However, I’m not complaining… this means that there’s a chance that I’ll have it by this weekend.  w00t.

Filed under: Life, Cars — at 9:53 am by jim

This past weekend, I finally bought something with some of the money from my tax refund.  After driving the BMW for the past six months with a broken radio, I finally purchased a new head unit.  I decided to go with a new BMW factory radio, rather than an aftermarket one.  There are several advantages to this:

1. The display on the BMW radio is the same color as all of the lights on my gauge cluster.  Most of the aftermarket ones use very bright blue lights.  This isn’t necessarily bad, but it’s just not what I wanted.
2. The BMW radio will just plug right into the stock radio harness.  With anything aftermarket, I would have had to get proper converter harnesses to connect it.
3. The BMW radio isn’t likely to be stolen out of my car.  With aftermarket, I’d have to make sure to remove the face plate every time that I leave the car.

The seller shipped it yesterday from New York, NY.  I was given a tracking number, so I’m now able to follow its movement online.  In 10 hours of travel yesterday, it went all the way from NY, NY to Keasbey, NJ.  It left Keasbey at 6:37am this morning, so I’m somewhat interested to see how far it goes today.  I’m pretty sure this is ground shipping, so I’ll be happy if the package gets all the way down to Maryland.

Filed under: Life — at 12:42 am by jim

So after a nice 11-hour work day, I’m here at home drinking some beers and watching the movie Torque. I’ve never heard of it, but it looks like it’s the motorcycle version of Fast and the Furious.

I missed the first minute or two, but it apparently starts with the main character Ford cruising through the desert on his motorcycle… he flies by a couple of guys that are driving some four-cylinder import tuner cars, and the guys get pissed that they’ve been beaten by a motorcycle. They eventually find him at a diner, where he mocks them for driving cars. Haha, those car owners, living with unnecessary luxuries like A/C and radios! Ford promptly busts out a can of whoop-ass on these two car-owning losers.

Next up, Ford and two other bikers are cruising along the desert highway… they do a couple of wheelies, just to show that they mean business. As they’re driving along, Ice Cube’s biker gang is chilling on the side of the highway, just relaxing and grilling up some food. You’d think I’m joking, but I’m not… they’re really using a grill along a highway in the middle of nowhere. Ice Cube’s gang chases down Ford and his two friends, and an argument starts about how Ford stole some of Ice Cube’s bikes. A fight almost breaks out, but it’s suddenly stopped when the cops show up.

After that narrow escape, Ford and his buddies drive into a biker town out in the middle of the desert. You’d expect the town to be populated by a bunch of grizzly, bearded, old biker guys on Harleys, but you’d be wrong. As any expert on motorcycles knows, these desert biker towns are filled with people in their 20s cruising around on crotch rockets. Additionally, the town has CHICKS IN BIKINIS!!! YES!!! BEST MOVIE EVER! The chicks in bikinis are just chilling in the town, earning money by washing people’s motorcycles. Just so you know, washing motorcycles requires lots of soapy water… also, the money from washing motorcycles goes towards boob jobs. Awesome.

Next up, the protagonist Ford walks up to a tent where some hot chick is selling motorcycle parts. As we learn from their conversation, Ford must have been dating this girl before he left for China because he was in trouble with the law. She’s pissed off that he left… and he’s unapologetic, because apologies are not part of biker culture. Just as they’re getting ready for a big argument, yet another biker gang shows up to start a fight with Ford. Much like with Ice Cube’s gang, the leader of this gang is pissed off that Ford stole some of this gang’s motorcycles too. Although he’s outnumbered, Ford survives based on his wit and charisma.

At this point, I’m only about fifteen minutes into the movie. It’s pretty late at night, but I may need to keep watching. This film may have no plot, but just give it a few years… Torque will have a cult following even bigger than the movie Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Filed under: Life — at 8:56 am by jim

I’m used to 40-hour work weeks.  It’s only on rare occasions that I ever have to put in late nights at work to meet a deadline… this week is going to be one of those occasions.

What makes this especially funny is that while I see this 60-hour week as a real test of my endurance, I have several friends who work that many hours almost every week… and then think of the people that hold down two jobs in order to make ends meet… I’m not sure how people can do that.

Regardless, I imagine I’ll be comatose by Friday.

Filed under: Cars — at 4:42 pm by jim

Back at the end of 2006, the EPA announced that they would revise their tests for calculating cars’ MPG Ratings.  As they explain it, the new numbers are a result of several factors, like faster speeds and the use of air conditioning.  The EPA also changed its practices because of the unreliable numbers they were getting for hybrid vehicles… there’s a wired.com article about it here:

http://www.wired.com/cars/futuretransport/news/2007/05/hybrid_mpg

The EPA web site also provides a comparison of old and new MPG ratings for previous model years.  I plugged in my 2001 Corolla CE, and it came back with a new estimated rating of 25/30.  The old rating was 29/33.  Since I do almost exclusively city driving in the Corolla, that 25mpg isn’t too far from the 22 or 23 that I usually get.  I don’t feel nearly as bad about the numbers now.

It’s worth a look, if you’ve been trying to figure out why your fuel efficiency numbers are so poor.

Filed under: Cars — at 3:11 pm by jim

It’s Friday afternoon.  I’m not at all in the mood to be here at work.  Plus I’m a little sleepy after having a big lunch at some Mexican restaurant.  What should I do to pass a little bit of time?

How about convincing my coworker Rick to snap a few sweet photos of my car from the top of the work parking deck!  Yeah, I had just washed Emmy this morning, so she was up for a short photo shoot.  Plus our parking deck offers the Atlanta skyline as an ideal background.

Here’s a few of the photos… the only modifications were some cropping and slight rotating:

Sweet.  By the way, Rick is willing to create a portfolio of artistic nudes for any interested attractive women.

Filed under: Life — at 3:49 pm by jim

Yesterday I took a Risk Management course that is being offered by my company.  This course is part of a curriculum to prepare employees for a future in project management.  Our instructor explained to us how we should identify, analyze, and monitor risks throughout a project’s life cycle in order to prevent them from derailing the entire project.

While talking about “identifying” risks, the instructor told us about a few different sources of risk, including personnel turnover, technology changes, and scope creep.  When we were on the subject of personnel turnover, I made one of my dumbest comments while on-the-job at GTRI.  It was effectively something like this:

“Well, let’s say that your project relies on the expertise of one specific person at GTRI… this individual is one of the only individuals in their field, like Computational Perception or something.  So what would happen if the person suddenly is unavailable mid-project, and they couldn’t complete the work?  Maybe the person becomes pregnant… how do you handle it?”

The instructor explained that prior to submitting a project bid, you can’t ask every female researcher whether she intends to become pregnant.  Everyone got a pretty good laugh out of it.

I quickly thought of a new example, and so I suggested that maybe it’s a researcher who had been talking about going back to school for a PhD soon, and you wanted to know how that would impact the researcher’s availability for this specific project… the instructor was able to give a more applicable answer, and we went on with the course.

However, whenever I become the manager of a project with a female researcher on it, I’ll remember the awkward example that I used in Risk Management class.

Filed under: Life — at 2:56 pm by jim

I went to lunch with a group of coworkers yesterday… one of the people at lunch is getting married on Saturday, and she confirmed that there will be an open bar at the reception… w00t!  That’s definitely good news.

The bride-to-be made it clear to everyone that we need to get our money’s worth out of this open bar.  For anyone who doesn’t know, often times an open bar is paid for up-front based on the number of guests and the length of time that the bar will be open.  So at the wedding, there might be 150 guests, and the bar will maybe be open for four hours.  Assuming that these numbers are correct, then the bride and groom will be paying for 600 person-hours of drinking.

The servers will then charge a fixed amount per person-hour, like maybe $10.  So for the whole reception, it would be $6,000 for the open bar… that’s regardless of whether each guest has one drink or ten drinks.

The bride told us that she’d consider it “breaking even” if each person has four drinks… I guess roughly one per hour.  However, she told me that I personally need to have eight drinks, in order to make up for our one non-drinking coworker… I accepted that responsibility.

But how much is eight drinks?  I mean, what would that do to my BAC?  With a quick Google search, I was able to find this BAC calculator on the University of Oklahoma Police Department’s web site:

http://www.ou.edu/oupd/bac.htm

This calculator definitely isn’t all-encompassing.  For example, it only gives 33 different drink choices… and I haven’t even heard of some of those drinks, like the “Harry Buffalo.”  That drink name actually has me a little bit scared… no OU frat parties for me.

Additionally, you can’t specify any more than eight drinks… and it has to be eight of the same drink.  Apparently the OUPD doesn’t realize that we alcoholics like to mix it up.  At least they have a warning at the bottom saying that it’s only a rough estimation.

But all those issues aside, it does give a very general idea of what eight drinks will do to me.  So I plugged in my weight (approximately 200 lbs), and I specified a “Highball” as the drink… a highball is just a liquor combined with a non-alcoholic mixer.

So anyway, if I have eight of those over the course of four hours, then my BAC% is APPROXIMATELY 0.11.  That’s 0.03 over the limit.  If I increase the time to five hours, then my BAC% is down to 0.09.  So maybe at six hours, I’d be down at the legal limit of 0.08.

Really though, the one thing that disappoints me is to see how the same amount of alcohol would affect somebody half my weight… eight drinks will send a 100 lb person all the way to the stratospheric level of 0.21!!!  Imagine the amount of money I could save on alcohol if I shed a hundred pounds.

Filed under: Life — at 1:42 pm by jim

The weekend went well.  Like I mentioned in the last post, I went with some coworkers on Friday afternoon to see Spider-Man 3.  My only issue with the movie was that it had many different sub-plots, so they couldn’t focus on any single one.

Saturday I was able to make it to two parties.  The first party had the pig roast… that was really awesome.  They had dug a small pit in the backyard, and it was walled in with cinder blocks.  The pig made for some good barbeque sandwiches.  Here’s a photo of some of the carved up meat:

Guess which part of the pig is on the bottom side of that pan… and here’s a photo of my friend Dan playing with the remains that were in the pit:

Delicious.  That party began slowing down around 5:00pm, so that gave me a chance to get to the second graduation party around 6:30.  My friend Greg graduated that day, and the party was at his house.  His father home brews, so I made sure to sample the beer a couple dozen times.  Here’s one of the party photos:

Good times.  Finally on Sunday, the big event was the Kickin Kids (my team) taking on the Kickin Nuggets in a friendly game of kickball.  We came away with the win, beating Kicking Nuggets 4-3.  I made several impressive plays out in left field, but I went 0 for 1 in kicking.  Here’s a snapshot I took of one of our All-Stars at the plate:

And then after the game, we celebrated down the street at Midtown Tavern.  Here’s a team photo from there:

Good job, team.

Filed under: Life — at 1:33 pm by jim

The weekend starts for me in another hour.  At that point, I’m going to watch Spider-Man 3 with some of my coworkers.  Don’t worry, people… I did some work last night until around 1:00am.  I definitely put in my necessary hours at the office.

I only have one hesitation about seeing the Spider-Man movie… no, I’m not worried about the quality of the movie itself.  Instead, I’m a little concerned because one of my co-workers had two chili dogs for lunch.  His digestive system is going to be a gas factory for the rest of the day.

Tomorrow’s plans are still up in the air for me at this point.  Georgia Tech was foolish enough to schedule their graduation ceremony on Cinco de Mayo, so that means twice as many parties on one day.  Already I’ve been invited to two graduation parties and two Cinco de Mayo parties.  Then at the end of the night, a group of friends plans to get together at Twisted Taco for some tequila and karaoke.  Note that “tequila” is Spanish for “devil water”, and “karaoke” is Spanish for “making an ass of yourself.”

I think I can actually attend almost all of the parties… in trying to piece together my schedule, I’m taking many factors into consideration.  These factors include:

• The quantity and quality of friends present
• The quantity and quality of alcohol present
• The quantity and quality of food present 
• The quantity and quality of women present

My plan-of-attack is to first hit the party with the best food, but nothing to offer in terms of alcohol or women.  Therefore, I’ll first attend a graduation party for a group of Georgia Tech guys… these guys know how to cook, plus they’ve announced that the party will have a pig roast in the back yard.

The second party on my list will probably be the second graduation party.  It’ll have some standard cookout food and a bunch of alcohol… but I’ll maintain pretty good behavior, since there will be many parents present.  This second party starts at 5:00pm, so I’m hoping to get there right around 6:00 or 6:30.  That gives the parents enough time to put down a few cervezas, so that they can loosen up and act less like parents.

Finally, the night plans will be a game day decision.  The two Cinco de Mayo parties both start around 8:00pm… right now I’m preferring one party, because the host has ordered the De La Hoya-Mayweather boxing match.  However, the other party has a lot of upside too.  It’ll have two kegs, plenty of friends, plus a couple of spare beds in case I put down too many tequila shots.

I’ll have my digital camera at some of these festivities, so expect to see a few photos posted on the blog on Sunday.

Filed under: Cars — at 7:38 pm by jim

Has anyone else seen the new Kia Spectra commercial, where the cars are basically involved in a game of musical chairs?  The people drive their Spectras in a circle around a bunch of parking spots… the music stops… and then the drivers all try to find an available parking spot.  In the end, there’s one less parking spot than car, and that person loses.

For some reason, I don’t like that commercial at all.  I think that Kia was attempting to give the message that the Spectra is a fun little car that handles pretty well… but instead, I just interpreted the commercial as saying that Spectra owners are reckless.  They’re all racing around a parking lot, coming within only a few feet of crashing into each other.

I guess it’s a little ironic, given that I autocross… and what is autocross, other than “racing around a parking lot”?  Anyway, what’s everyone else think about this commercial?

Filed under: Life — at 12:53 am by jim

Since getting the Corolla back last week, I’ve brought it to three different auto body shops to get estimates on the cost of the repair work. There really wasn’t much thought put into which shops I’d visit… the key criteria was to find places located in the three-mile stretch between my condo and my work building. This definitely wasn’t the same strategy I would use if the damage happened on my BMW.

Anyway, onto the estimates… two of the shops actually gave me the exact same estimate on the work. They both said that “it’ll buff out”, and the cost would only be $50… for the sake of full disclosure, one shop actually said $50 to $60. Additionally, they both said that if I dropped off the car in the morning before work, the car would be ready for pick-up by the end of the day.

And the third shop? Well, they were a little more formal with their repair estimate. They gave me an itemized list of repairs… I have it here, only modified to remove some white space and to protect the identity of the the repair shop:

WHAT??? $926.12??? WTFASLBBQ?!?!?! That’s almost one-fourth the value of the whole car! And all they’re doing is cleaning up some scratches on one door!

If you look closely at the itemized list, they’re doing a bit more than just buffing out the scratches. By the end of the repair, I’d imagine that the whole left side of my car will look like it just came off the factory assembly line.

So what makes this repair cost so much? Well, they’re removing both left doors and the back-left quarter panel… then they’re also removing the windows and the trim pieces from the doors, so that they don’t overspray onto these parts. Note that all of the operations labelled “R&I” are “remove & install”, which is basically removing and re-installing trim pieces. Then with Item #1 alone, they’re spending four hours repainting the doors and quarter-panel.

And why do they want to repaint three panels, when only one was really scratched? As they explained, my Corolla has a semi-metallic paint on it… if they don’t blend the paint on the adjoining body panels with the back-left door, then there will be a noticeable difference in the paint. I’m imagining that if the sunlight caught it at exactly the right angle, then the reflectivity of the paint will slightly different. All this is worth the extra $876.12.

Seriously… they must not have noticed the two big dents on the right side of the car, or else they would have realized that I don’t want the left side to look so good. If they made the left side side of the Corolla look that nice, then the right side of the car might secede out of jealousy. Since I wouldn’t want that to happen, I’m going to get the $50 “it’ll buff out” job.

So what’s the lesson learned from all of this? If you want to make a lot of money, then open up a very formal, professional auto body shop. I’m sure that I could already do the “R&I” work without any additional training… that’s just screwing and unscrewing some parts. And on my Corolla repair, it accounts for 6.1 of the 11.6 body labor hours. At $38/hr, that’s $231.80! Yeah… I’m gonna be rich.

Filed under: Life — at 7:20 pm by jim

Tax Day was only two weeks ago, and already I have received my state and federal refunds. The first order of business was to pay off my credit card.

After doing that, I still have $550 of refund money left over. There are a lot of options for what I could do with it. For example, I could put it into a Certificate of Deposit (CD) at my bank, and I’d probably earn about 3% interest on it… or I could repay $550 of my student loans, so I’d be six months closer to having those paid off.

But those ideas are too practical… I’m still young, so I need to go waste my money on something fun. Here are a few ideas that seem really appealing:

• Buy a Nintendo Wii
• Buy a guitar
• Buy a new computer
• Get a plane ticket to Vegas, and gamble away the rest of the money
• Have a keg party

Those are just a few ways to spend the money… they’re not necessarily the Top 5, but rather just the ones that came to mind.

What do you think I should buy for myself? And if you had an extra $550, what would you spend it on? Let’s hear some ideas.

Filed under: Life — at 10:03 am by jim

We’ve all heard that phrase said before… someone’s car is involved in an accident, and they hope that the damage will just “buff out”. It doesn’t even matter how minor or major the accident is. There could be metal exposed from under the paint, and people will still hope for the damage to “buff out”.

For example, I had a friend who scraped her car along a brick wall one time… she just did a real poor job of making a turn around the wall. Both of the driver-side doors were bent in a little bit, and there was a scratch for about four feet down the side of her car… and she bothered to ask, “Do you think it’ll buff out?” I told her, “Yeah… the indentation in your door will buff out. By applying some wax to the car, it’ll return the doors back to their original shape.” She said, “Oh, really?” No… not really.

If I had to guess, I’d say that you can buff out the damage only about 0.1% of the time. It only works if your own paint wasn’t actually damaged, and some paint/residue was just rubbed on top of it from the other car or object in the collision.

Why am I telling you all of this? If you recall, I mentioned that I was lending the Corolla to some friends for a couple of weeks. I got it back yesterday, and it looks like it was involved in a game of bumper cars. Nothing too bad… my friends left it parked overnight on the side of the driveway at the house where they were staying. In the morning, the homeowner was backing out of the driveway to go to work, and she ended up side-swiping the Corolla.

First off, note that it was a female driver. That’s always important.

The damage to my Corolla was a two-foot scrape on the rear driver-side door. The scratch started right at the front of that door, and it extended back to the fender for the rear wheel. It looked pretty bad… the only saving grace was that the door hadn’t been dented at all. I figured that the whole door would probably need to be sanded down and then re-painted. The cost isn’t much of a concern, because the driver of the other car already said she’d pay… however, I figured it would probably be about $200 to $250.

So when I got the car home last night, I figured I’d wash it and wax it. This would help make the scratch more visible, so that a body shop could then give a more accurate estimate.  Additionally, the car probably hasn’t ever been waxed since it was made, so I figured this was well overdue.
Unfortunately, I didn’t take any “before” photos. However, this is how the door looks after waxing it:

The red circle is the area that’s scratched. What you see in front of the door handle is just a reflection off the car. Here’s a close-up of the scratched area:

That’s probably about a 3″ long scrape. And lastly, the very front of the door:

That’s the only really bad part… the thin scratches there are about 6″ long.

At this point, I’m having mixed feelings… on the one hand, I’m happy that the damage isn’t as severe as it originally looked. Some of it actually DID buff out. On the other hand though, I’m not sure if it’s even worthwhile to have the door re-painted. After all, I have worse damage on other parts of the car.

I’ll still get an estimate for the repair… but once I get a check from the woman to cover the damage, I’m not sure if I’ll use it to fix the car or to buy a Nintendo Wii. That’ll be a tough choice.

Filed under: Cars — at 2:49 pm by jim

I’ve seen this posted on a few different car forums on the internet… a Porsche GT3 was totalled at an autocross event this past weekend.  Some photos are posted up here:

http://forums.vwvortex.com/zerothread?id=3197431

Apparently the owner of the GT3 allowed one of his friends to do a “fun lap” around the course… certain SCCA regions (not including the Atlanta region) allow fun laps at the end of the day, during which your lap time doesn’t count in the results.  This gives people a chance to try different things, like driving a different line on the course, or driving someone else’s car to see how it handles.  This is especially useful if they have the same car model as you, but they’ve changed certain components, like the suspension or the strut bar or something.

Anyway, the guy was just driving the Porsche for fun… supposedly he was used to driving a car with an automatic transmission, and the GT3 had a manual transmission.  When he went to step on the brakes at the end of the course, he instead stepped on the clutch.  So the car didn’t slow down, and it plowed into a bunch of parked cars.  Overall, it’s probably about $200K in damage.

This makes me a little more hesitant to ever let a friend co-drive my M3 at an autocross… there’s about a 0.0001% chance of anything happening, but I don’t want to be that 1 in a million.

Filed under: Life — at 4:43 pm by jim

It looks like we’ll have beautiful weather for the next week or so in Atlanta… so rather than bringing your car to a car wash, why not wash it yourself? I just did it yesterday… this was the process I followed in order to guarantee a great shine.

First, I gathered all of my supplies.

You’ll notice that I have sunscreen, beers, and car wash materials. Once I had gathered everything together, it was time to actually get to work. Here are the steps taken:

1) Apply sunscreen.
2) Drink a beer.
3) Wash and dry the car.
4) Drink a beer.
5) Apply the first coat of wax.
6) Drink a beer.
7) Remove the first coat of wax.
8) Drink a beer.
9) Apply the second coat of wax.
10) Drink a beer.
11) Remove the second coat of wax.

See, doesn’t that sound easy?  I applied two coats of wax, but that’s because I use a two-stage car wax product.  Some brands of wax will call for three coats… some will call for only one… the brand of wax you choose will depend on a lot of factors, like how much money you want to spend, how much time you’re willing to spend waxing, and what sort of results you want.  It took me about 2.5 hours total to wash and wax the car, and I’m very happy with the end result.

Filed under: Life — at 11:16 am by jim

If you use cell phone text-messaging often, then you’ve probably used T9 to send some of your messages.  Some services use another name for it, like iTap or something… but basically, it’s predictive text.  It’s faster than standard alpha input, and there’s not too many intersections of words… sometimes it’ll say “on” when I want “no”… or “he” when I want “if”… but when you’re typing words that have six or seven letters, it’ll get the right word.

Well, today I’ve been text messaging one of my friends to discuss dinner plans.  We’re going to the restaurant Eats, and I wanted to give an estimate on how many Eats jerk chicken plates I’ve had in the last few years… for anyone that cares, the estimate was 150 jerk chicken plates since January 2003.

So I typed out my message and hit Send… a minute later he responded back with “slaves?”  Huh?  Why would he write “slaves”?  I went back and looked at the message I had sent him… “Since then, I’ve probably had about 150 jerk chicken slaves.”

Slaves?  I looked at the keys I had hit for “plates”… they were correct.  7-5-2-8-3-7.  And what’s the keys for “slaves”?  7-5-2-8-3-7.  OK, so there’s an intersection there.  What I wanna know is why “slaves” is the top choice.  Does the word “slaves” get used more often in conversation than “plates”?  Maybe it’s because I live in Georgia… I guess I wouldn’t mind having 150 jerk chickens as slaves.  I could make the chickens do my bidding.

Anyway, this is the weirdest T9 behavior I’ve seen… what T9 weirdness have you guys seen?

Filed under: Life — at 2:47 pm by jim

In case you somehow missed it, today is tax day.  Get that Form 1040 submitted.