Month: July 2007

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GOOFY ERROR MESSAGES: Penske Trucks

A while back I needed to move some stuff from a storage facility in Atlanta to my home in Charlotte. I’d had pretty good luck with Penske in the past, so I went to their site to see what kind of trucks I could get.

I had some leeway about when I was going to move the stuff, so I played around with a lot of options to see what kind of prices I’d get. I got estimates for picking the truck up in Atlanta or picking it up here in Charlotte and driving it to Atlanta. I played with the dates, to try and see if I could get a cheaper rate on a Monday versus a Wednesday, for example. At one point, I accidentally entered the previous day’s date into the “pickup date” box, and received this humorous error message:

Penske Funny

OK, so the next time I need to rent a truck, I’ll be sure to visit Penske’s site 1,901 years before I actually need it!

(NOTE: I’m just having a little fun at Penske’s expense here. They’re a great company, and I have nothing but good things to say about them!)

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The first time I fell in love…

… was on September 14, 1984:

Madonna at the first VMAs

Interestingly, there is a story that appears in several Madonna biographies. It seems that “the president of a well-known record label” was in the audience that night. He (and we don’t know exactly who “he” is) is claimed to have laughed and said “well… her career’s over!” as soon as Madonna’s performance was done. Ironically, it was at that very moment that Madonna became a superstar. I guess I wouldn’t take any tips on the horses from that guy!

(In case you’re wondering why I posted this today… I was cleaning up an old folder of ‘cyberjunk’ this morning and came across this picture. It was originally a 1600×1200 bitmap (screencap) of a browser window from MTV’s “VMA Anniversary” site. The actual Madonna pic was embedded in a Flash presentation on the main page. I finally got around to cropping it and converting it to JPEG this afternoon.)

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MORE NEWS: Goldman Family Buys OJs Book, Gives It Funny New Title

And of course, as soon as I finish with the news, something hilarious comes over the wire:

The Goldman family (as in “Ron Goldman”, the guy that O.J. Simpson killed) has purchased the rights to O.J. Simpson’s book If I Did It and plans to sell the book as a means of partially fulfilling the financial terms of the family’s successful $33 million “wrongful death” suit against Simpson. Even better, the family plans to change the name the book from If I Did It to Confessions of a Double Murderer!

Read all about it here!

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News for 07/03/07

Hey hey everybody! It’s the day before Independence Day… so let’s do THE NEWS!

(In)famous Russian music site Allofmp3.com has finally shut down… don’t cry too much though, because they’ve already launched a replacement site: MP3Sparks.com. In fact, were it not for the new site’s radically different color scheme, you’d be hard pressed to spot the difference between the two sites. Why shut down one site, only to open an exact duplicate on the same day? Your guess is as good as mine. At least they didn’t sell out completely – unlike, say Fergie. The erstwhile member of the Black Eyed Peas has completely sold out to Candie’s (the shoe\clothing company). Sources say that the company will pay Fergie $4 million to “to promote their clothing line in her songs”. I guess something like this was inevitable – hell, Fergie’s already promoted Dolce & Gabbana and Fendi for free, so why not get some coin for dropping Candie’s name in her music? Still, I can’t help but find the whole thing distasteful. Actual product placements in music? What’s the world coming to?

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COOL WEB SITE: bookins.com

Bookins.com is a website that allows people to trade their old books with other book lovers all over the United States. Using Bookins is simple: just sign up for an account (a credit card is needed; I’ll explain why in a moment). You then gather up a bunch of old books and enter the ISBN* of each book into your Bookins “trade list”. When someone wants one of your books, you’ll get an email with a link that prints a free mailing label – all you have to do is print the label, put the book in an envelope, tape the label to the envelope and drop it in any mailbox!

Bookins uses a “points system” to asses how much your book is “worth” and to keep trades flowing. Each book you trade is worth a certain amount of points, depending on which version it is (hardback or paperback) and how in demand the book is. Each book you trade earns you points and each book you buy costs you points. Bookins will start you off with some amount of “introductory points” (I think it’s 20 points, but I could be wrong), but you’ll really need to trade a few books in order to keep buying books. Oh, and when you see a book you want to buy, Bookins charges you $3.99 for the book. This is to cover the postage costs and the upkeep of the Bookins site (you didn’t think they did this for free, did you?).

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My Favorite Firefox Extensions

One of the best features of Firefox is its support for extensions. Extensions are kind of like WinAMP plug-ins; they allow you to do everything from tweaking some of Firefox’s built-in annoyances to enhancing your web browsing experience by making life just a few clicks shorter. I’ve been meaning to post this list for some time, but thanks to the new site (and one helpful Firefox extension), it’s much easier to do now. Here’s a short list of some of my favorite Firefox extensions:

AdBlock Plus – My absolutely favorite extension, AdBlock Plus not only blocks 99% of the ads you’d see in your web browser, it also re-renders the page without any kind of placeholders for the ads. I’ve gotten so used to this extension that it’s almost jarring to use a browser on someone else’s computer. While the original AdBlock extension was great, AdBlock Plus has automatic updating of block lists built right in, so you always have the latest and greatest protection against annoying ads!

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