Normally, when we order out for fast-food pizza, we order from a Papa John’s franchise. We usually order a thin-crust pizza of some type.
Tonight, we decided to try the Papa’s Perfect Pan, the subject of much advertising of late.
We will not be ordering this particular pizza again.
What kind of pans are you running through that oven? When it comes to fast-food pizza, this version of the Pan Pizza can’t hold a candle to Pizza Hut’s venerable pan-style pizza. Not only in terms of taste, but for me, the latter evokes memories of college, and my comrades from ROTC, as a personal pan pizza and the salad bar, coupled with the largest iced tea possible, was our after-drill meal on Thursdays. Good stuff, and good pizza. For fast-food pizza, that is.
Papa, you’ve got something to learn from the Hut in this area.
Tag: rant
Yeah, it’s been up a few days, but I’m just getting to it, okay? John Gruber has come around, much as I have recently, to the notion of PowerBook-as-main/only-system, a concept Lee has been a proponent of for some time. John also has an in-depth review of the latest 15-inch PowerBook, outfitted just as I would like, with his usual attention to detail.
It’s Monday evening, and I’m still sore from the neighborhood tree planting from Saturday morning. Eleven ten-gallon trees to go in the neighborhood’s greenbelt area. Seventy homes, with an average of two adults per home. Seven people showed up, including myself. Yeah.
An interesting tip I picked up from No Plot? No Problem! shows an innovative use for all that spam that gets collected for me. This one writer keeps a list of names that show up in the From field of spam e-mails, so she always has a pool of character names to pull from. I really like this, since usually when I’m working on fiction, I can come up with two or three good character names, then I start really pulling stuff out of bodily orifices. A simple text document in BBEdit now has 305 names, one per line, and the built-in Kill Duplicates filter ensures I don’t have the same name twice.
Am I the only one that thinks the new “It’s the network” series of commercials for Verizon Wireless are actually more annoying than the old “Can you hear me now?” commercials?
Update: Okay, I am forced to admit to a redeeming quality of these commercials. Tom’s passionate defense of them as funny via IM made me laugh. “Perhaps goth angst doesn’t translate to Texan” has to be the IM quote of the day.
Alternative title: My Moron Moment of the Day
Of course, I have no one to blame but myself.
Each election cycle, Denton County, in its infinite wisdom, changes the polling place for our precinct, and apparently for all precincts in the county. This election was no different. So after finding out we would be voting at Bridlewood Elementary, I set off to vote.
I have passed by the Bridlewood development several times, but have never been inside. There is a golf club as part of the development, and part of the fairway parallels Bridlewood Boulevard. I followed my Yahoo! Maps directions, and turned off the main road to get to the school. After navigating a couple of turns, I find myself on Remington Park Drive, the street the school is on. I’m doing about 30, and slow to 20 when I hit the school zone, which starts near the top of a rise. As I begin to crest the rise, I see the school on my left, and a red sign with “Vote Here” in black and a large white arrow directing me in to the school’s parking lot. I come down the rise, put on my blinker, and turn left in to the school parking lot. Then I hear the “Whoop!” of the motorcycle’s cop siren. He does a single blast, and that’s enough to get my attention.
I pull over to one side of the aisle I’m on, wondering what I’m getting stopped for. It couldn’t be the school zone speed limit. I was doing twenty. I know I was doing twenty, because I’m fastidious about keeping it at twenty while in a school zone. Did I bump up to 22, maybe, coming down the rise? He’s going to give me a citation for that? These are the thoughts running through my head as he walks up to the window.
Driver’s license, insurance, I hand them over. He checks to make sure the insurance is current and hands the paper back. Then he asks if I know why he stopped me, and I tell him, no, I don’t. “You missed a stop sign back there, Mr. Turner.”
I did what?
Yep, never saw it. Sure enough, as I was leaving the school after I voted, there it was. Just on the down slope of that rise. I allowed my attention to laser-focus on the school and that “Vote Here” sign, and I totally missed the stop sign. (Stupid developer, putting a cul-de-sac right there in the middle of a down slope…)
So now I get to do the payment + defensive driving course (hopefully I can do the video version) thing, to keep this off my record and from affecting my insurance. It’s not good to be unemployed and broke, and have to cough up money because you were stupid. So again, totally my fault for not paying attention, and this voting experience could have been better.
On the totally geeky side of things, the officer had a handheld computer which allowed him to scan in my license info–thanks to the handy magnetic strip on the back–then punch in the violation, then I signed on the screen a la signing for a package from UPS or FedEx. He punched another button, and a paper version of the citation rolled out of the top. Nice to see the Town saving a little money by doing away with cases of duplicate/triplicate citations. I’m sure there’s a time savings, too, for the officer when he turns in the citations at the end of his shift. If I had to get a ticket, pretty nifty way to have done so.
It rains nine months out of the year in Seattle. So why oh why would you replace an aging dome with an open-air stadium? Collective stupidity?
(Alternative title: There’s an reason the word “anal” is in “analyst”)
Apple quadruples its profit, but the stock takes a ten percent-plus dive because the company “missed” the number of iPod sales stock analysts —who are not employees of Apple, do not sit on the Board of Directors, and who are not Apple executives— said they thought the company should have sold? They sold 6.4 million iPods in a three months. How many Rios did Creative sell in the last three months? Oh, that’s right, they canned that music player.
Hold on, it gets better.
Those same analysts, who are poo-pooing Apple for failing to sell as many iPods as the analysts thought they should have sold, seem to think Delphi is a good buy. No wonder monkeys are just as good at the stock market as these guys.
[With thanks to John Gruber, and Matt Deatherage and W.R. Wing on the MacJournals-Talk list.]
Attention Steve Levy and the rest of ESPN’s anchors:
USC did not win the national championship in 2003.
USC did not win the national championship in 2003.
USC did
not
win
the national championship in 2003.
The Trojans did not play in the BCS national championship game for the 2003 season. The BCS was created to determine a single national champion. For 2003, that national champion is LSU.
USC is not a two-time defending national champion. If you continue to insist they are, then I expect you to also refer to Auburn as a current defending national champion.
Note to self: do not join the clueless Authors Guild.
I echo Gruber’s sentiments regarding the decision of the Authors Guild to sue Google over Google Print. For one, an author can choose to exclude his work in a fairly simple process. Second, as an aspiring author, were I to publish a book, I would love to see it read by as many people as possible. If Google Print helped me accomplish that, so much the better.
My employed friends almost daily remind me of the travails of life in corporate America. I’d still like a job, thanks.
An unsolicited copy of the premier issue of Men’s Vogue arrived in the daily post.
What.
The.
Hell.
???