The Story of My Stolen Honda

I left you hanging. Sorry about that.

Thanks to all my Facebook and Twitter friends who tweeted or shared the call for help recovering my vehicle over 5,000 times.  That was so awesome.

So here’s how it happened.  Remember when I tweeted that my honda was stolen around two months ago?  Well the car was recovered and all is well in the world.  However, the story behind its disappearance are still irking me.  Here’s how it happened, all nice and bulleted.

My 1998 Honda Accord was parked at our condo.  The car was parked legally in a parking spot paid for by our association dues.

  • I went to Chase‘s softball game with a bunch of friends one night and came home to an empty parking spot, where my car used to be parked.
  • I called a few tow truck companies, none had the car (including Tiger Towing).
  • I called the police and asked if my car had been towed. They say no and send over an officer.
  • I open the door to a very nice officer who states “If your car was parked there and it isn’t anymore, it was stolen. For a car to be towed I would have to authorize it and I have not authorized any tows in this area. I’m sorry to say but your car has been stolen.”
  • I filled out the stolen vehicle report.
  • I called my insurance and filed a claim, they offered me a rental while recovery was attempted.
  • I waited several days.
  • I got a voicemail from State Farm saying at this point they see the car as gone for good, began to setup a payout on the value.
  • I received a phone call from the Columbia Police Department.
  • I am accused of falsely reporting a car as stolen! Officer on the phone says the car was stolen towed a week ago from my property by Tiger Towing (who denied a week ago that they had towed my car)
  • I call Tiger Towing, “Oh yeah, we have your car. We’ve had it for about a week.”
  • I am informed that the car was towed for being “illegally parked on private property.” Property that we own, parked 100% legally.
  • I pay the towing fee.
  • I pay the storage fee.
  • I am given a $15 ticket from the City for parking illegally. WTF?! WTF?! WTF?! WTF?!
  • I pay Custom Complete Auto to fix my car back up to where it was before the tow.
  • I send the car away to Texas. It has been too bad of luck for me.

In the matter of a few years that car has been stolen twice, broken into twice, vandalized three times, had three transmissions (two were defective) replaced… I loved that car but it had the absolute worst luck.  For me.

When my parents came into town for my graduation, they kindly took the car back to Texas to sit in our garage. Whenever my parents visit America they will use it instead of a rental car.  Here’s to hoping the bad luck I’m cursed with doesn’t continue to plague that car.

So there you go. The story of my stolen Honda.

Hoodie-Footie Snuggle Suit!

Be honest, how many of you are buying one of these?  Don’t be shy, you know you want one!

Warning #1: Don’t wear while walking on hard wood floors, you will slip to your death.
Warning #2: Don’t wear while walking on carpet, you will certainly electrocute yourself & possibly a loved one.
Warning #3: Don’t wear outside.  You are certain to get shot, if not by me, by some other do-gooder.

Warning #4: _________________________ Submit in the comments!

Letter to United Airlines

I feel the need to open up about a few things on my flight from Washington DC to Paris.

First off, United. I know we’re in an economic crisis but if you could update your Boeing 777s, that would be great. Here are a few of my, why the hell, thoughts.

Why the hell…

  1. Don’t you have standard power outlets for everyone on the plane. I’ve ridden busses with more amenities.
  2. Don’t you have wifi on your airplanes. If a budget airline like Southwest and Virgin can handle it, I’m pretty sure and old, established and relatively premium outlook like you guys could swing it. Hell, for a flight this long I’d pay as much as $50 for access to high speed Internet access. I’m really only asking for 512kbps here.
  3. Do you have your seats so close together that if the person in front of my leans back, I can’t see my little video screen, use my food tray or even THINK of using my laptop comfortably.
  4. Are your headphone outputs boosted so much? I know I have high quality, high sensitivity Klipsch headphones but even my Sennheiser headphones with higher impedance could barely handle it.
  5. Did my video screen, audio, map, light, flight attendant call, volume, channel, brightness control module die? I’m stuck looking at a over bight map, playing way too loud pop music, in the dark.
  6. Did you make the aisles so thing, the space between chairs so narrow and the seats so flimsy? I know this is more of a Boeing and economics question but, seriously. If I can feel the every move of the people in front and behind me. If someone walking down the aisle means I get rammed into, we’ve got problems.
  7. Aren’t there rules on who gets to fly on these planes. I know this one is a little silly but if people can’t mind themselves, stay at home. If you feel the need to constantly move your chair up and down, talk loudly to no one in particular, go to the lavatory every thirty minutes or any other absurdly annoying habit… Stay at home. I don’t want to deal with your issues and France certainly doesn’t either.
  8. Aren’t there warm cookies?
  9. Would you choose these color schemes?
  10. Wouldn’t you tell me about the above so I could have known to fly Air France or British Airways?

Ah, but it isn’t all bed. My seat is comfortable, despite the seemingly epileptic person sitting in front of me. The person next to me keeps to himself. The cabin temperature is just perfect. Oh and best of all, my flight attendant is the definition of a beautiful French man. He’s very nice, attentive and fabulously dressed.

Oh, and thanks for creating Business Class so that most of that stuff above doesn’t pertain to me anymore.

Cheers!

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Interview with a Palinite

This brings the lulz and then brings the ahhgeeze.

On November 20, 2009, Sarah Palin visited Columbus, OH as part of her book signing tour for “Going Rogue.” When her supporters were asked broad questions about why they why they thought she should be president, the responses were vague: She’s “real.” She’ll “stick up for America.”

THERE ARE UNINFORMED OBAMA SUPPORTERS, TOO
It has been said in comments that we would find similarly talking point-driven, substance-less supporters at an Obama rally, and we agree. But no politician has emerged on the national stage as undefined and unqualified as Sarah Palin, and her public persona–which is anti-intellectual by definition–discourages substance. Instead, we get winking. One could hardly imagine her giving a complex speech about race in America, or speaking eloquently about our country’s relations with Islam. Not just because she couldn’t write such a speech (Obama has speech-writers, of course) but because she wouldn’t–such necessarily academic discussion is antithetical to the persona she’s created for herself and that her supporters have come to love.

CHERRY-PICKING
As for accusations of cherry picking, which are commonly thrown at interview-based videos, it simply isn’t what we did. We interviewed only a few more people than ended up in the video, not hundreds, and what was cut was done for time purposes. The people were selected at random–some offered to be interviewed–and we were only there for about 90 mins (it gets dark early and fast in Ohio right now). What didn’t make it into the video was just more footage of people talking generically or about taxes/spending, drilling, and abortion, and we constructed blocks in the piece to represent those issues. Of course the piece was edited to be entertaining (this is YouTube, after all, where the currency is cat videos) but we don’t believe we misrepresented the attitudes of the people at that signing in any way.

This NEW LEFT MEDIA film was produced and edited by Chase Whiteside (interviews) and Erick Stoll (camera).

DONATE:
Donations to New Left Media will go toward the production costs of future videos. Any contribution, no matter how small, will go a long way in keeping us online.
http://bit.ly/nLOdU (will take you to PayPal)

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Disqus the Frustration

Sad about it but my Disqus is still not working properly.  Only maybe a hundred or so of the comments actually imported.  As you can see in the screenshot below, the “latest” fourteen comments came in over the last two years.  Now, I know my blog isn’t BoingBoing.net or LifeHacker but I’ve gotten more than fourteen comments over the last two years.

Disqus Comment Moderation Panel

So, where do we go from here? How do we get the missing 1,500 comments imported?  How do I active posting a comment on an older post?  Yeah, another problem I just came across.

While I’m sure this is just a setting issue, I sure can’t find it.  That option is unchecked in WordPress and I don’t even see it as an option in Disqus.  Help?  I don’t want to poke and poke Disqus but I’d really like this to work.  I’m pay for Disqus, I like the platform that much.  But if this is how it’s going to work for, maybe I’ll look again for another option. JS-Kit Echo?  Any other suggestions of where I should send my comments should Disqus never work properly?

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You Are a Terrorist

Knowing that these sort of people are in the world make me fear walking out the door.

Of course, after they day I had today… Knowing I haven’t gone this crazy was about the only thing to make me smile.

Furthermore, I’m pretty sure Kanye West is about 90% of the way to this level of crazy.  Seriously, his antics on the MTV VMAs were pretty horrendous.

What a crazy day tomorrow, time to get some sleep.  Enjoy the audio on the right, turn down the speakers, sit back and enjoy some crazy bitch yelling at a, really nice, telemarketer.  Hilarity.

Enjoy

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Not Bjango’s Fault

Bjangos iStat for the iPhone

I have gotten so fed up with Apple‘s App Store approval process and the people that review all the products in the iTunes Music Store.  The latest comes with Bjango’s latest release of iStat for the iPhone.  Definitely one of my favorite apps, it not only provides you with vital information about the state of your iPhone, it also had this nifty feature that let you clear up wasted memory.

Apps on the iPhone have a terrible tendency for memory leaks and not really quitting when you return to the home screen.  The solution?  Either force quit every app on your iPhone/iTouch, restart the device or use this nifty app to clear up the wasted memory.

In the last few months we’ve seen all sorts of crazy going on in the iTunes App Store.  Most notably, the GoogleVoice application being rejected and all other Google Voice applications from third parties actually being KICKED out of the store.

The newest thing to itch Apple is this amazing feature in iStat that clears up memory leaks.  What’s more, I can’t tell you how many Apple Genius’s that have told me or other Apple Store customers to install iStat which has this nifty feature.  Restarting an iPhone takes minutes and in this world of living for the instant, seconds to minutes isn’t an acceptable wait period.

So when I went to the App store today to check out what’s new, I decided to see how Bjango was storming the latest App Store Storm.  I learned about this issues at least a week before Bjango made the change in their app and took the proper measures to prevent losing this incredibly useful feature.

Here’s the App Store customers’ reaction, to vote the app one and two stars and in their reviews bitch to Bjango about the lack of a memory feature and demanding refunds.  Nevermind the actions taken by Bjango to prevent this backlash.

Click for More of this Image

And then, my response as a review in the store.

They warned you ahead of time on their site and in the App Store.

They even have on their website a way to get your old version of the app back if you actually read the site ahead of time, and perhaps afterwards.

This is a fantastic application that does everything it says it does.  It’s a shame that Apple decided the memory clearing feature needed to be removed, yes, but rating an application poorly because of something Apple has done is not fair.

Furthermore, they held a vote for their customers on how to handle this issue.  Two options were proposed, update the app and lose the memory feature or create a new application that customers would have to buy, all over again, that would have the new features and leave the original iStat untouched.

The overwhelming majority of people who voted on this issue voted to update the app and lose the memory feature.  You had your choice, you ignored or simply didn’t take the time to read before you bought/updated and now you’ve gotten yourself in this mess.

It is not Bjango’s fault.

If you need an application to monitor your iPhone’s state, from memory used (that still works), drive space, network, battery (new) and others, this is your app.  If you need to remotely monitor other computers running their free server monitoring software, this is the app for you.  If you want to support a fantastic company, Bjango, this is the app for you.

They warned you ahead of time on their site and in the App Store.

Finally?  They lowered the price of the application by $1, or by 33%, for new customers.  Primarily because of the memory feature removal, I’d presume.

So there you have it, my rant to stupid people who probably won’t read what I’ve said and are so indoctrinated in their own idiocy that they won’t get it. I’m done ranting, it’s time for class. Catch you later.

Oh yeah, and check out their software for your computer and the iPhone.  It’s great stuff!

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